AStA
Imperialism: What is it and why should we be against it? // NC-UHH #3
18 May 2023, by Chris Cutrone
German translation by Marius, Platypus Hamburg
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NC Editor's note: We are reprinting these comments, which are over 15 years old, today because they express some important points of criticism of anti-imperialist views that have lost none of their validity in view of current left-wing discussions about wars. In particular, the resentful anti-Americanism, the support of even the most barbaric, sometimes Islamist, opposition movements against Western powers, and the refusal to take a differentiated look at the actual situation in war zones are mistakes of the left that Chris Cutrone rightly pointed out. With New Critique, we hope to contribute to the project of questioning left-wing categories and clarifying left-wing history called for by Cutrone. |
On January 30, 2007, Platypus hosted its first public forum on “Imperialism: What is it-Why should we be against it?” The panel consisted of representatives from the groups “International Socialist Organization”, “News and Letters”, “The New Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)”, “Open Democracy” and Chris Cutrone from Platypus. Below is the translation of Chris Cutrone's opening statement. The full video and the edited transcript from Platypus Review 25 (July 2010) can be found online at the link below.
Chris Cutrone: Platypus is named after this animal because it is incomprehensible and defies categorization. Like our namesake, we believe that an authentic left today would be almost unrecognized by the existing left or, if recognized, would be seen only as a living fossil. We focus on the history and thinking of the Marxist tradition, but in a critical and undogmatic way that takes nothing for granted. We do this because we recognize our present, the politics of today, as a consequence of the self-liquidation of the left over the course of at least a generation. It is our observation and provocation that the left, understood in its best historical traditions, is dead. It needs to be completely reformulated both theoretically and practically at the most fundamental levels.
The question of imperialism provides a good framework for examining the current international crisis of the left. Although the question of imperialism has been problematic for the left for some time, it has recently taken on particularly grotesque forms and lost any coherence it may have had in the past. Today it symptomatically betrays the loss of emancipatory imagination on the left. The current anti-war movement continues its struggle against the recent war by misapplying the schema of the Vietnam War and the counterinsurgency led by the US in Latin America. There, the US fought against progressive agents of social change. The same cannot be said today. Not only is the left confusing the past with the present, but it is also running after the most blatant opportunism of the Democratic Party, for which the more deaths there are in Iraq, the more the Bush administration can be pilloried.
The left has abdicated responsibility for a self-conscious politics of progressive social transformation and emancipation. Instead, US policy and the realities with which it deals are opportunistically denigrated. In this way, the left avoids thinking seriously about its own uncomfortable history, about its own role in how we got here. The worst expressions of this can be found in the inordinate hatred of Bush and the notion, unfortunately widespread in some leftist circles, that the U.S. government orchestrated the September 11 attacks.
We at Platypus recognize that left politics today is characterized by its despair over the limited possibilities for social change. Whatever visions for such change exist in the present spring from a wounded narcissism animated by the kind of revulsion expressed by Susan Sontag in the 1960s when she said, “The white race is the cancer of human history. ”1 The desire for change has become reactionary. The left has turned into an apologetic for the world as it is, for existing social and political movements that have nothing to do with emancipation. In this way, the left threatens to become the new right. Many who consider themselves on the left are dressing up Islamist insurgents as advocates of national self-determination. Recall Ward Churchill, who called the office workers killed on September 11 “little Eichmanns of US imperialism,” or Lynne Stewart, the civil rights lawyer who said that Sheikh Abdul Rahman, who orchestrated the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, could be a legitimate freedom fighter.
The left has lost its fundamental focus on freedom, a problem that goes back at least to the 1930s. The perspective that the left once had on the question and problem of freedom has closed itself off in the present. As a result, the left has largely dissolved into competing rationalizations for a bad reality that the left has not only failed to prevent in its long degeneration, but has actually helped to cause. The sooner we stem the rot in the left, the better, but first we must recognize the depth of the problem. That is why we at Platypus are dedicated to researching the history of the decline of the left, so that the imagination for social emancipation can be regained. The left can only survive if it overcomes itself. The serious questioning of the dominant political categories on the left, not least imperialism, is an essential precondition for the creation of a coherent politics that can change the world in an emancipatory direction. The enemies of social progress have their visions and pursue them. Some are more reactionary than others. The only question before us now is: What are we on the left going to do?
[1]. Susan Sontag, “What’s Happening in America?” in Styles of Radical Will (New York: Picador, 2002), 203. Originally published 1966.
https://platypus1917.org/2010/07/09/imperialism-what-is-it-why-should-we-be-against-it/
