#138 What is anti-imperialism? - Dr. Bikrum Gill

Malcolm X: As far as I'm concerned, as long as that same respect and recognition is not shown toward every one of our people in this country, it doesn't exist for me. And during the few moments that we have left, we want to have just an off-the-cuff chat. between you and me, us. We wanna talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand.

Mamadou: welcome back to another episode of the malcolm effect and this is our second installment of our three-part series with professor dr uncle bikram gill on what is anti-imperialism so the broad theme is what is imperialism what do we mean when we're applying an anti-imperialist lens to relations in the world So Uncle, welcome back to the show. It's always a pleasure to have you on. Let's recap for the people succinctly. So let's end off and conclude. What do we mean when we say imperialism?

Bikrum Gill: Okay, so first of all, it's good to be back on the Malcolm Effect. Yeah, it was a good discussion last time, so I'm looking forward to this. So, yeah, I think with imperialism, you know, obviously it's difficult to discuss the one without the other, so it'll come up again in the episode at times, but fundamentally, imperialism is when a state or a political power. It can be any kind of entity, an organized form of political power, a state, an empire, what have you. It functions through denying and containing or constraining the sovereignty of other states, of other peoples. And the way that I've been thinking about it over the last couple of years is I tried to draw a distinction between imperialism and colonialism. So it's not to say that there cannot be both colonialism and imperialism or that they're not related to one another. But again, just to remind from last episode, both are about the denial of sovereignty, the denial of sovereign right to a people to determine their own destiny and use their resources. But imperialism operates not on a one-to-one territorial scale. So it's not about the British colonizing India or the French colonizing Algeria. It's a systematic relationship that operates on an international scale. So you can't have formal political sovereignty, but still be within an imperialist world system. You can be on the peripheries of this system where you are still ensnared within a denial of sovereignty, a diminishment of your sovereignty, And under capitalism, remember, this is towards the end of draining surplus wealth from your territory to the capitalist core. And that's really important. I think as we think about anti-imperialism that we hold analytically, imperialism is operating at that scale, at the international scale, at a systematic international scale.

Mamadou: I appreciate that answer. So then if we accept that definition and understanding of imperialism and as it relates to the international world and the world system, what then does anti-imperialism mean? And what is that relationship between anti-imperialism, sovereignty and development?

Bikrum Gill: Yeah, okay, so the anti-imperialism, so then, therefore, at its most fundamental basis, anti-imperialism is about the reclamation of sovereignty, right? Now, again, what is sovereignty? This is who holds the power over a clear territory, who holds the ultimate decision-making power or authority, right? over a territory, how its resources are to be utilized, how its labor are to be utilized. So imperialism takes that away from the people. So anti-imperialism is to reclaim sovereign power over your territory. Now, that's also decolonization. But for anti-imperialism, to achieve real sovereignty means transforming the entire world system, not simply overthrowing the direct colonizer, but overthrowing the system that backstops that colonizer. So anti-imperialism is about reclaiming sovereignty over your territory, but it's fundamentally also about reclaiming sovereignty over the flow of capital into and out of your territory. It's reclaiming sovereignty over your relations with other states. So it's an international question of the reclamation of sovereignty at that scale. And how this relates then to questions of development and sovereignty is, like we were discussing last session, you can reclaim formal political sovereignty. but you do not have the means necessarily to achieve robust economic development, particularly in the sense that Cabral speaks about development or socialism or what really counts is meeting the material needs of your people, right? So you may have formal political sovereignty, but now capital technology are located in the core. So for anti-imperialism, it's the realization of sovereignty requires overcoming those international relations that dependency on capital and technology located in the core. So how do you do that? How do you construct an anti-imperialist program? And I'm talking right now economically, but also it has to happen militarily as well. So there's a military and economic basis of anti-imperialism, of transforming the entire world system so you can engage in a sovereign project of economic development. Right. That you don't get entrapped back within dependent neocolonial relations that drain the wealth to another country. Right. So I think that's like and if I can say one thing, maybe we'll come back to it later on. But, you know, like what is what is a key objective here? It's to meet the material needs of your people, but it is to establish real independence. Right. Like independence towards what end? To realize some sense of, and I spoke about this on another podcast recently, but I'm thinking about this more these days, what does it mean to think about sovereignty in a qualitative sense? The specific meaning that people have in relation to their territory, the specific class relations that ground a sovereign project. to open up space to realize that for a people requires productive power. It requires economic power, right? And so, yeah, I think like, so yeah, to return again, anti-imperialism is operating at the international scale to reclaim sovereignty in the fullest sense, not just locally, nationally, but in your economic relations internationally, your diplomatic relations internationally, and so on.

Mamadou: Okay, so before we go into, I want to talk about specific examples of what does, what sort of questions do anti-imperialists ask when making an analysis of particular nations and states? I'm going to let Christian go.

Christian: I guess in regards to specific examples, I'm curious as to what you believe certain governance structures help facilitate this economic and military sovereignty that you speak of, right? I mean, you look at China and their centrally planned economy. You look at a number of different socialist projects that use democratic centralism within their governance structure to be able to facilitate some level of sovereignty. And even on the international scale, I guess, like what do you make of certain institutions such as the UN? How does different, I guess, going into specifics, how do you think different governance structures help facilitate different nations or different collections or organizations of people engage in anti-imperialist struggles?

Bikrum Gill: Yeah, so I think so this is like this is a governance structure question. This is an institutional question. And I think that question really attaches itself to this, to the relationship between the class question, I think, and the question of anti-imperialism. So, you know, if you look at the difference between, say, the governance structure in China and India at the moment that both countries achieve formal independence agreements, in the late 1940s. You know, China has a governance structure that is built, you're right, there's a democratic centralist element, although I think India in many ways would not be opposed to that in the way that, say, somebody like Nehru is influenced by Lenin, and, you know, even the concept of Indian federalism might seek to reproduce some of those dynamics. But I think a key distinction in the two structures is that the Chinese revolutionary state is built upon an institutional governance structure, an institutional economic structure that is grounded in universal land reform. It's grounded in the class power of the peasantry, which structures the state in a very distinct way. I'll often say the first act of the revolutionary Chinese state was to enforce the redistribution of land from the parasitic landlord class that had benefited from imperialism, that had helped drain wealth from China to the core. to enforce the redistribution of land from the landlord class to the peasantry. Okay, now this is what Frantz Fanon will then later on in studying the French Revolution, sorry, the Chinese Revolution, when he's writing Wretches of the Earth, he'll talk about this as the necessary basis, right? Because this creates a universal basis of a state because the land is now distributed universally, right? Right now, in so doing, then that means the surplus must be recycled back into a universal basis. You cannot just have a portion appropriated by a landlord, parasitic landlord class that enables a drain for the rest. Right. So you have this institutional structure that grounds it, whereas in India, the first act of the Indian state was to restore land to the landlord class. The post-colonial Indian state, the very first act that it did under Nehru and Patel, the home minister, is they went into the south of India where peasants organized through the Communist Party had claimed a million hectares of land. They actually took that land and gave it back to the landlord class. The grounding structure of the Indian state was held by the landlord bourgeois class. Right. So that then makes possible a structure that is more amenable to fitting into the neocolonial world system. Right. Because they're not concerned with a universal reproduction. You know, like when Fanon says the last shall be first. Right. When he's saying like the wretched, the rising class of the peasantry. Well, that requires a kind of an economic basis that forecloses the drain of wealth. And it generates the condition for the creation of a domestic surplus. So in China, you will have land reform that will generate forms of surplus recycling that are not available in India because the landlord class will continue to hold property in a way that prevents that sort of domestic surplus generation. This is the idea that you can mobilize labor in a different way, in a more intense way that can That can generate small surpluses. And you see, that's important, too, because that's going to help overcome that dependency problem we talked about in the last episode. And we just talked about at the beginning. So you have a deficit of capital. You have a deficit of surplus where you can mobilize something through land reform. Right. And whatever surpluses are generated there, they can maybe be recycled back into some form of industrial development. So I think there is an important question on how there's not a universal post-colonial state. There's not a universal decolonizing state. These states are structured differently. And this is, I think, a really important distinction between Marxist approaches to international relations and, say, realist approaches. Like a realist approach, like a Mearsheimer or something, they'll assume that there's a single generic state that's operating according to a universal kind of logic of this generic state. Whereas I think it's important for us to think about how differently structured states open up different possibilities for restructuring the international system as a whole. I think that distinction between China and India is very important, right? Now, another key structuring factor here is the degree to which I think a state will, say, engage in land reform, but also nationalize land. key industries, nationalized resources, right? Again, for the fact that because you confront a condition, say underdevelopment, a resource deficit, a capital deficit, it's really important that you rationally hold your resources as a collective pool rather than letting individual capitalists, especially individual capitalists that are located in the core, like outside of your country, but even domestically, if that capitalist class holds power, you're not going to be able to pool your resources together and manage the recycling of investment and surpluses in a way that orients towards, let's say, more rational sovereign development, right? So I think nationalization is another important kind of grounding or structuring force that grounds a certain kind of, let's say, governance structure. that is important to achieving anti-imperialism, right? And then I think the question of the United Nations is really interesting, right? Because I think that the United Nations obviously has existed as a tool of imperialism, but that's not its entire history. It was an arena of struggle in the mid-20th century, right? In the mid-20th century, you had... the emerging bloc of Afro-Asian states, especially, also later on, obviously, Latin American states, especially after the Cuban Revolution, you have this emerging as well, but you have this Afro-Asian bloc of states that are attempting through the United Nations to overcome this problem of dependency, to overcome the international scale of the denial of sovereignty, because they're all confronting formal political sovereignty. We have formal political sovereignty, but we don't have the means to implement real economic sovereignty for two reasons. One, that most of the capital has gone back to the core, but two, that which does exist in their country is owned by the former colonizing power. And now they're trying to implement, through the United Nations, forms of international law which provision them the right of economic self-determination. And it's really interesting The United States very early on categorized these attempts as a form of hate speech. And then later they start calling this authoritarianism. Very familiar language today, how they talk about the Venezuelan state or other sovereign attempts at development. But the United Nations at this moment was an arena of struggle. I think an example of this is the Arbenz government in Guatemala. They're trying to pass land reform. And I think they're trying to invoke certain UN resolutions or propose UN resolutions as the reason why they have the right to implement land reform and nationalization in Guatemala. And the United States is vociferously opposed to this. And we know U.S. capital has direct ownership in Guatemala. We know they have direct interest in Guatemala. But they sidestep the United Nations by simply undertaking a coup against the Arbenz government. And so this is like you see these kind of contestations within the UN and the former colonial powers are constantly trying to prevent that sort of international law from being put into motion, which is what will eventually give rise to the Bandung conference, which I hope we'll talk about later on. Thank you, Christian. Do you have a follow up?

Christian: Well, I mean, it depends where you want to take a moment to do it. Because I think to the point of the Bandung conference, I think some of the answers you started to get into, Vikram, I'm really curious on your takes of what anti-imperialism has looked like historically and what even some of these different approaches have looked like through time. Because to your point about no universal state structure in order to to solve these issues. I think that is true not just across geography, but it's also true across time. So even the question of what, navigating and building an anti-imperialist project looks like within a given state has differed through time. So I wanted you to kind of expand on what these things have looked like through time, even in places on the international scale, states' relations with the other, and even again with China. I think China's so significant given that it's a leading anti-imperialist project, but even the way that it's approached, its challenges has changed through different periods of leadership and whatnot.

Bikrum Gill: Right. Okay. So yeah, I think this is good to get into this because I wanted to get into this history as well. On China, I think we can maybe leave some of the more contemporary stuff to episode three, but I think it's still, it'll be good to work through that and And China is really interesting for reasons we'll see. So I think, OK, historically, a history of anti-imperialism. The first point I would want to make is just like Marx argues that, you know, human history is the history of class struggle, right? Like sometimes seen, sometimes hidden. I think it's really important, especially today, and this is something that in the last several months at different conferences and workshops I've attended, I've noticed a bit of a, sometimes a generational divide, but a confusion where imperialism is often only apprehended on its own terms as a self-propelling system. The way imperialism has always existed in relation to anti-imperialism. So if Marx's class struggle is ever present, but you don't always see it, it's not out in the open, you don't always have workers out on the streets But nonetheless, it's there in one form or the other. It's important for us to, when you take a historical approach, to understand that the moment of imperialism is also always the moment of anti-imperialism. It generates the conditions for anti-imperialism. And there's a deeper history we can get into there that imperialism itself is actually responding. It's not creating a world. It's also responding to worlds already in existence. But anti-imperialism has been there for the duration of the history of imperialism. And again, what anti-imperialism calls forth is a move of sovereign reclamation from a local or national scale to an international scale. So how do we track that? So like, how does a country understand or a people understand? We're struggling for our independence, right? But we must actually enter into relations with others struggling for their independence and internationalism. transform the international system to overcome those international relations of dependency, to overcome the military power that's exercised at the international scale. So, like, I think one place we can think about as a key moment, we talked about this last episode, where this might begin from, you know, last time, for example, we talked about U.S., I think, Christian, you might have asked a question about the U.S. imperialist state and the history of U.S. imperialism. And we thought about the U.S. revolutionary, I'm sorry, the U.S., the U.S. War of Independence, quote unquote, from the British state, right? Now, what was underneath that? What was underneath that was actually the U.S., quote unquote, revolution, which is actually a form of imperialist restoration. It's actually a form of capitalist imperialist restoration, even though I know Lenin and Mao and others would read it as an advance in some ways, right? Like they would say it's overcoming the a monarchical feudal British order. But that has to ignore the reality of Pontiac's wars in the 18th century. It ignores the reality that British imperialism was brought to crisis when they're fighting the French in the Seven Years' War in the 18th century. They're actually... they experience in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War a series of military defeats at the hands of an indigenous confederacy. An indigenous confederacy, what does that represent? A form of pan-indigenous, pan-Indianism, right? If we want to use the language of the 20th century, a kind of, if we think about what we'll get to in Kruma's pan-Africanism, we have this kind of unification of different Indian nations into a confederacy under leadership of Pontiac, who imposes a military cost on the British and the British attempt or they're forced into in many ways, right? So they cannot achieve sovereign power west of Appalachia, west of the 13 colonies through military means. So they seek to do it through these diplomatic means and they do so through this thing called the 1763 Royal Proclamation, right? They're trying to establish British sovereignty by saying to indigenous peoples, okay, you're going to have land rights. This is reserved for you, hunting grounds, etc. They try to contain indigenous rights to the property or land question, but they're forced to do so by this kind of anti-imperialist power. And that's what we talked about last time. The American Revolution is actually a reactionary revolution against this. That's where, again, a lot of the mega-communists lost their way. That's a history they either don't know of or deliberately ignore. So I think we can look at that as a really important moment of, I wouldn't say origin, because I'm sure there's a lot that we all could continue to learn about, but a key moment in the historical emergence of anti-imperialism. Obviously, a second, I think, really important lesson for anti-imperialism is the Haitian Revolution. And just maybe before I move on, you see this example of the Pontiac Wars. Anti-imperialism forces imperialism then to adjust. It forces imperialism to try to reconstitute itself on different terms. So whatever, however, whatever, I don't mean to use the word good, but whatever universal basis may exist in international institutions or whatever, it's because of the way imperialism has been forced to respond to anti-imperialism. So now let's think about the example of the Haitian Revolution. So you have in Haiti a fundamental challenge to the basis of the denial of sovereignty. You have a military victory by the peoples of Haiti, by these formerly enslaved Africans who achieve sovereign power, not just over themselves, who was denied over their own bodies, but over the lands that they were working. So there is this sovereign power that they articulate themselves. fundamentally militarily and politically, but then they end up being contained economically. The Haitian Revolution puts forward a vision for a very different world. If you look at the writings of some of the Haitian revolutionaries, the way they think about an Afro-Indigenous sovereign expression, qualitative sovereign expression in the relationship between people and the land, but that is foreclosed and interrupted by this blockade that the French and the Americans impose on Haiti. And that is imperialism here, that they're able to, at an international scale, mobilize trade relations, military relations in such a way that constrains Haitian sovereignty. But still, Haiti is an important moment in the articulation of anti-imperialism. Now, as the 19th century proceeds, one thing I talked about last time, and I just want to bring it up because it's going to have a key component of what is anti-imperialism. So one thing we can think about, anti-imperialism requires If we look at the history of the Indian Wars, it's going to require a certain pan unifying practice, right, of people's unifying across these individual colonies. So they have stronger unified economic and military power because imperialism seeks to unify the core and balkanize the rest. The history of the 19th century is a history where Europe achieves a semblance of unity and a balance of power in the Congress of Vienna, in the Concert of Europe, but they do so by balkanizing and fragmenting the African continent, by balkanizing and fragmenting Europe. Asia, the opium wars in China, right? So like this is the long struggle, right? And I think the Haitian revolution is another important opening shot of imperialism that will also generate the conditions for the crisis of the slave order of the capitalist imperialism of the 18th and 19th centuries, right? So it's important that there's an anti-imperialism that's contained, but it's not defeated. So we're in a long history of anti-imperialism that's building on each round of struggle. So those are important historical moments. Now, the 19th century, of course, is considered the century of really what Lenin says when imperialism becomes the highest stage of capitalism, where in many ways, in response to the crisis that the Haitian revolution imposes on the imperialist order, they seek to restore and put in place a new type of imperialism that Lenin, of course, traces that we talked about in the first episode. And here, a key strike against 19th century imperialism, of course, is the Bolshevik Revolution post-World War I. Now, the Bolshevik Revolution, like the Chinese Revolution, is going to matter in two senses. It's going to fundamentally, dramatically transform the basis of world order, the structure of of international relations, so extends beyond simply the Soviet Union. It's going to fundamentally change the balance between the North and the South. It's going to change the balance of power between the core and the periphery, unlike any revolution that had happened historically before them. Now, that's the external component. And I'll come back to that in a moment. But the other significance of the Bolshevik revolution is that the Bolshevik revolution comes to understand that it is imperialism that is the primary contradiction of the capitalist world system, even more so than capital labor, right? Because as we know, The proletarian revolution does not spread across Europe. We know what happens across Europe to socialist and communist movements. Just look at the biography of somebody like Rosa Luxemburg. What happens to Rosa Luxemburg? Why isn't there a proletarian victory after World War I? Well, for the Bolsheviks, this is very clear that this is attached to the reality of the imperialist subsidy that buys out the labor aristocracy, that buys out workers. So anti-imperialism becomes a primary question for the Bolsheviks. And so it becomes a very key question of supporting anti-imperialism, which is gonna change the balance of force available to those struggling against imperialism, right? So if Haiti, if the Haitian revolution would have happened post-Soviet revolution, you would have had a different balance of force with which to confront the blockade, right? Like as we'll see with Cuba later on. So the Soviet revolution, it internally, it comes to understand the anti-imperialist question is primary. But also internally, the Soviet Union itself, as it constructs, I think, Christian, like you're saying, a governance structure, the federalist structure of the Soviet Union itself is grounded in the national question. Now, the national question, maybe people associate with Lenin saying, how do we approach the Eastern question or the anti-imperialist question? Well, the national question is a primary question. You have to support anti-colonial movements, even if they're not proletarian movements. But the national question was also a question internal to the Soviet Union. In his debates with Rosa Luxemburg, you know, Lenin is arguing that you need to have a strong federated unity, right? Where the national, the rights of national minorities within the federation must be upheld in terms of a form of autonomy within a federation. But you need, so it gives a model is what I'm saying, right? It gives a model of a federated unity where together you are stronger in confronting an imperialist world system rather than if you were individual states, right? But the key point of the national question is that they have the right to secede from the Federation, but you want to integrate people on more positive terms into the Soviet Union, right? So the Soviet Union has an internal anti-imperialist structure, right? It doesn't, like, okay, if I can just keep going. Yeah, yeah, carry on.

Christian: No, this is good, this is good.

Bikrum Gill: Okay, okay. You can look at the way in which the Soviet Union contrasts with the American Revolution. So you can say the Russian Empire and the American Empire, they're different. Or let's say Russia pre-Soviet revolution has a similarity to the United States conquest of the American continent, right? And the way the Russian empire is also engaging in forms of colonialism, etc. But the American revolution in the 18th century doesn't contest the colonial basis of the state. And in fact, it intensifies it and restores it, whereas the Bolshevik revolution overturns it. That's why it's so world historic. It's not the same. There's something internally that's very distinct. They don't reproduce those colonial relations inside of the Soviet Union. So I think that question of structure, the Soviet Union structures itself in an anti-imperialist form internally, but externally then it will provision this massive continental scale now state at the service of anti-imperialist movements. which means that now, later on, if a Haitian revolution happens again in a place like Cuba and you find yourself again subject to a blockade, well, now you can undertake trade relations and access forms of trade and investment and cooperation that can help you withstand that sort of imperialist siege that seeks to return countries to a state of dependency. That's the name of the game of imperialism. So I think the Bolshevik revolution is another key moment for us to understand. And something else that happens in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution is Chinese anti-imperialism is born. You can say the anti-imperialism in China has existed since the Since the opium wars, you could say even the opium wars are driven by the refusal of the Chinese state to play by the rules of the opium drug trade. But like, so you had anti-imperialism in China in the 19th century, but you have this kind of different consciousness emerge in relation to the Communist Party, you know, in the 1919 uprising in China, which is a very anti-imperialist uprising. which will eventually lead to a certain anti-imperialist praxis in the Communist Party of China when it gains independence. And I just talked about China, and I'll come back to it momentarily. But so this would bring us historically back now to where we were talking before, to what's leading into the Bandung Conference. So if I can just take two or three minutes here to discuss now this era. So you have this era now in the mid-20th century where you're actually having the victory of anti-colonial movements. Very inspired in many ways by the Bolshevik Revolution, leaning for support on the Soviet Union. This is a history we know very familiarly. So now as decolonization starts to take hold in Asia, And then across the African continent, of course, the problem that we've been sketching is you get formal decolonization, formal political sovereignty. But nonetheless, for you to access the resources, the capital with which to mobilize your resources, you must engage in interactions with the core. And they're going to then say, if you want investment, it can only happen on these conditions, which will reproduce the surplus drain from periphery to core. So the key question in the mid 20th century, very quickly for decolonizing states becomes economic sovereignty, real economic sovereignty and also military sovereignty. Right. So military power and economic power. So you have formal political sovereignty that you've achieved internally, often through armed struggle. But now you confront a hostile world. Right. So how do I develop my economy? I need international relations, economic sovereignty. But now these imperial powers can put me under siege conditions. They can withdraw capital, etc. So this is what generates what we were talking about, a demand within the United Nations, within these bodies very quickly for economic rights of self-determination. This is something. And as they confront in the United Nations roadblocks to achieving this. This leads then to attempts to formulate a different type of international order. So if that makes sense, I see decolonization is happening in the 20th century, but there's a realization and awareness that you need an international scale of power. And this is what generates the Bandung Conference in 1955. So the Bandung Conference is not a communist revolutionary conference anymore. by any means, but it is at a conference propelled by an awareness, right, that it is only through Afro-Asian states entering into cooperation with one another, deepening and advancing their economic linkages with one another, that they can withdraw and de-link from their relations with the global north, even in a post-colonial setting. So Bandung becomes a very important moment of articulating two things. Both, how do you construct an alternative system? Let's deepen our trade relations with one another. Let's support one another in building one another's economies. But two, how do we press for these rights? We don't just want sovereignty. What does sovereignty mean to us if we don't have economic sovereignty? So there this Bandung has two tracks that we can understand. Christian, to get to your other question, like China today continues to say, walk these two roads, building alternative institutions on an international scale, but also trying to either reform or call to account the existing system. Right. So the at this moment, what does that look like? Bandung makes a demand for permanent sovereignty over natural resources. And this will actually eventually be proposed and passed in the UN General Assembly. I think in 1962 and 1964, you have a series of resolutions that come forward for the permanent sovereignty of natural resources, the Charter of Rights and Duties, which basically argue that states have rights over their natural resources. They have the underlying title. Now, why does this matter? Because you have transnational firms from the colonial era that continue to hold these rights. That will say, well, if you're going to take it away, then we choose the compensation that you have to pay us. You know, the question that in Zimbabwe in the late 20th century, early 21st century becomes a preeminent question. But they try to enshrine an international law that peoples have an inherent right to their natural resources and to reclaim those. And you don't have to compensate the colonizer. if you're going to reclaim those lands or a transnational firm. So Bandung becomes a key moment in articulating these two legs, that you're trying to, on the one hand, enshrine your right over economic sovereignty to overcome this problem of dependency. You're trying to... The other things Bandung puts forward is explicitly... calling for international trade, a fair trade system, a system that will overcome the uneven trade relations between North and South. So they're trying to enshrine these sorts of things in the international order as they're trying to construct an alternative system. Now, the reality, however, is just like in Haiti, just like in Guatemala, concrete military and economic power remains with the imperial and colonial cores. So this is the question that confronts decolonizing states. Now, we know Abdel Nasser and Egypt soon after Bandung in 1956 will wage a strike at this scale in nationalizing the Suez Canal. This is an important moment. And we'll see in episode three when we come to a discussion of contemporary anti-imperialism and Ansar Allah, how potent of an anti-imperialist strike the Red Sea is. Because you're actually overcoming this denial of sovereignty or challenging the power over economic flow between territories. That is actually the real scale of imperialism. And so like, you know, Abdul Nasser's in Egypt, the Suez kind of crisis becomes a very significant, I think, international scale fight against imperialism. Now, so Bandung, what I'll say just about Bandung at this moment, and this is going to be very important when we come to the contemporary moment. Bandung articulates ideologically, I think, a very broad anti-imperialism. But materially, the conditions aren't in place for the realization of Bandung. You do not actually have in the possession of decolonizing states the material means to enforce a Bandung order. It will be China's rise in the late 20th and early 21st century that create the conditions of possibility for this. Now, the question that stands before us today in many ways is, is there a formula for that ideological coherence of Bandung? Does that exist today? But the material conditions are there. So do we have a different mismatch of materiality and ideology today? than the mid-20th century. So Bandung puts this forward, but they don't have the means to realize it. Now let's see exactly an example where we can really understand this, is in the Congo crisis, what really generates Nkrumah's understanding of the need for Pan-Africanism in many ways, right? The crisis of the Congo, where you have in the Congo in 1960, the achievement of decolonization, the advancement of a brilliant program of decolonization under the leadership of Patrice Lumumba, But immediately, again, just like in Guatemala, you have an immediate imperialist counter-revolution that seeks to, again, reintroduce Balkanization, to Balkanize the Congo through a quote-unquote secessionist movement in Katanga. As we know, it eventually will lead to the overthrow and death of Lumumba and the reimplementation of a neocolonial state in Congo. Now, this is where I think there's an essay I'll often cite. It's really important to understand What does anti-imperialism mean? You know, Frantz Fanon responded to, he wrote an essay in response to Lumumba's death. I forget the title of the essay. It's in his collection of essays towards an African revolution or towards the African revolution. I don't know if that could be linked or something somewhere. I think it's a really important one to read. But, you know, Fanon then says there was a real mistake that was made by Africans in the Congo crisis. They should not have trusted the United Nations to oversee the resolution to the Congo crisis. They should have raised up an African army, essentially. He was like, we underestimated our enemy. You never should underestimate imperialisms. It has no hesitation, he says, to commit murder. So at that scale, though, what was missing was perhaps a pan-Africanist military capability that could have resolved the Congo crisis in a different key, in a different register. And we'll see, actually, in the 21st century, the Congo War that emerges in the late 90s and the early 21st century. You know, Christian, I know when I spoke with the December 12th movement, we talked about this briefly, but the You know, Zimbabwe was sanctioned because it actually in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it actually raised up in some ways a pan-Africanist force right out of southern Africa to contest the U.S. interventions into Congo in the early 21st century. Right. So I think, you know, you can see in the Congo crisis this that the capabilities are not there to enforce a banding order. And I want people listening to think about this too, is that we live in a Westphalian world order. We live in this kind of world order of sovereign states that was generated out of Europe. It's generated out of Europe and the Treaty of Westphalia, out of the Congress of Vienna in the 19th centuries, which hold the principle of sovereign states. In the European order, the idea of sovereign states is there. They don't want the church to be a sovereign. They're saying, okay, let's have a balance of power amongst European states. However, the history of Westphalia has been that the Europeans have balanced between themselves through draining wealth from the colonies. That has been the formula of Westphalia. If you want to see why it is Great Britain, why are they able to absorb trade deficits from Germany and the United States in the 19th century? Because they're draining wealth from India and China. That's the primary force. So Bandung, if there's a Westphalian order, we can think about a Bandung order. or a Bandungian order, right? Like that conference provides the framework potentially for something very different. And the key distinction is how it puts forward this question of the right of self-determination over your economic resources, right? The question of foregrounding even trade, not uneven trade. But the capabilities were not there at the time to enforce a Bandung order. And I think this opening era of decolonization, moving towards an anti-imperialism, it suffers a series of setbacks in the 1980s and into the 1990s with the fall of the Soviet Union. I think the Vietnam War is a high point. The victory of the Vietnamese over the American imperialists is actually a high point of anti-imperialism, right? Because the Vietnamese are fighting the French and then the Americans, but there is an internationalist scale to their struggle. That they are able to draw upon a different international architecture with the Soviet Union, with the People's Republic of China. You have different options available that enable the Vietnamese to win their struggle against imperialism. We know on the African continent, actually, just briefly, I think we've talked about this before. And I know, obviously, Mamadou, this is the heart of your dissertation in many ways, right? But the question that emerges on the continent at this time with regards to, I think, the Nkrumah Nyerere debates that are happening, that you have decolonization. Can you have decolonization in one country? But the problem, again, is should African states, for example, bargain with Europe as smaller states against a unified Europe? Or even if it's not a unified Europe, a Europe that has a monopoly over core capital and core technology, Or is anti-imperialism actually an African federation, a pan-African, and maybe not just even an African federation, but even more deeply if we think about where Nkrumah begins his thoughts on the streets of Harlem, you know, when he's meeting Du Bois and then a deeper pan-Africanism that unifies African peoples more broadly as a means to overcome the dependency and the fracturing of the imperialist system, right? So, but we know what happens to Nkrumah. We know what happens post even Vietnam War with, the way in which the United States, through establishing hegemony and power in West Asia, is able then to contain and set back the anti-imperialist movement, I think, into the end of history. Now, I would say, though, that we talked about this last time, but the renewal of anti-imperialism In our contemporary era, it really comes out of in many ways, not out of only, but I think like something like the revolution in Iran is a key moment in 1979 that we can get to maybe in episode three. But something else I would also want to emphasize when I was saying, you know, anti-imperialism of this moment is contained. We know in Krumah it was overthrown in a coup d'etat. Another key kind of moment, I think, at the close of the 20th century here is you have something like, you know, the coup that happens against Allende. So you do have imperialist counter-revolution happening, but you have also in Southern Africa, for example, Zimbabwe and the end of apartheid in South Africa, you have basically the British especially, but the West containing the radicalism of anti-colonial movements, right? But the Lancaster House Agreement in Zimbabwe, You have the post-apartheid South African Constitution, which entrenches the property rights of the settler class, which does not overcome the denial of sovereignty over territory, even in Southern Africa, which does not achieve the basis of real sovereignty, a formal sovereignty there. So this is a long sweep that we can think about into our contemporary era. But what would lead us into the contemporary moment is the fact that this was not the end of history, in fact. The fall of the Soviet Union weakens and limits the room of maneuver for anti-imperialism and the realization of real anti-imperialism, but it does not defeat it. And we see this by the early 21st century, that already in the 1980s, the grounds are there for a more potent potentially reemergence of anti-imperialism. And we've seen it on material grounds, both militarily and economically. But the question, I think, is where are things ideologically in some ways? There might be more fracturing kind of in that sense. But one thing that I would say, maybe to conclude the historical discussion, is what was not achieved, I think, in the 19th and 20th centuries. You had decolonization, but you did not have anti-imperialism. You never actually had at the international scale a contestation and a defeat of the power of imperialism. So economic monopoly power remained in the hands of imperialist powers. Military power remained in their hands at the international scale. The war was never fought on that level. even, let's say, right? And that's, I think, something that we may be seeing the possibility of, right? And I would say, as we get to that discussion next episode, again, what was happening in the Red Sea in many ways is a taking of the fight to that scale, to the international scale, right? And again, I would encourage listeners to, I know I've mentioned this many times before, but Fanon's, the last 10 pages of Concerning Violence, he goes from the settler colony, why does he end with that passage that says violence in the international context? you are not going to achieve actually even real individual sovereignty without transforming the world itself, right? Like there has to be a transformation of the entire world system. So sorry, that was a bit long, but... No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Mamadou: That was great. That was great. That was great. And to be fair, you covered a lot of the things I would have followed. So I would say just to kind of precipitate the next episode, how can we identify... if a country is anti-imperialist, what does that look like? And then what does that look like today? And then we can go into more specifics next session.

Bikrum Gill: So I think there's two components to anti-imperialism here, right? There's going to be an internal component to anti-imperialism and an external component to anti-imperialism, right? So, I mean, I guess they're related to one another, but on one level, if a state is anti-imperialist, okay, so is it, in terms of its own national development, is it able to, to in its relations with the rest of the world and the mobilization of its own resources is it able to establish sovereign power over the generation of surplus out of its resources towards recycling it back into its own form of sovereign development okay that's so that that is what samira mean would call auto-centric development or is it an auto-centrically developing state or is it a dependently developing state so i think that is one way to understand if a state is anti-imperialist. It's a real struggle, though. It's not easy for... We should not idealize that, right? Because the moment any country tries to put in place the conditions for real sovereign development, for real anti-imperialism, is the moment you're subjected to sanctions, to military intervention, which can then leave states in a real bind. So you have to be careful of how you will... say, criticize the state or not, right? To say, okay, is this anti-imperialist or not? But also understand the contradictions that these projects are caught within, right? Like, so is it easy to say, what is Cuba's road today? What is the road ahead of the Cuban state or the Venezuelan state today? Now, the other question is, externally, for an anti-imperialist state, I think fundamentally, number one, I think when we get to a discussion of a state like China, are you, number one, are you imposing a denial of sovereignty in other states? That would make you an imperialist state, right? Like, are you denying sovereignty to other states in order to facilitate a surplus drain from periphery to core? Is it attached to relations of development and underdevelopment, right? If instead your international relations are oriented towards what the Chinese call a win-win paradigm, right, or a coexistence where you have not a surplus drain, but a framework that is enhancing the sovereign development of all parties. That to me is an anti-imperialist order. So have you achieved sovereign power militarily and economically, internally? And is that how you carry your relations with other states as well? I think that's a good kind of measuring stick with which to look at it. And then I think, are you challenging? I guess the other question is, are you challenging the imperialist structure? Maybe that's the preeminent question. Right. And I think the state that I didn't mention is perhaps the anti-imperialist state par excellence is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Right now, it is cast, obviously, as a lunatic state by the by the imperialist bourgeois media. Right. Like, but why do they cast it as a lunatic state? The Democratic People's Republic of Korea achieves real sovereignty. It achieves land reform. It achieves nationalization. It achieves military power. And then it puts that at the service of other states. Not just in the East Asian region, but we know the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is a key grounding relation for the Islamic revolution in Iran. The Islamic revolution in Iran has its own dynamics and histories in motion. But its capability to project military power against imperialism is very much tied to the relations it forges with the Democratic People's Republic of Korea very early on. So I think that is a clear indication of an anti-imperialist state. Internally, externally, are you having relations of mutuality, of sovereign development? But then third, are you also contesting imperialist power? Are you shifting the balance of force in the international system by putting your resources at the service of anti-imperialist actors. An example that you can consider, I know we're going to talk more about it, the very tense and sensitive and fraught discussion of China nowadays, I think there's many dimensions to it that can be critiqued, that should be assessed. One example, for instance, China might not be an ideologically driven state in the same way it would have been during Bandung, but nonetheless, is it not significant? What does it mean for anti-imperialism that China refuses to abide by imperialist sanctions? whether against Venezuela, whether against Iran. So does not not then provision those more explicitly resistant states the material means with which to carry out their sovereign development projects. Right. So I think we can think about maybe those three levels of how we would identify.

Mamadou: Yeah. And I think definitely we're going to when we come to episode three, we will go through. the contemporary forms of anti-imperialism right and even imperialism to be fair because i think even we can talk about hezbollah we can talk about hamas and other resistance factions as well how these fit into the anti-imperialist struggle and then we can also talk about the relationship between anti-imperialism and socialism but i think we can leave that to last episode so in closing i would say christian if you have any final questions or final thoughts and then we can wrap up yeah yeah and i think this has some room also on the final episode as well

Christian: But we talked a lot about anti-imperialism or what is really being identified as a dialectic between imperialism and anti-imperialism with regards to different states. But I also and I think some of this was also some of you approach some of this when we talked about certain settler colonial projects, but also like what is the internal within the imperialist core? What is the dialectic between imperialism and anti-imperialism? I mean, just both of y'all, you know, both you, Bikram, and you, Momadu, have dealt with your own struggles regarding engaging in anti-imperialist struggle within the imperial core. So is there not significance of anti-imperialism from within? What is the importance of a strong left in being able to have some level of anti-imperialism within? And what does it even mean to try to engage in anti-imperialist scholarship for you guys under a state apparatus that seeks to constantly crush any sort of dissent against its power.

Bikrum Gill: Yeah, I mean, that's like, I think you have this question of, you know, I thought about it during the Black Lives Matter movement some years ago. You know, what came to me then was this distinction between anti-racism and anti-imperialism. You know, like it's it's really easy, actually, to be an anti-racist in many ways, because, you know, you saw the splitting in the Black Lives Matter movement between an anti-racist and then like an anti-imperialist, more international, internationalist anti-racism. Right. Because, you know, there's there is space that is accorded to people within an imperialist order if you don't trouble the sovereignty question. If the question that you pose in terms of your scholarship is a question of inclusion, and I don't mean to minimize this because we know diversity, equity and inclusion is under attack now. But who knows? Maybe this is a question of the sharpening of contradictions, whatever it may be. But there is a space to say that one wants inclusion within an existing context. even racist order, right? Even an existing imperialist order. But it's at that moment at which one questions the denial of sovereignty, like Malcolm X did, right? Like what is Malcolm X really saying? He's not saying what is often imputed to him. He's saying black people should have sovereignty before we talk to white people. That's essentially what it comes down to. People-to-people discussion has to be based on empowered people. Otherwise, we are weak. But the moment at which you start to talk about actual sovereign reclamation is the moment at which your very voice becomes an existential crisis. That is where you cross the boundary of what is politically legitimate and illegitimate.

Mamadou: I think that's interesting because that's when I quoted you quite controversially when you said that you feel... Perhaps the Nation of Islam and Black Panther are probably the best articulations of Black sovereignty.

Bikrum Gill: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, no. I think so. That's like this question of like what it means in these countries. Right. So like there's a space for us politically to talk about, I think, like exclusion or racism or even colonialism and decolonizing. But the moment where you go to where Du Bois actually started, right, black reconstruction, he links the U.S. South. He links the black national question or the. So it's an African national question in the U.S. to anti-colonial struggles across the world. He says these are actually of a similar form. The moment you go back to that sovereignty question, then you're outside the bounds of politically acceptable scholarship or speech. And this is where you find yourself increasingly in a difficult situation. But I think that poses in this question, what does it mean to be anti-imperialist in the core? There are labor struggles in the core. So does it mean to return to the spirit or ethic of the Third International? You know, where the Bolsheviks are like, well, hold on a minute. The class question is impossible to address without the imperialist question, right? Like that, in fact, some degree of the consciousness of the proletariat is overly shaped by the existence. So, you know, I talked about this recently. I forget where, very recently. But, oh, okay, no, no. We had on our Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective podcast. You know, like Marx, where Lenin comes to the national question, he's actually coming to it from Marx's reconsideration of his famous quote he ends the Communist Manifesto with, you know, workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains. Sometime later on, Marx is writing a letter to somebody, I forget whom, on Ireland. And he says, actually, the English proletariat will never attain a revolutionary consciousness so long as they are ruling over Ireland. You know, like the colonization of Ireland inhibits the development of a revolutionary proletarian consciousness. So like in the core today, you know, you see the way in which what's happening in Venezuela today. What is the relationship between that and class consciousness today? in the core, between Gaza and class consciousness in the core, between Sudan, Congo, Zimbabwe, and class consciousness in the core, right? Like, do you get invested into an American national identity, into what Du Bois at the time called the wages of whiteness, right? Is this something that captures that? So, but then how do you practically put that in motion, like at this moment, right? Like, can you internally, I think... build an anti-imperialist politics that's in solidarity with these movements elsewhere in the world. And I think that's why they're cracking down so hard on anti-imperialism today. Right. It is the primary fundamental question. But I think the difficulty, though, is do you put forward to class forces in the court that anti-imperialism is in your interest? Right. When what is suggested otherwise, like by Cecil Rhodes or others, is that, you know, you buy off the proletariat with imperialist wealth. So then is it not contradictory to say what's in your interest actually to fight against imperialism? But I think I think that's the task ahead of us, because I think it is in many ways. Right. Because you can be a worker. making weapons somewhere in the United States, wherever industrial manufacturing remains, it's tied to weapons production. You can be making those weapons. You can be getting a wage. You can be getting a salary. But the surplus that is generated out of that as a whole does not go into actually building your community. It does not go actually into building the infrastructure that you need to have a more prosperous, thriving life. You're not getting high-speed rail. You're not getting good health infrastructure. You're not getting any of these things. So I think It is really important, I think, the anti-imperialist movement linked to the class question and the national question, right, the Indigenous and Black questions in the core today. I think these are really important, but I think we're seeing right now exactly what you're saying, Christian, that like, yeah, you can talk about inclusion and anti-racism, but do not talk about the question of the reclamation of sovereignty.

Mamadou: I know people tease me when I say this, but I'm going to say it. This was a masterclass. Once again, I really enjoyed it. I'm looking forward to episode three. And until next time, people, peace out.