Socialism: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, May 2023

I traveled to see friends in Bristol, England, in 1974. Harold Wilson’s Labor Party had been elected as a minority government for a second round of Keynesian social democracy intended to put the finishing touches on the British welfare state built from 1945 to 1951. Swaths of industry remained under state regulation and ownership. Social insurance, public housing, education, and unemployment relief had been established and expanded. An Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970. And Wilson’s government abolished the death penalty, decriminalized homosexuality, and outlawed racial discrimination. But it was no longer the “swinging sixties.” The Beatles had disbanded and the countercultural tribes were getting a dose of hard reality. The Angry Brigade’s bombing campaign in 1970-71 brought a crackdown on youth, which proved nothing compared to the society-wide clampdown instigated by the spillover of The Troubles from Northern Island to England with the IRA’s London bombing campaign. Even my liberal Bristol friends were anti-Irish. I stepped a couple of feet away from my backpack in the London Underground to examine the subway wall map, only to have my hippie ass immediately surrounded by suspicious Bobbies and plain-clothed officers.

I visited my relatives the same year in Poland deep in the Soviet Bloc; my grandmother in Gdynia with its massive Paris Commune Shipyards and my cousins in Warsaw with its famous Zeran car factory and working-class suburb Ursus. These locations were recurring flash-points in the off-again-on-again Polish rebellion against Soviet occupation.[1] The economy was state-owned and run, the society dreary. Polish Peoples’ Army and Soviet Red Army soldiers were everywhere, along with the police. In Warsaw, an additional reminder of the Soviet presence was the massive Palace of Culture and Science done up in Stalinist wedding cake style. Gomulka’s gray years as First Secretary of the Polish United Workers’ Party had given way to a more optimistic time under Edward Gierek who tried to boost economic development and average income through foreign loans, which meant that instead of bread lines people queued up for a few basic consumer goods. All my relatives told Russian jokes. On Sundays they took me to church where, beneath cover of the Catholic mass, an overflowing crowd whispered, argued and organized against the Soviets.

I also hitchhiked through Josip Tito’s Yugoslavia and enjoyed the novelty of staying at hotels, going to restaurants and buying supplies from enterprises that were worker-owned councils operating in a market economy. The newsstands carried uncensored every Western newspaper and magazine and the country was prospering. But there was little doubt that I was in a one-party Marxist-Leninist country. When I failed to convince several Yugoslav Peoples’ Army soldiers to give me the striking red star pins on their hats I tried to take their picture. They warned me off with threatening gestures.

My most inspiring and troubling experience of socialism was Israel when I lived on a kibbutz for six months in 1974. A kibbutz is a rural commune with a mixed agricultural/industrial economy where people own all private property in common, raise their children socially and work cooperatively “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” Kibbutzim were but one of many forms of cooperative agriculture within the Histadrut, a centralized syndicalist trade union which was at the same time the owner of numerous businesses and factories. The Histadrut ran about 65% of the Jewish economy and 75% of the Jewish workforce in Palestine by 1948. Its state-building function, alongside the Hagana, spearheaded the Labor Zionist national liberation struggle that declared independence for the State of Israel in 1948. The parliamentary, multi-party Jewish state nationalized half of the Histadrut’s economy almost immediately. Israel’s Jewish socialism was one of the more self-organized, communitarian, liberatory forms of socialism I’ve known. But it was Jewish socialism nonetheless, an exclusionary “socialism for one people” that placed ethnic identity over class identity, resulting in Israel devolving into a settler-colonial apartheid state.

Now it’s a bad time for socialism.

During the 1980s, socialism advanced by one-party Marxist-Leninist regimes was based on centrally planned command economies, collectivized agriculture and industry, and nationalized property. “Real existing socialism” encompassed one-third of the world’s population (over a billion people) and close to a fourth of world’s land surface. After the collapse of the Communist bloc (1989-1991)—instigated by Reagan and the US striving to bankrupt the Soviet Union and its allied nations—there are now only five explicitly Marxist-Leninist countries remaining in the world—China, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, and North Korea. North Korea further refined its state ideology into Kimilsungism–Kimjongilism which is also defined as the Juche Principle. This supposedly is a revolutionary socialism of material necessity grounded in concrete, immutable realities where “the people” have all the basic means of life. Yet in reality it is a socialism of chronic scarcity where people often don’t have even the basics to survive, where workers’ power is substituted for the power of the vanguard party and frequently the power of a dictatorial cult leader.

From 1945 until 2015, social democracy was seen as a viable socialist alternative in Western Europe and other parts of the Western world. Epitomized by the Nordic Model—Iceland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland—it involved market-based mixed economies, private property, a strong labor movement, multi-level collective bargaining and a comprehensive welfare state administered by multi-party parliamentary democracies that mediate between capital and labor. Norway extended this with extensive state-owned enterprises and natural resources as well as state share ownership in publicly listed enterprises. This democratic socialism sometimes considers itself a moral crusade against capitalism and the profit motive and for workers’ rights and freedoms. Democracy, egalitarianism and social justice are emphasized over a specific form of socialist economy. Social democratic parties have peacefully traded governance with more conservative political parties even in the Nordic countries. Issues of national sovereignty and immigration after 2015 have caused a marked decline in their popularity.

The “hard” socialism of Marxist-Leninists regimes is attributed to their Third World context, to the oppressed and exploited peoples of color and proletarian-peasant nations of the Global South. The “soft” socialism of social democracies is not really considered socialist by “hard” socialists, but rather is of a piece of the Global North, of the First World whose nations are capitalist, imperialist and mostly white. I don’t regard either Marxist-Leninist regimes or social democracies as truly socialist, even though I’d much rather live in the latter than in the former.

I reserve the term socialism for a handful or two of historical periods and relatively short social experiments that broadly fall under the general category of “libertarian socialism.” Among them are examples that readily cross over the First/Third World-Global North/South and the “hard”/“soft” socialist categories. First is the Soviet-led government from the Russian 1917 Revolution until 1922 when opposition parties were outlawed, factions within the Bolshevik party were banned and Stalin started his rise to power. Second is the self-managed anarchist/socialist territories of the Spanish Republic during the 1936-39 civil war before Franco liquidated them. Third is the ongoing policies of indigenismo promoted by the EZLN in Chiapas, Mexico. And fourth is the ongoing system of democratic confederalism under the PYD/YPG in Rojava, Northern Syria.

Each of these examples of libertarian socialist economics—decentralized, socialized economies of collectives, cooperatives, communes, committees and councils—are coupled with democratic multi-party political systems based on parliaments, soviets or assemblies. Libertarian socialist economies have occasionally been combined with one-party vanguardist regimes—the first ten years of villagist ujamaa in Tanzania under the rule of Julius Nyerere’s TANU party, Tito’s Yugoslavia of workers’ councils—but they are no longer libertarian socialism proper.

To be clear, nations that call themselves socialist are a dime-a-dozen.[2] Some have references to socialism in their constitutions, most others are ruled by nationalist political parties that claim to operate on socialist or communist principles, but virtually none are Marxist. A fair number are one-party regimes, military juntas or personal dictatorships. And almost all have capitalist, oligarchic or corporatist economies.

There is also an implied socialism that is winning big by default.

In a world supposedly divided irreconcilably between imperialist nations and anti-imperialist nations, it is common to assume that those countries in the imperialist “camp” are reactionary whereas those countries in the anti-imperialist “camp” are progressive. This basic campism insists that the US is the center of global imperialism and therefore the primary enemy. The anti-imperialist forces arrayed against the US are on the right side of history and are, if not socialist, at least leaning Left. So campism implies that those who oppose imperialism are socialistic.

Lenin formulated the theory of imperialism, but there are no pure Leninist movements, parties or regimes any longer. All are some form of Leninist hybrid—Stalinist, Trotskyist, Maoist, Hoxhaist, Marcyist, ad nauseam. Additionally, the concept of anti-imperialism has spread far beyond its Marxist-Leninist origins. Maoist-inspired movements and parties multiplied under the rubric of anti-revisionism. With the rise of anti-colonial and national liberation struggles the Third World came into its own. But it also became the ideology of Third Worldism. And anti-imperialism has infected anarchism (Love and Rage), autonomism (German Wildcat), even democratic socialism (Democratic Socialists of America). In turn, tankies are Stalinists or campist apologists who defend the use of tanks in the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary in 1956, the Warsaw Pact’s suppression of Czechoslovakia in 1968, China’s massacre of the Tiananmen Square protestors in 1989, and the like.

So ideologies that embrace anti-imperialist campism often uphold an ersatz socialistic prognosis. They often claim that since the US is the only imperialist power in the world no other nation can be imperialist. And they often defend not just authoritarian Marxist-Leninist regimes past and present but authoritarian states in general.

Campism is truly the anti-imperialism of fools.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] 1944-47, 1956, 1968, 1970-71, 1976, 1980-81, 1982, 1988

[2] Algeria, Angola, Argentina, Bangladesh, Barbados, Bolivia, Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Mauritius, Mexico, Moldova, Mozambique, Namibia, Nepal, Nicaragua, Peru, Portugal, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Syria, Tanzania, Venezuela, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

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Time: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, April 2023

“We will sell no wine before its time,” Orson Welles proclaimed in sonorous tones in his famous Paul Masson California wine commercials from 1978 to 1981. The motto and those ads became an oft-parodied media trope in the late twentieth century, a meme before memes were invented, when bootleg outtakes of an apparently drunk Welles circulated widely, gaining a second comedic life for the advertising campaign.

Historians sometimes have difficulty in determining how to categorize and periodize historical events. The mere chronicling of short-term, discreet historical events known as evental history—histoire événementielle in the French Annales School—needs to be superseded by the study of long-term historical trends, structures, and collectivities (the longue durée), the broad evolution of economies, societies and civilizations. Once established, the historical long haul—the histoire totale—can then be subdivided into convenient medium-length combinations of events; decades and centuries when more thoroughgoing socio-economic-cultural changes can be studied. Thus the much-vaunted or maligned 1960s becomes the “long 1960s” (1955-1975) as the significant history before and after the actual chronological decade of the 1960s are incorporated. The “long 1940s” spans roughly from 1933 to 1955, and the “long 1970s” overlaps with the “long 1960s” from 1965 to 1981. Periodizing such “long” decades are above all flexible and frequently conjoined, with historians often debating when to start and end a particular period, and what to include in or exclude from their study.

As the Orson Welles/Paul Masson slogan implies, the proper demarcation of time for an historical study is crucial, with the discipline of history preferring more natural historical periods to the simplistic use of standard calendar definitions. The “long eighteenth century” thus spans from the English Glorious Revolution (1688) to the Battle of Waterloo (1815), with some historians extending the period to 1660-1830 in order to encompass broader socio-economic trends. The “long nineteenth century” begins with the French Revolution in 1789 and ends with the start of the first World War in 1914. But the “short twentieth century” starts in 1914 with the first World War and ends in 1991 with the dissolution of the old Soviet Union, and might be subtitled “the rise and fall of Soviet Communism.” Here again natural historical periodicity is key, even as historians argue over the specific dates in question.

Take for example the Italian Years of Lead from 1968 to 1988, a 20-year period of political and social unrest highlighted by the birth and reign of terror, respectively, of the far left Red Brigades and the far right Armed Revolutionary Nuclei. This was in the context of popular workerist/autonomist organizations and movements to the left of the Italian Communist Party and much smaller neo-fascist groupuscules to the right of the Italian Social Movement party. Within the context of the “short twentieth century” and Soviet Communism’s beginnings and demise was the era of Joseph Stalin’s rule from 1922 to 1952. Of all the Communist dictators—Mao, Tito, Castro, Sung, etc—Stalin was easily the most brutal and bloody, presiding over millions of corpses created by forced agricultural collectivization and economic industrialization, a Ukrainian famine, several mass political purges, and numerous political show trials and executions.

[As for the historian-explicated “long decades” and “long centuries” cited above, the self-defined, self-perpetuating dynasties of West and East have them beat. China was ruled by the Shang (16th-11th century bce), Zhou (1046-221 bce), Han (202 bce-220 ce), Song (960-1279 ce) and Ming (1368-1644 ce) dynasties. Europe had the Houses of Romanov (1613-1917), Oldenburg (1101-1917), and Habsburg (1020-1918), not to mention the British (1066-present) and Dutch (13th century-present) monarchies. These capitalist “long duration” periods and, less so, the feudal dynastic spans are the meat and potatoes of my history-based nonfiction inquiries as well as some of my fiction work.]

I write nonfiction essays and fiction books, specifically speculative, near-future, and science fiction. But I’m seventy years old. I have a limited time left on this planet and, in a way, my life is my own personal periodization. I anticipate having only one more novel in me to write.

This next and perhaps final novel is a departure from my usual fiction efforts. I’m switching from the future to the past, specifically 1968. Nineteen sixty-eight was the year I got leftist politics and so this novel attempts to encapsulate my experiences with that year and the 1960s in general. I’ll also hope to elucidate certain “truths” of the era while keeping the process lively and entertaining. My protagonist, who I’ve made a white Western European cis male to avoid claims of cultural appropriation, has a story of political intrigue and mayhem as a National Autonomous University of Mexico student set in Mexico City prior to the 1968 Olympic Games. When the Mexican State gunned down an unknown number of protesting students in Tlatelolco Square. Prior to Mexico’s momentous student uprising, this protagonist travels the Western world to highlight other aspects of the effervescent 1960s. The plot is further drenched with action and politic, fascists and Situationists, and sex, drugs and rocknroll.

I started the book maybe ten years before, dropped it, and returned to it a year ago. I’ve been writing it ever since. I’ve never been prolific but I have been consistent. The historical research is daunting. But I intend to get a rough draft out and to various editors in three to four years. Given my mortality, it’s now a race against time. Lately, I’ve been remembering my residual  Christianity that counts us lucky at eighty years but admonishes that no one knows the hour. I’ve outlived my parents and I’ve had a few serious illnesses. I’m healthy now but I’m also in a hurry.

My rush is being impeded by several factors. I’ve already mentioned the research I’m doing for the book. I’m slowly, painfully reading through the miniature library I’ve accumulated to backdrop the story. The plot comes first, and even if the writing goes more slowly then is my usual pace the story can be altered as I dig up and apply the historical details. Currently I’m reading through Elena Poniatowska’s stunning Massacre in Mexico with its haunting oral micro-histories. More serious is the fact that I don’t speak Spanish. My main character—pretty much all my characters in Mexico—speak Spanish so my lack is a definite disability. I have to do an impossible task, write an authentic story of a time and place without knowing the language that authenticates it. I am hoping to learn some basic Spanish. I constantly rewrite what I write, but since I’m not very good about editing my own writing I always need to hire an editor for beta reading, proofreading, copy editing, line editing, substantive editing, mechanical editing, and developmental editing. If and when I finish this novel I’ll need to hire an editor who speaks Spanish.

Finally, the sheer complexity of this story threatens to sink my efforts. When I first conceived the idea for this book I sketched out four plot lines: (1) the protagonist’s story prior to the October 2, 1968, Tlatelolco massacre in  Mexico; (2) his travels around the US and Western Europe earlier in 1968; (3) his back story growing up; and (4) a parallel plot about a UC Berkeley researcher who encounters evidence of a centuries-old entity that embodies the essence of revolution. The researcher chases down this revolutionary demiurge through photographic evidence during key historical uprisings—Paris Commune, 1871; Russian Revolution, 1917; German Spartacist uprising, 1918; Shanghai Commune, 1927; Spanish Revolution, 1936; Hungary, 1956; Cuban Revolution, 1959—to interact with the novel’s protagonist and witness Tlatelolco.

One of the plots of Paco Ignacio Taibo’s detective novel An Easy Thing is the search for Emiliano Zapata, the folk hero and a leader of the Mexican Revolution—very much alive and rumored to be hiding in a cave outside Mexico City. This element of magic realism aligns well with the science fiction/fantasy bent of the novel’s fourth plot line. But because of my desire to base the novel firmly in the history of 1968 and of the Tlatelolco massacre I abandoned the fantasy element early on.  Even without this however the story’s intricacies are discouraging. Do I switch back and forth between plot elements or do I lay out each plot discreetly from beginning to end? The former threatens to muddy the plot with convoluted flashbacks and flash forwards while the latter simplifies things to the point of trivializing the reading experience.

So what’s left is whether I have the time to finish this project. Emerson’s aphorism that it’s not the destination but the journey only goes so far in assuaging my anxieties. Running out of time is up there with losing my memory or suffering a debilitating accident or disease which prevents me from completing the book. All high level fears for me. But all I can do is write the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next page until I’ve written the book. Or I have nothing left to write.

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Diversity of tactics: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, December 2022

It was November 8, 1960.

My parents and their friends were arrayed around our black-and-white RCA Victor TV in our tiny San Bernardino living room. It was election evening, with John F. Kennedy duking it out against Richard Nixon. My parents were lifelong Democrats but some of the friends present had voted Republican. In a testament to the times, everybody was drinking, smoking, eating European deli foods, joking, laughing, and playfully arguing. It was quite congenial, with no mention of a “second civil war.”

My parents allowed me to stay up way past my bedtime so I wandered around in the background. I carried a glass jar filled with dry soup beans and every time Walter Cronkite announced a victory for Kennedy I shook the jar and said: “Kennedy wins!”

That was my first memory of an American election. I would become a “don’t vote, it only encourages them” anarchist in 1968 and burned my draft card in 1970. When the voting age was lowered to 18 in March of 1971, I ran with a group of New American Movement-inspired youngsters for city council and school board in Ventura, California. That same year I registered with the Peace and Freedom Party. I’ve had a complicated, some might say contradictory relationship with American politics ever since.

Campism: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, November 2022

“This is utter nonsense.”

The gray-haired bespectacled man gestured angrily. It was July 21, 1989 and I was standing behind the Neither East Nor West literature table at the “Without Borders” anarchist conference/festival in San Francisco’s Mission High School. I was hanging out with the THRUSH girls and Bob McGlynn as the pissed-off individual continued to point at our table’s banner.

“Neither East Nor West, huh? That sounds an awful lot like the slogan of the Italian Fascist MSI. Neither Left nor Right.”

“We’re anarchists, not fascists,” Bob said.

“Anarchists, fascists, it’s all the same.” The man delivered his verbal coup. “If you’re not for the international socialist revolution you’re for reactionary capitalist imperialism.”

I’ve recently written a couple of columns exposing the idiocy that is Fascist Third Positionism.[1] Let’s now talk about campism and legitimate efforts to transcend it. In order to discuss international politics, let’s start with an analogy.

Logic: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, September 2022

I was on a college track in high school getting mostly A’s and B’s. There wasn’t quite the feeding frenzy in 1970 to stack my academic CV and get into the very best institution of higher education I could. Besides, my parents were barely middle class and we’d agreed that, to save money I’d attend the local community college for two years before transferring to UC Santa Cruz.

One of my English teachers my senior year was Lynn Bjorkman who instructed us on how to write a proper nonfiction essay and academic paper in preparation for our college careers. His specialty was the “science of logic,” both the formal logic of propositions, proofs and inferences and the informal logic of natural language argumentation and logical fallacies. He was a singularly unappealing individual who gave milquetoast a bad name. In the days when Star Trek’s Mr. Spock was the fascinating poster boy for logic, we would pass around notes depicting Bjorkman as an addled cube-headed robot spewing logical nonsense.

I was into pro-Summerhill/Skool Abolition/student liberation politics, so I decided to write an academic-style term paper using Marshall McLuhan’s famous catchphrase “the medium is the message.” In education that meant the message (content) of freedom and democracy was being taught in educational institutions (forms) that were profoundly authoritarian and hierarchical. So I argued that the form/medium invariably prevailed over the content/message, using plenty of quotes, footnotes and a respectable bibliography that included AS Neill’s Summerhill, Paul Goodman’s Compulsory Miseducation, Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and Jerry Farber’s The Student as Nigger. I got a C- on the paper. Bjorkman commented that my writing was bright and sparkling on the surface but deeply flawed logically. He also remarked that I was actually dangerous and unfortunately would make a persuasive propagandist. But aside from noting an occasional logical fallacy in the margins, he never engaged with my argument’s logic point-by-point nor did he try to refute my conclusions.

Left of the Left: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, July 2022

I sometimes view humanity’s sordid past as one long, interminable tale chronicling organized bands of murderous thugs trying to exterminate each other. Much as I admire the sentiment of pacifism and humanism, I’m neither a pacifist nor a humanist. Homicide seems to be part of our species, with genocide often its inevitable conclusion.

I’ve been on the left of the Left for most of my life; from being a left anarchist in my youth to a half-assed libertarian Marxist today. That means embracing a vision of stateless, classless global communism even as I abhor the terrors perpetrated by Leninist movements and regimes. I consider all forms of Fascism an abomination, and I dismiss the red-brown sophistry of Third Positionism as fascist sleight-of-hand. In the wake of the precipitous 1989-91 collapse of the Communist bloc, there’s been an upsurge of tankyism/campism on the Left that sees world conflict in terms of US-led imperialism versus any and all opposition to imperialism. That anti-imperialist “camp” is considered socialist by default, even when it’s in defense of patently capitalist, authoritarian, totalitarian, even outright fascist regimes. Then there’s the steady rehabilitation of overtly Fascist/Nazi politics. Last column I commented that, when I was growing up I only saw Nazis as fictional TV characters. Now I see them unashamedly flaunting their fascism in the Republican Party and in demonstrations I’ve recently organized against.

So why do I identify with the Left, despise the Right, and consistently choose socialism over barbarism every time?

Antiwar: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, May 2022

“Peace is not simply the absence of violence or war”—a truism I grew up with in the 1960s. When I first got politics in 1968 I called myself an anarchist-pacifist and affiliated with the American Friends Service Committee, War Resisters League, and similar organizations which promoted the concept that in order to achieve a social order based on peace, one had to use nonviolent methods. I flirted with the eastern religious concept of ahimsa and the western religious notion of turning the other cheek, as well as more formalized nonviolent practices like Gandhi’s satyagraha.  But soon the contradictions of pacifism, specifically the argument that nonviolence doesn’t save lives or guarantee peace in the short or long run, dissuaded me from remaining a pacifist. Besides, I didn’t have the integrity or discipline to practice any form of nonviolence. And while I rejected the pacifist notion that nonviolent ends require nonviolent means, I incorporated the whole “means-and-ends” argument into my anti-authoritarian politics at the time.

So I opposed the Vietnam War, not so much out of principle but out of self interest. I was subject to the draft and I didn’t want to be conscripted and shipped off to die in a rice paddy in Southeast Asia. Thus I wasn’t part of the peace movement so much as I participated in the antiwar movement. I’ll briefly discuss one small aspect of the anti-Vietnam War movement’s wide and convoluted history—the attempt to build and sustain a single, overarching antiwar organization in the US. The broadest umbrella coalition of people, organizations and issues seeking to end America’s intervention in Southeast Asia was the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (the Mobe).

Revolution, war, chess: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, February 2022

“Shachmat,” Uri said in Hebrew, then English, “checkmate.”

I was stunned. I’d dominated the chess board as white, with eleven of my sixteen pieces intact and pushing aggressively into black’s territory. I’d mercilessly attacked him throughout the game until he had only a half dozen pieces left on the board. I was just about to deliver the coup de grâce when he put me in check with his remaining knight, then checkmated me with his remaining bishop.

“Another game?” Uri asked, the right side of his face and his right arm marked by a stroke.

American socialism revisited: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, October 2021

Socialism for the rich; capitalism for the poor.

It’s an oft-repeated Leftist cliché that encapsulates an entire socio-political-economic analysis in a single sentence. It was first promulgated by Michael Harrington and frequently repeated by the likes of Noam Chomsky, Bernie Sanders, and Robert Reich. The gist of this argument is that capitalist corporations receive government largess in the form of subsidies, tax breaks, and favorable legislation while the general population is left to fend for itself. Big business regularly receives favorable treatment and corporate welfare from the government which allows corporations to “privatize profits and socialize losses.” The rest of us are shit-out-of-luck.(1)

Anti-imperialism: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, September 2021

I am against imperialism, be it French, British, US or Chinese. I am not an “anti-imperialist,” since that is a political position supporting national liberation movements opposed to imperialist powers.
—Gilles Dauvé

Mark Twain was an anti-imperialist, a member of the American Anti-Imperialist League (1898-1920) which opposed US annexation of the Philippines. For the League, just republican government was based on the principle of the “consent of the governed” as embodied in the Declaration of Independence, Washington’s Farewell Address, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The imperialism of US territorial expansion thus violated the classical liberal precepts of self-government and non-intervention as put forward by British writers like John A. Hobson. Twain’s dark sarcasm and claims of America’s liberatory intent notwithstanding, he was neither so generous nor as damning regarding the US continental expansion of Manifest Destiny that expropriated the native peoples. The raison d’être of this type of anti-imperialism was simple; empire was bad and needed to be morally opposed.