Imperialism

Paisaje Zapatista

Problems of Dependent Determination and Primordial Form (1982)

In this work we want to consider the question of the construction of politics in relation to the tension between authoritarian forms and democratic movements, considered in their points of origin. According to a certain Latin American irredentism, there are no national histories. What would usually be categorized as such are only repercussions in this territory of the history of the core countries. Dependency would permanently beget dependency. What is important is to define, however, is the degree of self-determination that a national history can have, the conditions in which a self-determining process is produced. 

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The Communist International and Imperialism

The Communist International and Imperialism

The new Soviet state needed allies – either socialism would extend its victory, or exploitation and oppression would continue and new wars would break out. It was with this perspective that the Comintern was founded in 1919, with the object of encouraging world revolution. And with the Baku Congress of September 1920, the Bolsheviks made a symbolic declaration of their opposition to imperialism and attempted to lay the foundations for an organizational expression of this opposition.

Mouna Karray, Avant La Chute (I), 2017

Decolonizing Tunisia’s Border Violence: Moving Beyond Imperial Structures and Imaginaries

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What if rather than starting from Tunisia’s “border problem,” analysis instead started from problematizing the very concern with “border violence” itself? How can a longue durée approach to Tunisia’s borders help us understand not only the nature but also the kinds of work Tunisia’s borders do in terms of producing certain political and socio-economic realities?

The Angolan Question (1976)

The Angolan Question (1976)

It was immediately obvious that there was a startling coincidence – a startling convergence – between the positions of certain individuals who call themselves progressive, revolutionaries, and who in fact regarded themselves as the essence of revolution – yet their positions converged with that of U.S. imperialism. And this amazing historical convergence needs to be understood.

Diana al-Hadid, Noli's Orders, 2012

The Enemy at Home: U.S. Imperialism in Syria

How does the destruction in Syria fit into broader historical patterns? How do we situate the war on Syria into the histories of U.S. imperialism, the Arab world (including Palestine), and the relationship between the two? It is only by positing those questions that we can develop the theoretical grounding necessary to build the movements and establish the alliances required to defeat the U.S. war machine in Syria and elsewhere. 

Vietnam Libero, Vietnam Rosso

Old and New Questions in the Theory of Imperialism (1975)

The renewal of Leninism generally ends up being performed mechanistically, as a simple annexation of the subsequent changes that have intervened on the scene of international power relations to the schema of Imperialism. This proves more and more to be a fruitless operation. Instead it is a matter of returning to Lenin by way of Marx. Today, renewing Leninist analysis in the political sense requires us to make this passage once again: to find in Marx, in his method before even in the contents of his discourse, the correct way of posing the question. In this case: what determines capital – as a political-material relation, as a relation of force – in its configuration and its international dynamics?

Street art in Athens by Bleeps.gr

The New Debt Colonies

In the wake of the global financial crisis, methods of financial subjugation have been applied on a massive scale in the capitalist heartland itself. The result has not just been a new wave of “accumulation by dispossession,” but in some cases also the effective abolition of national sovereignty.

The Dye Workers

Development Under the Threat of War in the Arab World

We must understand this crisis as an outcome of the ways this region is woven into the global economy. The oil and war economies, the destruction and waste side of capital accumulation, are the main channels by which the region is articulated with the global market. Waste and militarism are principal elements in an accumulation regime that produces value by consuming not only the value of labor-power, but also the value inherent in human lives.