The time of the Popular Front

Abstract

Our political world is impoverished by the lack of the category ‘imperialism’. Academic and media languages have succeeded in consigning it to history. Use of the category imperialism to describe our present condition is often met with derision; it is seen in the bourgeois tongue as too simplistic, as outdated, as Leftist bombast. But what other category do we have to explain the kinds of extra-economic institutional coercion meted out to the Third World during the 1980s debt crisis or to Greece in its ongoing tragedy? Academic and media languages would like to measure these political conflicts in the terms of mainstream social science – as state failure and economic mismanagement, as the imbalance between the greed of unions and the sensibleness of the bankers. Empirical description takes the place of theoretical understanding – a mass of data and information clogs up the arteries, while careful theoretical assessment of the problem is set aside. The Left is on the defensive, unable to explain why the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) wants to bomb this country or why the International Monetary Fund wants to extract its pound of flesh from that country.