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 moral grounds, but a materialist analysis requires acknowledging certain facts about its historical function.
First, American imperialism has operated as an unparalleled mechanism for dismantling pre-capitalist, semi-feudal, clerical, and patrimonial social formations across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Whether through military intervention, political restructuring, or economic integration, it consistently undermines traditional authorities—tribal systems, religious legal orders, dynastic rule, and rent-seeking oligarchies—that obstruct the free movement of capital. From a Marxist standpoint, these formations are not neutral cultural expressions but material barriers to proletarianization.
Second, American imperialism universalizes bourgeois social relations on a global scale. Wage labor, commodity production, contractual legality, and market dependence are not merely imposed but normalized. Entire regions are forcibly integrated into global circuits of capital, dissolving subsistence economies that once shielded local ruling classes from class antagonism. In this sense, American imperialism accelerates the very conditions Marx identified as prerequisites for class consciousness: urbanization, labor discipline, and the separation of producers from the means of production.
Third, the much-criticized cultural homogenization associated with American dominance represents, materially, a rationalization of social life. Secular education, mass media, standardized legal codes, and bureaucratic governance weaken ideological superstructures rooted in archaic modes of production. A frequently misunderstood example is the U.S.-backed Pahlavi state’s effort to curb the power of clerical landowners in Iran—precisely the class that later formed the backbone of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. That contemporary campists celebrate this revolution purely for its anti-Western posture, despite its restoration of clerical authority and regional imperial ambitions, illustrates how moral anti-imperialism can align with reactionary social forces. That such transformations are experienced as violent or alienating does not negate their historical function; Marx never required that progress be pleasant.
Fourth, under advanced capitalist integration—often spearheaded by American power—previously marginalized groups are incorporated into social production as juridical subjects. Women’s participation in wage labor, the commodification of domestic labor, the abstraction of the individual citizen, and the formal extension of rights to racial and sexual minorities are not moral victories floating above the material base. They are functional requirements of capitalism itself, which cannot sustain rigid exclusions without sacrificing efficiency. To acknowledge this is not to celebrate it, but to recognize capitalism’s tendency to dissolve traditional hierarchies even as it reproduces exploitation in new forms.
Fifth, critiques that portray American imperialism as uniquely regressive often rely on a romanticization of “non-Western” or “anti-imperialist” formations. Many such alternatives preserve pre-capitalist relations under the banner of cultural authenticity or national sovereignty, while others merely reproduce capitalist contradictions in a different geopolitical alignment. Marx was explicit that resistance to foreign domination does not, in itself, guarantee progressive social relations. Historical stagnation can persist under the most militant anti-imperialist rhetoric.
Opposition to imperialism detached from an analysis of productive forces risks becoming reactionary in content, however radical its appearance. Those who opposed slavery in antiquity, settler colonialism in the early modern period, or British rule in India purely on moral grounds would, from a materialist perspective, have been reactionary. This is not a moral judgment, but an analytical one.
None of this implies that American imperialism should be politically supported. It implies only that it must be understood correctly. To denounce it as an absolute evil is to replace historical materialism with moral spectacle. The task of Marxist analysis is not to assign blame, but to trace motion: to examine how forces collide, how contradictions sharpen, and how new social relations emerge from upheaval.
It is worth clarifying that none of the above requires one to support American imperialism in a political or ethical sense. Support and analysis are separate categories. The question is not whether imperialism is desirable, but whether it functions as a historically progressive force in the strictly material sense outlined above.
If one maintains that imperialism is always and everywhere regressive regardless of its effects on productive forces, social relations, and class composition, then one is no longer operating within historical materialism but within an ethical framework external to it. Conversely, if one accepts that capitalism historically dissolves pre-capitalist relations as a condition for its own supersession, then it follows that the most expansive forms of capitalist integration perform this function most efficiently.
To deny this is not to be “more radical,” but to quietly reintroduce moral exceptionalism into Marxist analysis — precisely the move historical materialism was developed to overcome.
If communism is to arise from capitalism rather than leap over it, then it follows—however uncomfortable—that the most aggressive agents of capitalist expansion are also the most efficient destroyers of the old world. History, as Marx understood it, has never waited for permission.
Campists and tankies claim to oppose “imperialism,” yet when historical materialism is applied to these self-declared axes of resistance, their framework collapses. Consider the following:
- Russia – Under Putin, the Russian state has largely reasserted semi-feudal oligarchic hierarchies, extracted surplus from laborers via state capitalism, and maintained a clientelist political economy that privileges ex-Soviet bureaucrats and the wealthy. From a materialist perspective, the Russian state actively slows proletarianization and suppresses the formation of independent working-class structures. The “anti-Western” posture of campists masks their tacit support for a reactionary redistribution of power and wealth: a defense of pre-capitalist or non-modern social relations.
- The PRC – While China appears industrially advanced, its party-state structure combines extreme centralization with control over labor mobility and a suppression of autonomous social movements. Marxist analysis recognizes that while productive forces have grown, political centralization limits class self-emancipation, and much of the surplus extracted from workers feeds a bureaucratic elite rather than a proletarian revolutionary subject. Yet campists treat China as an unqualified “anti-imperialist hero,” substituting admiration for analytical rigor — precisely the moralistic, aesthetic impulse they claim to oppose in the West.
- Iran and the Fertile Crescent – Campists lionize “anti-imperialist” states while ignoring that theocratic rule and clerical control preserve pre-capitalist property relations, tribal and sectarian hierarchies, and patriarchal social structures. The Islamic Republic, for example, reproduces modes of labor, gender, and juridical inequality incompatible with proletarian development. To glorify it as a counterforce to American imperialism is to prioritize symbolic defiance over the material conditions necessary for class-conscious social transformation.
- Latin America – Many “anti-imperialist” Latin American governments are portrayed as post-colonial utopias resisting the North. Historical materialism, however, highlights that these states are deeply westernized: white elites dominate economic and political life; capitalist property relations are often maintained or superficially reformed; and productive forces are integrated into global markets in ways that replicate rather than subvert dependency. Romanticizing them as wholly non-Western or revolutionary ignores their reproduction of bourgeois social relations and racial hierarchies.
Campists love to tell themselves that Latin America is a peripheral, oppressed region whose anti-American governments are the natural heroes of history. Yet a materialist reading quickly exposes the shallowness of this claim.
Latin America is Western. It exists because of the West, and as part of it. Christianity, European institutions, white elites, and capitalist social relations are foundational to its identity. Its ruling classes were imported, transplanted, or educated in European models, and most Latin American countries became liberal democratic republics long before many European nations stabilized their own democracies. To label the region “periphery” is therefore less a material analysis than a reflexive aesthetic: it signals anti-American moralism rather than historical insight.
Consider how campists reflexively denounce U.S. influence in Latin America as imperialist oppression, while ignoring that U.S. intervention has accelerated precisely the transformations Marxists are supposed to care about: the dissolution of semi-feudal hierarchies, the commodification of labor, the expansion of wage relations, and the integration of local productive forces into global circuits of capital. From a historical-materialist perspective, American imperialism in the region is progressive. It creates the conditions for proletarianization, urbanization, and the eventual possibility of class consciousness — in ways that uncritically lionized “anti-imperialist” governments often actively impede through clientelism, rentier structures, and bureaucratic stagnation.
Campists fail to see this because the current Western mode of production has produced a middle-class, aestheticized left unable to imagine a material alternative. As Mark Fisher noted, these pseudo-revolutionaries are sociologically condemned to live within capitalist realism: they cannot conceive of alternatives beyond symbolic gestures, moralistic opposition, or the fetishization of anti-Americanism. Their “radicalism” is therefore performative, not material.
If even Lenin were to examine their premises, he would likely shake his head. In postcolonial or semi-peripheral contexts, Lenin emphasized that revolutionary praxis required disciplined organization, ideological clarity, and engagement with objective material conditions. Supporting a regime or movement solely because it opposes American power, without analyzing whether it advances the productive forces or proletarian emancipation, is the very essence of Blanquist infantilism: subordinating material reality to moral or aesthetic preference. Lenin’s vanguard was meant to mediate concrete conditions and articulate real historical motion, not to cheerlead symbolic defiance from the sidelines.
In short, the reflexive campist narrative collapses under historical materialism: Latin America is Western, U.S. interventions are materially progressive, and the anti-Americanism of tankies and campists is a moralistic, aestheticized indulgence. By fetishizing “anti-imperial” credentials over productive development, they repeat the same moralism they claim to despise, revealing themselves as the reactionary force Marxism was never meant to empower.
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I don’t know if you’re a tankie or not, but your reply is proof of what I’m talking about, namely how campists, due to their class background, often collapse their arguments into liberal moralisms, the very thing they accuse liberals of doing.
For starters, I’m not applying simply what Marx wrote into current events. All I’m doing is applying historical materialism as supported by orthodox marxist scholars into the present history.
That Marx may or may have not opposed English imperialism in Ireland doesn’t negate both the fact that he ultimately saw European colonialism and Neolithic slavery as progressive in purely materialist terms, nor that it can be consistently argued that English imperialism from the days of the Tudors to 1922 was historically progressive for it did away with the old Gaelic system of lordship and integrated Ireland into the coming age of the Industrial Revolution and globalism by the early modern period.
Furthermore, American imperialism today continues to be a force of material progress much like capitalism was in the days of Adam Smith, especially in the third world where archaic modes of production based on agrarians predominate in the absence of American imperialism. Indeed, American imperialism has done more to proletarianise the people of the third world as well as integrate them into global market dynamics, moreso than any nominally communist country has ever done. The integration of minorities into juridical society, women into the labor force, and the dismantlement of the old elites are actual material results.
And while Maoism was an actual progressive force as you note, where you diverge with the facts is in saying that the same goes for Islamic republicanism in Iran and Dengism in China.
What you’ve done there is a far more grotesque application of Marxist theory that you accuse me of doing, considering how dengism and Jiang Zemin have actually heralded the legitimisation of the return of the bourgeoisie into Chinese society, and the results today speak for themselves be it with China’s trend towards further economic liberalisation, the presence of stock markets, billionaires, de facto land-lordism, and the acceptance of marginalism among Chinese mainstream economists in spite of the Cambridge capital controversy undermining marginalism. Do I need to mention China’s imperialist policies in Africa and Asia, as well as the fact that the PRC isn’t even an opponent of the unipolar order, as much as part of it. Why else would it trade with Israel to this day? It’s not pragmatism, it’s just a capitalist entity acting on its own material interests, namely by doing trade with Israel for its tech, much like what the west does.
As for the Islamic revolution of Iran, it has turned a secular autocratic monarchy into a reactionary theocracy that upholds the power of the Islamist landlords and rural landowners that made up the core of the 1979 revolution in order to preserve their powers against Reza Shah Pahlavi’s white revolution that, if continued, would have brought Iran into the modern age of industrial production rather than having its industry ossified as it is the case in the present.
As for capitalist Russia, need I say more?
So by supporting reactionary and bourgeois entities, you are proving the shallowness of campist arguments which even Lenin went on to critique as blanquist infantilism, for the current anti-imperialist milieu relies as much on vibes and aesthetics as the alt-right does when it comes to laundering former psyops as “trad and Based” on the basis of a few superficial aspects whilst ignoring the larger picture. Ironically, this is what campist and tankie arguments often devolve to: Liberla humanist Moralisms that most communists would see as the idealism that it is.
As for Israel: No matter how much you feel about it, it’s effectively a force of progress as well by dismantling the old archaic mode of production Hamas supports, itself a force of reaction. This would be comprehensible to you, my dear interlocutor, if you were more well-read on historical materialism.
From a materialist standpoint, much like how the United States was founded upon the corpses of millions of redskins, thousands of European settlers, and the tens of millions of bisons that once freely roamed the great prairies, whilst modern Africa was founded upon the corpses of millions of Africans and hundreds of white men and the countless animals that used to by ubiquitous in the open lands, the same goes for west Asia: The new Middle East will be founded upon the corpses of tens of millions of Arabs, the thousands of Jews, and the remnants of the wildlife that once characterised the Fertile Crescent of the Bible, the Torah, and the Quran.
However we fee about it, history marches on. Neither Marx nor history care about our moralisms, the very moralisms that have unfortunately contaminated much of leftist analyses.
Posting in the most based thread on the catalog rn
disregarding your ai post, you analysis is more than 200 years out of date.
>>2808520Prove it is then.
>>2808522No. I am correct. The fact that you unironically use words like tankie and campist discredits your whole argument to begin with. sage
>>2808531I'm not OP
Prove him wrong. The US and Israel are genocidal wr criminals, but exporting capitalism is progressive
>>2808465Hello Mr. Cutrone. The problem with your argument is that the USA/West doesn't develop countries, not in a long time anyway. They prefer to make failed states and vassals that sign off their resources to Western corpos. They've been deindustrialize Europe and they're trying to blow up the Middle East to strangle BRICs. If you were gonna troll with "based imperialism" you should like Chinese imperialism too and say America should build more railways, ports, and green energy infrastructure.
>>2808531>you used a word i don't like therefore you're wrongcrazy
>>2808535>exporting capitalism is progressiveHello comrade Deng
>>2808465This shit must be bait
>>2808536>They've been deindustrialize EuropNot necessarily, Europe has become deindustrialized because the end of Euro colonialism, the aging of their population and China rising
>>2808544As long as we don't call China socialist it's alright.
>>2808544indeed it is, glory to chinese imperialism due to its progressive nature, and death to the american and russian imperialism!
I'm not reading all that slop, but the vibe I'm getting is that you've reinvented Kautskian ultraimperialism. this doesn't work, for reasons that Lenin lays out in Imperialism
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