Towards a New Wave of Anti-Imperialist Internationalism

The anti-war movement has been informed and inspired by a distinct spirit of internationalism. However much Washington may try and brand this internationalism as anti-Americanism, it has emerged as a massive counter force against US unilateralism masquerading as “American internationalism”. At a time when the United Nations Organisation stood thoroughly undermined by the United States of America (as a Pakistani poet has put it, the UNO gets its U from the US and NO from the rest of the world), the huge and synchronised global anti-war demonstrations continued to pulsate with this internationalist spirit.

Just as the early development of transport and communication had played a key role in bringing about nationalist awakening in the former colonies development of bourgeois nationalism – the railways and the print media, for instance, had played a pivotal role in the rise of anti-colonial nationalism in British-ruled India – the latest revolution in information technology, especially the emergence of the Internet and satellite television is contributing in no small measure to the growth of a live internationalist awareness.

But we are also aware of the number of the vicious methods employed by capital to disrupt the sense of working class unity and solidarity. Within the framework of a national economy, capital counters the working class by promoting various divisions and even lethal competition. The uneven development of the world capitalist economy opened up many more opportunities. In the heyday of British colonialism, Marx and Engels spoke of the bourgeois airs of the British working class reflecting an unmistakable colonial corruption of the working class consciousness. Lenin’s analysis of imperialism showed how it almost perfected the art of checking the working class movement by bribing sections of the workers with part of the super-profit reaped from third world countries and ideologically derailing and emasculating the working class by whipping up chauvinistic passions. Lenin called these bribed workers labour aristocrats and identified labour aristocracy as the social base of opportunism within the working class movement.

Of course, the extensive and intensive growth of globalising capitalism is also restricting capital’s ability to bribe and cheat the working class in the advanced capitalist countries. This is rooted in the fact that while capital has acquired tremendous mobility, labour remains largely immobile. So while capital is free to exploit labour at its cheapest, workers in advanced capitalist countries are faced with an invisible competition, they are to defend their jobs and wages vis-a-vis the cheap labour in third world countries.

History has witnessed several major attempts to infuse the working class movement with a decisive degree of internationalism and coordinated and unified action. The Communist Manifesto itself was born with the supreme internationalist call: Workers of the world, unite. The First International (International Working Men’s Association, 1864-71) had succeeded in bringing about the first wave of unity in the arena of trade union struggles. While it disintegrated soon after the first definitive attempt to create a workers’ state in France (Paris Commune, 1871), the Commune gave us the Internationale, the ever-inspiring anthem of the working class and progressive forces. The Second International, formed in Paris in 1889, hundred years after the historic French Revolution that had given the modern world the lofty notions of liberty, equality and fraternity, brought together most of the socialist or social-democratic parties of the capitalist world.

In November 1912, delegates of the Second International met at Basle, Switzerland in an Extraordinary International Socialist Congress even as war clouds had been gathering on the European sky. The Basle Manifesto warned the nations against the imminent threat of a world imperialist war, revealed the aggressive aims of the war and called on the workers of the world to fight for peace and “to pit against the might of capitalist imperialism the international solidarity of the working class”. The Manifesto included a clause, formulated by Lenin, to the effect that in the event of an imperialist war the socialists should take advantage of the economic and political crisis that would result from the war to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule and fight for socialist revolution. By August 1914, however, these worthy sentiments of confronting the capitalist world of exploitation and mass murder by the proletarian world of peace, revolution and international brotherhood had crumbled before the trumpet blast of jingoistic mobilisation and chauvinist hysteria. The Second International met with an ignominious collapse. It was then that the revolutionary wing of the Second International met separately at Zimmerwald, Switzerland and called for turning the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war against domestic reaction. That was how and when the Russian Revolution was born and parties calling themselves Communist Parties, as opposed to the opportunist Social-Democratic lot, began to organise globally under the banner of the Third or Communist International.

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US IMPERIALISM IS A PAPER TIGER

July 14, 1956

MAO TSETUNG

Only when imperialism is eliminated can peace prevail. The day will come when the paper tigers will be wiped out. But they won’t become extinct of their own accord, they need to be battered by the wind and the rain.

When we say US imperialism is a paper tiger, we are speaking in terms of strategy. Regarding it as a whole, we must despise it. But regarding each part, we must take it seriously. It has claws and fangs. We have to destroy it piecemeal. For instance, if it has ten fangs, knock off one the first time, and there will be nine left, knock off another, and there will be eight left. When all the fangs are gone, it will still have claws. If we deal with it step by step and in earnest, we will certainly succeed in the end.

Strategically, we must utterly despise U.S. imperialism. Tactically, we must take it seriously. In struggling against it, we must take each battle, each encounter, seriously. At present, the United States is powerful, but when looked at in a broader perspective, as a whole and from a long-term viewpoint, it has no popular support, its policies are disliked by the people, because it oppresses and exploits them. For this reason, the tiger is doomed. Therefore, it is nothing to be afraid of and can be despised. But today the United States still has strength, turning out more than 100 million tons of steel a year and hitting out everywhere. That is why we must continue to wage struggles against it, fight it with all our might and wrest one position after another from it. And that takes time.

(Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, Vol. V, p. 309-10)

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