On Material(ist) Dialectics and Imperialism

Section 1: Universal Philosophy of Dialectical Materialism

The essential meaning of philosophical materialism is: there is a real universe, consisting in the stuff of the Material, in material objects and incidents (matter, energy, space, physical interactions, etc.), and the human mind, being a quality or event arising from the Material (a quality of the material object of the brain), is capable of knowing and interacting with this reality truly, of having an accurate objective picture of reality {12}. There is not a mystic dualist’s duality of soul and flesh, nor of a spiritual “reality” and a material “illusion,” nor of abstract metaphysical-divine Good and Evil†; there is one Real, one Monad (singular essential unit of reality- if such a thing can be!), and we are capable of knowing it truthfully- it is the sum of the stuff of the Material, the material universe, and it is made up of infinitely many material parts happening/interacting in contradiction and struggle, dialectically; we know it by our own interactions within it, for we too are parts of it, assemblages of material things, of material objects and interactions: not ethereal spirits, but bodies and their interactions and parts: brains, minds, organs, senses, bodies{14}. We know the world as it is, for we deny the idealism that declares a difference between the essence of things-in-themselves and things as we experience; things are defined precisely in their interactions of unity-and-contradiction with each other, which are described accurately, by Dialectical Materialism, and it is in these interactions that we come to know them- the thing-in-itself and the thing-as-we-know-it are one and the same, material reality comprehended by us, beings that exist within it, through our participation in its great ballet of dialectics*, of contradiction and progress and unity and struggle{12,10,9,14}!

The Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism, the theory of material dialectics, is our accurate, materialist picture of the world and how it can be known, our correct theory in ontology (philosophical theory of the nature of reality) and of epistemology (philosophical theory of the way reality can be known){9}. Knowledge of the real universe and of its structure exists meaningfully only in so far as it emerges in the matter of the brain-mind from dialectical practice in the material world and is re-applied to that practice; but it is also refined and altered by dialectical development within the mind or between minds. By this theory we know that the nature of all relations in the material world is dialectically-described, that we are surrounded by dialectics or dialectical relations described by the science of dialectics{18}. We know that reality is described by the Law of Unity of Opposites, the essential law of reality: material relationships are systems of unity and struggle between contradicting parts which develop around contradictions between material elements and evolve as the two interact and mutually transform one another toward a resolution of the contradiction, are of a nature describable as dialectical and defined by these contradictions {18}. We know this by the evidence of our senses, by our own development of knowledge through this very kind of struggle and secondarily through the refinement of knowledge by resolution of contradictions in struggles of universalizing theoretical thought which refines the lessons we gain from this external practice- thus we know Dialectical Materialism to be an essentially correct ontological and epistemic theory (and one that transcends and resolves the contradiction between empiricism, which vulgarly limits knowledge to perceptions, and rationalism, which vulgarly limits it to thought) {9}. And so we know that in all things, in every material object or event/interaction/system of objects around us, we will find contradictions between elements, and expect the struggle over these contradictions and toward their resolution (whether it is an antagonistic one in which the secondary aspect of the contradiction negates and triumphs over and abolishes the primary to resolve it or whether it is a benign one in which two aspects exist in affirmative interpenetration) to define how matters change over time- as they inevitably will, in a universe characterized by such dialectical processes of unity and struggle.

The reality which the Law of Contradiction or Law of Unity of Opposites describes is this: in all things there exist within the single reality contradicting elements, elements whose being and whose teleology are contradicted against one another{18,10}. Every object or incident which exists in the material universe, therefore, is a unity-of-opposites, a relation of two things contradicted against one another, mutually interpenetrating and transforming one another, defining and negating one another, until the contradiction is resolved by an explosive qualitative change in their relationship in which this unity-of-opposites is transformed into a new one, one with its own new contradictions{18}. In the symbology favored by idealist “formal” logicians of academia, the concept of contradicting aspects coexisting can be written as: x^¬xⁱ; it is anathema to the current of idealist logic that has been passed down by establishmentarian intellectuals from Plato to Bertrand Russell, as a violation of their “law of noncontradiction.” Yet from the scientific materialist perspective of Marxist dialectical logic, concerned with real reality and applied to real conditions, it is obviously true: we can prove this by examining our own bodies. Am I one, or am I multitudinous? I must be both; I am one body, and yet I am many cells. So although one-ness is the negation of many-ness, one-ness=x and many-ness=¬x, yet in my body exist, in unity-and-opposition, mutually defining and transforming and affirming and negating one another, an aspect of one-ness and an aspect of many-ness, two aspects existing in the essence of a single material object which is a unity of these two opposites, in mutual affirmation and negation of one another. Likewise in the body exists a contradiction between those elements (cells, systems, etc.) which are actively alive, and those which are dead (e.g. necrotic tissues in an otherwise living body), and the related or equivalent contradiction between the tendency toward the maintenance of homeostasis and the tendency toward its disruption. So, my body is a unity-of-opposites, a material dialectical system. So too is its relationship with another body, and so too is society; so too is every object or incident in the world, made up of other objects and incidents which relate in this manner of contradiction and resultant dialectical interaction. The Law of Contradiction is a universal descriptor of reality and how it can be known, just as Mao states in On Contradiction.

In a dialectical relationship, in the relationship between opposites within a U-of-O or in our picture thereof, there is a principal and there is a secondary aspect {18}. In the dialectic defining the human body around the contradiction life↔death/homeostasis↔anti-homeostasis, life and homeostasis are principal and their negations/opposites secondary. Yet as the body ages and its power to maintain life and homeostasis wanes, the contradictions intensify until quantitative buildups of illness and senescence transform into a qualitative leap: death becomes the principal aspect and life the secondary, being crushed as the old U-of-O of the body is supplanted by the new one of the cadaver- in a word, the body dies**. This is a dialectical description of the process of death(!). As dialectical materialism is a universal philosophical system, giving shape to the way we understand every matter of scientific investigation of the world, we can make such a description, and find it illuminating, of anything{10}; obviously, as revolutionaries, we use this scientific philosophy most often in study of political-economy and revolution.

Section 2: Its Specific Application to Scientific Political-Economic Study of Imperialism

We know that we can apply the scientific philosophy of dialectical materialism to the analysis of political economy in class society, and to the scientific socialist project of constructing a new system and struggling to resolve class contradictions and build a fair society by practical, scientific, material means. We know that the fundamental contradiction in capitalist society, in class society defined by the capitalist mode of economic production and by the resultant social order of the bourgeois class-dictatorship, is that of exploitation betwixt the minority of capitalist parasites and the majority working class, the mighty proletariat that shall rise up to destroy capitalism and build the socialist epoch. However, in the present moment, as described by Lenin in his book of the same name, the present form capitalism has taken is imperialism, its highest degree of development before its inevitable overthrow, in which the finance capital of the richest countries spills over its own borders and begins to parasitize the peoples and properties of colonized foreign lands- and in this age of imperialist capitalism, in which the system of capitalism is unmistakably characterized by being imperialist, the principal position amongst social contradictions has been taken by that between the parasitic imperialist states and capitalists of the first-world capitalist-imperialist powers and the Peoples, especially proletarians and semifeudal peasants, of the colonized countries {1,7,13}. Today this contradiction is the most significant of the three kinds of contradictions that fundamentally characterize the present state of global political-economy{7}. Anti-imperialism is the struggle that now defines the efforts of the progressive People of the world, led by the working class, toward liberation- i.e., toward the end of capitalism and its hallmarks of fascism, imperialism, colonialism and semicolonialism, semifeudalism, and many more.

It is therefore imperative that, in applying the scientific philosophical thought-system of dialectical materialism to addressing the needs of the oppressed People of the world today, we must understand imperialism and the anti-imperialist struggle. Marx told us that philosophy must work to change the world, and he and Engels- though not the first to critically analyze capitalism’s problems- were first to set out to produce an ideological view forged in struggle that could enable this, by applying the scientific philosophical theory of dialectical materialism to political-economic criticism of class society and to scientific socialist thought{2}. More important than either an ontology or an epistemology, Marxist philosophy must also be an ideological guide to action in challenging existent bourgeois society and political economy and in building the new social order and political-economic system of proletarian rule, by which all humanity will be united and prepared for communism, the political-economic mode and social order that finally moves us beyond class contradictions after their resolution under rule by the majority working class which subsumes all others into itself by employment of revolutionary democratic semi-state power, through soviets and people’s committees and collective economic ownership and planning by the workers, abolishing class strife by becoming the last class {17}. And so our understanding of imperialism must, furthermore, be one that aids in our work toward its destruction.

Let us start our perusal of imperialism as it stands at the present moment with review of what Lenin has said. For writing a century ago, he has given a remarkably accurate report on the condition of capitalist political economy as it is today. Although colonial policies that can be described as imperialistic have existed under previous economic modes (e.g. the feudalist colonization of Ireland by the English as far back as the Norman Henry II, and especially the feudal colonization of the Americas by kings and nobles of Spain•) and this is acknowledged by Lenin in his book, the imperialism of capital is distinct as an entire new further development in how capitalist political economy functions{1}.

The era of imperialism in capitalism is defined chiefly by the monopolization of the capitalists in the richest countries, their accumulation and concentration of as much capital as possible (and thus as much political-economic control as possible over production of value across the whole world) into their exclusive control{1}. Gone is the age of independent cottage capitalists competing freely; in the present era it is to be expected in any advanced capitalist economy that the near-totality of capital, value, means of production, and labour-power is controlled totally by a few enormous conglomerations of capital in the hands of a few individuals (and what is this but the intensification of the contradictions in the dialectic of capitalism, leading toward their explosive resolution by communist revolution?). With this comes the incorporation into the institutions of capitalist economic ownership of systems of financial management for these huge conglomerations- investment banks, hedge funds, stock indices, et cetera- a unification of the merchant and the banker into a single institutional bourgeois power managing capital, on an international scale, to buy up means of production and labour-power and grow itself as much as possible with the value derived from the labour in which these resources meet {1}. What this entails is the emergence of finance capital: massively monopolized capital, both controlled by banking and invested in industry, which totally controls the economies as well as the states and political superstructures of its own countries (the imperialist countries) and, having already maximized exploitation there, furthermore uses these states and other institutions to export itself to other countries, colonizing them, so that it can take over control of further labour and means of production, and grow itself even more by extraction of still-more surplus value{1}. Thus, in imperialist capitalism, colonization of the colonized countries is a mechanism by which the ruling classes of the imperialist countries, and the states they control, and above all the institution of massively centralized and monopolistic finance capital which defines them, engage in further expansion of capital beyond the finite confines of their own countries by manipulating, through myriad means, the Peoples and means of production in others (the drive to infinite expansion within a finite field being a deeply rooted contradiction in capitalism).

Lenin laid out the following 5 base characteristics of the capitalist system of imperialism in chapter 7 of his text, and we may look for them in certain economies today to judge whether or not a country is functioning as imperialist- though we should not apply this rubric mechanically, like a lazy professor grading essays, but dynamically, like Marxists{1}.

1. Massive concentration in the imperialist states of production and of capital at the helm of it, to the degree that monopolization becomes systemic.
2. The merger of the banking and mercantile/industrial capital into finance capital, and the emergence of its ownership as a financial oligarchy or plutocracy of haute bourgeoisie.
3. The taking-on of importance of the export of capital (distinct from that of commodities) into foreign countries from the imperialist ones so that it may further its scope of expansion and accumulation into drawing surplus value into itself from their workers and means of production as well as those of its homeland. It does this by forcible invasive military means but also “by greater financial speculation and interbank loans, [by] investment funds, and by the so-called foreign direct investment (FDI) of the great monopolists,” etc {13}.
4. The formation of international associations of capitalists which “divide the world amongst themselves.”
5. The dividing-up of the whole world into colonial territories of the big imperialist powers, by means both of open colonial war and of political-economic manipulation.

Lenin’s analysis, only a cursory review of which has been repeated here, is overwhelmingly correct- though obviously all of its examples are dated, as they concern the imperialist powers of that day, not this.

It has, of course, been challenged; one criticism I have heard is the suggestion that it is incorrect to say imperialism is a further development of capitalism because capitalism has always, since the very beginning of bourgeois revolutionary-preparations and of primitive accumulation, depended on the pillaging of colonies. I have fairly little truck with this argument- as I have already said , Lenin acknowledged colonialism existing before the fully-developed stage of imperialist capitalist political economy; Marx and Engels also refer to the degree to which colonial pillaging and mercantilism fueled early capitalist accumulation in chapter one of their Communist Manifesto§, so it can hardly be said that Marxism was ever unaware of this {11,4}. Perhaps Lenin did not set down exactly the right start date for its beginning, but what he is describing as the qualitative evolution from pre-imperialist to imperialist capitalism involves more than just colonialism, but global systematic colonialism in service to monopolistic, international finance capital.

There is, though, a seemingly more firmly-based quibble with Lenin’s book. He predicts the steady division of the world into only imperialist powers and their colonies, with no states truly independent of the capitalist-imperialist system unless they are freed by socialist revolution{1}. One would expect, then, that since the time of the book’s publication the number of sovereign states would have decreased, with countries being subsumed into the empires of others as colonies (as, say, Puerto Rico and Hawaii are to the US). And yet, we find that the number of nominally independent states has ballooned since Lenin’s time. Does this mean he was wrong? No. What he predicted has in fact occurred- but not in the manner he expected. What occurred after Lenin’s death, owing to tides of anti-colonial rebellion and to the brutal counterattacks made by the colonizer states and their fascist comprador lackeys, was the alteration in the dominant form of colonial rule from “fully” colonial (the total sublimation of colonized countries into the state apparatuses of the colonizers- e.g. Belgian Congo and the British Cape Colony, or examples remaining today like the US Virgin Islands and the occupied six counties in the Irish province of Ulster) to what Maoism calls semicolonial (or, less often, neocolonialᵠ). Semicolonialism entails the governance of a country politically by a nominally independent state which is in fact, by nature of the total control of the economy which is its base by foreign finance capital, only a puppet of foreign capitalists and their local comprador lackeys; a semicolony, like any colony, has an economy in which production is piloted not by the local bourgeoisie but by foreign imperialist bourgeoisie and their cronyist local enforcers and middlemen, the bureaucrat and comprador bourgeoisie, and it is these classes that control the state {13, 5}. This method of imperialist-capitalist rule by puppet-states and bureaucrat capitalists on behalf of foreign capitalist masters, semicolonialism, is the dominant method for the imperialists today (though “full” colonies- like France’s Guadeloupe, the US’s Boriken/Puerto Rico and Hawaii, and the UK’s Bermuda- most certainly persist). Examples of its early test cases include: China under the European merchants’ rule over foreign-puppeteered Qing kings and their comprador semifeudal landlords, as it developed after the Opium Wars; Peru’s early days of republican rule when the development of the country’s own capitalist class was stunted by the conditions left to it by the brutality of Spanish feudalism, leading to it developing not as a complete ruling class in its own right but as a class of bureaucrat-capitalists ruling jointly with semifeudal latifundistas (with whom they were inextricably tied) as co-lackeys of English and American finance capital that was increasingly invested in controlling the country’s nitrate and guano industries (Peru, though the specific imperialist states whose finance capital rules and what industries are principal for its investment and accumulation, remains a semifeudal semicolony in much the same state as it was then, though more urbanized) {15, 3}. Today it reigns over most of the world, leaving the People in the semicolony countries, principally the proletariat and the backward peasants that must become proletarians and join behind proletarian leadership on the New Democratic road to socialism, crushed under the “Three Great Plagues” of imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat-capitalism{5}.

The Philippines is a classical example of a semicolony- it may no longer be de jure under the authority of the US state, but its economy is entirely dependent on the import of American capital in various forms (especially investments in arms to support the fascist regime) and on the sale of its own people’s labour-power to American capitalists in the form of mass exodus of expatriate workers; all of its local billionaires exploit their nation’s workers and peasants not for their own wealth alone, but for the joint wealth of themselves and their American benefactors- and the two together, but with the local bureaucrats in subordination to the foreign imperialist capitalists, control the viciously corrupt state by usage of their finance capital, enriching themselves by exploitation of and in contradiction with the People of the country {5}. In the change from “full” to semi- colonialism, there is no liberation. This is only a quantitative shift in the amount of autonomy allowed to the colony; there is no qualitative change away from colonialism. If imperialism has changed its form, still the essence of it persists as the reigning political-economic paradigm of the world today{13}.

And together with semicolonialism comes semifeudalism. In the Communist Manifesto’s first chapter it is written that the capitalist class “compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois [i.e. capitalist] mode of production{4}.” In some sense this remains true𐦂, but in another things have changed in the era of imperialist capitalism- for the bourgeoisie of the imperialist countries have discovered a way to make feudalism in the colonized countries work for them. As the Manifesto describes, the class structure of feudalism is much more “manifold” than that of capitalism, with such institutions as urban tradesmen’s guilds, cossack bands, what-have-you. But its majority class was and is the agricultural peasantry, and its essential contradiction is that between them and the feudal lords (out of which arises the urban flight of the upper peasants, creating- in the most classical form of a bourgeois revolution- the bourgeois merchant class and ultimately their new states and economies that supplant the lords). As the bourgeoisie of advanced capitalist countries have colonized ones that are still in feudal economies, they have found that the old order that was once their great foe is now a useful tool: the local landlords of (semi)colonies become compradors, and foreign corporations step in to take over as the tributary oligarchs who control the resources peasants must work. A peasant in the rural Philippines or rural India today lives much like one in rural England in 1066, except that in addition to paying a tribute from their crops to the local landlord, they must pay tribute also for the usage of those crops to a foreign corporation, which subsidizes feudalism in its home country’s semicolonies{5}. Semifeudal capitalism: comprador landlords running the country, bureaucrat-comprador bourgeoisie running the city- this is the economic model enforced by world capitalist-imperialism in the semifeudal (semi)colonies {5, 13}. The semicolonial state is run by the foreign bourgeoisie through the corrupt oligarchy of their lackeys, big feudal landlords and bureaucrat capitalists.

Once we understand the nature of semicolonialism and especially semifeudal semicolonialism, we see that the world has indeed been divided amongst the imperialist powers as Lenin predicted. Imperialism is alive and well! Today the one hegemonic world imperialist superpower is the United States. Its stock exchanges and their biggest capitalists and conglomerations of capital set the pace of the world economy; it strongarms world law and politics through its domination of “international organizations” like the UN, and most importantly its financial auxiliaries (the IMF, the World Bank, and every other global cabal of capital-exporters); it holds the whole world in military terror through the ever-expanding octopus of armaments that is NATO. In every country in the world it parks its restaurants and its banks and its oil companies- above all, its capital, and sucks masses of surplus value to add to the capital of its own economy from the lifeblood of these countries {13}. And it parks its military bases alongside them, to keep the locals and their “independent governments” in line! The characteristics of imperialism Lenin described should be obviously visible here.

But the US is not the only imperialist power active today- and too many mistakenly think it is, and thus find themselves supporting the atrocious actions of rival states that are in reality imperialist in their own right, in the absurdly incorrect view that these are “anti-imperialist” acts𐦃. I have said before that the essential division of the world today is in four. Three of these divisions are the spheres of influence of three imperialist powers; the largest is the United States, but China and Russia are both pitted against it in inter-imperialist contradiction{19}. This is not to mention the various smaller imperialist powers making up the EU, such as France and until recently the UK, or others like the Saudis, who at present find it to their advantage to maintain uneasy alliances with one or more of the “big three.”

There are those, of course, who deny the imperialism of the Chinese state on the grounds that it claims itself to be socialist in its economic character. What they do in this is suppose that the manner in which a thing is described, like a theistic-idealist’s holy Λόγος-Word-Of-God carved in stone, determines its nature moreso than its actual material character. Of course we know this cannot be true- the Hitlerite fascists also said they were “socialist,” and the United States government says it is built on “freedom and justice for all.” Marxist philosophers are also scientists; we draw our theoretical knowledge from, adjust it to, and bring it to bear on the reality of objects and incidents between them in the material world, which is described most accurately by our theory of Dialectical Materialism{9}. And so we must study the real material reality of the Chinese economy, the real manner in which it comes into contradiction and interaction with the rest of the world and its elements do with one another, and judge it scientifically. The enormous pursuit of control over infrastructure in Africa by Chinese business, and the massive investment of surplus value therein in order to draw more out- what can we call this other than capitalist-imperialist export of capital? And we see the same practice in the involvement of massive Chinese capital in the “Build, Build, Build” infrastructure project- a naked attempt (failed, for now) to wrest imperialist control over the Philippine economy and state away from the US in pursuit of expanding China’s own colonial “division of the world.” There are two of Lenin’s described characteristics of an imperialist power; we will surely find more if we look harder{19,11}. Stop the Dengite sophistry- China is a capitalist country and an imperialist world power!

It is a basic error to suppose that, because one imperialist power is of hegemonic domination, there can be no others. Indeed, it is an undialectical error: dialectical materialism knows that nothing is of a singular nature, that all things consist in contradicting parts and in the interactions of struggle and unity between them (the ultimate unit of existence, the sum of the Material world, is not, perhaps, sensibly called a “Monad,” for it is not a one but a many of parts that form greater parts that form greater parts, and the interactions between all these parts…); we must understand that there is nothing that cannot be understood as having internal parts and contradictions therebetween, including the world system of imperialism{18}. Thus it is that we can understand, as the PCP has clearly described in their own works, that inter-imperialist contradictions exist and form a significant tertiary contradiction in the system of capitalism-imperialism as understood by Dialectical Materialism {7}. So we can say that the USA is the one dominant hegemonic imperialist superpower, that the two runner-up superpowers of China and Russia are contradicted against it (USA↔️Russia & China being the principal inter-imperialist contradiction today), and that there are smaller imperialists also (such as the Saudi state and the various former superpowers of Europe) who for the time being find it to their advantage to support and share in the semicolonies of the big three, though the contradictions amongst them and between them and the big three nonetheless exist.

What is the line of the communists in relation to the wars that ofttimes occur as intensified periods in the dialectical struggles of inter-imperialist contradictions? This has been a vital question for over a century, and was a major contradiction of line in the Second socialist International. The correct answer is that taken up by the Red faction in the RSDLP that would become the CPSU(b), or Bolsheviks, under leadership of Lenin. “During a reactionary war a revolutionary class cannot but desire the defeat of its government… A revolution in wartime means civil war; the conversion of a war between governments into a civil war {8}.” This is the line described as “revolutionary defeatism.” It is often misunderstood by those reactionaries𐦃 who conflate “anti-imperialism” with a vigorous support for non-US imperialist powers, but Lenin smashes this bad understanding as easily as he smashes every other: “Are co-ordination and mutual aid possible between the Russian movement, which is revolutionary in the bourgeois- democratic sense, and the socialist movement in the West? No socialist who has publicly spoken on the matter during the last decade has doubted this… Ask any Social-Democrat who calls himself an internationalist whether or not he approves of an understanding between the Social-Democrats of the various belligerent countries on joint revolutionary action against all belligerent governments… Many of them will reply that it is impossible, as Kautsky has done[,] thereby fully proving his social-chauvinism. This… is a deliberate and vicious lie[!]” (italics added) {8}. Marxism-Leninism-Maoism is internationalist, is for the defeat of every bourgeois institution and the construction of socialist proletarian ones everywhere. The true meaning of revolutionary defeatism must be internationalist, and for the defeat not simply of our own capitalist-imperialists but of those in every nation. Therefore the true revolutionary defeatist line for communists in an imperialist country is for the defeat of every competing power in the inter-imperialist war, principally our own, and the replacement of the war in which imperialists contend over others’ countries with a civil war in which the People in every country thrust off their own class-oppressors, imperialist capitalists or bureaucrat capitalists and semi-feudal gentry in their service{8}. For communists in the US this must indefatigably and incontrovertibly mean that we strive for the defeat and destruction of the imperialist aspirations of our own capitalists and their state, and support massively the efforts of other countries’ communists to do the same to all other imperialist powers!

It is sure that imperialism is alive and well as a beast preying on the People of the world. And yet it is conjured up in the classroom as a thing of the past- the “age of imperialism” is taught in many US primary, middle, and secondary school history classes as something that ended in the inter-war period or (at the very latest, if the teacher is a “daring free-thinker”) the Cold War- never mind that the US capitalists’ and imperialist apparatus’s (including “international organizations” it stears like the OAS) creeping fingers have been implicated in fascist coups in Latin America as recently as 2019–20. The cultural superstructure of capitalism-imperialism in the world’s premier imperialist powers, and its pilots- the bourgeoisie and their state, their engine for repressing other classes’ and countries’ interests- has succeeded in pulling off a grand ruse, in making the imperialism it is carrying out now look like a thing of the past. How has it done this?

One element in this trick is in terminology. No longer are we to refer to imperialist countries and colonies, or to the first world and the third- no, say the bourgeois pundits, this language is offensive! What we must say now is that there are “developed” countries and “developing” countries. There is a devious trick in this. In this phrasing, a gross misrepresentation of the real contradiction at play (that of one country’s rulers pillaging another, robbing and terrorizing its People, by which is meant all of its social strata whose interests are progressive, are counter to the said pillaging and aligned with progress toward socialism and communism), it is implied that there is no systemic cause to the latter countries’ destitution and deprivation, that they are “developing” along a road that will surely lead them away from it, that the only difference between the former and the latter is time, that given enough time everything will be well and all countries made rich without any change to the current global political economy. This is not so; these countries are not developing. They are not developing because they are stagnating, and their stagnation is forced upon them{13}. Congo, say, cannot “develop” because all the value its resources and its People’s labour produce are not being turned toward its development, they are being bought at unfair prices through the investment of foreign capital so they can be sold at-value in other countries to expand that capital. The copper and the diamonds of Congo are not in Congo, and not owned or used by the Congolese- the diamonds of Congo are owned by Belgians, by Canadians, by the French, by the Chinese, by Americans. How can Congo “develop,” when it has no resources and no labour-power with which to make the use values it needs which is not stolen away by foreign capitalists? What incentive has the populace of Congo to “develop,” when whatever resources it may “develop” are owned not by its own populace but by the good Canadians at Barrick Gold, or Chinese “Belt-and-Road” capitalists? The colonized countries can never develop what positive aspects capitalist economic systems do have, because they do not have any large growth of capital in their own countries- nearly all the surplus value work in these countries produces becomes, through import of invested capital to buy goods which are exported and sold abroad, capital in foreign pockets in countries that already have advanced capitalist economies. Even what industrialization occurs occurs only to increase the rate of exploitation attainable for foreign imperialist corporations; it does not occur to improve the number of use-values available to the country’s own people {5}. Congo is not developing- this word does not begin to describe its political-economic situation. Congo is held as a semicolony, nothing less, by the ruling powers in foreign countries- and these are not merely “developed” states; they are pillagers of the development of other countries!

This is one part of the ruse. Another is the great legend of “foreign aid.” How generous China must be, with all the foreign aid it gives to Africa- in the form, of course, of capital investment and economic domination. How generous the US must be, with all the foreign aid it gives to Latin America, to Korea, to Ukraine, to eastern Europe- in the form, of course, of capital investment and economic domination, and of governmental “advice,” and of friendly military presence for “mutual defense.” When a country invades another with the explicitly said purpose of making it a colony, even the most reactionary fool can call this “imperialism.” But it can do the same exact thing and be praised as the opposite if it only calls what it is doing “foreign aid.” The master of this was US president Truman, whose eponymous foreign policy Doctrine taught the American state machinery to disguise its imperialist military expansion as altruistic “defense of freedom” from the spread of socialism or of the sphere of influence of the rival “Soviet” phony-socialist imperialists. Every semicolonial regime propped up by the US imperialists was simply a democracy it was “defending”- never mind that many of them were tyrannical monarchies or fascist states, or regimes that the US military and intelligence apparatus simply created. This rhetoric is still in use today- the brutal regime that US and Saudi imperialists are propping up in Yemen is simply a free democracy being defended from terrorism- never mind that the only freedom it affords homosexuals, say, is the freedom to die. Often this kind of “aid” in the form of military enforcement of the semicolonial order comes with the lie that it is only a “temporary” or “special” measure to “stabilize” a country or region; and yet, we can see in the seeming perpetuity of the “War on Terror” how “temporary” this violence really is.

But imperialist colonization and domination need not only take the form of open warmongering. The lie of “foreign aid” is more insidious by far when it covers for other forms of export of capital to the semicolonies, or of territorial division of the world between imperialist powers: ever-increasing “Foreign Direct Investment” (including as a form of “development aid”) of capital by imperialist capitalists into buying up means of production and labour-power in the colonies (the very definition of imperialist export of capital, openly boasted of by the capitalists under the name “FDI”!), buying up rights and licenses to resource exploitation (mining, farming, logging, etc.) in other countries or national territories, filling up other countries with weapons to enforce colonial rule and calling it “military aid,” etc {1,13}. All of this may be called “peaceful”- but imperialism and its regimes of (semi)colonialism and bureaucratic-capitalist compradorism are never peaceful; when there is not open imperialist war in the colonized third world, there is simply colonial violence and enforcement of a more insidious and less direct kind {1}. If there is not open carpet bombing of a country by the imperialist power(s) exploiting it as a semicolony, as there is in Ukraine by the Russian imperialists or in any of the many theatres of the phony “War on Terror” by the hegemonic imperialists of the US, then still there is an occupying presence allowed to commit violence with impunity by the oppressive local comprador regime it props up, as there is in the Philippines. If there is no visible occupying military force, still there is the extraction and theft of surplus value produced by a country’s own people to accumulate unto foreign monopoly capital imported by the imperialists and their local lackeys from the rich imperialist countries- the basic essence of the imperialist capitalist political-economic paradigm and all its violence.

Imperialist war, brutally massacring millions in the name of the global expansion of monopolistic finance capital, is ever-present under the conditions of capitalist imperialism{1}. Further, even without this war, it presents unavoidably antagonistic contradictions of injustice and parasitism between countries and their peoples: as long as the finance capital of the big bourgeoisie in the richest countries continues to expand itself through export into colonies into which the world is divided by the power of the states it pilots- and it will never stop doing this, is necessarily functionally-teleologically driven to do it forever in order to exist — the principal contradiction of imperialist capitalism, the robbery of the Peoples and all toiling classes of the colonized countries by the bourgeoisie of the imperialist ones, will remain a thorn in humanity’s side, forever prompting violence and exploitation and brutal transgressions against the human species{1,13,7}. The only resolution to this contradiction conceivable is the end of imperialist capitalism- and the evolution into imperialism is a teleologic inevitability of capital’s drive to expand and accumulate surplus value into itself endlessly{1}, so the only end to imperialist capitalism is the end to capitalism, its replacement with a better economic order and corresponding social order in every country: socialism on the road to communism, ownership of the means of production and their products in common by all and their direction toward the good of all.

It being the case that the advance of history toward world communism and away from capitalist-imperialism is a dialectical process, or a process of interaction between entities essentially defined by their contradictions and the struggles that lead to change via the resolution of those contradictions, as described by the scientific and materialist philosophical view of Dialectical Materialism, it is important to understand how such a process, describable as a dialectic, progresses. The march of history, we know from the study of dialectics, is not “gradual.” No, sociohistorical progress takes place in “punctuated equilibrium”: there are periods of relative apparent calm, of equilibrium, in which the contradictions in society appear to lie dormant but are in fact intensifying incrementally by quantitative degrees, as imperialism gets more and more exploitative of colonized People, as the petit-bourgeoisie disappear into the ranks of the proles and the bourgeoisie and the yawning gap of inequality between them widens, as the bodies of the dead in imperialist wars pile up- until these contradictions explode into open antagonistic struggle, open class war, which either succeeds or fails in producing qualitatively different social conditions, i.e. revolutionary construction of a new political-economic mode. As Lenin put it: “there are decades in which nothing happens, and weeks in which decades happen.”

Today, except in those countries where armed revolution is already being waged under luminous leadership of the great MLMist Communist Parties of the world, the conditions of capitalist-imperialism are quantitatively worsening and the contradictions thereof intensifying bit by bit in all countries, colonized and colonizer. The day will come in every country when the dawn breaks, the kettle boils over, the powder catches- the day will come when the explosion bursts, the communists lead the masses to take up arms, and the protracted process of politico-military revolution to construct socialism (preceded where necessary by New Democratic anti-feudal development) will begin, with the launching of People’s Wars. Dialectical Materialism tells us, as expressed so brilliantly in Marx’s second Thesis on Feuerbach and in Mao’s On Practice, that theory arises out of practice and its use-value of truth and utility must be proven in application to practice{2,9}. Let our theory of imperialism be proven, as it is already being proven by the active revolutionary People’s Wars being waged, in its application to imperialism’s destruction!!

The defeat of imperialism is a necessary step, today the definitive principal step (for as the PCP and Comrade Lenin have told us, with imperialism as the present system of capitalist political economy the contradiction between colonizer states and capitalists and colonized countries and their People becomes the principal one in capitalist society), in the historical movement away from capitalist pillaging, from ownership of means of production by parasitic plutocrats and their massive sums of finance capital which expand their scale and power of ownership by robbing the world’s working peoples of the surplus value they produce, and toward a proletarian revolution{1,7,13}. A proletarian revolution to establish, through the seizure of power by workers’ republics, socialist political economy around the world: ownership of means of production by the majority that work them to control their work for themselves, and to freely possess and use in common the surplus product of their productive labour, that all may live together in prosperity and direct the new wealth of society that labour creates toward the good of its creators and of all, and that humanity may progress toward world communism and a total end to parasitism of one class by another. Socialism in every country is the historic path forward to the full-stage of communism, is the lowest stage of communism and the transitional stage from class society to communism, and the defeat of imperialism is vital to its construction. In every country we must build socialist economies and socialist republics, build the ownership and management of economic production and the revolutionary rule of the cultural superstructure by the proletarian majority through collective and sovietist democratic-state bodies of worker rule (soviets, revolutionary committees, people’s communes, etc.), advancing humanity toward the abolition of class division and state rule and toward a world political-economy of society run for the best good and utility of all people, not the quantitative profits of a parasitic property-owning minority.

The triumph of the socialist republic in every country must occur by its construction, through People’s War led democratically and centrally and in the spirit of mass line by a Communist vanguard Party, as a new state in a situation of dual power taking the country over piece by piece from the old powers before finally destroying them and taking on sole rule{7,6}. This in every country, and in every country this is an anti-imperialist struggle: in the (semi)colonial semifeudal countries the state built in this manner must be a New Power of the proletariat and the peasantry and local anti-imperialist bourgeoisie and other oppressed classes together, until the basis is built for the peasantry etc. to be democratically proletarianized and the People to unite as a socialist proletariat in a democratic dictatorship of the proles and a socialist economy; in countries (semi)colonized but not semifeudal (which are relatively uncommon, but exist- e.g. Ireland) of building proletarian state and collective bodies like soviets to take over ownership and rule of the means of production by force immediately and kick all the capitalists out; in the imperialist countries of destroying the imperialist bourgeoisie and liquidating finance capital from within the belly of the beast. In every country, that country’s revolution must be guided by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, the universal scientific ideology of the proletariat’s liberation developed through revolutionary struggle in Peru’s revolution in the 1980s as the highest stage in the development of Marxism, together with the universal lessons added to it by Gonzalo Thought, the guiding thought of the PCP developed through struggle under the great leadership of Chairman Gonzalo, and that country’s own guiding thought, developed under its own revolutionary leadership and Communist Party in its own struggle toward socialism.

And so, a serious dialectical examination of imperialism leads us to a few vital theses:

1. Imperialism remains alive and well as the modern form of capitalism and the only form the capitalist political-economic mode can take today, characterized by the horrors of colonialism and semicolonialism, of undemocratic anti-people rule by compradors and semifeudal and bureaucrat capitalists, and of constant imperialist war, and above all by the principal contradiction between the imperialist bourgeoisie and their states and the exploited classes and People of the colonized countries.
2. Being that capitalist-imperialism is the necessary final form of capitalism and will always remain as long as capitalism continues to exist, the communist and socialist revolution that negates capitalism and class society must be anti-imperialist, and anti-imperialism to be truly successful must be communist and socialist. To resolve the contradictions of imperialism necessitates resolving those of capitalism and vice versa, for capitalism’s present and final form is imperialism.
3. “Anti-imperialism” cannot be a dogma of simple opportunistic opposition to this or that imperialist state or capitalist or war; genuine anti-imperialism must be a political programme against the entire global economic mode of capitalist-imperialism, grounded in a comprehensive Dialectical Materialist scientific analysis thereof, directed to resolving the contradictions inherent therein through dialectical struggle to transform the material world.
4. Resolution of the problems of capitalist-imperialism means liberation of humanity from exploitation, colonialism, imperialist war, etc. by conquest of power for the working class in every country and construction of socialism on the road to communism. The only final and total erasure of the political-economic mode giving rise to the horrors of imperialism, to colonialism and semicolonialism and to mass death in imperialist wars, is in every country and ultimately the whole world the triumph of a political-economic mode of ownership of the means and produce of production by the majority whose labour-power furnishes the surplus of that produce, and its governance by that majority for the common good of all, with the whole of humanity being united through cultural and political-economic revolution into that majority- socialism on the road to communism!

Onward with the weapons of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism!

Onward in the struggle to resolve the contradictions of bourgeois society by revolution!

Onward to the total annihilation of the capitalist-imperialist enemies!

Onward to the Workers’ Soviet-Democratic Socialist World Republic!

Onward to communism!

WORKS DRAWN ON:

1. Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, VI Lenin; and my own notes on that text

2. “Theses on Feuerbach,” Karl Marx (it was in these short notes, probably preparatory for his writing of the Critique of the German Ideology, that he gave us that all-important slogan that a truly revolutionary, scientific, and materialist ideology for the movement toward working-class liberation and liberation generally must not merely analyze the world but show us the practice by which we may change it.)

3. Seven Essays on Peruvian Reality, Essays 1 and 4, José Carlos Mariátegui

4. Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

5. Philippine Society and Revolution, José Maria Sison

6. “The Dual Power,” V.I. Lenin in Pravda

7. Fundamental Documents and General Political Line, Communist Party of Peru

8. “On the Defeat of One’s Own Government in the Imperialist War,” V.I. Lenin in Sotsial-Demokrat

9. On Practice, Mao Tse Tung

10. Materialism is Militant and Therefore Dialectical, Evald Ilyenkov (after Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism)

11. China: A Modern Social-Imperialist Power, Communist Party of India (Maoist)

12. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, Chapter 2.1 “The ‘Thing-In-Itself,’ or V. Chernov Refutes Frederick Engels,” V.I. Lenin

13. Notes on the Process of Bureaucratic Capitalism in the Third-World Countries, MPP (A PARTICULAR NOTE ON THIS WORK: I was not aware of it when I began writing this piece, then found it while this piece was in progress and saw that it had touched many of the same ideas and points I had wanted to touch herein. It is very good and available online, if hard to find).

14. “Where do Correct Ideas Come From?,” Mao Tse Tung

15. The Opium Wars and Taiping Revolution from the series History of Modern China, collective authorship, compiled during the Cultural Revolution to apply Historical Materialism to China and published widely there and abroad𐦉.

16. “How Can Socialism Ensure the Complete Liberation of Women?,” Joan Hinton

17. See The State and Revolution, V.I. Lenin.

18. On Contradiction, Mao Tse Tung.

19. “Unmasking The Yankee Imperialist Plan Against Peru and Other Latin American Countries,” Communist Party of Peru, 2023.

FOOTNOTES:

*I use the word “dialectics” both to refer to the study of material relationships of contradiction between opposing parts in a unity-of-opposites, moving in opposition to one another until the contradiction is resolved, to the study of the contradictory relationships in all things that define the shape and the motion of the material universe, and to refer to the relationships so studied (as in there is “a dialectic,” or a dialectical relationship, between workers and capitalists (or between master and slave, or many-ness and one-ness), i.e. a relationship of contradiction, struggle and unity, affirmation and negation, and mutual definition and transformation of opposing forces, until the contradiction is resolved, creating new ones, between them which is studied through the philosophical outlook of “dialectics”). There is precedent for this usage: in On Contradiction, his great essay on DiaMat, Mao uses the word the former way when he says “…materialist dialectics effectively combats the theory of external causes, or of an external motive force, advanced by metaphysical mechanical materialism…” and the latter way when he says “The task of Communists is to expose the fallacies of the reactionaries and metaphysicians, to propagate the dialectics inherent in things, and so accelerate the transformation of things and achieve the goal of revolution” (italics added in both cases to higlight differential uses) {18}. As we know from Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism it is possible and necessary that a materialist understanding of the world correctly represents the world as it is {12,10}; therefore, we can refer to the relationships that exist in the world and our understanding of those relationships in the same way, because we know our understanding to be correct. Nonetheless the most proper and usual use is the former, and I should criticize past writings where I have mainly used the latter, not because they are per se wrong but because I think this usage is somewhat confusing and- at worst, though I do not believe I am guilty of this- can lead to an idealism of conflating a picture of the world with the world itself.

ⁱThe logical-notational expression x^¬x can be translated as “x and the negation of x.” “X” here is a variable denoting an existent entity (more usually for the idealist the considered entities are propositions, but we can just as well consider objects or other kinds of incidents), an object or a quality/event/incident; “^” is the symbol in logical notation denoting coexistence; “¬” is the symbol for “negation” (so, ¬x means “the opposite of x”). Another logic symbol, “↔”, is here used to represent a relationship of contradiction rather than its usual meaning, the concept of equivalence. A two-way arrow is used for the one in dialectics and the other in symbolic logic; a system of logical notation designed for dialectical materialists would have distinct symbols for each (maybe a two-way arrow through a “C” would be a good symbol for “contradiction), but alas, we have only what the idealists and Unicode have provided to use.

**Of course, the coming-into-primacy of death in the body, and its transformation into cadaver, itself furthers the future existence of life: the decomposition of cadavers in the earth is part of what enables energy for life to continue existing in the soil. This is another facet of the nature of dialectical relationships and their philosophical-scientific description as dialectics, what Hegel described with the “Law of Negation of the Negation” and which Mao described more accurately as “affirmation and negation” or as the transformation of a thing into its opposite, as a facet of the reality described by the Law of Contradiction. In the course of the progression of a dialectical relationship two opposites are united in a unity-of-opposites, one in the principal position and one in the subordinate; the contradiction between the two grows incrementally sharper by quantitative degrees, their relationship of mutual transformation becoming less and less one of affirmation and more and more one of negation; this leads to the explosion of open conflict, often protracted, between the dominant and the subordinate aspects in the dialectic, culminating in the resolution of their contradiction as what was once the subordinate aspect of one unity-of-opposites becomes the dominant in a new one {18}. In this way new things form out of old things through internal dialectical processes; in this way the universe progresses. But in the course of this, the victorious aspect is transformed into its opposite {18}. For instance, in the class struggle, what was once a subordinated class is transformed into a ruling class. E.g. when the bourgeoisie are transformed from the class embodying artisans, tradesmen, and ex-peasants subordinated to the feudal ruling class to the new ruling class subordinating the proletariat, their status as the negation of the dominant class is itself negated and they become themselves the dominant class, with a new subordinate beneath them. Thus resolving the contradiction in one unity-of-opposites only produces a new one. The triumph of the bourgeoisie as negation of the feudal ruling class and of capitalism as negation of feudalism produces a new struggle between the bourgeoisie and their negation, the proletariat, and on the global stage between those places under capitalism and those where its negation, socialism, is being built by revolutionary armed conquest of power. The triumph of the negation brings a new struggle, between socialism and the now liberated ruling majority-class of the proletariat and their own negation, remaining vestiges of class ideology and culture in socialist society which must be rooted out by struggle in the government, the Party, and the culture — this is the need for Cultural Revolution, as Chairman Mao prescribed {16}; without the successful waging of Cultural Revolution we lapse back into a prior stage of society, an earlier unity-of-opposites that preceded that formed by the socialist political-economy and social order, with the bourgeoisie and capitalism reasserting dominance. The triumph of the ruling socialist proletariat and its social order and socialist economic system worldwide means the unification of all humanity into a common body owning its social wealth and controlling it fairly for the good of all and every one; this is of course different than the triumph of any previous class in class struggle in that it negates not only the preceding system of class society but the entire historical epoch of class society; communism is the negation of all forms of class society and the resolution to all their contradictions. But even so, with the triumph of socialist revolution all over the world, the unification of humanity into the proletariat, and the withering-away of the proletarian semi-states as they are no longer necessary and all humanity can rule its life, its resources, and its labour-power by truly free community organization, we should expect new contradictions to emerge and be resolved under full-stage communist social reality. Communism’s achievement worldwide is not the end of the history of humanity; it is its end as a history of class society and the struggle to abolish it, and the beginning of its next form, a totally new unity-of-opposites the shape of which we can only guess.

†The nonexistence of an ideal, extra-physical Good or an ideal, extra-physical Evil should not be taken to mean ethics have no truth- or use-value. It is possible for Marxist-Leninist-Maoist philosophy to include an objective, materialist, scientific framework of ethics- this would be a form of utilitarianism.

• Spain is a distinct and interesting country in that it was competing economically with other European countries in the early modern period when they were already capitalist economies ruled by bourgeois states (e.g. France after its bourgeois revolution of the 1780s-90s (the backsliding of the Napoleonic and Bourbon restoration eras before the re-cementing of bourgeois power circa the July Monarchy notwithstanding), Britain after the bourgeois revolutions of Parliament and subsequently of William III and Mary II, the Netherlands after establishing its bourgeois republic in revolution against the feudal Habsburg dynasty, and the British empire’s bastard child in the United States), while it remained feudal in character- the bourgeois revolution in Spain, likely due to the country’s very rural nature, came late and in fits and starts, and, as Mariátegui describes (see Seven Essays on Peruvian Reality, essays 1 and 4) happened principally in the colonial empire rather than the home country {3}. Although it was by no means unique in engaging in feudalistic colonialism before its bourgeoisie had been fully cemented as the ruling class and feudalism supplanted by capitalism.

§“The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to [capitalist] an impulse never before known…” -Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, §“Bourgeois and Proletarians” in Manifesto of the Communist Party

ᵠThis term, I believe, originates with Kwame Nkrumah. With no disrespect to Comrade Nkrumah, I prefer “semicolonialism” as the “neo-” in “neocolonialism” seems to imply that there was a cessation of “original” colonialism and then the beginning of a new, separate thing- and this did not occur. Semicolonialism is simply the same practices of imperialist finance capital going forth in a new costume, with some quantitative changes to the amount of autonomy colonies are given but no qualitative transformation. The MPP concurs with the preference for semi-, not neo-, as the accurate term. They write: “the economic heart of the matter is not that ‘imperialism is applying new forms of domination’ because it has lost its colonies, and is now Yankee ‘neo-colonialism’ etc., but that the economic base from the time before these countries gained formal independence has remained intact with very few changes. Thus, with the political and military fact of independence, they become semi-colonial countries while remaining semi-feudal.” The imperialist stage of the development of capitalism is that of desperate and dying capitalism, that of the rule of monopolist finance capital groaning under the weight of its own contradictory nature, needing violent domination of colonies to continue expanding its investment and its accumulation of surplus value into itself- to survive, to go on ruling. Thus imperialism is essential to capitalism in the present, and essentially is colonial: “This essence necessitates its reactionary and violent nature in economics, and, therefore, its reactionary and violent nature in politics; (imperialist) economic domination is primary, and it necessarily leads to (imperialist) political domination.” We cannot suppose (after the fashion of Kautsky, the great traitor) that colonialism is only a particular policy the bourgeoisie have selected and essential to their rule today, that the imperialist states and capitalists would merely abandon their policy of colonialism and pick up a new, a neo-, policy, for imperialism and its colonialism is essential to capitalism today, and today the primary social contradictions of capitalist-imperialism are those of imperialism. “The concept of a ‘neo-colony’ does not start from the economic essence of the imperialist domination of our countries, which can be colonial or semi-colonial, but posits it instead as ‘forms of domination that imperialism applies’, as if imperialism is at most a matter of economic policy. This would imply that with a simple change of government, the national question could be solved”{13}. Of course, it cannot- the mere change from colony to semicolony is an unimportant quantitative change to the length of the chain the slave is kept on; it is only New Power revolution in the (semi)colonies that can explode into being the qualitative change of cutting the chain.

𐦂Marx and Engels here correctly describe what Lenin would dissect in greater detail, which is the contradiction in the nature of capital that forces it to evolve its economic system of capitalism into the imperialist stage: it is driven to expand infinitely through more and more accumulation of surplus value as new capital, yet the capacity of any country it finds itself in to support this expansion is finite (it has only so many workers, so many means of production) and so it must force itself on the workers and resources of other countries, in the same way and at the same time it must centralize into a smaller and smaller number of ever-larger poles of monopolist control, because it is the nature of a sum of capital to grow by swallowing others{1}. But, as we see in semifeudal colonialism, this does not always per se mean forcing countries to adopt the capitalist system in its most classical form{5}.

𐦃We are all familiar with the idiots, the Deng-Xi devotees and hapless followers of Caleb Maupin (the grifter and accused rapist and pimp whose ideology amounts to fascism, idealism, and Christian moralism in service to Russian imperialism, disguised as socialism…), who place the unscientific faith of their desperate desire to believe in someone else’s “anti-imperialist” project (instead of taking part in one) in China’s belt-and-road initiative, or even in Russia’s imperialist invasion of Ukraine (an attempt to claim back what was once their semicolony and now is increasingly one chiefly of the US) on the notion that these measures are strides toward a “multi-polar world” (which apparently means global domination divided equally between several imperialist powers, instead of one being clearly on top- why this is perceived as “anti-imperialist” is altogether beyond me). A comrade of mine has diagnosed this idiocy as ideologically rooted in part in the incorrect analyses of imperialism put forward by Kautsky, the father (with Bernstein) of the reactionary, anti-socialist reformism that has today usurped the name of “social democracy”; I myself am not terribly familiar with said analyses, but I believe my comrade to be correct.

As far as Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, we know from the theoretical analysis of Chairman Gonzalo and from the General Political Line adopted democratically by the PCP under his chairmanship and great leadership that contradictions between different imperialist powers are entirely to be expected in the capitalist-imperialist world order {7}; we can indeed find a dialectical relationship, or one described by the scientific philosophical theory of Dialectical Materialism, between any two imperialist powers, which come into contradiction as both strive to bring the whole world into the circle of that which is owned by and used as their ruling class’s sum of finance capital. To deny that the imperialist powers would struggle against each other is an error that can only made from a perspective uninitiated in matters of dialectical thought, for if we accept the universality of the Law of Contradiction/Law of Unity of Opposites as a basic descriptor of reality and knowledge thereof than we know that all things, all objects and incidents, are unties-of-opposites in which contradicting parts are held together at once in unity and in contradiction, struggling with each other in ways that define the shape of the whole{18}. Therefore we can say that it is an untenable position for Marxists to suppose that world imperialism is a single monolith and anything that challenges an imperialist power is anti-imperialist; Marxists must rather recognize the reality that there are struggles between imperialist powers in which we must be for the defeat of all contending bourgeois imperialist states, as the Bolsheviks were in relation to the first world war{8}.

𐦉A really fantastic series in many small books; I highly recommend Taiping Revolution as a volume that is both educational and enjoyable reading. It grounds a proper understanding of the Taiping Revolution, that remarkably vast civil war in China, in scientific materialist analysis in the spirit of dialectics of the contradictions and struggles of Chinese society at the time, providing a useful antidote to the idea that it was some sort of bizarre “fluke” or the product of one man’s madness (for dialectical materialists know that there are no flukes or aberrations in the dialectical process of human historical development; it is a process of contradicting parts interacting in struggle within the united wholes they form (countries, societies, empires, etc.) and producing new transformative outcomes from this dialectical/dialectically-described struggle- and this process works in a way that is actually very explainable and generally logical (by the logic of dialectics, of course, i.e. by the logic that understands all things as unities-of-opposites in contradiction, defined by the affirmation or the negation, the unity or the struggle, between the countradicting opposites- not by the vulgar “formal” logic of idealists)).