The July issue of Science & Society (volume 88, number 3) contains an interesting and timely symposium on “Imperialism, Anti-imperialism and the Global Class Struggle”. It was provoked by a couple of earlier pieces by William Robinson, who contributed an opening article to the symposium. An excellent contribution by Alex Callinicos, a member of our editorial board, shares Robinson’s fears about the dangers of “campism”, of responding to the horrors of US imperialism by collapsing into largely uncritical support of rival imperialisms. As Robinson’s article puts it: “The US state remains…the greatest threat to the world’s people. But in opposing US interventionism socialists must not excuse capitalist exploitation and state repression in other countries around the world or fail to support those resisting such exploitation and repression.”
However, Callinicos takes issue with Robinson’s wider claim that traditional Marxist approaches to imperialism have been superseded through globalisation, which has generated a transnational capitalism and transnational forms of class exploitation. As we argue in this issue, the internationalisation of capital that took place in the decades preceding 2008 has largely stalled since, and there has been something of a return to state intervention and more explicit forms of inter-imperialist great power rivalry.
It is better to retain a classical conception of imperialism, which Callinicos theorises as an intersection between economic and geopolitical competition, while tracing its varying historical forms and avoiding a dogmatic attachment to specific economic features discussed by Lenin (see Callinicos’s work Imperialism and Global Political Economy, published by Polity in 2009). It’s worth reading these and the other contributions to the symposium, which are freely available here: https://guilfordjournals.com/toc/siso/88/3.
Guglielmo Carchedi has for many decades been one of the most incisive and interesting Marxist theorists. In Historical Materialism (volume 32, issue 2) he returns to a long-standing preoccupation with labour and knowledge, developing his points in relation to contemporary debates about artificial intelligence.
For Carchedi, mental labour is itself a material process occurring in a context shaped by social relations. It cannot be seen as “immaterial”. These processes transform existing mental use-values into new ones. Carchedi argues that what makes human thinking unique, in comparison to, say, AI, is that it draws, “dialectically”, on “a formless but socially determined potential”, rather than resting on the manipulation of existing forms of knowledge. We should therefore see large language models such as ChatGPT as a mental means of production, a repository of existing value but not a wellspring of new value, in the manner of human labour.
More controversially, Carchedi offers a criticism of approaches to quantum mechanics, including the Copenhagen Interpretation, in which the act of measurement causes probabilistic wave functions to collapse. There were, as he suggests, strong ideological currents underpinning this conception, but other, quite different conceptualisations of wave-function collapse exist in modern physics that do not rely on granting a special role to “observation” and avoid some of the issues Carchedi discusses.
Leandros Fischer has written an insightful article on the Antideutsche
(anti-German) current, also published in the journal Historical Materialism (volume 32, issue 1). The Antideutschen identify as left wing and draw inspiration from Marx and, particularly, the Frankfurt School. Yet, they maintain unconditional support for the state of Israel. Fischer does not attribute the broader German left’s odd and isolating stance on Palestine primarily to them, as some do, but he does acknowledge that they have exerted a degree of influence. This influence stems from several factors: the emergence of the party Die Linke, with key individuals politically capitalising on Antideutsche ideas (for example, to gain acceptance in the German state); the predominance of poststructuralist perspectives on racism and antisemitism; and left-liberal justifications for the new German imperialism.
Globalizations, James Foley and Vladimir Unkovski-Korica criticise the
one-sided application of postcolonial theory to understand the Ukrainian war effort (www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14747731.2024.2399475). In line with articles published in International Socialism, they argue that the interests of Western imperialists, with which this effort is inevitably fused, are ignored. Ironically, when applied to Ukraine, instead of critically examining the realities of (Western) imperialism, postcolonial theory ends up with legitimising them.