This is an interesting essay which discusses pessimism and revolutionary optimism. I found it an informative and enlightening read and it’s made clearer some of my thoughts on why I think even left-wing media can be pretty subpar sometimes.
It’s way too long to quote fully here, so I’ll be summarizing and giving some quotes. I’ve brought it down from 15,000 words to 5000 words for easier digestion; the essay itself has many footnotes and a lot of evidence for those who aren’t already convinced of the claims below. I’m also going to rearrange the essay slightly, so that there’s two main sections: the first section is on the problem of pessimism, while the second section is on what concrete reasons there are to believe that a genuinely better world is coming. The first section is here, while the second is in the comments.
The author begins by talking about his experience watching an expose of the arms industry and its control over politicians, saying that:
As excellent as it is, I did come away from it wanting more; for as much as it exposes the sheer scale of corruption and profit behind war, it seldom shows the cracks in the hegemony it depicts, or lends the countervailing forces of resistance as having any kind of hope. While I am glad it treats the subject with the seriousness that it deserves, and does not try to placate the viewer with promises of mere reform, the documentary leaves the viewer with the feeling that war is eternal.
This is a frequent problem in political media, or media in general: simply depicting a problem is not enough. Portraying or pointing to the inequalities and abuses of capitalism has to come with the practical solutions to these problems, otherwise it is an exercise in despair – an informed despair, yet despair nonetheless.
This is critique as exposure, shining a light on the problems as opposed to demonstrating the fallibility of these problems. Something missing from documentaries and books like Shadow World is the premise that despite the overwhelming power of the U.S Empire, it is inevitable that it will fall. The brilliance of a work like Marx’s Capital is that it demonstrates the sheer power of capitalism, its ability to extract immense quantities of wealth and social control, while simultaneously showing the power of labour, the protagonist who will break its chains and bring in the next necessary stage in human development.
He then quotes Sobrina de Alguien, who distinguishes between the historicization of an issue versus its fetishization; the latter treating issues as eternal, and the former treating them as having beginnings and endings. While glorifying problems is usually bad, even depicting them as bad but nevertheless part of an eternal human condition is also not good. It’s also, not coincidentally, undialectical - one of the things that dialectical materialism asserts is that no state of affairs is permanent, change is inevitable, and things are always coming and going on various timescales. Villains (people, countries, corporations, etc), are richly described so that we fully know their faults, we can boo them, and we can fear them, but there isn’t any discussion of their weaknesses, nor how to fight them.
This leads naturally onto another type of depiction of issues: that which talks about how utterly powerful and frightening and insurmountable something is - the CIA, massive corporations, militaries, climate change - but at the end, instead of no positive message at all, it gives a vaguely and naively optimistic message which doesn’t remotely address how the problem could be solved. For example, a climate change documentary that details how utterly fucked the world is for a solid hour and then at the end, shows a five minute clip talking to a tiny charity in fucking Nebraska which designs cooling vests for dogs or something, as if that’s meant to give you hope that enough small charities and individual action can combat the combined carbon output of every corporation on the planet. He says:
…there is a difference between this naive optimism and the concrete optimism I advocate; we should have more than the simple ability to posit a better world, we need to scientifically prove that the better world is both possible and necessary.
He gives an example of the destruction of Libya by NATO. A bad analysis will merely talk about the sheer power of the military-industrial complex. A slightly better (but still bad) one might have an interview afterwards with a Libyan who gives a somewhat hopeful message about how things might get better, eventually. A good analysis will show how the internal antagonisms of imperialism will lead to its eventual dissolution; in the example of Libya, he says that the immediate aftermath has not led to revolutionary consequences inside the country itself, but Libya’s example has been informative for other developing countries; a warning message that you cannot trust the Western financial system:
This has led cooperation by these countries in the face of this threat: the recent success of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation Summit (FOCAC) is explicitly aimed at mending the “historical injustice” dealt by the West, with African leaders extolling China’s role in “combating colonialism”. We can see that learning from experience is difficult, but it is the only way that change occurs; every terrible action by imperialism has its opposite reaction, and the historical experience only strengthens the appeal of countries like China that offer an alternative path. Imperialism’s self-interest, a system based on creating instability, cannot create a stable situation for its self-perpetuation.
The Demiurge is a figure in Gnosticism which created the imperfect material world in which we are trapped. The only escape, Gnostics proclaim, is via salvation of the mind, because trying to change the material world is pointless. Nowadays, there are some who claim that the power of capitalism is inescapable: it is the modern demiurge. This usually leads to nihilism and despair:
From this vantage point of endless horror, the system seems immense and unsolvable, with revolutions impossible despite historical evidence to the contrary. This nihilism and fetishisation of power flattens different wielders of power as having the same self-interested goals, or sees the system of power as controlling every actor on the global stage; this is what leads some to conflate “Soviet power, Marxist ideology or radical Islamic fundamentalism” as having the same “profoundly undemocratic” mechanisms.
The world is flattened - everybody is evil. Perhaps you then excuse or even justify NATO imperialism as merely combatting Chinese/Russian imperialism, or you say that anti-colonial projects should not be supported because they still have poverty or hierarchy. This is not merely an information gap. Well-meaning people very familiar with imperialist wars can fall into the trap: sure, the Korean War was bad, but every communist revolution has led to yet greater mass murder and socialist countries are poverty-ridden, so the only path left is reformism! Even many leftists can tumble into this (Losurdo talks about this tendency within Foucault and Adorno in Western Marxism).
The late Mark Fisher fell hard into this flattening of the world. He criticized how society was unable to picture anything beyond capitalism and urged radical thinking, and yet paradoxically seemed unable to find a socialist state that he was willing to support, and floundered around fighting strawmen. The 1973 Chilean coup was seen by Fisher as the disappearance of a near-divine strain of socialism: non-authoritarian, democratic, and technological. The author remarks that the briefness of socialist Chile is precisely because of its non-authoritarianism, with Allende ignoring Castro’s warning to take control of the military in the event of an imperialist attack. Further, if Allende’s Chile had lasted for much longer, then it is inevitable that liberal academic consensus would have put it in the same category as Fisher’s hated, totalitarian USSR and China. Just as the Holodomor was an invented genocide to discredit Stalin (alongside false assertions that he was an all-powerful dictator), Allende would have been tarred as a brutal strongman for some invented or exaggerated atrocity.
Another paradoxical aspect of Fisher was that he discussed the “purity fetish”; that material good should be prioritized over ideological perfection. He was unable, however, to cast aside his own purity fetish towards the USSR and China; the former who defeated the Nazis and liberated concentration camps at catastrophic cost to themselves, and the latter who has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and had created one of the largest manufacturing bases on the planet even at the time of Fisher’s death. He instead directed the criticism of purity fetishism towards communists for not accepting social democratic parties in Western Europe which have generally failed to produce significant results. Fisher’s rejection of Leninism is odd considering its success throughout the developing world, either through communist movements applying his methods directly, or via non-communist liberation movements nonetheless inspired by them. In all, Fisher seems blind to imperialism. This blindness leads to confusion about why there are few strong worker movements in the imperial core and the resulting cultural stagnation.
Thus, despite his insistence on an alternative, he dismisses all real attempts to build one.
The dark mood emerging since the fall of the Soviet Union, the proclamation of the “End of History” and the failure of the Occupy movement, is coming to an end; since roughly 2020, the decline of the United States as global hegemon and the obviousness of its internal and external antagonisms has created a new influx of class consciousness. The process is by no means complete, with many still holding pessimistic attitudes about the omniscience of capitalism – but I contend that the historical forces that should generate optimism are only increasing. The genocide in Palestine, the climate crisis and potential for all-out war with Russia and China are ominous clouds hanging over the world, but these are symptoms of a much larger historical process that should be cause for hope: the collapse of the American epoch.
There is a difference between defeatism and realism: one deflates and stultifies action, while the other guides action towards positive ends.
The author goes on to say:
The power of capitalism, the appearance of an all-powerful Demiurge, is undone when we are able to recognise the world as changing over time; this is the Hegelian and Marxist notion of “History”, a dynamic process based on interconnected and material struggles, rather than “history”, a collection of isolated events with no underlying logic.
Without an understanding of how quantitative changes turn into qualitative changes, it is easy to see small wins as isolated, without their transformative potential in aggregate. A lack of process thinking creates “Messianism”, the belief that the world should be changed in one fell swoop; this binary logic is endemic to Western thought and a major factor in the pessimism seen among the Left. A combination of intense pessimism towards the construction of socialism in the short-term, and an intense utopian optimism that the revolution should arrive “all-at-once”, is a fundamental issue that prevents a grounded understanding.
Even after a glorious revolution, the problems that beset a nation or people are highly limiting; the historical evidence shows that isolated socialist countries are constantly under siege from imperialism, and utopia can only be constructed by accepting long and necessary historical processes. As pointed out by Losurdo in Western Marxism, even Lenin was not immune; the difference between his more messianic rhetoric before the revolution, and the sober tone he adopted afterwards, is a testament to the difficulties in changing an entire society’s mode of production.
Exposing the darkest depths of capitalist and imperialist logic is vital to stave off the naivety of liberal reform. No anti-pessimist is advocating for sticking our heads in the sand because some defeats are too discouraging to admit. Even the most discouraging and horrific parts of the system should, and must, be studied and understood, but that study must include those who fight against the horrors and sometimes win, and precisely how self-destructive those horrors are to the system they attempt to reinforce.
Now that the American Epoch is ending, the world is seeing a more distributed balance of power. Thus, our optimism is not founded on imagining a better world, it is justified by the new world emerging before our eyes. Challenges and contradictions will remain, History never ends, but we should hold dear to the knowledge that it is progressing.
Good post!
I don’t fear that the american capitalist imperialist empire will last forever, just that it will outlast our planet.
Part 2: Why Have Hope?
Everybody here understands that America is engaged in staggeringly colossal crimes all over the world. This demonstrates that staggeringly colossal effort is required to maintain imperial domination and capital accumulation. Imperialism is a process which physically cannot last forever. The violence should not be thought of as maintaining the system for capitalists, as much as it is buying time against its inevitable destruction. The current generation of bourgeoisie does not want to be in the generation in which the profit bonanza ends.
In the essay, the author here describes the logic of capitalist breakdown, such as the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. To summarize paragraphs of Marxist theory, this is a problem of capital overaccumulation. The aftermath of major crises can lead to temporary relief for capitalists, but future crises will be on a yet larger scale for a variety of reasons, and so capitalism is unsustainable in the long run. They can only delay the decay up until the point at which a crisis will grow so large that it will rend the whole system asunder. Political revolutions will both take advantage of and exacerbate these economic crises, with the quantitative number of revolutionary situations transforming into a qualitative change for the whole system.
The main method for delaying the final crisis has been through neocolonial extraction, which is now rapidly eroding. In the past, the imperial core used direct colonialism which financed and industrialized both the core and periphery to varying degrees. After the wave of national liberation movements in the 20th century, capitalism had to find a way to maintain cheap extraction in order to survive as a system. How this has been done has been studied by many scholars, all the way to the current day via Jason Hickel’s studies, and can all be put under the broad category of “unequal exchange.” The dollar can be thought of as a commodity all its own - the US “produces” it, and other countries compete to “buy” it by selling their natural resources. This international competition pushes the price of their commodities downwards. They need those dollars to service their debts, which are in dollars, as well as to sustain the exchange value of their currencies. In order for the system to be at least somewhat sustainable and keep countries on the treadmill, the debts must keep increasing. Countries that outright refuse to pay these debts, or accumulate them in the first place, are sanctioned, invaded, and/or couped.
This process of wealth accumulation requires that poor nations are kept underdeveloped. The greater the development, the more capacity they possess to consume their own resources, which raises the prices of resources and labour, which then pushes imperialist profits downwards. Contradictions in the imperialist process mean that neocolonialism must necessarily end at some point, as outright colonialism once did.
Before the 20th century, the main threat to imperialist nations was competing imperialist nations, with WW1 and WW2 exemplifying this. The battle was between competing imperialist nations using similar technologies of repression and exploitation, with e.g. Nazi Germany inspired by American segregation and genocide of the Native Americans. The USSR was, however, not an imperialist power. The Bolsheviks were a uniquely anti-imperialist leftist force at a time when national left parties sided with their own countries during WW1, and maintained support for anti-colonial movements across the world in the decades after taking power. The US aggressively opposed this, encouraging an arms race that purposefully drew resources away from national development, which created the conditions for a stagnation of the USSR’s economy and eventually a coup and collapse in 1989. Russia was then demoted to the periphery, unable to be incorporated into Western alliances for the same reasons that many third world countries also could not.
After a period of shock therapy and massive increases in poverty, Putin has established and strengthened the national bourgeoise of Russia and turned the country into an energy-self-sufficient regional power. After the 2014 Maidan coup, a pro-US government was implanted into Ukraine, and Russia later invaded in 2022 for the purpose of establishing long-term defence against a NATO military, diplomatic, and economic offensive that had marched gradually eastwards over the years. Russia’s position in the world-system makes the diagnosis of the Ukraine War as “inter-imperialist” inaccurate; Russia has lost over the years even more wealth through unequal exchange than India or Indonesia on a per-capita basis.
China has more ideological motivations than Russia and less political contradictions, but are in a somewhat similar position. The Communist Party’s anti-colonial civil war led eventually to their ascension, but without massive economic development, their independence would remain only nominal. Deng Xiaoping’s policies led to economic development and technological advances, keeping banks and industry under socialist state control. As a consequence, their development did not follow the same pattern as the dozens of other poor nations kept under imperialist economic relationships: with domestic wages and consumption increasing; development becoming higher-quality and more technological (up now to parity with the West in some areas, and even exceeding them in others); Western capitalist interests suppressed; and the financial system kept firmly under state control. China’s development path has been mystified; some on the left see no difference between this and neoliberal capitalism, while those on the right see all this as communist authoritarianism.
Russia and China are struggling against the US for economic sovereignty. Interimperialist aspirations and conflict (in the form of taking control of foreign countries currently under American control) would be very difficult, with the US possessing over 700 overseas bases and massive military funding; even the most generous definition of a “Chinese overseas base” puts that number in the single-digits, and that number has not been increasing particularly quickly. If China and Russia want to be the new ruling imperialists, which implies (as with past and current empires) a great deal of military domination, they are not doing a very good job at starting that process. China remains remarkably reticent about even invading Taiwan, let alone conquering the rest of the island chains, while Russia has kept the war in Ukraine simmering with attrition rather than doing shock-and-awe campaigns, and has not declared outright war in order to keep resources and manpower focussed on other domestic tasks. China also does not seem interested in setting up a yuan hegemony to replace the dollar hegemony and has only increased manufacturing, the opposite of the US’s offshoring.
So, what are they doing a good job at?
The Imperialist Breakdown
Imperialism is both imposed and undermined via sanctions. A small number keeps troublemakers isolated. But once enough sanctions are imposed, countries eventually begin to create alternative trade systems. More than 60% of all low-income countries are now under some form of financial penalty.
Sanctions also act as direct economic incentives. Venezuela has near-total food self-sufficiency despite US pressure. Cuba has developed one of the world’s best healthcare systems despite, and because of, the embargo. Sanctions on Russia have not only not collapsed the economy, but have arguably been a gift to it; the withdrawal of Western companies forced them to sell assets back to Russian companies for favourable prices. Sanctions on China’s semiconductors is leading to them more fervently aiming for self-sufficiency, with domestic chips powering domestic smartphones and computers; electric vehicles flooding the world; and they have a near-monopoly production of renewable energy generation.
Meanwhile, US military failures are becoming increasingly meaningful. The withdrawal from Afghanistan; the failure of Syrian regime change (author’s note: whoops); the DPRK rising economically and militarily despite a near-comprehensive economic blockade; Venezuela’s continued free existence; Iran beginning to overcome American sanctions and power projection; Hezbollah and Hamas’ resistance of Israeli genocide and war; the US’s inability to wrest control of the Red Sea from Yemen…
The result of this can now be witnessed in the Red Sea. If the US Navy cannot even lift a blockade by Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world, the idea of lifting a blockade around Taiwan is a complete fantasy. If the US cannot compete with the arms production of Iran, then the notion of somehow out-competing China should be put to bed immediately.
But this is also why the Red Sea defeat will be met with silence. More than any other conflict raging today, it highlights the crisis within the West’s military organisation, as well as the fact that there is no real way to fix it. To admit our powerlessness is to admit that the era of Western hegemony is already over. Faced with little alternative, we will continue to let the Houthis blow up our ships – and then pretend that none of it really matters.
Inside the imperial core, American allies are growing increasingly discontent even as they are asked to sacrifice more to keep American hegemony afloat. Europe’s political alliance is becoming disconnected from their economic interests of maintaining a cheap supply of natural gas from Russia and large amounts of trade with China. Similar dynamics exist with South Korea and Japan. Even within America, thousands of corporations are highly reliant on their factories within China and will resist true decoupling.
Alternatives to Western financial institutions are, admittedly, still fairly embryonic; BRICS is not remotely as rigidly constructed and imposed as, say, NATO (regardless of NATO’s declining actual strength). However, it is also far from the only organization based on international cooperation and development; others include the SCO and ASEAN.
All of these dynamics could, potentially, be part of a Chinese master plan to destroy American hegemony and replace it with their own. This is essentially the position of many imperialist academics and analysts. They project America’s settler-colonial history and ambitions onto China, believing all nations to be just as chauvinistic. The author lists many quotes from Chinese diplomats painting them in a good light (with contrasting hostile quotes from American diplomats), but China’s actions are the most meaningful thing to study here.
Analysis of unequal trade from Kyle Ferrana’s Why The World Needs China reveals that China has not merely become another imperialist harvesting from neocolonies. China is the largest trading partner of every African country, and yet the terms of the trade are only very slightly in favor of China. This is actually a substantial issue for China: they buy commodities from African countries (which, due to Western influence that China is so far unable to reverse, are grossly underpriced), and then refines those commodities and sells them for prices lower than in the West (which is how it has achieved manufacturing dominance). That is: rather than overwork African labourers even more than the West is to drive raw commodity prices down, China is instead using Chinese labour.
This places China in the semi-periphery - wealth overwhelmingly flows from Africa to the imperial core rather than to China, but what little China does get is used in state-led production to compete with the imperial core, as well as investment in the periphery to raise their level of development. In fact, Chinese net investment income from abroad is negative (they are losing money by investing in the developing world), whereas for Western countries, it is very positive. China either has unbelievably incompetent investors, or they are doing something sneaky and clever. The Belt and Road has invested over a trillion dollars into the Global South, with ports, rails, roads, and pipelines being constructed all over the world.
Is this merely cynical? Didn’t the British also construct railways in their colonies? No, because:
This omits how imperial projects were purely extractive endeavours and came at the expense of colonial peoples, even to the point of purposively de-industrialising nations like India. The neo-imperialist period saw active efforts by the West to prevent infrastructure from being built, with mechanisms of debt peonage and indiscriminate bombing, such as the U.S’ destruction of Sudan’s Al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory. China’s participation, in contrast, has been to build infrastructure providing power, transport, medicine and education.
What about Chinese debt trapping?
This is another example of flattening real differences: as shown by repeated papers and investigations, Chinese debt-trap is an outright myth, with even Western newspapers such as The Atlantic and Bloomberg admitting as much. In fact, in 2022 alone, the country forgave “23 interest-free loans for 17 African countries, after already cancelling $3.4 billion and restructuring $15 billion of debt from 2000-2019.” This practise of forgiving loans is a stark contrast to the activities of Western institutions, as covered in many sources.
In 2024, at the Forum on Africa-China Relations, Xi Jinping announced that all Least Developed Countries that have relations with China, including 33 countries in Africa, will gain zero-tariff treatment, and intergovernmental interest-free loans due at the end of 2024 will be waived, while those same countries are perfectly allowed to put tariffs on Chinese imports to build up their domestic industries.
China is, therefore, not becoming the new imperialist hegemon. They are working to end the fundamental structures of imperialism altogether.
This was an excellent read, thank you comrade
