Today revisionism and social-democracy in the name of “anti-imperialism” or “democracy” align themselves with one or another imperialist faction in their continual struggle for redivision of the world while collaborating with the imperialist bourgeoisie in their news blackout against the development of the popular struggles and peoples wars

Lets consider some telling recent examples:

Assange, Pussy Riot and Marikana

“Progressives” have devoted more attention to the case of ideologically ambiguous Russian artists receiving two year prison sentences then to the slaughter of more then forty South African miners waging a struggle against both imperialist capital and a class collaberationist union apparatus

There is a political context for this disparity:

Pussy Riot has been championed by US-EU imperialism as an ideological weapon against the self-assertion of the Russian bourgeoisie under Putin even to the extent of a statement of support from the US State Department.

The mass media attention devoted to the case and attendant mass interest is a function of inter-imperialist competition.

In the case of Marikana on the other hand the police and social fascist union machinery of a “progressive” BRIC state born out of revisionist collusion with imperialism worked hand and glove to defend super-exploitation by multi-national Western capital basically unchanged since apartheid.

The situation of Pussy Riot and the liberal discursive framework of defense of free expression surrounding it serves the ideological agenda of the West in its struggle against a resurgent Russian imperialism.

While an agitational campaign around the massacre in South Africa serves the interest of no imperialist power (after all Chinese capital has been involved in similar violence in Zambia) and would highlight in garish colors the anti-popular character of the reformist and revisionist left and the illusory nature of “peaceful transition”.

Meanwhile others focus on the dilemmas of the petty bourgeois libertarian and rapist Julian Assange whose massive leak of US diplomatic cables was objectively favorable to Russian and Chinese imperialism and their “multi-polar” allies.

Assange has been rewarded for his services with a program on Russian state TV and asylum from Correa compedor of Chinese imperalism in Ecuador.

There are perhaps reasons to take a supportive stance towards both Pussy Riot and Assange-but what is more significant to the articulation of a proletarian politics-these manipulated objects of inter-imperialist struggle or the forty dead in South Africa?

Bijapur?

For another comparison lets consider the almost total lack of coverage of the peoples war in India and the state’s counter-insurgency campaign.

Massacres, rape, torture and life sentences all pass by with virtually no display of interest from either imperialist or left-progressive media.

A war covering broad swaths of one of the largest countries on earth with thousands of casualties might as well not be happening if the utter lack of international left liberal indignation were any indication.

The reasons for this are none too obscure.

The Maoist movement in India is an autonomous proletarian force which condemns both US imperialism and Dengist China while violently struggling against the revisionist electoral left.

No imperialist bloc has much to gain from championing the cause of a movement which damns them all and the state integrated Western Left is bound to feel much more comfortable with cheerleaders of social fascist repression like Vijay Prashad then with the “dogmatic” guerrillas who kill them.





“Stand with Assad” or support the FSA?

We can see the same divisions between rival imperialists playing out within the Left on the issue of the Syrian conflict.

Some defend the bureaucratic-bourgeoisie regime of Assad dependent upon Russian imperialism in the name of an obsolescent “anti-imperialism” reducible to opposing the hegemony of the US while others support the Islamist mercenaries of US-EU imperialism and their retrograde sectarian war in the name of a nebulous and throughly non-Marxist “right to rebel”.

In Syria there is no anti-imperialist side to the conflict. Only an inter-imperialist struggle for spheres of influence.