Coronavirus and American Exceptionalism

By Matthew Dolezal

Republished from the author’s blog.

America is the Fyre Festival of countries. It is pure hype with little to no positive results. It is a back-alley drug deal culminating in a sweaty palm gripping a wrinkled bag of oregano. It is broken promises, shattered dreams, and shameful regret. All our lives we are told with inflated enthusiasm, with charismatic apologia, that America is a spectacular monument to freedom and democracy, a “shining city upon a hill” and a beacon to lesser nations. We are told our country is “exceptional.” And all our lives we wait for supporting evidence to verify these sensational claims as we gawk with confusion at our surroundings.

In a sense, the “exceptionalism” narrative is true, but not in the sense the propagandists and gatekeepers from prominent institutions had intended. As we reevaluate the very notion of American policing — from its origins in southern slave-catching patrols, to its use as a violent deterrent against labor and civil rights struggles, to its ruthless enforcement of Jim Crow and the War on Drugs — we are also faced with a more profound question regarding the very nature of our “great” nation.

America is a political project founded, at first, by the violent ethnic cleansing of its indigenous inhabitants, then, by the colonizing of the blood-drenched land mass and, finally, by the instituting of industrial capitalism through a slavery-based economy. The European colonizers fought resolutely to maintain this barbaric system of kidnapped, forced, torturous, uncompensated labor in what historian Gerald Horne refers to as “the counter-revolution of 1776.” The subsequent development of white supremacy as a ubiquitous ideology then served the economic elite faithfully as a successful “divide and conquer” mechanism for decades and centuries to come.

As V.I. Lenin’s groundbreaking observations regarding imperialism as “the highest stage of capitalism” foresaw, the U.S. began expanding beyond its own borders — those which were initially forged through violent conquest, land theft, and treaty violations. In a stage of neocolonial domination beginning primarily with the Spanish-American War and continuing with covert military coups and death squads in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, the U.S. brutally secured natural resource acquisition for Western capital. The American military, globally perceived as the greatest threat to world peace, has an estimated 700 bases in 130 countries. In recent decades, the so-called “War on Terror” has taken the lives of approximately 1.3 million people. This inherently bellicose organization serves as a de-facto police force for the World Bank and the IMF, punishing any attempt at national sovereignty outside the confines of Western neoliberal capitalism.

The domestic effects of neoliberalism display themselves with such starkness that multi-billion dollar PR industries and corporate news media organizations make it their livelihoods to gaslight us and whitewash our own tangible material conditions. As the brief foray into a “prosperous” standard of living was dismantled by bipartisan Reaganomics, disillusioned Americans rejected their own ostensibly enlightened political process by refusing to vote in elections. Wealth concentration continued unabated, with three men now owning more than half the population. The prison population increased unabated, and is now the highest in the world. The for-profit healthcare system, claiming tens of thousands of innocent lives each year, continued unabated, and is now an outlier in the so-called “developed world.”

As the federal government doubled down on its commitment to serving the interests of private capital, public institutions and services were systematically gutted. This profound dedication to “profit over people,” specifically in the realm of healthcare, set the stage for America’s exceptional death toll in the wake of the voracious coronavirus pandemic. The flip side of this carnage is, of course, the ability of the ruling class to further enrich itself amidst the chaos. In a natural evolution of what Naomi Klein refers to as “disaster capitalism,” we are now well on our way to anointing the world’s first trillionaire.

If America was a political satire film, the coronavirus pandemic would be its whimsical climax; its Dr. Strangelove mass-nuking scene juxtaposed with a comforting musical score. Once again, we are exceptional, but in a rather insidious and villainous sense. In a black humor sort of way, America is the laughing stock of the world. The Global South must think our chickens are coming home to roost, just as they had on 9/11. Our lofty ideals are effortlessly unraveling before the eyes of billions, culminating in an unsightly mountain of corpses and petroleum-based consumer goods. Indeed, the empire wears no clothes.

As the late comedian George Carlin said, “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” In lieu of the fabled “land of the free,” what persists is simply an empire in decline; something more resembling an American Nightmare for the vast majority of those affected, both domestically and abroad. All possibilities for revolution or even reform have failed. America is the Titanic of countries; an ostentatious facade naively heading toward utter destruction. The question now is who will survive this final, epic, prolonged plateau; this dark moment while the glimmering vessel ominously rests vertically, partially above water; this death rattle before rapid descent into oblivion.

American Exceptionalism, American Innocence, and What Comes Next: An Interview with Danny Haiphong

By Colin Jenkins

The following is an email interview with author and activist, Danny Haiphong, regarding the current state of capitalism, US politics, and his new book, American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: A People's History of Fake News-From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror, which is co-authored with Roberto Sirvent. Danny is a regular contributor to Black Agenda Report. His book may be purchased directly from Skyhorse Publishing .

"The failure of the Western left in general and the U.S. left in particular to understand the inextricable, structural connection between empire, colonization, capitalism, and white supremacy-and that all elements of that oppressive structure must be confronted, dismantled, and defeated-continues to give lifeblood to a system that is ready to sweep into the dustbins of history. This is why American Exceptionalism and American Innocence is nothing more than an abject subversion. It destabilizes the hegemonic assumptions and imposed conceptual frameworks of bourgeois liberalism and points the reader toward the inevitable conclusion that U.S. society in its present form poses an existential threat to global humanity."

- Ajamu Baraka

I've been a personal fan of your writing on Black Agenda Report for many years, so I was excited to hear of this book when it was in the works. Can you let everyone know how it came to fruition? And how it materialized into a co-authoring project with Roberto Sirvent?

Thank you. I certainly have so much gratitude for The Hampton Institute, which I believe is one of the few truly socialist resources available for both new and veteran activists interested in the science of Marxism. As for the book, the project began when Roberto Sirvent reached out to me in the summer of 2017 with the idea of a book of essays on American exceptionalism. Roberto believed that Black Agenda Report's voice needed to be included in any analysis of the subject. We engaged in a series of discussions over the course of the next several months. The conversations centered on issues such as the U.S.' legacy in World War II, the significance of Colin Kaepernick's demonstration against the national anthem, and the framework of humanitarian imperialism.

We realized that American exceptionalism was a thread that linked these issues to a common struggle, the struggle against imperialism. American exceptionalism protects the system of imperialism by linking the interests of the oppressed with those of the ruling class under the banner of the (white) nation-state. Our purpose in writing the book was to ensure that activists and scholars possessed a tool for challenging American exceptionalism from the left. The left really has no use for American exceptionalism because it is based on myth and white supremacy. American exceptionalism presumes that the U.S. is the principle force for good in the world and that U.S. superiority gives the oligarchy the right to determine the destinies of those deemed inferior, whether in Syria, Venezuela, or for Black Americans right here in the United States. We agreed to make internationalism and anti-war politics a central focus of the book from the introduction to the final chapter.

Can you tell us a little about your personal journey through politicizing? Do you identify with any particular ideology?

Sure. I grew up in a working-class community in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My father was a white union worker for the federal government and my mother was a Vietnamese woman who has consistently struggled with mental health issues and has thus struggled with employment. After the elimination of Glass Steagall, banks and creditors sold my mother the dream of owning land and great wealth. Her pursuit of these endeavors nearly left our family bankrupt and her massive credit card debt (upwards of a quarter million dollars by the 2000 economic crisis) forced my father to work sixty to seventy hours per week for several years to make up the difference. Even then he was forced to refinance the house that we lived in twice in order to pay a small portion of the tuition that my sister and I incurred from undergraduate school.

It was in college that I was exposed to the one percent. Unlike many of my Black, brown, and white peers, I was able to attend an elite college and graduate. During this time, I frolicked in the same institution as our class enemy in the one percent. It drove me into depression. I thought about dropping out more than once. Then an Afro-Dominican friend of mine was racially profiled by the police and community in the town outside of my school and my depression turned to anger. I had lost several Black peers to premature death and was already privy to racism from my experiences with being called a "gook" and a "model minority" throughout my childhood. My organizing efforts around his case led to broader efforts to fight against racism on campus. These efforts were severely limited due to the class orientation of many of the students I was organizing with. It became clear that careerism trumped their principles.

I was lucky enough to have a professor who facilitated my transfer to New York City for the fall semester of 2011. While there, I interned for a labor union and participated in Occupy Wall Street. Both the labor movement and Occupy Wall Street, for different reasons, seemed unable to confront the fundamental contradictions of U.S. society. Labor leadership appeared indifferent to militant action out of opportunism and fear of capitalist reprisal. Occupy Wall Street appeared too disorganized to solidify an ideological and strategic direction and thus was vulnerable to state repression. As I participated in these struggles, I began reading corporate mainstream news on the U.S.-NATO invasion of Libya. I questioned why the so-called Black president who I voted for in 2008 would lead an invasion of an African country on what seemed like an Iraq-like pretext. No one in Occupy or the labor movement mentioned Libya.

The invasion of Libya and my frustrations with the struggle on the ground led me to read Black Agenda Report and Huey P. Newton's To Die for the People simultaneously. Each source of information introduced me to the concepts of socialism, anti-imperialism, and internationalism. It was clear from reading Newton and studying Black Agenda Report that I needed a stronger understanding of Marxism and socialist theory. Political education became my new objective. In the years since 2011, I have focused mainly on political education through participation in various mass-based and socialist organizations. I have been writing weekly for Black Agenda Report for the last five years. My ideology is socialist. Not to be confused with democratic socialism or social democracy, I ascribe to Marxism-Leninism as described by Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Fred Hampton.

In the Introduction, you explain one of the goals in writing this book: (xix) "we want to equip our readers with the tools to locate, critique, and dismantle the twin ideologies of American exceptionalism and American innocence." Can you expand on this statement a little?

This book is not just meant to tell activists what to think, but how to think. By revealing the central contradictions of American exceptionalism, we believe that this book contributes to the broader struggle for social justice and transformation at the point of ideology. In 7th Congress of the Youth Communist League, Fidel Castro said that

"We must use solid arguments to talk to members and non-members, to speak to those who may be confused or even to discuss and debate with those holding positions contrary to those of the Revolution or who are influenced by imperialist ideology in this great battle of ideas we have been waging for years now, precisely in order to carry out the heroic deed of resisting against the most politically, militarily, economically, technologically and culturally powerful empire that has ever existed. Young cadres must be well prepared for this task."

We feel similarly to Comandante Fidel. American exceptionalism and innocence have shaped the political orientation of every single working class and oppressed person in the United States. While this doesn't mean everyone aligns with the tenets of innocence and exceptionalism, it does mean that their influence surely has an impact on the development of resistance movements against capitalism, white supremacy, and empire. The left in the United States rarely raises the question of war and when the struggle against white supremacy is raised, we find that it is not linked to the questions of power and oppression but rather of representation. This allows U.S. imperialism to render itself innocent of wrongdoing through the division of our struggles into easily containable parts. We believe that if we can identify and demystify American exceptionalism (the belief that the U.S. is a force for good), and American innocence (the belief that the U.S. is "above" the crimes it commits), then we can advance the battle of ideas that is currently being waged in the here and now. For example, instead of arguing that socialism is a project of reform, the rejection of American exceptionalism and innocence helps us realize that socialism requires nothing short of a complete transformation of society. We hope that our book will help others come to this realization through a study of history, ideology, and the reality behind imperialist rhetoric.

A paragraph that struck me as especially important reads, (xxiii) "Many avoid being labeled "un-American" by remaining silent about war, poverty, racism and the many ills that U.S. imperialism inflicts upon the world. Some activists have even suggested that approaching people from "where they are" by appealing to American exceptionalism will help recruit more Americans to the cause of social justice and transformation. If Americans believe "democracy" and "freedom" are worthwhile goals, we are told, then these sentiments should be utilized in service of the development of a more just social order. We believe that this is a monumental error in political thought and action. It not only assumes that the American population, especially the oppressed, primarily identify as "American" and will identify as such for the foreseeable future, but it also assumes that the American nation-state is in fact capable of ever bringing about true freedom, justice, or peace."

Can you talk about why this approach is a "monumental error" and why the underlying assumptions to it are wrongheaded?

The U.S. was never a democracy in the first place. This is difficult to swallow for many, including Bernie Sanders, who still believes that the West is the beacon and standard bearer of "democracy." In this era of neoliberalism, we find that pandering to the so-called values of the U.S. is very common, even among those who claim to be progressive or on the left. Take the example of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. In speech after speech on climate change, Ocasio Cortez continues to insist that the best way to mobilize a fight against tide of environmental catastrophe is to rise to occasion like the U.S. did in World War II. This reinforces the myth that the U.S. saved the world in World War II and that the U.S. is going to save the world again.

Our struggles for liberation and revolution will fail if they intend to make U.S. imperialism a more perfect system. We can't improve upon what doesn't exist. We can't rise to the occasion like in World War II. Real socialists should not whitewash a legacy rife with criminality including the use of two nuclear bombs on Japan, the firebombing a defenseless Dresden at the expense of over thirty thousand civilians, and the corporate financing of Hitler and fascism prior to the U.S. entrance in the war. We discuss the U.S.' participation in WWII in Chapter 4.

We should also remember that American exceptionalism is a white exceptionalism. If we are attempting to reform or perfect the architectures of the U.S. imperial state, then we are perfecting a racist regime whose primary interest is in the mass incarceration, elimination, and erasure of native people and Black people in the United States. Our conceptions of liberty, freedom, and democracy will have to be based on a different model all together, if they are to be useful at all.

Chapter 1 sets the tone for the entire book, dissecting the underlying psychology that stems from dominant culture (culture from above). In it, you hit on the events of 9/11/01 and its aftermath, illustrating how the capitalist ruling class took advantage of this to perpetuate a backs-against-the-wall mythology that continues to prop up the empire. You write, (p 3) "The idea of the United States as a perpetual "victim" of enemy aggression that is compelled to "play defense" on the international stage is a quintessential example of American exceptionalism and American innocence working together."

Can you talk about what you mean here, especially in terms of how exceptionalism and innocence interplay in this scenario?

The Bush administration declared after 9/11 that terrorists hated the United States for its "freedoms." By invoking American exceptionalism and the myth that people all over the world fawn over the achievements of the U.S., the U.S. imperial state was able to simultaneously present itself as a victim of foreign aggression. This aggression was stateless and thus anyone could be blamed for its occurrence. The lies kept coming and coming. First came the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 based on the false allegation that the Taliban were behind the attacks. Then there was the Weapons of Mass Destruction debacle that led to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Throughout it all, the U.S. justified the destruction of far weaker nations by playing the innocent victim.

Innocence and exceptionalism often go hand in hand. Innocence requires an aggressor, a rapist, a subject devoid of humanity. The cruelty of the beast allows the U.S. ruling class to do whatever it wants in the name of profit. Enslaved Africans and displaced natives were depicted as savage creatures who were blessed by the civilized settler colonialist. In the War on Terror, the terrorist became synonymous with Muslim or Arab. Ironically, plenty of actual terrorists, or who are more appropriately named mercenaries, are created by U.S. foreign policy and its staunch ally, Saudi Arabia. But the War on Terror has always been less a crusade against these forces than it was a war to justify endless war abroad and state repression at home.

In Chapter 3 you address the interconnectedness of American imperialism, Black oppression (from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration), and the genocide of Native Americans at the hand of European colonizers. Can you tell readers why this is such an important connection to understand?

In this era of Trump, there appears to be an ever-growing awareness of the race-based foundations of the United States. Missing from this awareness is how the U.S. never grew out of its white supremacist roots. We hear a lot that Trump "isn't what the U.S. is all about." We are often told, especially by white liberals, that the U.S. is proud of diversity and inclusion. Yet the plight of indigenous people and Black people in the United States tell a different story. Not many people know that indigenous people face higher rates of police homicide than Black Americans. Or that Black wealth in the U.S. is set to be zero by year 2053 if current trends persist. Inclusion and diversity ignore these realities. Even more disturbing is how anti-Russian racism fuels much of the white liberal resistance to Trump.

Without the enslavement of Africans and colonization of indigenous peoples, the U.S. would not have been able to develop the capitalist infrastructure necessary to become a global imperial terror in the world. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who we cite extensively in Chapter 2, explains that the U.S. military's very formation lies in the hiring of mercenaries by the War Department to rob and loot indigenous communities. There is a deep misconception that the struggle for Black liberation or against settler colonialism is a domestic dispute. Nothing could be further from the truth. If we don't internationalize the struggle against racism at home, then we can't follow in the footsteps of Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party, both of whom sought redress and recognition from the United Nations. American exceptionalism helps us forget these struggles and keeps us interested only in making the U.S. a more "diverse" society at the expense of any real struggle for power.

As someone who has gone from once being restrained by the thought parameters of dominant culture to now being deeply involved in revolutionary thought, I've noticed that one of the most difficult tasks when dealing with folks who are stuck in that former stage is reorienting their thought from individualistic to systemic. Angela Davis talked about this type of individualistic worldview being solidified in the neoliberal era, to the point where it even negatively affects activism and organizing. One of the reasons I've always loved your writing, as well as most content on Black Agenda Report, is because it is firmly embedded in a structural/systemic understanding. Not surprisingly, this book carries that analysis forward. For example, in talking about the systemic effects of white supremacy in the United States, you write, (p 54) "If American society itself is a monument to white supremacy, then the economic, cultural, and legal manifestations of white supremacy must take precedence over individual attitudes." Can you explain to our readers why it is so crucial that systemic effects must take precedence over individual attitudes?

Individualism is a bedrock ideology of American capitalism and imperialism. It is a powerful force that has a wide array of effects on the consciousness of the masses. Our book centers individualism not only in the neoliberal stage of capitalism but also in the formation of the United States as an empire that privileges the god-like image of the white citizen. The U.S. ruling class has been comprised of these whte citizens from the very beginning. White citizens of the ruling elite have attempted to instill the same values, principles, and behaviors in the entire white American population with great success. Citizenship here is key. Citizenship gives white America something to mobilize around. That was the basis of the entire Jim Crow period. The end of slavery was depicted as the end of white citizenship and organizations such as the KKK emerged to ensure that freedom for Black Americans would be nominal rather than universal in character.

Individualism not only mobilizes the political right but also infects the so-called left as well. We saw this inn the recent struggles against Confederate monuments in the United States. We also saw this in the confrontations of figures such as Richard Spencer. The focus tends to be on individual symbols and leaders rather than on the material conditions that allow people like Spencer or monuments of the Confederacy to exist at all. Such a focus allows real monuments to white supremacy such as the prison-state and finance capital to remain undisturbed and unchallenged. Individualism thus inevitably leads us toward projects to improve the image of the U.S. rather than the conditions of the masses. While some may see this as a defense of the political right, it is really a call for us to move our energies toward the structures of power that give the political right a foundation to stand on. If we cut that foundation, we cut out their existence as well.

An ongoing topic of importance is how white folks fit into modern revolutionary politics. This is especially important in the United States because of our long history of racial divide, both within the working class itself and as used as an effective tool by the capitalist class. It continues to be a crucial question. One product of liberalism and "white guilt" has been this manifestation of white saviorism.

You touch on this phenomenon in the book, writing on page 161, "The White Savior Industrial Complex is a modernized expression of American individualism and thus a direct product of the United States' racist and capitalist roots. In an article in the Atlantic, Teju Cole describes the White Savior Industrial Complex as "a valve for releasing the unbearable pressures that build in a system built on pillage." White saviorism recruits Americans-and white Americans in particular-to resolve the guilt inevitably produced by the unbearable conditions that U.S. imperialism has wrought on the world with individual acts of charity funded and sponsored by the very agents responsible for the destruction. Acts of "charity" not only focus on individualized action over collective response but also tend to reinforce the United States' obsessive fear of racialized "others." The White Savior Industrial Complex uses charity to absolve the U.S. of responsibility for the conditions produced by this obsession. White guilt is the escape valve. "We can participate in the economic destruction of Haiti over long years," Cole writes, 'but when the earthquake strikes it feels good to send $10 each to the rescue fund.'"

White saviorism is usually reserved for liberal circles; however, like most products of whiteness, it can certainly infect radical and revolutionary circles as well. That being said, what are your thoughts on more recent notions like "allies" and "accomplices?" How do such roles square up within a proletarian movement in the vein of Fred Hampton's Rainbow Coalition? How do you see the divides working out between so-called "class reductionists" (who are often white, and thus more likely to underestimate other forms of oppression) and hyper-marginalized members of the working class (Black, Brown, Women, etc) who experience these compounded forms of oppression every day?

Those are great questions. The United States is an imperialist nightmare with no shortage of internal contradictions that pose serious problems in developing a class-conscious revolutionary movement. White leftists in the United States are divided into two general categories (although they are far from exhaustive). These categories are the New Left, which emerged from anti-war and other political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and a new generation of younger leftists who were inspired by Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and now the Sanders phenomenon. What is interesting is that while the New Left is often thought of as class reductionist, the politics of white saviorism often instills feelings of guilt about their white privileges and render them attracted to liberal discourses on race and identity largely emanating from the bourgeois academy and university system. I find that class analysis is what is reduced when class analysis is ignored, while class reductionists in the white left are reacting to this development in a negative way. Both often lead to irreconcilable issues and weak movements.

The younger white leftists are more amenable to radical interpretations of society. What is lacking is political organization, a real vehicle that can drive younger activists toward revolutionary politics and strategies. Occupy Wall Street was unable to become an organized, discipline force capable of developing long-term alliances and fending off state repression. Right now, everything is confined within the Democratic Party and Bernie Sanders. On the surface, it appears that Sanders supporters tend to take a class reductionist point of view. Many of the demands of Sanders supporters revolve around economic necessity. Corporate Democrats have taken such a surface level analysis very seriously and have attempted to make what is a pretty diverse group of people who are aligned to Sanders look like a bunch of angry white men.

It is important to realize, however, is that the only effective way that class reductionism or white saviorism have ever been countered is through the self-determined political organization of Black Americans and the racially oppressed. Your example of the Rainbow Coalition is a good one. Fred Hampton and the Black Panther Party were able to forge alliances with white radical organizations such as the Young Patriots because there was a significant Black left-leaning presence in the struggle of that time. Even if the Black Panther Party was numerically small, Black Americans in large numbers opposed wars, favored economic transformation, and (especially young Black Americans of the period) were attracted to political demands that sought to rectify the failures of integration and Civil Rights. Furthermore, there was a large global socialist movement led by a bloc of nations such as China and the USSR which helped challenge U.S. imperial domination worldwide. In the absence of these conditions, we have seen white saviorism and class reductionism battle for the hearts and minds of the white left.

In summary, Black workers and working people of oppressed nationalities must be the ones to lead the conversation and organization around their self-determination. This is the best antidote to the contradictions white left, which has always needed direction. But the answer for white leftists is not to sit on their hands or give up demands for economic and political change. It also isn't to become "white allies" with the oppressed in the way that it has been defined by the academy. White American leftists need to be challenging the ideologies of exceptionalism and saviorism, as well as the far-right political trend occurring throughout the Western world. They must ask: when has being an "ally" transformed the material conditions of anyone? No movement has ever been based on elitist grand-standing, which is what I believe the politics of diversity and inclusion promotes in the final analysis. White leftists must bring an anti-imperialist, anti-war orientation into their communities and find ways to promote solidarity with their comrades in Black communities and other oppressed communities. That is the only way forward.

In Chapter 21, you tackle the question, "who exactly does the military serve?" As a military veteran who has written about such questions, this spoke to me. In answering, you write (page 239), "Consciousness of who and what is behind the dominant narratives of American exceptionalism and American innocence is a prerequisite for the development of an alternative narrative that can be popularized widely." Can you elaborate on what you mean here?

We must know the enemy. American exceptionalism and innocence make us believe that the enemy is ourselves. Or, that the enemy is the "other"-a racialized threat created to justify the original sin of slavery through the dehumanization of the African or Black person. Alternative political narratives emerge only when the veil has been lifted off those who cause the suffering. The Black Lives Matter movement initially pointed to the police and prison-state as the enemy that was not only killing Black Americans but also reinforcing narratives of criminality so important to the conditions of premature death that plague Black communities across the country. We believe that lifting the veil from the peddlers of American exceptionalism and innocence gives us an even broader understanding of who and what is behind the oppression and exploitation of Black America and the working class more broadly. Corporate media outlets, education systems, corporate executives, military officials, and politicians; these are the stakeholders of the ideologies of American exceptionalism and innocence. Being able to identify them and begin an investigation into their interconnectedness helps us realize how power in the form of the profit-motive is at the heart of U.S. imperialism. Perhaps even more critical is that we can then see that this system is not an amorphous or abstract project. It is a product of class rule in a specific historical epoch and thus a temporary condition which can be destroyed and replaced by a new system with the help of a peoples' revolution. This is no easy feat, and I don't pretend have the answers as to how this will happen but getting more struggling people in the U.S. to realize this is an important step.

That is what our book is all about. And we feel that ending on the note of the U.S. military is appropriate since there is perhaps no institution more destructive and obviously controlled by the capitalist class. The U.S. military is also one of the most venerated institution in U.S. society for this exact reason. Few people, except the ruling class themselves, would support wars if they believed the only reason for them was to expand the profits of a small number of capitalist oligarchs. Thus, the military has been depicted as an engine of democracy, freedom, and an opportunity to get an education and a job in a society that provides neither as a human right. Prior to that, the U.S. military was heralded as an engine of white prosperity and employment. Its targets on the other hand have been turned into sub-human creatures worthy of annihilation. Who can forget when, in 2011, the U.S. military-state and its media accomplices claimed that the Gaddafi government was using Viagra in the U.S.-NATO invasion of Libya to rape women and children? Or when the U.S. military trained its soldiers to view Koreans as wild savages and "gooks" during the Korean War? Unfortunately, many Americans have, and that's because American exceptionalism has infected the political discourse from top to bottom.

As a society, we seem to be on a precipice of sorts. Or at least find ourselves in a significant moment in history, with neoliberalism intensifying inequality, environmental disaster looming, extreme wealth taking ownership of our public agenda, never-ending militarism, creeping fascism, etc. Where do you see things heading in the next five years? And how should we as radicals respond from within the belly of the beast?

In the next five years, I see three developments of significance that will have a profound impact on the trajectory of the U.S. left.

First, the ruling class will continue its assault on the social democratic tendencies of the Democratic Party base. This will exacerbate the political crisis of legitimacy occurring in the United States generally, strengthen the figures such as Trump, and lead hopefully to new opportunities to develop a viable independent left political party.

Second, the U.S. is due for a capitalist economic crisis. This crisis is likely to be even more devastating than the 2007-08 crisis. The proletarianization of U.S. society will reach a breaking point. Where workers and oppressed people in the U.S. go from here is anyone's guess, but we can expect that they won't take the suffering quietly.

Third, Russia and China are eclipsing the United States on the world stage. U.S. imperialism wants nothing more than to weaken its rivals to the East. This means that in the next five years, the threat of war with Syria, Iran, Russia, and China will escalate. The threat will increase amid political and economic crisis.

We must respond through political organization and education. There is a progressive tide occurring in the United States. But the tide is not organized outside of the Democratic Party and there is no Black liberation movement to lead it. Thus, we must be vigilant in creating the conditions for the organization of the working class and popularizing the politics of solidarity and anti-imperialism.

The conditions for organizing on a socialist and communist basis are becoming more favorable. Large portions of the United States want universal healthcare and are more amenable to the term socialism. Of course, many still think socialism is the New Deal and a reform project. But the sentiment against unfettered capitalism and imperialism is there and it will be up to us to harness it and push the contradictions forward to their logical conclusion: social revolution.

Russophobia and the Logic of Imperialism

By Ava Lipatti

As it stands today, the U.S./NATO imperialist bloc has its eyes set primarily on two countries: Russia and China. While NATO imperial terror, including economic sanctions and military action, in countries such as Ukraine, Syria, Iran, and North Korea constitute exploitative projects in their own right, they also function to encircle Russia and China. Given the importance of Russia as an object of imperial desire, clarity on the character of Russia is imperative in order to understand the current economic and political crisis of imperialism.

There are several important aspects to the question of Russia as it stands today.

The narrative of the Democratic Party is that "Russian hackers" rigged the "democratic" "elections" and that Trump is a puppet of the Kremlin and of Vladimir Putin in particular. There virtually no substantial evidence for this claim. But what is the significance of this narrative? What are its historical roots?

There is also the common claim by elements of the left that Russia is in fact an imperialist power in its own right, primarily for its actions in Crimea, Syria, and Chechnya. However, Russia's relatively weak economy is characterized primarily by the export of raw materials, rather than the export of finance capital as in imperialist countries. The claim that Russia is an imperialist country has been convincingly argued against both by Sam Williams and by Renfrey Clarke and Roger Annis . But does this claim come from nowhere? What is its intellectual heritage?

The purpose of this article is not to prove that Russia is not imperialist or that Trump is not a Kremlin puppet. Others have already grappled with these questions in a much more thorough way than I am equipped to do. The purpose of this article, rather, is to place these phenomena in the context of a long history of Orientalism directed at Slavic people in general, and Russia in particular.

Before proceeding, a brief definition from Edward Said's Orientalism (1978):

"Orientalism is a style of thought based upon ontological and epistemological distinction made between 'the Orient' and (most of the time) 'the Occident.' Thus a very large mass of writers, among who are poet, novelists, philosophers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators, have accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, 'mind,' destiny, and so on... the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient... despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a 'real' Orient." (5)

Whiteness, Nazism, and Bolshevism

On the border between "Europe" and "Asia", Russians have historically maintained at best a vacillating, conditional relationship with whiteness and "European civilization". The most historically openly terroristic, revanchist manifestation of European supremacist ideology was undoubtedly Nazism. What was the relationship between Nazism, Bolshevism, and the Slavic peoples?

In War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century (2015), Italian Marxist Domenico Losurdo seeks to reclaim the revolutionary tradition and reevaluate the character of Nazism, which he argues has been whitewashed by revisionist historians. Losurdo emphasizes several key points in relation to Nazism and Bolshevism.

Perhaps most importantly, Losurdo argues that in rejecting the revolutionary tradition (from the Jacobins through the Bolsheviks), the revisionist historians have also concealed the colonial character of the Nazi project. Even a cursory reading of Nazi ideology and its goals and practices indicates an essentially colonial dynamic with respect to Jews, Romani, Slavs, and other oppressed peoples. However, U.S. and European historians prefer to whitewash this history, ripping the Holocaust from its historical context and presenting it as an anomaly in human history, rather than an integral manifestation of colonial conquest and imperial terror.

A central aspect of the Nazi project, outlined in Hitler's Mein Kampf, was the plan to colonize Eastern Europe, specifically through exterminating Eastern Europeans and settling throughout the Soviet Union. What historians have traditionally suppressed is that this plan did not come from nowhere: it was inspired in large part by the U.S. settler-colonization of "North America" and the genocide carried out against both the Indigenous people and the people of Africa. Nazi concentration camps were influenced by U.S. concentration camps (i.e. "Indian reservations"); Nazi eugenics was largely inspired by reactionary U.S."scientists" .

Anti-Semitism, anti-Ziganism, and anti-Slavic racism fused to produce the fascist Nazi ideology of turning Eastern Europe into an Aryan settler-colony. In this process of counter-revolution, Nazi ideology racialized its most ferocious enemy: Bolshevism. Bolshevism, a revolutionary working class movement, was the primary existential threat to Nazism, the counter-revolution of big capital. The Bolsheviks, who supported the rebellion of the toiling colonized masses, were the antithesis of imperialism in general and especially its Nazi iteration. Losurdo writes:

"[Revisionist historiography] forgets that, in addition to calling for the transformation of the imperialist war into revolutionary civil war, the Bolsheviks also appealed to the slaves of the colonies to break their chains and wage wars of national liberation against the imperial domination of the great powers. Such repression makes it impossible adequately to understand Nazism and Fascism, which also presented themselves as a movement in reaction - extreme reaction - against this second appeal." (103)

Nazi demagogues painted the Russian Revolution as a "Judeo-Bolshevik" conspiracy, bankrolled by the supposedly economy-controlling Jewish capitalists. As Bolshevism, a movement born out of Russia, took on an anti-colonial character, Russian workers were increasingly racialized for "betraying" Europe and placing their lot with the oppressed rather than with imperialism and colonialism. In a way this process was the opposite that took place among ethnic minorities in the United States, particularly Italians, Poles, and Irish. While the latter groups assimilated into whiteness fully from their conditional status through embracing cross-class white supremacy (and especially anti-Black racism), the Bolsheviks embraced the toiling masses and national liberation; thus, their "whiteness" was "revoked." Hitler himself stated directly in Mein Kampf that the Tsarist Empire was a product of "the state-forming efficacity of the German element in an inferior race," whereas the "inferior" Slavic elements took power in October 1917.

The racialization of Bolshevism was a direct manifestation of historical Orientalism. Nazi SS leader Heinrich Himmler told a group of Waffen SS fascists three weeks after the invasion of the Soviet Union:

"When you, my men, fight over there in the East, you are carrying on the same struggle, against the same subhumanity, the same inferior races, that at one time appeared under the name of Huns, another time- 1000 years ago at the time of King Henry and Otto I- under the name of Magyars, another time under the name of Tartars, and still another time under the name of Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Today they appear as Russians under the political banner of Bolshevism."

However, this was not the first time that the Soviet Union faced an invasion of reactionary terror. After October 1917, the Bolsheviks fought a "Civil" War against the pro-Tsar White Army, the latter enjoying military support from 14 countries. As Losurdo notes, the anti-Semitic pogroms and lynchings carried out by the anti-Bolshevik White Army against Russian Jews and other ethnicities was "a chapter of history that seems to be a direct prelude to Nazi genocide." Anti-Bolshevism, anti-Slavic racism, and colonialism thus became intermeshed in the anti-Semitic Nazi program of extermination. Losurdo explains:

"Denunciation of October [1917] as a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy now reached its most tragic conclusion. General Blum communicated the orders received: 'Eastern Jewry constitutes the intellectual reserve of Bolshevism and hence, in the Führer's opinion, must be destroyed.' As well as building the new colonial empire, the crusade in the East now aimed to detect and destroy the bacillus of dissolution wherever it was to be found. The 'poison of dissolution' that acted via Bolshevik cadres was to be neutralized once and for all, but without forgetting that 'the chief "carriers of the Bolshevik infection"' were the Jews. In Goebbels' words, 'Jewish terror' was the core of 'eastern Bolshevism', that mortal enemy of civilization. The Jews were doubly Oriental and doubly barbarous. They were an 'Asiatic people' alien to Europe and the West, as had been stressed by Houston Chamberlain and the anti-Semitic tradition that fed into Nazism; they therefore formed part of the 'native' populations. Furthermore, they were the inspirers of 'eastern Bolshevism' - were, in fact, the ethnic basis of the virus eroding civilization that was to be eliminated for good." (190)

This racist ideology of anti-Semitism provided the ideological narrative for the Nazi colonial project, which killed millions of Jews, Slavs, Romani, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, and other oppressed groups. According to Nazism, Russia, far from being a bastion of "Aryan civilization", was a "host body" of the "Judeo-Bolshevik virus" that "infected" Europe.

The relationship that Russians and other Slavic peoples have with whiteness today cannot be evaluated in isolation from the history of Nazism and the racialization of Slavs and Bolshevism that went hand-in-hand with anti-Semitism and the entire Nazi project, a project deeply rooted in settler-colonialism, directly inspired by the United States and Canada.

Hannah Arendt and "Totalitarianism"

Most bourgeois historians have suppressed the colonial character of Nazi Germany and its conquest of Eastern Europe. Instead, they have gone as far as to conflate the USSR under Stalin and the Third Reich under Hitler as equally oppressive dictatorships. They conceptualize World War II and surrounding geopolitics as the struggle between "democracy" (imperialist U.S., Britain, etc.) and "dictatorship" ("Stalinism", Nazism).

One of the most popular ideologues of this argument was the Heideggerian philosopher Hannah Arendt for the theory of "totalitarianism", which equates Nazism with Communism (or "Stalinism"). Other proponents of this theory included George Kennan, Arthur Koestler, and George Orwell. In effect, this framework asserts that despotism "infected" the "civilized world" (Europe) through the "uncivilized" and "barbaric" peoples of Africa and Asia.

In The Post-Colonialism of "Cold War" Discourses (1988), William Pietz asserts that Cold War discourse displaced colonial discourse in the aftermath of World War II. Note that George Kennan located "totalitarianism" in the "Oriental mind" of Russians:

"[Russian] fanaticism, unmodified by any of the Anglo-Saxon traditions of compromise, was too fierce and too jealous to envisage any permanent sharing of power. From the Russian-Asiatic world out of which they had emerged they had carried with them a skepticism as to the possibilities of permanent or peaceful coexistence of rival forces. Here caution, circumspection, flexibility, and deception are the valuable qualities; and their value finds natural appreciation in the Russian or the oriental mind."

Hannah Arendt followed suit, asserting that "totalitarianism" was something "learned" from African tribes:

"When the Boers, in their fright and misery, decided to use these savages as though they were just another form of animal life they embarked upon a process which could only end with their own degeneration into a white race living beside and together with black races from whom in the end they would differ only in the color of their skin. They had transformed themselves into a tribe and had lost the European's feeling for a territory, a patria of his own. They behaved exactly like the black tribes who had roamed the Dark Continent for centuries.

"My point is not the awful, Conradian diction or even the stark conceptual separation between the European and the African. It is the effect upon the Boers and thence - so the retrograde diffusionist argument goes - upon Europe. We "degenerate" into a race-based, primitive and nomadic, rootless 'tribe' (or 'race organization') no better than them. Thanks to this contact with the primitive, not only do we come to think in terms of race (i.e. in a racist way), but this mode of thinking later morphs into a tribal nationalism that, in turn, becomes modern anti-Semitism and totalitarianism ('a whole outlook on life and the world'). This last phenomenon 'lies in the nature of tribalism rather than in political facts and circumstances.'"

Instead of locating the origins of fascism in the colonial violence of capitalism, it is located in the mind of the Oriental despot who, like a virus, has spread from the East into Aryan civilization. Pietz elaborates:

"It was Arendt's signal achievement to frame a set of historically grounded political concepts capable of locating the origin of 'totalitarianism' in general and modern European anti-Semitism in particular - and by implication, the responsibility for the Nazi holocaust - outside Europe, in the savage 'tribalism' of 'the Dark Continent.'"

The colonized are blamed for an outgrowth of colonialism itself; the socialist tradition is condemned as the catalyst for the very system most antagonistic towards it, fascism. Pietz states:

"American cold war discourse about totalitarianism served a double function: in regard to the Soviets, it justified a policy of global anti-communism by reinterpreting all struggles for national self-determination in terms of the geopolitical contest for zones of power against totalitarian Russia; in regard to Nazi Germany, it saved the traditional pre-war faith concerning 'the values of Western civilization' held by post-war foreign-policy 'wise men' by displacing the human essence of fascism into the non-Western world... The necessary conscience-soothing exorcism was achieved by affirming the equation of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, combined with an historical interpretation of the essential Orientalness of the Russian mentality. The basic argument is that 'totalitarianism' is nothing other than traditional Oriental despotism plus modern police technology. The appearance of the first truly totalitarian state in the heart of Europe was thus an accident, explainable by the fact that the technology permitting totalitarianism was invented by Western science and was thus first accessible in the West. Moreover, Germany's totalitarian moment is characterized by Kennan as a 'relapse' into barbarism; far from showing a flaw in Western culture, it proved the need for constant alertness in preserving our distinctly Western values."

A supposedly anti-racist theory reveals its racism in its implied upholding of "Western values", a distinctly fascistic, colonial ideal. As "European civilization" faces an existential threat of "barbarism", it tightens its ranks and purges itself of all but the purest elements. According to the Orientalist worldview, Russians have only been able to masquerade as white due to their frequent contact with Europe. However, once the veil is lifted, an essentially Oriental mind is revealed. Pietz again writes:

"History - specifically the pre-modern geopolitics of the Eurasian 'ecumene' which produced the 'Russian-Asiatic world' - explains the Oriental essence of the Russian mind. This mentality is distinguished by its ability, after centuries of direct contact with Europe, to appear civilized and to use this facade of civility for its own barbaric ends."

Not only was Cold War discourse anti-communist; it, in effect was also deeply racist, Orientalist, and provided cover for Nazi terror and its colonial origins. While Russians may have enjoyed conditional whiteness under Tsarism via participation in European imperialism, this privilege was quickly revoked upon the world-historic Bolshevik revolution for its anti-colonial character. The facade of whiteness evaporated, and all that was left was Oriental despotism, or so the racists argue.

On the one side there is Bolshevism, national liberation, and revolution; on the other, Nazism, colonialism, and imperial conquest. To reject the former is to provide tacit support for the later.

Russian "Exceptionalism" and Eurocentrism

A Eurocentric view of history asserts that, while Europe exists as a dynamic, linearly progressing bastion of "civilization", the "uncivilized" world (Africa, Latin America, Asia, and other places) is static and dormant. The "uncivilized" people have no history, existing as a feature of nature itself rather than as an active agent within it.

This teleological worldview attempts to measure all social formations by the standard of the development of industrial capitalism that took place in Europe. Of course, it sidelines the fact that western Europe developed the way it did precisely because of colonialism and genocide enacted on the rest of the world.

Even Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in their earlier works, fell into this trap with the concept of an "Asiatic mode of production" separate from the slave, feudal, and capitalist modes of production as they developed in Europe. This idea is based on an understanding of Georg Hegel's concept of The Oriental Realm .

Marx outlines several basic features of this supposed mode of production in Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (1857-58):

"...as is the case in most Asiatic fundamental forms, it is quite compatible with the fact that the all-embracing unity which stands above all these small common bodies may appear as the higher or sole proprietor, the real communities only as hereditary possessors...

"Oriental despotism therefore appears to lead to a legal absence of property, in most cases created through a combination of manufacture and agriculture within the small community which thus becomes entirely self-sustaining and contains within itself all conditions of production and surplus production."

This unfortunately aligns with the common racist myth that the "Orient" has a tendency towards despotism and dictatorship, which has intellectual roots dating all the way back to Aristotle .

Not only was this concept for the most part dropped by Marx and Engels, but Samir Amin (a Marxist) has theorized a "tributary mode of production" that encapsulates both European feudalism and economic systems based on land ownership in east Asia. However, the "left" has latched onto this "exceptionalism" for the East, continuing to characterize Russia as a timeless, supernatural social formation of Oriental despotism.

The Soviet Union, formed on the basis of the Russian Revolution of 1917, was quickly denounced by left communists as non-socialist, especially under Stalin. However, these theorists were unable to argue that the USSR was a capitalist formation in the traditional sense, because it clearly functioned like no capitalist society to ever have existed. Thus, "left" detractors of the Soviet Union resorted to creating ad hoc economic categories much like the way "Asiatic mode of production" was used to characterized the "exceptional" nature of the "Orient".

Raya Dunayevskaya characterized Soviet Russia's economy as "state capitalism":

"Since under the specific Russian state capitalism legal title to the means of production as well as the competitive market for such means have been abolished, how is appropriation achieved?

"Inasmuch as private property in the means of production has been abolished in Russia, it is a deviation from the juridical concept to permit accumulation within any enterprise since the state aims to increase only 'national capital'. Nevertheless, with the establishment of 'ruble control', enterprises were permitted to accumulate internally...

"The Stalinist Constitution of 1936 recognized the intelligentsia as a special 'group', distinct from workers and peasants. With this juridical acknowledgement of the existence of a new ruling class went the guarantee of the protection of state property from 'thieves and misappropriatiors.'"

Compare this with Marx's statement above that "Oriental despotism therefore appears to lead to a legal absence of property"; compare "national capital" and "new ruling class" with "the higher or sole proprietor". The Asiatic mode of production makes a reappearance, in so many words. Again, the despots of the Orient have achieved the impossible: capitalism without capital, and a ruling class with no legal property rights. Stalinist totalitarianism thus became the latest iteration of Oriental despotism.

Hillel Ticktin called the Soviet Union's economy a "non-mode of production"; yet again, Asiatic production exists outside of history, time, and space. It is a static, non-society without a mode of production and subsequently a political and cultural life. Italian "socialist" Bruno Rizzi and later a faction of the U.S. Socialist Workers Party (SWP) characterized the Soviet Union's economy not as socialist but rather as "bureaucratic collectivist":

"In the USSR the 'nationalisation' of property came in one swoop following the October revolution, but, since the concept of nationalisation has no scientific validity in Russia, in effect this was the generalisation in one swoop of state capitalism and its foster brother statism.

"What has happened to the economy? Has it become socialist? No, says Trotsky. Is it still capitalist? No, we say, precisely because of the law of the transformation of quantity into quality; it is Bureaucratic Collectivism."

Dunayevskaya, Ticktin, and Rizzi thus all latched onto the idea of an Asiatic mode of production. An Oriental despot (Stalin) has appropriated the (collective) means of production through totalitarian rule, absent legal property ownership. This application of the so-called Asiatic mode of production to the Soviet Union was put forth even more explicitly by Karl August Wittfogel in Oriental Despotism (1957), in which he "observed a transition from the old despotic governments to a new form of despotism represented by communist Russia, which could be considered as a new version of industrial-bureaucratic despotism."

The ghost of Oriental despotism and the Asiatic mode of production made an appearance yet again with the theory of Soviet "social-imperialism," which Albert Szymanski argued against . This charge that the Soviet Union was "socialist in words, imperialist in deeds" was first asserted by the Communist Party of China, and subsequently taken up by the Party of Labour of Albania and numerous U.S. Maoist groups in the New Communist Movement. Yet again, the Slavic despots have achieved the impossible: an imperialist version of socialism, and yet another (imperialist) ruling class with no legal property rights.

As left communists and U.S. Maoists alike have noted, legal property relations are secondary to productive relations, which underlie the economic life of a given society. Of course this is true; but to assert that the two can be wholly incongruent is an exercise in metaphysics. In this model, the Superstructure has a life wholly independent from the Base; form has transcended content.

In The 'State Capitalist' and "Bureaucratic Exploitative' Interpretations of the Soviet Social Formation: A Critique (1978), David Laibman produces an incisive critique of all of these trends:

"The power of capital, then is exercised through a heterogeneity of institutional structures no one of which, taken in isolation, manifests that function… Adequate comprehension of capitalism requires this complex structuring of concepts in which the capitalist function is determinant at the level of production relations but is simultaneously constituted by the proximate forms in which it is manifested. This approach must be contrasted with rationalist methodology of ideal types which focuses on 'essences' or 'deep structures' as uniquely 'real' and the proximate forms as mere illustrations 'at a lower level of abstraction' No more than the Hegelian Absolute Idea can the capital concept exist in disembodied form. Capital is not reducible to its form of existence; but neither is it separable from these forms…

"Capitalist production relations, and in particular the existence of a capitalist class or bourgeoisie, are not like a disembodied spirit that can inhabit one or another juridical form - i.e., state vs. private property - at will. As an important application of the dialectic of the production relations as a complex structure, one can neither merge the property form and the 'social process of appropriation' and mistake the form for the real relation itself; nor separate them, and speak of the underlying class relation as one of real 'appropriation' etc., without explaining the source and reproduction of the power appropriate."

In other words, Marxist dialectics allow us to understand the underlying relations of production in a given society through the really existing institutions and mechanisms that facilitate and reproduce them. Capitalism cannot persist without means by which to maintain and reproduce the accumulation of Capital. Capitalism is not some "inner essence" that invisibly persists in the DNA of a given society; it is a real process involving real actors and real mechanisms and institutions. Legal institutions are not identical with capitalist exploitation as such but they cannot be an isolated phenomenon wholly separate from the economic system of a given society.

Laibman aptly locates these critiques not in Marxism, but in Hegelianism, a philosophy of teleology, rationalism, and Eurocentrism. The Asiatic mode of production and the ruling class without legal property rights are wholly alien to Marxism. While those who call themselves Marxists have continuously put forth the arguments of Dunayevskaya and Rizzi as it applies to Russia, their arguments are both anti-Marxist and Orientalist in essence.

"Russian Imperialism"?

It is within this intellectual tradition that the new thesis emerges: since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation has developed into a modern imperialist power, some claim even in the Leninist sense. While the form (Stalinist totalitarianism) is long gone, the content (Russian despotism) has lingered on. Tsarism, Stalinism, and Putinism are each manifestations of Oriental despotism, an inherent feature of the ahistorical Slav.

It would be quite difficult to argue that Russian Federation can be characterized as an imperialist power in the Leninist sense. Economic arguments aside, the "Russian imperialism" thesis cannot be separated from the theses above: state capitalism, bureaucratic collectivism, and the Asiatic mode of production. If the Russian Federation, boasting an economy based on the export of raw materials, constitutes an imperialist power, it would be the strangest one to ever exist.

Yet again, the Slavs have transcended reality: a ruling class without legal property ownership, capitalism without capital, socialism with imperialism; and now, imperialism without finance capital. Clearly, at least among the liberal left, arguments about "Russian imperialism" are based much more on racist fears and imperial chauvinism than a sober appraisal of Russia's economic situation.

The liberal media projects constant fear about Russian encroachment onto NATO territories, and has blasted Russia's air assistance to the Syrian government. They have also condemned Russian "interference" in Crimea and the Donbass, despite the high concentration of ethnic Russians in these territories and Crimea's landslide vote to join Russia . The spectre of "Oriental Despotism" has returned to Europe, the United States, and the rest of the "free world", hellbent on undermining Aryan civilization.

All of this is very ironic, given that NATO has been quietly deploying thousands of troops to the Russian border in Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Estonia for months now; and given that a far-right, NATO-backed military junta rules over Ukraine, persecuting ethnic minorities such as Jews, Romani, and Russians. This continuous uptick in anti-Russian hysteria has most recently manifested in the charges by the Democratic Party and its supporters that in fact Donald Trump is a puppet of the Kremlin in its plot to expand its Empire's influences across the globe.

The Democratic Party and Imperial Decay

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), Marx famously noted:

"Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

If Cold War conspiracies were a tragedy, the contemporary anti-Russian conspiracies of the Democratic Party are a farce. It is obvious, and thus has been widely noted, that the smear campaign against Russia reeks of McCarthyism and Cold War hysteria. This hysteria is in no way limited to the Democratic Party elite. Rachel Maddow spent over half of March talking about Russia. Newt Gingrich has even called for the establishment of a new House Un-American Activities Committee. The bourgeois T.V. news has gone as far as to "accidentally" refer to the Russian Federation as the Soviet Union. While the Soviet Union has been gone for over 25 years, the spectre of "Asiatic despotism" continues to haunt the paranoid Western powers.

Yet again, Arendt-esque Cold War discourse comes into play, this time perhaps through an even more openly Orientalist form. U.S. society cannot come to terms with the fact that President Donald Trump is a direct product of centuries of settler-colonialism and white supremacy. So, it blames Russia for "infecting" "American culture" with Asiatic despotism, this time in the form of Putinism. The racist logic of this argument is no different than Arendt's and the original Cold War fear-mongering. Therein lies the basis for re-asserting "American values", which in itself constitutes an ideology of white supremacist terror.

The red scare is being replayed through a broken projector; while the original McCarthyist witch hunts were an ascendant imperialist power's expression of fear of socialism, today's Russophobia is the desperate sigh of U.S. imperialism in utter decay. Russia is threatening to U.S. imperial interests because the U.S. is failing. Recent U.S. imperial conquests, especially in Syria, have been largely unsuccessful, and all the oppressed of the world continue to fight as the economic and political crisis of imperialism only deepens.

Ava Lipatti is a Marxist, anti-imperialist, feminist activist and writer. Her blog can be found at lonelyhourreflections.wordpress.com .