Western Marxism, Anti-Communism and Imperialism

Abstract

ABSTRACT Many Western Marxists have jettisoned the concepts of imperialism while retaining opposition to actually existing socialist projects of the Global South. This paper asserts that the failure to critique imperialism and to support socialist projects in the Global South is grounded in a rejection of classical Marxist human relations to nature and a failure to contemplate the continuance of state-socialist projects in the Global South. Since the 1990s, Western Marxists have replaced imperialism with global capitalism that is untethered to Western imperialism. Western Marxists have also deemed socialist projects as a betrayal of their utopian views rooted in the Hegelian “purity fetish.” Instead, some Western Marxists have aligned with imperialist states in support of political and economic intervention against countries they view as failed projects, often leading to the reassertion of imperialist domination. Consequently, Western Marxists blindly support Western policies which undermine socialist state projects and wittingly or unwittingly, the reassertion of economic, political, cultural and military dependency on imperialist capitalism.