How To Be A Leftist In The Age of Imperialism

An Honest Reflection

Photo by Mahmoud Sulaiman on Unsplash

For a long time, I asked myself what actually made me a leftist. There was a period when I rejected anything associated with “the left” and called myself a centrist. So what shifted?

Part of it was the pandemic. I was studying public health while watching a real-time public health collapse. People who claimed to be “moderate” began repeating right-wing talking points, minimizing the crisis, and insisting that “the economy” mattered more than human lives. I saw the entire public health playbook, carefully developed for decades, abandoned because reopening businesses took priority over protecting people. It forced me to confront a basic truth: an economic system that sacrifices lives to preserve profit is fundamentally broken.

Around the same time, I reflected on my own experiences, periods of homelessness, financial strain, and the constant pressure to simply survive. I realized these struggles weren’t individual failures; millions of people face them. So I returned to the most critical public health question: why do people experience poverty at all?

That question pushed me deeper into political theory, conversations with friends, and my own reading. Eventually, everything clicked. The suffering we see—both in the U.S. and globally—is not random or accidental. A predatory system produces it. The same system that extracts resources abroad is the system that creates precarity, inequality, and abandonment at home.

This understanding matters today, especially as the U.S. escalates hostilities toward Venezuela and continues its global interventions. Suppose we, on the left, want to resist imperialism meaningfully. In that case, we must understand not only what imperialism is, but also how our own experiences and observations tie into a broader global structure. While my reflections are not academic, they are the foundation of why anti-imperialist struggle is necessary.

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What is imperialism?

For a long time, I wondered why entire countries could be trapped in poverty, corruption, and exploitation. It became clear that these crises weren’t caused by a lack of “hard work,” but by historical and systemic processes far larger than individual effort.

My first real entry point was colonialism. In college, I encountered Frantz Fanon and the Black radical tradition, which exposed the violence and psychological devastation that defined the colonial world:

To blow the colonial world to smithereens is henceforth a clear image within the grasp and imagination of every colonized subject.

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

Reading Fanon, Cedric Robinson, Angela Davis, and others pushed me to question how the United States behaves abroad, governs territories, and sustains its global power. Colonialism, broadly defined, is the domination and subjugation of one people by another, a political, military, and economic relationship built on extraction.

But I still wondered: what was the economic engine behind colonialism? Why did so many nations remain impoverished even after formal independence?

However, I wondered what it was about colonialism and its economic connection that made much of the world impoverished. This is when I began reading more of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who described the predatory nature of capitalism.

In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels

Colonialization, in this case, is part of the process as Marx and Engels described it: “the conquest of new markets.” Colonialism in its purest, most exploitative form is the economic and resource extraction of a colonized place by a colonizer. Capitalism requires conquest, it requires exploitation, and subjugation; in this case, colonized lands fit the bill.

When outright colonial rule became unsustainable, it didn’t disappear; it evolved. Debt traps, IMF structural adjustment, CIA coups, and military “advisors” replaced direct occupation. This is the logic of neo-colonialism: domination without formal administration.

So where does imperialism fit into this picture?

While colonialism is one practice of domination, imperialism is the broader systemic stage that makes such domination necessary. Bourgeois scholars define imperialism as a policy of extending political or economic control beyond national borders, but this definition misses the engine driving it.

Lenin captured that engine clearly:

If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by Vladmir Lenin

As capitalism concentrates, banks merging with corporations, markets consolidating into monopolies, it must expand outward to survive. It must seek new territories, resources, labor pools, and markets. Colonialism (and later neo-colonialism) becomes one of the tools it uses to accomplish this.

This is why capitalism and imperialism cannot be separated. They function as a unified capitalist-imperialist system, driven by accumulation, expansion, and domination.

If this system produces global exploitation by design, then the question becomes: How should the left resist it?

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The Attitude of Anti-Imperialism

The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

- Steve Biko

In the Marxist tradition, there is a saying that we must agitate, educate, and organize. We must agitate by speaking to the wounds of the masses, these wounds being their lives and misfortunes under capitalism-imperialism. We must educate people on how to liberate themselves from said system. And then we must organize people in politically viable ways that will finally lead to liberation.

Part of the education process is letting go of attitudes and beliefs that serve the prevailing status quo, which is capitalist-imperialist. The purpose of education in the Marxist sense is to build class consciousness.

Consciousness of the conditions in which we live, concerning class society and class relations. An awareness that most of us are working class (proletarian) and that our interests are in direct contradiction with the capitalist ruling class (bourgeoisie). Consciousness is essential because if we are not conscious of the problem, we cannot change the situation.

If we cannot build consciousness, we cannot hope to change the current state of affairs.

Part of building this consciousness is understanding two outlooks that can help on the path of resisting imperialism: Revolutionary Optimism and Proletarian Internationalism.

Revolutionary Optimism

Revolutionary optimism refers to different lines of thought related to revolutionary politics. One of those lines is being hopeful that the goals of the revolution will one day be achieved. Another train of thought is the rejection of pessimistic ‘doomer’ outlooks that nothing can be changed.

Revolutionary optimism is also not a native outlook that the capitalist-imperialist system will fall on its own. It is the acceptance that, to achieve revolution, we, as a collective, must work towards it, and that work starts with action.

Revolutionary optimism demands that we look honestly at the world as it is without collapsing into fatalism. The point is not to deny crisis, exploitation, or suffering, but to refuse the idea that these conditions are permanent. Despair is politically disarming; it convinces people that nothing they do matters. Optimism, in contrast, becomes a discipline, the practice of believing that the future is still open, still shapeable, and still worth fighting for.

It also reminds us that revolutions are not spontaneous miracles. They are built through organized, patient, collective struggle carried out by ordinary people who refuse to give up. This kind of optimism rejects the passive belief that the system will crumble on its own. Instead, it insists that social transformation requires strategy, solidarity, and a willingness to show up for each other even when change feels distant.

Most importantly, revolutionary optimism reframes historical “failures” not as evidence that liberation is impossible, but as lessons for the next struggle. Every fallen movement leaves behind tools, insights, and memories of possibility. The point is not to romanticize the past, but to understand that we stand in a long lineage of people who believed that the world could be different. Their unfinished work is not a reason to despair; it is a reason to continue.

Proletarian Internationalism

The socialist, the revolutionary proletarian, the internationalist, argues differently. He says: “The character of the war (whether it is reactionary or revolutionary) does not depend on who the attacker was, or in whose country the ‘enemy’ is stationed; it depends on what class is waging the war, and on what politics this war is a continuation of. If the war is a reactionary, imperialist war, that is, if it is being waged by two world groups of the imperialist, rapacious, predatory, reactionary bourgeoisie, then every bourgeoisie (even of the smallest country) becomes a participant in the plunder, and my duty as a representative of the revolutionary proletariat is to prepare for the world proletarian revolution as the only escape from the horrors of a world slaughter. I must argue, not from the point of view of ‘my’ country (for that is the argument of a wretched, stupid, petty-bourgeois nationalist who does not realise that he is only a plaything in the hands of the imperialist bourgeoisie), but from the point of view of my share in the preparation, in the propaganda, and in the acceleration of the world proletarian revolution.”

The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky by Vladmir Lenin

Proletarian internationalism, as Lenin defines it, is the principle that the working class has no true national interests within a capitalist-imperialist world order. For Lenin, workers across all countries share a common position: they are exploited by their own bourgeoisie and dragged into wars that serve capitalist expansion rather than the needs of ordinary people. Because of this, the proletariat must reject nationalism and unite across borders in a shared struggle against all imperial ruling classes. In other words, the “enemy” is not the worker in another country; it is the capitalist class in every country.

This principle becomes essential in resisting imperialism because imperialist powers rely on dividing workers, convincing them to abandon class solidarity in favor of patriotic loyalty.

Lenin argues that as long as the proletariat identifies with its own bourgeoisie, it becomes a tool of empire, supporting wars that enrich the ruling class while intensifying the misery of the masses. Proletarian internationalism breaks this spell. It forces workers to evaluate every war and every international conflict not by the flag it flies under but by whose interests it ultimately serves.

For Lenin, resisting imperialism therefore requires a global revolutionary movement. Only by organizing internationally, by recognizing the shared struggle of workers in oppressed and oppressor nations alike, can the proletariat undermine the economic, military, and ideological foundations of empire. Imperialism is a global system; its defeat must be an international project. Proletarian internationalism is the political, moral, and strategic commitment that makes such a project possible.

Bringing It Together

We need BOTH revolutionary optimism and proletarian internationalism to resist imperialism effectively. We need to believe revolution is possible while also seeing past petty international differences between workers.

I have noticed that many within the US left tend to think in terms of national interests while sacrificing workers on the international stage. Lenin and others spoke out against this social chauvinism, pointing out that it benefits the ruling capitalists in a given country.

The US left should not see themselves as “American”, but we should see ourselves as workers, mothers, fathers, children, etc. We should see the commonality between ourselves and the oppressed, either at home or abroad. We should recognize the importance of revolution not only at the national level but also at the international level. The US empire has harmed and is harming numerous people. This must be resisted, and that resistance starts with being conscious of the problem and potential solutions.

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What Actions Should Be Taken

It is always contentious when discussing political action, especially in a country where people tend to sit back and are less politically involved. While I could talk about Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? and get into building a vanguard party… There are various trends of thought concerning what should be done to fight imperialism effectively.

Instead of covering these trends of thoughts, potential strengths and downsides of said thoughts, and whatever other details concerning organizing an anti-imperialist movement… I think it’s crucial for any leftist who is not involved to get involved.

What local left-wing organizations are in your area? (not the Democratic Party or its affiliates)

What do those organizations need?

What can you provide?

If we are not even past this elementary stage of involvement and struggle, vast theoretical considerations do not matter. While education is always essential, so is doing something with that education.

If you are involved, good, keep helping your organization. Keep reading theory, perhaps start a reading circle if you aren’t a part of one already. Reflect on both the positives and negatives within your current organization. See where improvement can foster and dare to speak up.

One of the most important things you can do is deepen your understanding of the political terrain, study imperialism, study class struggle, study the history of movements that succeeded and movements that collapsed, not as an academic exercise, but to sharpen your instincts and avoid repeating old mistakes. Organizing requires constant reflection. Seeing what worked, what didn’t, where contradictions lie, and how strategy needs to shift as conditions change.

You should also take on the work that keeps organizations alive, such as outreach, logistics, administrative tasks, communications, fundraising, political education, coalition-building, and conflict mediation. Much of movement work is unglamorous, but it’s in these small, consistent actions that political power is built. Becoming someone others can depend on by showing up on time, meeting deadlines, being transparent, and communicating honestly. This matters far more than having the “correct” line on every theoretical debate.

If there are no existing groups in your area, you can start small. Connect with a few other leftists in your area and form a study group or political discussion circle. These often become the seeds of something larger. Many historical organizations began with only a handful of committed people who read together, analyzed their surroundings, and slowly built capacity. Even sharing anti-imperialist news, hosting reading nights, or organizing small teach-ins in community spaces helps break political isolation and prepares the ground for more serious work.

Anti-imperialist work also requires understanding how imperialism operates in daily life. Support union drives at workplaces, defend immigrant communities targeted by repression, show up for protests against U.S. intervention abroad, participate in Palestine solidarity efforts, or connect with abolitionist groups fighting police and carceral violence. Each of these fronts, labor, anti-war, anti-racist, anti-police, and anti-capitalist, feeds into the broader struggle against imperialism. No single action “solves” the system, but each builds confidence, networks, and political clarity.

Finally, keep building your political discipline. Learn how to attend meetings consistently, take on tasks humbly, build trust, handle disagreements without factionalism, and practice accountability. This applies to those who are just starting and who are well established. Anti-imperialism is not only about what we oppose; it is about cultivating the kind of movements capable of winning. Theory without action is hollow, but action without discipline collapses. Getting involved means committing to both.