Anti-imperialists aren’t following Noam Chomsky’s PR strategy! That’s the core grievance of what I guess is supposed to be some kind of epic takedown rant by Twitter personality and occasional blogger Zei Squirrel. She doesn’t put it that way, of course; like a lot of folks, Zei thinks that a particular approach to anti-imperialism popularized by Chomsky is just how you do anti-imperialism, and how it has always been done. It’s a popular misconception, which is why I think it’s worth looking at here.

Since that post spends so much time painting the author’s critics as indoctrinated squishes, however, I think that some brief perspective is in order. Zei is taking positions about imperialism that have only been dominant on the US-UK left for about twenty years. Her ideas about criticism are almost verbatim Chomsky; you can get them from watching one or two of his YouTube interviews. And her understanding of Lenin, as I am going to make clear, is directly at odds with what he actually wrote.

In other words, Zei is very typical of what I often call heterodox anti-imperialists. These are activists who have absorbed a certain conventional wisdom about what imperialism is and how to fight it from 21st century Marcyism and Chomsky fandom — wisdom that’s directly at odds with Marxist orthodoxy, but that is so seductive in its cartoonish simplisticity that we are probably going to be stuck with it for a very long time.

Confused about Lenin

Zei promotes her article as a discussion of “what Lenin called social imperialism”. That term is also in the title, and about halfway through she links to Lenin’s Imperialism to corroborate her argument. She also, repeatedly, makes a point of letting everyone know that the hypothetical critics she quotes in her article think that she’s a “tankie”.

This is extremely typical positioning from heterodox anti-imperialists: reading Zei, we are supposed to believe that we are dealing with some kind of exciting hardline communist radical. But her actual substantive argument is directly at odds with Lenin.

Simple illustration: four paragraphs in, Zei ridicules anti-imperialists who say that besides the United States, “other countries are imperialist and bad too”. Here’s what Lenin says:

• “An essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between several great powers in the striving for hegemony…”

• “Features of modern imperialism: 1) the competition between several imperialisms…”

• We must advance “all-embracing propaganda…against the reactionary and bourgeois government and parties of all nations” and “struggle against the chauvinism and ‘patriotism’ of the petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie of all countries without exception”.

It must be stressed that only the last quote comes from a different text. The first two come directly from Imperialism, the very book that Zei is citing! Lenin is obviously not calling himself a social imperialist; he is calling Kautsky one for advancing Zei’s own position.

I’ve expanded on Lenin’s critique of Kautsky on imperialism elsewhere, so here I’ll just add one more point. For Lenin, we simply cannot bracket our critique of imperialism off of the Marxist critique of capitalism. Anti-imperialism cannot be some vaguely anti-war project or even a vaguely anti-capitalist project; imperialism must specifically be understood from a Marxist perspective as the inevitable consequence of private property, which always ends in the concentration of capital, which always ends in monopolies, which always ends in international aggression. As Lenin puts it, we must

understand the fundamental economic question, that of the economic essence of imperialism, for unless this is studied, it will be impossible to understand and appraise modern war and modern politics.

There is a reason you will not find the word “capitalism” or “monopoly” in Zei’s post, even as she scolds the left "for “woefully lacking in any understanding of anti-imperialist principles”. There is a reason why Zei, in this post, seems utterly disinterested in the well-known disagreements between Lenin and Chomsky, even though she casually invokes both as if they are on the same page. And there’s a reason why, over and over again, Zei rolls her eyes at the “abstractions” of her critics and their insistance that “things are just so complex and complicated and we just have to analyze it more” — even as Lenin describes Imperialism as “an exclusively theoretical, specifically economic analysis”.

Heterodox anti-imperialism just doesn’t have anything to do with the Marxist tradition. If anything it has thinly veiled contempt for the sort of abstract systematic analysis of capitalism that a Marxist understanding of imperialism demands, even though it will superficially appeal to figures like Lenin for radical credibility.

Chomsky’s PR strategy

Once we peel away the radical veneer from Zei’s post, what’s left amounts to an argument for a particular PR strategy against war. She doesn’t put it that way, of course. As a rule, heterodox imperialists just take for granted that their strategy is the most “marginally effective thing [we] can actually do to change the situation” when war is at hand. Since we all supposedly agree on that, the argument then proceeds on moral terms: either we do their strategy to oppose imperialism, or we must be imperialists ourselves.

What’s the strategy? Here’s the simplest way I can put it:

There are certain dark truths about other governments that you and I can acknowledge without concluding that we should go to war against them. The public, however, cannot handle the truth; so we need to avoid commenting on such matters.

This kind of logic is extremely popular on the left because it lets activists quietly position themselves as an intellectual elite — and for precisely that reason, you will never see it spelled out this way. But the subtext is inescapable. Just look at Zei’s praise for Noam Chomsky:

Chomsky...has always maintained a steadfast commitment to anti-imperialism, while still also being very critical of the Official Enemies when asked about it. But he understands that...criticizing while in a moment of total mass hysteria by the media and political class agitating for war and conflict...totally invalidates his professed anti-imperialism.

Let’s take a closer look at what’s going on here. Chomsky knows all along that there really are truthful, legitimate critiques to be made about other governments; presumably he concluded that at least some of the mainstream reporting he’s come across was accurate. Chomsky also knows that we must not go to war even though those critiques are legitimate. He is able to reflect on things like unintended consequences, international stability, self-determination, proportional response, and other basic matters that often discredit any case for intervention even when there is a supposed casus belli.

Chomsky is able to understand all of these things, Zei is able to understand all of these things, and you and I are able to understand all of these things — all without buying the case for war. But the public, it turns out, cannot. The discourse is in a state of “total mass hysteria”; people simply can’t think about anti-imperialism on our level. So what Chomsky and Zei want us to do is deliberately avoid saying things that we know are true, and that we know do not justify war, but that the proles simply cannot understand.

I think the rebuttal to this is pretty straightforward. The best cases against war are legitimate despite any inconvenient truths about other countries. People will find those arguments honest and persuasive, because they know that your argument for peace has taken real problems into consideration instead of simply pretending they don’t exist. If however you consistently give a deliberately one-sided perspective on international affairs that ignores certain problems, people will come to think of you as an unreliable narrator. They will even start to suspect that you won’t talk about certain things because the case against war would fall apart if you did.

One curious quirk of Chomsky’s PR strategy also appears in this passage: he actually will acknowledge legitimate criticism of other governments if you ask him about it. But why? If he actually thinks this aids and abets imperialism, then I should hope he isn’t doing so simply for the sake of his own conscience. The more credible explanation is that if Chomsky starts lying about things, people will stop taking everything else he says seriously.

But this is precisely the concern that compels us to acknowledge legitimate criticism of other governments even when we aren’t cornered in an interview. In the end, Chomsky’s PR strategy certainly isn’t anti-imperialism, and it’s barely even a strategy; it just comes down to him making subjective judgment calls about how critical he should be about various actors on the international stage. This makes sense to me, but it also undermines any real principled basis for scolding leftists who make different judgments.

Socialist anti-imperialism

With both of these objections in mind, we would expect socialists to talk about anti-imperialism in a very different way than Zei seems to expect.

As Lenin stresses over and over and over again, anti-imperialism is ultimately a struggle between the international working class and the international bourgeoisie wherever it appears. Sometimes class interests may correspond closely with national interests as it quite often did during the 20th. In the 21st century as US imperial power continues to decline and other imperial powers continue to ascend, workers are likely to find themselves caught in the competition of multiple bourgeois factions.

When that happens, the task of the socialist will be to challenge the common sense of war as a conflict between nations, to highlight the shared plight of workers all over the world, and to demonstrate how the ruling class, even when they are at war, are all working to uphold the same capitalist system.

Today we are already seeing the first flashes of conflict between these two schools of anti-imperialism; I expect it will only intensify in the years ahead.