The SWP, publishers of Socialist Worker (SW), have published a new book on imperialism, Death Rides Out, by Tomáš Tengely-Evans, editor of SW.
It is billed as the first in a new series, "Concepts in Marxism", whose aim seems to be to get younger SWP leaders to learn to write at "theoretical" length.
The idea of the project is good. This first book contains a good section (if factually accurate, which I have no reason to doubt) on rare-earth refining and how its global centre shifted from the USA to China. But mostly it is poor.
In general theory it is a rehash of writings by John Rees and Alex Callinicos for the SWP's "anti-imperialist turn" after 1986-7 on Israel-Palestine and the 1980-8 Iran-Iraq war. The SWP had not been pro-imperialist, or indifferent, or unwilling to support Palestinian rights, before 1986-7. But in those years it came positively to celebrate almost any political force in conflict with the USA.
The prime purpose of Evans (if he will forgive me shortening his name) is "to restate... the Marxist theory… for 'Generation Palestine'" (i.e. to present a version of "Marxism" rationalising their existing prejudices) and to rationalise the SWP's "rejoicing" at Hamas's 7 October 2023. He also covers SWP's refusal to back Ukraine against Putin (it's a proxy war between the USA and Russia); and its positive backing for Iran in the current Trump war.
His arguments have a looser relation to the stated general theory than those by Rees and Callinicos back in the day.
7 October 2023, writes Evans, was "the Palestinian resistance re[taking] land that Zionist settlers had stolen". So full liberation would be the atrocity enlarged to killings and hostage-taking all across Israel? Evans does not say so, but he does use "Hamas" and "Palestinian resistance" as synonyms.
Evans repeatedly prefers "the Israeli settler colony" as a term for Israel. He leaves unexplained why the remedy for the "Israeli settler colony" is to "retake the land" at the expense of the nation which lives there now mostly because it was born there. And, unlike some other writers, he makes no claim that settler colonialism is central to the general mechanics of imperialism today. He does not prefer "the US settler colony" for the USA, or "the Argentine settler colony" for Argentina, or even "the Lviv settler colony" for Ukrainian Lviv, though it was long a Polish city before Stalin evicted its Polish population of the city in two bouts, 1939-40 and 1945.
Aside from that, his argument is the old one, off-beam if you consider the facts, that Israel is the enforcer for the USA in the Middle East, so that every defeat for Israel is good as a weakening for "Western imperialism".
On Ukraine, Evans instructs us that we must not start from empirical facts, but "following a dialectical approach… start with the analysis of imperialist competition between the West and Russia".
Abstractly, an independent Ukraine would be within the sphere of influence of the USA and EU, and a crushed Ukraine within the sphere of influence of Russia. The dominance involved is very different in the two cases. No country in the world today can be fully self-sufficient and "independent" economically. Whether a country is politically independent, though in a world where big banks and corporations outside it control the flows of credit and technology, or whether it is crushed militarily, makes a difference. The actual war is about that difference.
Evans concedes that almost every small nation battling for self-determination will seek aid from the imperialist rivals of its oppressor. That does not automatically make the small nation a "proxy" of those who aid it.
He mentions Vietnam, which defeated the USA only thanks to aid from Russia and China. But he dismisses that as only a matter of "a few weapons". Actually it included large amounts of (then) high tech, plus some "boots on the ground". If we backed Vietnam against the USA, as we rightly did, it wasn't because all it got from the USSR was maybe a few spare old AK47s.
Evans also cites the Serbian socialists' vote against war credits in 1914, though in principle Serbia had a national-rights case then. Yet he also cites Lenin saying at the time that Serbia's national issue was "one per cent" of World War One. Ukraine's national rights are not "one per cent" of a war already raging between the USA and Russia. (Besides, Evans misstates some of his facts here, as often in the book. No space here for detail).
On Iran, Evans argues US vs Iran is one of the six (he says) global imperialist powers vs a regional-only imperialist power, and in such cases we must back the smaller imperialism.
That would be right if the war were about the US conquering Iran and installing a viceroy or a client regime. But it is not. As Lenin put it in 1915: "With reference to wars, the main thesis of dialectics... is that 'war is simply the continuation of politics by other [i.e., violent] means'. Such is the formula of Clausewitz". We base our stand on what the war is about, the politics which it "continues", and how that relates to our positive programme.
Back in the day, Alex Callinicos argued explicitly against general backing for regional imperialist powers if in war with global imperialist powers. He was justifying the SWP's refusal (sound in my view) positively to back Argentina against Britain in the South Atlantic war of 1982, rather than denouncing the war on both sides.
Evans makes no effort to square this circle. He wants his pro-Iran stance to be critical, but on grounds that "Iran has repeatedly held back from attacking Israel".
None of this connects much with the claimed general theory, which is that "imperialism is a global system of competing capitalist states marked by the fusion of economic and geopolitical competition", or, less pompously put, that imperialism is big military powers waging wars to serve the interests of big capitalist outfits based in them.
The description fits some US "banana wars" and US-organised coups in Central America which served the United Fruit Company, but is much too crude to cover the whole history.
Evans claims it is "the Marxist theory", developed by "Lenin, Bukharin, and Luxemburg". He does not acknowledge that Luxemburg had a different take on the economics from Lenin and Bukharin.
Rees and Callinicos, back in the day, argued that the 1914 system had been seriously modified for a whole era, but that "the new imperialism" was returning in the 1980s, reprising the patterns of pre-1914. Evans sometimes suggests that this "new imperialism" is arriving now; sometimes that it has been in force ever since 1898-1914.
Although he reasonably describes Steve Bannon as fascist (while saying it is "ridiculous" to describe Putin that way), Evans notes no real difference between Trump and Biden in geopolitics.
Background on the general debate about Marxism and imperialism, and on the Rees-Callinicos writings after 1987, is at:
On Israel, Tengely-Evans argues that it has always been "the watchdog of imperialism" over oil and gas resources in the region. The "evidence" is the same passage from the Israeli daily Haaretz from 30 September 1951 that SWPer John Rose cited in 1986: "Israel is to become the watchdog... relied upon to punish".
The connection to truth is that, since the USA decided about 1949 that Israel was not going to "go communist" (as the CIA had feared) and was probably able to stabilise itself, the USA has seen Israel as a ally worth keeping in a region full of unreliable regimes. Even more so since 1967.
But the fact since 1951 is that Israel has been no help to the USA in its search for reliable regimes there. When the USA invaded Iraq in 2003, the one ally the USA absolutely did not want active in its "coalition of the willing" was Israel. Israel did not even try to be a factor in the successful moves, especially in the 1970s, by Middle East petro-states to get more of the fossil-fuel revenues. Etc.
Besides, the one sentence quoted by Rose and re-quoted by Evans was not, as presentation suggests, an gung-ho quasi-official Israel statement of intent to be the USA's enforcer. And Rose's translation from Hebrew is doubtful.
Check the files of Haaretz, available online, and it is a skeptical comment on the Israeli government by a sharp liberal critic, the paper's longtime editor Gershom Shocken. For "watchdog" (represented by a cover image on Rose's pamphlet of a slavering beast), automatic translation has "safety-valve". It would take someone with more language skills to say, but my guess is that at issue is a Hebrew word which dictionaries render as "regulator". Backstop ally? Maybe. Hit-man? No.
The background to the SWP's 1986 turn is that it had said little on Israel until 1967. For example, its lead article in Suez in December 1956 scarcely mentioned Israel, focusing all its fire on the British and French governments.
The SWP then became not only (rightly) pro-Palestinian, but also vehemently anti-Israel. Yet it still warned that "an anti-Israeli campaign quite easily degenerates into a 'jihad', in which the most reactionary regimes save themselves by channelling the struggle into racial channels". From 1986 its criticism of anti-Israel regimes came to be what Evans's is of Iran, that they were not jihadist enough.
The SWP had described the Iran-Iraq war as reactionary on both sides; in the last months of the war it seized on the USA favouring Iraq (as it had done more or less all through) to rationalise backing Iran.
The background to the Rees-Callinicos writings is as follows.
In the 1960s Socialist Worker's main text on imperialism was Michael Kidron's Imperialism, highest stage but one (1962). It held that Lenin's 1916 pamphlet on imperialism had identified its root as export of capital from rich countries to poorer to ease the "glut" otherwise choking those rich countries; now foreign direct investment overwhelmingly moved between richer countries, and the ex-colonies were "maimed and shattered by the growing economic isolationism of the west".
This view was quickly upended by the growth of the "New International Division of Labour" from the 1960s, with industrialisation in South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil, and then a growing range of other poorer countries. Kidron restated the view in his widely-read book Western Capitalism Since the War (1968), but day to day it was quietly dropped. The SWP was as vocal against US imperialism in Vietnam as anyone else on the left.
Nevertheless, there was an element in the SWP "line" of insistence on the working class in industrialised countries as the necessary central force for socialism, and of recognising a difference between "anti-imperialism" in the sense of opposition to conquest and colonial rule and actual socialism.
As late as 1982, the SWP had essentially the same approach as Workers' Liberty to the South Atlantic war between Britain and Argentina: to denounce the war as reactionary on both sides, but to refuse to give positive support to the Argentine regime because it was notionally "fighting imperialism" (i.e., a bigger power). The war was about rival ambitions for prestige and aggrandisement, not about liberation.
In the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-8, again, the SWP had essentially the same approach as Workers' Liberty, to denounce it on both sides. It was not fazed by the fact that the USA clearly leaned towards Iraq, seeing Iran as a more dangerous enemy. (Israel backed Iran, seeing it as a more distant enemy).
In late 1987 the SWP switched to backing Iran. As far as I know, it made no developed argument that the war had changed its nature, nor stated that it had been wrong in 1980-7. It just switched. The war ended in August 1988, with no gains for either side, but up to a million dead along the way.
The main mover here, so I understand, was Tony Cliff, maybe taking thought further from the shift on Israel-Palestine in 1986 (which he may have inspired, too). But he wrote nothing of substance on the issue. It was left to John Rees and Alex Callinicos to tidy up. They did that in two articles, The new imperialism (Rees, International Socialism 48, September 1990) and Marxism and imperialism (Callinicos, IS 50, Spring 1991). Those were reprinted (with some revisions) in a book, Marxism and the new imperialism (1994). Around the time of the US invasion of Afghanistan, Rees wrote a follow-up: Imperialism: globalisation, the state, and war (Rees, IS 93, December 2001).
Though all those were essentially rationalisation – and though in 1990, we might note, Rees was younger than Evans is now, and Callinicos not that much older - their work was a notch above Evans's.
The SWP then deployed the same sort of reasoning for the Kosova war of 1999. Kosovar self-determination, they said, was secondary or impossible. The issue was the USA (imperialist) vs Milosevic's Serbia (not imperialist, or only regional-imperialist); therefore, side with Serbia.
They deployed the reasoning again to "refuse to condemn" the Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001; positively to back the Taliban when the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001; and positively to back Islamist-sectarian "resistance" groups in Iraq in 2004-8.
They were, however, much more shifty about that than about Iran-Iraq or Kosova. In early 2002, at a lively Stop The War conference, Lindsey German, then the public political "heavyweight" of the SWP, explicitly reversed the "refusal to condemn" on the World Trade Center.
When Daesh emerged from the Iraqi "resistance" groups in 2014, and captured large areas, the SWP did not back it. Tengely-Evans's book, in passing, refers to Daesh as "reactionary", without qualification. He does not comment on Kosova or Afghanistan.
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