The Left Begins at Anti-Imperialism
This is the REAL left
Too often in mainstream discourse, “the left” is diluted into a vague brand: cultural values, a politics of compassion, or at worst, a boutique progressivism that coexists comfortably with empire. But there is no left without anti-imperialism. That is the foundation. Any movement that seeks justice while excusing domination abroad is not leftist at all… it is merely liberalism draped in red.
On the flip side, “the left” is often demonized as this horrible boogeyman that’s aimed at stealing people’s toothbrushes and dominating the world. The political ‘left’ concept is then conflated with liberalism in the American context.
I seek to appropriate the left back to its anti-imperialist roots, showing that the left is for freedom and the self-determination of the oppressed. The left needs to be for the destruction of the empire; anything less is a smoke screen made to distract us.
Empire as the Bedrock of Capitalism
Imperialism is not an accident of U.S. foreign policy; it is the engine of capitalism itself. Lenin clarified this in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917). When capital outgrows domestic markets, it must expand, dominate, and extract globally. From oil in Iraq to lithium in Latin America, U.S. imperialism is the lifeline of its economy.
Imperialism, as we know it, is a stage of capitalism that requires global expansion and domination to sustain itself.
To call yourself leftist while supporting the endless wars, coups, sanctions, and military occupations of the U.S. state is to ignore the very structure of capitalist domination. Michael Parenti was blunt:
“Given its expansionist nature, capitalism has little inclination to stay home. Almost 150 years ago, Marx and Engels described a bourgeoisie that ”chases over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.... It creates a world after its own image.” The expansionists destroy whole societies”
- Against Empire, 1995
Imperialism abroad and exploitation at home are two faces of the same system. The bombs dropped on Gaza or Baghdad are tied to the austerity budgets and crumbling schools in Detroit or Jackson.
Nevertheless, imperialism is not solely a problem with U.S. foreign policy; as described earlier, it is inherent to capitalism. Lenin outlines it simply here:
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, 1917
The advancement of monopolies, which consolidate markets and shut off free competition, is an essential development in how capitalism functions. This is not unique to a particular country or area. However, since the Second World War, the United States has become the political and economic strong arm of neoliberal capitalism in the Western world. So, understanding America's version of imperialism is of the utmost importance.
Anti-Imperialism as the Ecological Struggle
Imperialism is also an ecological disaster. Extraction is not just economic, it is planetary. The Pentagon is one of the world’s largest polluters, with a carbon footprint larger than many nations. Fossil fuel wars and resource grabs devastate ecosystems, displace communities, and accelerate climate breakdown.
The war machine, which imperialism depends on, kills life on earth, generally on top of the human lives lost to bombs.
To be leftist is to recognize that ecological collapse is not a “policy failure” but the logical outcome of an imperial system that treats both people and the planet as expendable.
As Jason Hickel writes:
Under capital’s growth imperative, there is no horizon – no future point at which economists and politicians say we will have enough money or enough stuff. There is no end, in the double sense of the term: no maturity and no purpose. The unquestioned assumption is that growth can and should carry on for ever, for its own sake.
- Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World
Green capitalism is no answer. Solar panels built on stolen Indigenous land, or “sustainable” mining operations in the Global South, are not liberation, they are imperialism painted green. Any ecological politics that does not confront U.S. militarism and imperial extraction is doomed to reproduce the very destruction it claims to resist.
We are on a finite planet with finite resources. We cannot survive in a system predicated on infinite growth because this will inevitably lead to destruction.
No Left Without Internationalism and Decolonialism
Frantz Fanon taught us that liberation requires breaking the chains of colonial domination, not merely reforming them (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961). The same lesson applies today: you cannot build socialism, ecological sanity, or genuine democracy while endorsing the global machinery of empire.
This is the litmus test. Supporting U.S. imperialism, whether through NATO expansion, regime-change wars, or sanctions, is fundamentally incompatible with leftist politics. One cannot claim solidarity with the oppressed at home while denying it to the oppressed abroad.
What imperialist countries do abroad to others will eventually find its way back home. Aimé Césaire, a politician who inspired Fanon, wrote about this phenomenon in 1950, dubbed the ‘imperial boomerang effect’.
And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: "How strange! But never mind—it's Nazism, it will pass!" And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples…
- Discourse on Colonialism
It is only when the terrifying truth of fascistic methods is utilized on bodies within the imperial core countries (the United States and Europe) that people begin to take them with the seriousness that they deserve. But the abominable methods of imperialism and domination should not be tolerated at all.
The left begins with anti-imperialism because it is the only stance that sees humanity as a whole, not divided into worthy and unworthy lives, not partitioned by the empire's profit needs. Decolonial struggle abroad is our struggle at home.
Toward a Liberatory Politics
A real left politics starts where the empire ends:
Anti-imperialist: refusing to endorse the domination of one nation over another.
Anti-capitalist: recognizing that imperialism is capitalism’s highest form.
Ecological: refusing to let the planet be strip-mined for imperial gain.
International/Decolonial: seeing domination and imperial rule as wrong, no matter where it is, and seeking liberation for those affected.
Without these, “the left” is just progressive window dressing on a system built to consume, dominate, and destroy. With them, it becomes a force capable of breaking chains, here and everywhere.
Because to be leftist is not to fight only for one nation’s working class, but to stand with the oppressed across the world. That solidarity is the root. Everything else grows from there.
Coming from a classical libertarian / anarchist/ volunteeryist view, I agree 100% with this article.
Marx and Lenin's take on imperialism in a nutshell and in plain English. I challenge right-wing populists opposed to Empire to find something here with which they disagree.
Real leftists ain't woke. Real leftists despise Empire. Real leftists want to place the American PEOPLE first.