Marxism is not about vibes, justice, or who feels bad. It is about material development. Any attempt to condemn American imperialism primarily on moral grounds is liberal humanism, and therefore idealism. Despite the moral indignation likely to follow this post, let me explain.
As is well known, of all the things Karl Marx was, an idealist he was not. Nor was he a moralist. He did not frame his analysis of social phenomena—however fraught—in terms of ethical condemnation or approval. Even when discussing subjects as uncomfortable as prostitution, Marx was concerned with material conditions, not moral outrage. One can only imagine his incredulity at seeing self-described “Marxists” today reverting to liberal moral language when confronted with elite scandal, mistaking denunciation for analysis.
Naturally, as a man of his time, Marx was not immune to contemporary prejudices. This is neither here nor there. What matters is that his method rejected moral evaluation as the driver of history.
Unlike Whig historians, Marx understood history as neither moral nor immoral, but amoral. Accordingly, he described phenomena such as the destruction of Indigenous societies in the Americas, the expansion of European colonialism, British rule in India, and even slavery in ancient Greece as progressive—not in an ethical sense, but insofar as they advanced productive forces and dissolved pre-existing social relations. In the Greek case, slavery marked the transition from tribal organization to the polis. In the colonial case, capitalism shattered stagnant forms of production. For Marx, European colonialism represented a double mission: destructive, certainly, but historically necessary.
It is with this framework in mind that one can argue—without moral embellishment—that Marx would have understood modern American imperialism as a progressive force. If historical progress is defined by the destruction of pre-capitalist social relations and the development of productive forces, then American imperialism is not merely progressive, but among the most effective such forces in history. Marx regarded capitalism itself as a violent yet necessary stage, since communism emerges through capitalism, not alongside or prior to it. To recoil from this conclusion by introducing moral exceptions is to abandon materialism in favor of sentimentality, a tendency unfortunately common in the contemporary Western left.
One may object to American imperialism on
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