Neil Davidson (1957-2020)
htmlIn mid-May, British Marxist historian Neil Davidson died of cancer at the age of 62. Davidson, who worked as a civil servant in Scotland in his spare time and participated in historical research and social activities in his spare time, entered the academic community in the 2000s and received attention for his research on Marxism and nationalism. As a Scottish , he studied the Scottish nationalist movement that rose after 2000 and explored why it suddenly rose in recent years. He also published related works "Discovering the Scottish Revolution 1692-1746", "The Origins of Scottish Nationhood", etc. In 2012, he published the book "How did the Bourgeois Revolution be established? 》 (How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?), discussing the role of the bourgeois in the independence movement of European and African countries, and attempting to re-introduce Marxist class and historical theories into the study of the nation-state issues around the world.This article is an interview with Neil Davidson by Benjamin Birnbaum, editor of the French magazine Période, in 2016, published in the magazine Viewpoint. The Pengpai News Thought Market Column published a translated version of this article for readers. In what context did you decide to write the book "Nation-States: Consciousness and Competition"? Politically speaking, territorial cracking has appeared in Europe again since the 1990s. Academically, since the 1990s, "Faced with the catastrophic nationalism of the post-communist era that emerged in a world presupposed as ‘globalization’, the new generation (scholars) have developed a great interest in ‘group, race or ethnicity’."
Neil Davidson: The articles and chapters in the book I wrote on many different occasions between 1999 and 2014. My initial motivation for writing about nationalism and nationalism was to try to understand what had just happened in my own homeland, Scotland. In 1997, Scotland just passed a referendum to establish a decentralized parliament. The Parliament was formed in 1999. I am particularly interested in why nationalism, as a political movement, is so weak in Scottish history—although paradoxically, “Scottish sex” is very powerful as an identity. (In Scotland) The dominant nationalism is British nationalism (even Irish nationalism for many Scots who believe in Irish Catholicism), not Scottish nationalism. Given the recent hegemony of the Scottish National Party (SNP), it is easy to forget that although the party was founded in 1934, they had only one member of the parliament in the parliament (Westminster Palace) until 1967, and they only worked for a few months. It was only in 2007 that they formed a majority government at Holyrood Palace (referring to the Scottish Parliament), and in 2015 they won the majority seats in the Scottish constituency for the first time in the British Parliament. Even now, Scots may not necessarily vote for the Scottish National Party because of nationalism. To explain the particularity of the Scottish issue, I have thought more about the broader national issue, but there are three other factors that researchers in this area cannot skip through the entire 2000s. First, the situation in Scotland is the nationalism of "stateless-nation" that emerged in developed Western countries, where there is no or no national oppression - such as Catalonia and Quebec. The second is that the existing nation-state collapses on the basis of what is commonly known as "ethnic" - most obviously the former Yugoslavia and several countries in central Africa. The third is that neoliberal globalist claims that the form of nation-state is becoming redundant—although that voice has clearly decreased since the bailout packages of countries during the 2008 crisis.
Neil Davidson's book "National State: Consciousness and Competition"
Marx and Engels wrote in the "Communist Manifesto": "Workers have no motherland" - this sentence is their most famous conclusion on national issues and is written very abstractly. However, their later works on Polish and Ireland focused on concrete political strategies, emphasizing the dialectical relationship between national self-determination and proletarian internationalism. What lessons can we learn from Marx and Engels about national issues? What does the word “nation” mean to them?
Neil Davidson: Marx and Engels use the word "nation" in many different ways: sometimes they refer to a people like Johann Herder; sometimes they refer to territorial units like Adam Smith; sometimes they refer to a mixture of the two. In other words, in fact, like the rest of the era, Marx and Engel used the word very casually and common sense, which was very different from the scientific rigor of their definition of " capitalist mode of production ". They certainly did not specifically associate nations with capitalism—in fact, Engels occasionally talked about the "German nation" that existed during the fall of the Roman Empire. Therefore, as modernist national theory researchers, I do not think that we should regard Marx and Engels' arbitrary and unsystematic comments on specific nations as the basis of Marxist national theory. But their ideological theories can provide us with more—more specifically, Marx’s own statement about religion. Of course, this has long been overlooked or carelessly misunderstood. The "people's opium" mentioned by Marx does not mean that religion is a drug specially used by the ruling class to downplay people's consciousness, but that religion itself is a product made by the people themselves to fill the void that Marx later called "alienation". In this sense, nationalism is a modern form of religion that is accompanied by the power of the state or seeking to establish a new state, occupying the organizational role the church once played.
The important discourses of Marx and Engels on nations are mainly related to the attitudes that socialists should adopt towards specific national movements. Their attitude is primarily about whether the success of any movement, whether national separatism or national unity, is possible to promote the socialist revolution—although this is usually indirect. Essentially, they believed that nationalism was a political movement to build a nation-state and part of the bourgeois revolution, which would wipe out pre-capitalist state forms and create conditions for the birth of the working class. In this context, they decide which nationalisms to support and which nationalisms to oppose. The British and Russian empires oppressed and hindered the development of Poland and Ireland respectively, so support these two nationalisms should be supported. Similarly, they opposed nationalist movements that had to rely on the great empire to survive, such as Panslavism in 1848. Of course, one can also accept the latter conclusion based on the acceptance of Engels' mystical "non-historical nation" (see Engels' article "Democratic Panslavism" in Volume 6 of the Complete Works of Marx and Engels. Engels believed that Panslav nationalism was reactionary and counter-revolutionary because "(except the Poles and Russians) all other Slavs did not have the historical, geographical, political and industrial conditions necessary for independence and sustaining vitality." - Translator's note).
You point out that classic Marxists have not developed a systematic idea of the concept of nation, and the main ideas of Marxists in this regard (mainly proposed by Austria [Austria-Hungarian Empire] Marxists) basically reflect the non-Marxist approach.What did they ignore? What may constitute the basis of Marxist national theory?
Neil Davidson: If we put aside Austrian Marxists, most classical Marxist discussions about nationalism follow Marx and Engels, focusing on strategic issues: in other words, which nationalist movement should be supported and which nationalist movement should be opposed. Interestingly, when discussing the two countries that Marx and Engels were most concerned about, the relevant Marxists - Rosa Luxembourg to Poland and James Connolly to Ireland, they took a completely opposite position. (Connolly is obviously Scot, but he is an Irish Catholic.) Luxembourg disapproves of the “right to national self-determination” as a metaphysical form, which I am partially sympathetic, but Lenin’s distinction between “oppressed” peoples and “oppressed” peoples is still crucial as a starting point for action, at least in the colonial era. Today's situation is even more complicated. Obviously, there are still all kinds of oppressed people today, such as the Kurdish people and the Palestinian people. But the concept of “oppression” is of little help in our response to national movements in Scotland or Catalonia: at this time we need to understand more broadly what is the interests of the working class.
However, when discussing what really constitutes a nation, classic Marxists have no idea other than mentioning the keyity of the common language and the application of the nation-state form to capitalist development. Therefore, many of the most influential Marxist theorists of contemporary nationalism have turned to non-Marxist thinkers for theoretical frameworks, particularly prominently because Tom Nairn relies on the Weberist thinker Enerest Gellner. By the way, I am not suggesting that Gerner's work has no value, but rather that it has an inherent coherence that Marxist scholars lack. The Marxists in Austria seem to be an exception. But Otto Bauer's works are of course very exquisite, and in my opinion they are involved in a nationalist concept of "perennialist" (in the sense of Anthony Smith), and even to the level of primordialism - any form of identity group based on a certain region may appear just in the fifth century AD, and are traced to a "nation". The central claim of Marxism is certainly that certain types of ideology and consciousness are only possible at certain moments in history. When theorists give up this perspective, it means they are already subject to the ideology they are trying to explain - I think both Ball and Nain are.
You distinguish between national consciousness and nationalism in the book. Can you explain these two terms and the meaning of this difference, and can you also discuss the concept of "identity"?
Neil Davidson: Nation can be defined in an objective or subjective way. The former usually involves a series of facts such as language or territory - taking a scientific and rigorous look. Unfortunately, ethnic groups will also tend to appear in groups that lack these facts, although it is undoubtedly inconvenient for social and political scientists: if you go to tell the Swiss that they are not the same people because they do not have a common language, or if you go to tell the Kurds that they are not the same people because they do not have continuous territory, it is impossible to convince the two groups, although they vary greatly. In fact, if one can define a nation without immediately citing counterexamples or exceptions, there is only a subjective definition: a group of people feel that they are different from other groups - usually for reasons such as historical and cultural accumulation, but not necessarily. The reasons may vary from situation to situation, but this subjective sense of identity is their only common attribute. This feeling of mutual recognition is what I call "national consciousness": a more or less passive expression of collective identity in a social group.For many people - such as most modern Scots and Catalans until recently, it is normal to have a national consciousness and not become a nationalist, but it is impossible to become a nationalist without a national consciousness.
National consciousness and national identity are not the same thing. Identity is a collection of all external signs through which people can show themselves and others what category they choose to be classified. These signs can be a specific type of clothing or a specific way of speaking, but for the most part, they are just people’s reactions to a specific title. And national consciousness is a psychological state that seeks to express itself in an external identity symbol.
Nationalism is an activity that is more or less actively involved in political mobilization of social groups to build or defend a country. As a political ideology, nationalism—any relatively progressive or absolutely reactionary nationalism—must contain two principles: first, a national group should have its own state, regardless of any social consequences; second, the power of unify a national group is more important than dividing its power, which includes class differences. Finally, it is also possible to seek to build a nation-state without nationalism and without nationalism: this was true in Scotland during the 2014 independence referendum. At that time, many Scots agitated and voted for an independent country for reasons of “social” rather than “nationality”.
The sociological tradition inspired by Durkheim and Weber emphasizes that society will seek to establish consistency to offset it in the face of the disintegrative role brought by industrialization. To what extent, Marxist attention to the domination of capitalist mode of production provides us with deeper insights into the development of national consciousness?
Neil Davidson: The key figure here is neither Durkheim nor Weber, but Gelner I mentioned earlier. Here, nationalism is essentially a substitute for religious roles in what Weber calls it a traditional society or agricultural society. They do not consider the state to be the eternal side of the human condition before industrialization, and believe that the state will inevitably be reintroduced after industrialization begins. Marxist emphasis on the dominance of capitalist modes of production is based in part on the historical fact that some people developed national consciousness before industrialization began, and formed completely nationalism, especially in the United Kingdom, the United States and France, and in the Netherlands - slightly weaker. If we think that states only appear at some stage in the late 18th century, it is absurd to claim that capitalism only appears at the same time. In fact, it took centuries to become a dominant consciousness, just as it took centuries to become a dominant mode of production, and the former is the result of the latter.
In these pre-industrial capitalist countries , nationalism is the product of four main elements. The first element is the distinction between "inside" and "outside" in economic activities and the formation of connections between different regions within (groups). In this case, the importance of capitalist development is greater in the field of circulation and smaller in the field of production, because the establishment of trade networks allows merchant capital to connect scattered rural communities with urban centers to form a broad domestic market. Directly related to this element is the second point, that economically interconnected groups adopt a common language. The communication demand brought by the market begins to undermine the uniqueness of the dialect and form a language that is common to all people or at least understands each other. Language sets the boundaries of these economic networks in this way, and these boundaries do not necessarily coincide with the boundaries of medieval kingdoms. Obviously, this economic and linguistic unity is easier in a small centralized country like England, and more difficult in a larger territory like the German Empire. In the formation of language standard forms, the help of the invention of printing is immeasurable, and it provides the basis for a large number of copied, coded languages.The increase in language standardization further promotes its economic foundation - the trade network of merchants initially defined the boundaries of language commonality, and now they define their identities by scope of activities, excluding competitors who speak different languages.
The third element is the characteristic of absolutism, a form taken by the feudal state in the economic transition from feudalism to capitalism. Local jurisdictions with classic military feudal characteristics began to give way to more concentrated state power, especially the establishment of standing army, and regular centralized taxation that began in part to pay for standing army costs. Both death and taxation involve bureaucracies that need to have a language that can be understood in the national territory, which strengthens the above element two, namely "language". They also have two unexpected effects. On the one hand, the implementation of regular taxation and the implementation of mercantilist policies have strengthened economic unity, which has spontaneously formed from the activities of commercial capitalists. On the other hand, a major feature of the new system is military confrontation, which requires the mobilization of active support as a minority of the bourgeoisie to provide fiscal revenue and administrative technology. Nevertheless, we should not misunderstand the role of authoritarianism in the birth of nations, it is a midwife, not a mother. The arrival of nations is not related to the establishment of absolutist states, but to the process of overthrowing them.
The fourth and final element is the Reformation, which makes religion no longer just an ideological pious worship of the image of the ruling dynasty. After 1517, any specific territorial area where Protestantism became the main religion would allow faith groups to oppose themselves and the cross-regional Roman Catholic Church with the Holy Roman Empire, thus promoting the formation of national consciousness. To some extent, this is achieved by reading " Bible " in a local language, but this is based on the existing language of market transactions and national administration. In short, Protestantism stimulated national consciousness only after the development of capitalism provided it with a framework. This process is naturally the farthest in the UK. But even in England, it was not until 1603 that Protestantism parted ways with the monarch.
However, outside of a few countries, capitalism emerged simultaneously with industrialization, so to some extent, what Gelner said about popular nationalism is a product of industrialization and is correct, but his view is too focused on the function of nationalism in industrial society. At the very least, he should focus more on the ways in which industrialization and how the process of urbanization brings about changes in human consciousness, factors that make nationalism possible for the lower classes, just as these processes have produced more complex societies that make nationalism necessary for the ruling class. The impact of these experiences on individuals is so huge that they are too easily overlooked.
You point out that capitalism is a competitive accumulation system based on employment labor, providing reasons for the continued existence of the state system in two aspects: first, for competitive purposes, capital within a specific region needs to be coordinated; second, this territorial region must have a common ideological foundation - nationalism, in order to connect the working class with the state and capital. You think it is regrettable to overemphasize analysis of internal political or geopolitical relations. How can we discuss nation-state in a more balanced way?
Neil Davidson: problem stems in part from how the academy system is divided into more or less arbitrary subjects, and the result is that national consciousness becomes the subject of social psychology, while nation-states are the field of international relations. This way of studying the world is alien to Adam Smith and Karl Marx, and the unexpected ideological effect is that our understanding of how the world works becomes fragmented. Of course, we need to study specific parts of the social whole, but we must also remember this: no matter how microscopic our research object is, it is part of a larger whole, which is why research on why problems at the micro level are important.When dealing with the problem of fragmentation in the research on the topic of nation, we have no more ways than to emphasize the concept of constituentity as any other discipline.
Can you explain your conclusion for us: "The consciousness of the nation does not directly compete with the revolutionary class consciousness for the loyalty of the working class, but national consciousness is a key element of class consciousness in reformist ". What is the impact on the revolutionary agenda?
Neil Davidson: Regarding the awareness of reformists, Gramsci has a very famous description, he believes that they are "double-sided" or "contradictory". On the one hand, we accept the continuity of the system, and on the other hand, we reject the operation results of these systems. The most basic manifestation of this contradiction is that workers accept the wage system but reject the specific level of wages they are offered, but it extends to all aspects of social life. Reformist workers remain nationalists. From the perspective of the bourgeoisie in each country, such a combination is absolutely necessary, otherwise there will be a danger for the bourgeoisie that workers will identify with the same kind of class they destined regardless of geographical location, rather than the "national" interests of the country they happened to be born. Nationalism should therefore not be seen as something that “was happening” only in the separatist movement or in fascism and imperialism on the other side: it is the capitalist system that takes nationalism as a necessary daily condition for its continued operation. It develops new structural capacities, new experiences, and new psychological needs for people who must work in factories and live in cities. Nationalism provides a sense of collective belonging without a revolutionary class consciousness to overcome the influence of alienation and psychological compensation for the harm suffered by people in capitalist society, which is combined with the class consciousness of reformists. Some may say that the origin of national consciousness is the emergence of an identity group in order to adapt to the historical situation of universal alienation. However, the demand generated by capitalist industrialization will exist as long as the system itself continues to operate. The capitalist system must ensure people's loyalty to the country, and the nation is the means. People often ask workers to accept rising interest rates, cuts in wages and services, or participate in imperialist wars, but they never say that it is for the benefit of capitalism, but always say that it is for the "national interests." It is not only the state that makes such a call. The working class organization strengthened the reformists' class consciousness on national issues. On the most fundamental level, this is because such organizations are reluctant to challenge nationalist political discussions, fearing to be labeled unpatriotic. More importantly, however, they attempt to influence or determine policies within the existing national-state framework. Therefore, investment in nationalism reflects the typical contradiction of the reformist worldview.
Neil Davidson's book We Can't Escape History: The State and the Revolution
There is a common assumption that neoliberalism does not need a state, but you think it needs a state. You also give the view when you mention David Harvey that neoliberal states “need some type of nationalism to survive.” Can you explain the connection?
Neil Davidson: In a sense, this is just a contemporary form of the general demand of capitalism that I mentioned earlier. The neoliberal organization of capitalism exacerbates three existing trends: transforming interpersonal relationships into market transactions, reducing human potential to simple factors of production, and prioritizing human self-identity into consumers. As a result, the degree of atomization and alienation of humans has increased to an previously unimaginable level, with potentially dangerous consequences for capital, which still needs to be accepted by the working class in the process of exploitation, preferably actively supporting the entire system. If not, it is possible that social collapse may be caused by individual consumers transferring competition from the market to all other areas of life, thereby threatening the entire system, or when workers discover or rediscover their class consciousness and mobilize them in a concentrated manner, bringing social conflicts and thus threatening the entire system.But simple suppression will not produce the voluntary acceptance required by the system. In this context, nationalism plays three roles: first, it provides spiritual compensation for direct producers, which is not available only from commodity consumption. Just as some ruling classes strengthen nationalist education when they turn to the opening up of the world market; second, it is a means to re-seek cohesion at the political level after losing cohesion at the social level; third, it uses this cohesion to mobilize the entire nation behind national capital to counter its competitors. The last point needs to be explained in detail, as it may involve risks or at least cause inconvenience to capital. The imperialist nationalism launched by British conservatives against "Europe" before 1997 was not because the EU was somewhat hostile to neoliberalism, but because the neoliberal ideology failed and they turned to something else to seek to change the fate of British capital. No matter how reasonable it seems, the nationalism that emerges has become a major obstacle for British politicians and state managers who want to expand their European integration strategy, as can be seen in the Brexit referendum.
But there is another danger for the ruling class, that is, neoliberal nationalism will cause the neoliberal state to split. The difficulties here are even greater. Since nationalism is inevitable for capitalist development, in the face of unbearable conditions, people's first reaction is to seek to establish a new nation-state, although this is usually only possible if there is already a certain sense of nationality, such as in Scotland. In other words, neoliberalism may require states, but not specific states. Nationalism, as an opposing force of neoliberal social and economic policies, may bring a series of problems to individual ruling classes—not class struggle or “all-to-all” war issues, but the uncertainty and inconvenience caused by potential national-state divisions. This situation is usually only possible if there is another national consciousness and is associated with a certain territory with a distinct boundary within the state.
However, despite the risks or inconveniences to capital, it is not clear what can replace nationalism to ensure the loyalty of the working class to the capitalist state—even if only a little—or to prevent the formation of revolutionary class consciousness. Can loyalty be transferred upward to global governments or even regional governments? It seems difficult. As Benedict Anderson said: Who would die for Comecon or the EU? Loyalty cannot be easily transferred downward to individual capital. Workers are known to support their companies and even make sacrifices to keep the company running. But this often happens in local, mature, and long-term employed companies for workers. When workers are to make sacrifices, such as accepting worsening working conditions or actual wage cuts, they do not do so because they believe there is no other option to accept a situation of complete unemployment. Managers or "team leaders" can give themselves chicken blood from the McDonald's spirit or the Walmart spirit, but workers cannot. The reality of daily conflicts between them and their employers is too severe to overcome. Besides that, even companies that provide health insurance and pensions for workers cannot provide the comprehensive functions that even the weakest nation-states provide. Oil millionaires and media celebrities who fund and lead the Tea Party respectively may intend to make the entire country more protective for Wal-Mart and Wall Street, but their free-market rhetoric always advocates regaining the country from the White House’s “Marxist antichrist” and “liberal elites” who threaten American freedom, rather than saying profit margins are restored.
Not all social conflicts can be directly attributed to class struggle. In many recent conflicts, such as Yugoslavia or Rwanda , and in conflicts related to Islam, people often use the term "ethinicity" to explain conflicts.To what extent do you think the word ethnicity has insight?
Neil Davidson: People currently use the concept of "ethnicity" and are using it more and more, which contains many problems for the left. Two of these problems are particularly prominent. On the one hand, those who agree to understand a certain cultural identity as ethnic group seem to emphasize the so-called innate differences among human social groups, and are at risk of endorsing today’s racist ideology. On the other hand, those who disagree with the concept of “ethnicity” and understand it as a manifestation of (real or imagined) identity exclusion are also at risk because they believe that “ethnicity” nationalism is particularly prone to becoming an act of oppression. The danger here is that they blur the characteristics that all nationalisms have—whether they are oppressors or oppressed, or somewhere in between.
There are three definitions of "ethnicity": first, members of a group have a common blood lineage, so they are in the same kinship relationship; second, they enjoy a common position in the international division of labor, so they have the same profession; third, they have one or more common cultural attributes, so they have the same identity. The first ethnic group no longer exists. In fact, even before capitalism penetrates every corner of the world in order to find markets and raw materials, trade, conquest and migration have made the gene pool of marriage within the same race less and less. The second meaning is also effective to a certain extent. For example, we can use it to describe the occupational model in pre-colonial society that is classified by European colonists as a group of intra-nation marriage and blood ties; we can also use it to describe the situation when colonialism leads to immigration: some groups claim to be internal marriage, or claim to have certain qualities or characteristics, which separate themselves from the surrounding local residents. And the third definition that currently dominates is, I think, the definition is the most problematic because it is actually a way to label people with ideological "super categories" that can contain any characteristics people have.
Socialists should go beyond the increasingly described divisions of “ethnic groups” by eliminating oppression that makes the ethnic group prominent, rather than permanently or aggravate it. This may mean supporting oppressed nations or groups, but the concept of “ethnicity” is ultimately a means of dividing people into increasingly arbitrary classifications. At best, it under the guise of “cultural differences”, emphasizing only the shallower parts of the social world, thus obscuring people’s commonalities. At worst, in the struggle for scarce resources, it can be used as a means of persecution of certain groups.
In France, historian Ernest Renan proposed to use "civic nationalism" to oppose "ethnic nationalism". This idea is very popular. Both these two nationalisms act within the framework of the nation-state. Is there a substantial difference between these two so-called inflexible, pure forms?
Neil Davidson: "citizen" nationalism is often regarded as the only real form of nationalism. Some people think that some nationalisms are oppressive because they are based precisely on the “ethnic” identity. This kind of nationalism is often compared with nationalism of "citizens" or "social". For example, Scottish and Catalan nationalism is often described as “citizen nationalism”, especially the Scottish and Catalan nationalists themselves. What is interesting in the debate about "citizen" nationalism is that, in addition to nationalism like France with a republican constitution, citizen nationalism has historically been used to defend nationalism of multi-national oppressors such as Britain. For socialists, there are great difficulties in trying to replace "ethnic" nationalism with "citizen" nationalism. There are two points in particular: First, the category of "citizens" avoids the fact that nation-state must engage in certain activities no matter how unrelated it is to ethnic groups.As many refugees from Syria and other war-torn areas have been found so far, the state guards on the border against those called "non-nationals". The second reason is that, as I said in answering the previous question, the categories of ethnic groups can be invented by their enemies or defined by these groups themselves without having to be linked to real or fictional blood relationships: culture can easily become the basis of ethnic groups like the tribalism of "blood and earth". It is precisely because ethnic groups are the product of social construction that ethnic classification can occur anywhere, and the consequences of the disaster can be the same as those of the Balkans, Rwanda, Iraq and Ukraine. Therefore, we cannot think that "citizen" nationalism will not transform into "ethnic" nationalism under certain conditions, as Germany in the 1930s - Germany at that time was a modern, developed and highly culturally prosperous capitalist society. The advocates of “civic” nationalism are certainly eager to avoid this conclusion from me.
Regarding the US foreign policy in the Middle East, you observed that "failure to analyze modern states based on class analysis will lead to a limited understanding of the rationality of state managers, which leads to the inability to understand why they take certain actions." What is the significance of anti-imperialism in anti-capitalist strategies?
Neil Davidson: The points I am trying to make in this paragraph you quote are mainly targeting certain versions of "Political Marxism" by Brenner, Wood, Teschke, etc. Among them, capitalism is simplified to dependence or coercion on the market. But capitalism is not only about the market, but actually if this definition is taken completely seriously, then we would doubt why it can exist in the vast majority of the world so far. However, in the specific context of imperialism, an obsession with the concept of market leads to a Weber-style conclusion. This conclusion has its effect—geopolitics is seen as a field independent of economics, or as a decision by politicians and state managers is “irrational” because they cannot immediately meet the needs of the specific bourgeoisie. For example, it is obvious today that the U.S.-based oil companies are not entirely keen on the Iraq War. But capitalist states must act for the interests of national/state capital as a general, rather than the interests of a particular sector of capital, which is the ultimate meaning of the Iraq War: the United States uses it to knock on its allies and enemies, and what will happen if they do it too much. It shows to allies that the United States is still the only country that can use force to make "rogue states" obey, and can also control China's oil supply, etc., which have nothing to do with market competition. Putting aside the indescribable suffering caused to the Iraqi invasion, this war was largely a failure of the Americans, but that does not mean that the war was not in line with the rationality of American capitalism, simply because it was a gamble, and the result was determined by many factors that they could not foresee, including but not only the extent of internal opposition.
So it seems that I do think anti-imperialism is a necessary part of any serious anti-capitalist strategy, but it is important to understand what this means. Part of the reason the left was unable to reach an agreement on the current situation in the Middle East was because Stalinists and other supporters of "top-down socialism" actually believed that leaders like Assad were anti-imperialist, or that no possibility was seen from society in any way except him. However, there is another more theoretical question, which has two points. First, a series of misunderstandings about the classic Marxist aspects of imperialism and national self-determination established before and after World War I. Second, on top of the first misunderstanding, one imagines that these theories can be simply transplanted from the historical time when they were formulated to today without a serious summary of what has changed from then to now (although not limited to issues such as imperialism and the right to self-determination).
When Karl Liebknecht put forward the slogan "the main enemy is at home", he did not mean that the only enemy is at home. The context here is crucial. The right and centrists in the Second International supported the "their own" state in World War I, using arguments of self-defense, or the view that the other side was somewhat worse—less democratic, more oppressed the colonial people it ruled, and so on. This is why it is so important to understand the systemic nature of imperialism: the first shot is irrelevant, because competition among states can lead to war in any case. Therefore, socialists everywhere at that time had to object to the country they were in, rather than using the pretext of their enemies and not doing so. But Lenin did not expect that the revolution against the barbaric behavior of Russia would require him to remain silent about Germany's atrocities, and in fact he did not remain silent about it. The slogan of "turning imperialist wars into civil wars" is applicable everywhere from Britain to Japan.
At least, some contemporary people who may become anti-imperialists have abandoned this tradition. On the one hand, imperialism is no longer understood as a system, as an inevitable aspect of contemporary capitalism. Instead, they understand imperialism as policies implemented by governments, or attributes possessed by specific nation-states, to human cognitive or emotional abilities—as their specific expressions of imperialism, “imperialism “want”, “need” or “think” this and that, so they understand that, from the formation of ISIS to the events in Ukraine, American imperialism is responsible, and others do not have any agency or motivation. But if everything is the result of “American imperialism” omnipotence, what else can people resist? Sometimes, the United States is replaced by indiscriminate “Western imperialism”, in which there is obviously no conflict of interest, capital or geopolitical competition in this understanding of Western imperialism. In fact, this usage makes the game impossible. “Western” imperialism once resembles (non-imperialist) “Eastern” Opposition. Now there may be "degenerate" or "transformed" workers' states, in which workers are not only powerless, but are under great bureaucratic oppression, giving them formal applause, but calling for the defense of these countries at least has some logical consistency. It is incredible that Stalinists and at least some Orthodox Trotskyists have called for the defense of corrupt, undemocratic orthodox capitalist countries. The same logic supports the 2011 Egyptian revolution because it targets Egypt and the United States alliance, but also against the Syrian revolution - because it targets an enemy of the United States. Western socialists have a responsibility to oppose their government's bloody intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere, but this is not a reason to turn them to support regimes that kill workers and peasants, the basis of future revolutionary forces.
