Redefining the Left: Moving Away from Liberal Politics and Towards Decolonial and Anti-Imperialist Frameworks

What it means to be a leftist in the belly of the beast

“When we participate in elections to win, instead of disrupt, we’re lending to the fascist system’s credibility, and destroying our own.” — George L. Jackson

“This is the illiteracy of Settler Colonialism; it cannot envision itself anywhere but at the center of the progression of human understanding and meaning. It cannot truly speak of justice or freedom without vomiting half-chewed bone of forests, extinct species, and generations yet to come.” — Klee Benally

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Since WWII, the U.S. has spent decades creating a compatible left that on the surface is organizing against capitalism and opposes war, but in reality is a movement that is designed to burn out organizers, create massive in-fighting, funnel the revolution into dead-end solutions, and to support U.S. imperialism under the guise of “humanitarianism” and “upholding human rights.”

We do not have clear definitions of what it means to be a leftist or a liberal. The current definition of leftism is subjective and does not identify the cause of oppression or what it is we are fighting against. Mistaking liberalism for leftism creates a sense of hopelessness as we watch supposedly “leftist” solutions fail again and again, creating unspoken fears that nothing will ever change. This confusion functions to create an ideological illusion of resistance while maintaining power for the ruling class.

This definition also works as a mask. It’s an identity people can take on and off and use as a cloak for their liberalism. It allows people to cosplay as “radical” in an ideological sense, but not be accountable to rooting those ideals in praxis or in a decolonial and anti-imperialist political theory.

Anti-imperial and decolonial leftists must redefine and reclaim what it means to be a leftist. We cannot allow for this muddied definition of being vaguely “anti-capitalist” to serve as representation for our political stances any longer. But to begin to redefine the left, we must define three crucial concepts first: settler-colonialism, imperialism, and fascism, and understand how they interact, shape, and enforce one another.

Defining Settler-Colonialism, Imperialism, & Fascism

Settler-colonialism is a belief system and foreign policy that justifies stealing resources, land, and humans using military domination and settler migration as a means of displacement of the indigenous populations in another country. European colonialism expanded between the 16th — 20th centuries, creating empires between a few European countries such as England, France, Portugal, and Spain. However, due to national liberation movements in countries that were being colonized and occupied, such as Algeria, Vietnam, the DPRK, and China, colonialism had to evolve to maintain their control and dominance across the world. Neocolonialism is defined as “the policy of maintaining an economic grip on a country after losing direct political control.” A favorite strategy of neo-colonial and imperialist countries is creating military bases in other countries. The U.S. has the most military bases around the world, with close to 800 bases in more than 80 countries with about 173,000 troops deployed in 159 countries.

The common definitions of imperialism are the “ideological component of colonialism” and “a policy of extending a country’s power and influence through diplomacy or military force.” But, as Pan-African organizations such as the A-APRP have made clear, the common definition of imperialism is incomplete and does not identify finance capital and monopoly capital, or what imperialism needs to successfully control other countries in the neo-colonial era.

In his work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin wrote, “Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.”

In his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney also describes imperialism as a stage of capitalism: “Imperialism is itself a phase of capitalist development in which western capitalist countries … [establish] political, economic, military, and cultural hegemony over other parts of the world.” Rodney further writes that, “More far-reaching than just trade is the actual ownership of the means of production in one country by the citizens of another,” (emphasis added by me) and that “Under colonialism, the ownership [is] complete and backed by military domination.”

With these passages, we begin to understand that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism and an expansion of colonialism, in which finance capital (the banks) and corporate monopolies control the world’s resources. Capitalism always requires cheap or free human labor, control of land, private ownership of raw materials, and unregulated markets to sell products. To secure these requirements, imperialism must use strategies that go beyond military occupation.

In order to maintain global hegemony and dominance, imperialism must wage economic war through new strategies such as sanctions and debt traps with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Imperialism will also orchestrate coup d’états or colour revolutions, by funding opposition groups via NGOs such as the CIA-backed nonprofit NED, to disrupt and dysregulate local governments, especially (but not always, sometimes it’s just a politician who won’t play ball with imperialism) when socialists are elected.

To maintain this global control, imperialism will always use fascism, despite its facade of “liberal democracy.”

Leader of the Bulgarian Communist Party from 1933–1949 Georgi Dimitrov described fascism as the “open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital,” and that, “In foreign policy, fascism is jingoism in its most brutal form, fomenting bestial hatred of other nations.”

Benito Mussolini, the father of fascism and a favorite of the U.S. bankers and industrialists at the time, infamously revealed that, “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” Hitler was also favored among American businesses. IBM, General Motors, and Henry Ford did business with the Third Reich by manufacturing supplies, equipment, and weapons for Nazi Germany, and banks such as J.P. Morgan seized Jewish bank accounts during WWII and handed them over to Nazis.

Furthermore, after WWII, while the world was holding the Nuremberg Trials to hold political leaders accountable for their crimes against humanity — the United States government was creating Operation Paperclip — a secret program that assimilated former Nazis and war criminals into American organizations such as NATO and NASA.

However, fascism in the U.S. began before Hitler, Mussolini, or WWII. Fascism in this country began with the colonial genocide of the Native Americans. In Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, James Q. Whitman writes: “Indeed as early as 1928 Hitler was speechifying admiringly about the way Americans had ‘gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage’; and during the years of genocide in the early 1940s Nazi leaders made repeated reference to the American conquest of the West when speaking of their own murderous conquests to their east.” Nazis were also inspired by the U.S.’s Jim Crow laws, racist immigration policy, and western colonial eugenic policies such as the one-drop rule.

With these definitions, we can begin to identify fascism as the most reactionary form of imperialism and as a tool of colonialism that is marked by a rabid hatred and war-like mentality with other peoples and countries. It is not the dictatorship of one person, but the dictatorship of the ruling class, banks, and corporations.

We see this mentality with Democrats and Republicans alike when both sides cheer on endless wars and proxy wars either under the guise of humanitarianism or with outright racism. We see this mentality with both liberals and conservatives when they unite in their willingness to overlook genocide for middle-class luxuries. For a time, liberals may be anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-police — until it comes to waging war in so-called “backwards, authoritarian” countries; until their middle- and upper- class lifestyles are threatened.

And here we come full circle: colonialism evolving into imperialism, imperialism devolving into fascism, and fascism being used to maintain and form neo-colonial projects within the U.S. and around the world.

The Problem With Liberalism

The left must also define and name liberalism in the process of redefining the left. In his work Combat Liberalism, Mao Tse-tung mapped out 11 different types of liberal behaviors and astutely wrote that, “Liberalism stems from petty-bourgeois selfishness, it places personal interests first and the interests of the revolution second, and this gives rise to ideological, political and organizational liberalism” (emphasis added by me). Mao emphasizes that leftists must make this distinction: “We stand for active ideological struggle because it is the weapon for ensuring unity within the Party and the revolutionary organizations in the interest of our fight. Every Communist and revolutionary should take up this weapon. But liberalism rejects ideological struggle and stands for unprincipled peace, thus giving rise to a decadent, Philistine attitude and bringing about political degeneration in certain units and individuals in the Party and the revolutionary organizations” (emphasis added by me).

We see Mao’s words play out every election season. Liberals are always willing to stand in unprincipled peace with genocidal warmongers and fascists for the sake of their personal rights. Liberals believe fascism only looks like the Republican party and Trump and fail time and time again to recognize that both the Democrats and the Republicans enact fascism through the support of corporate monopolies and banks; and are willing to even commit genocide and ecocide to ensure imperialist countries get what they need to continue their domination across the globe.

Liberals support every current war and only condemn wars in retrospect, when it entirely too little, too late. They repeat state propaganda on the topic of imperialism verbatim and think themselves nuanced intellectuals. And it hardly matters that their “nuanced ideals” rarely stand up to the test of historical materialism.

Take for example the liberal fallacy of voting as harm reduction. Liberals insisted that voting for Democrats such as Obama and Biden would ease the rate of deportations and immigrant detention camps. Obama even swore he would close Guantanamo Bay. However, history and facts prove that deportations under Obama were higher than Bush, deportations under Biden have been higher than under Trump, and U.S. torture prisons such as Guantanamo Bay are not only still open but have been expanded.

A further example of liberal fallacy is this notion that not voting or voting for a Republican will “usher in fascism.” As we have read here, the very definition of fascism already dispels this theory, but to take it further, let’s name some of the policies and imperial initiatives that have either been ushered in and funded by the Democrats, or are allowed to occur through federal negligence: the overturn of Roe v Wade, the expansion and funding of cop cities in cities with Democrat mayors; the return of child labor in corporations; the criminalization of homelessness; the expansion of anti-LGBTQ laws and legislation, book bans, a continuation of institutional racism; and of course, the genocide of Palestinians and ecocide of the Earth.

These are prime examples of fascism, with genocide marking the height of fascism, not the beginning.

But facts don’t matter to the liberal. A recent poll conducted by Data for Progress showed that only 56% of the Democrats even believe Israel is committing a genocide. Strategy also doesn’t matter to the liberal. White women raised over a million dollars for Kamala Harris at the start of her campaign in 2024 without a single demand, without strategy, and without a care that she doesn’t have a concrete platform and wasn’t even nominated through a primary election process — she was appointed by the corporate fascist state. And even though she was the vice president and actively funded the Palestinian genocide, liberals wanted us to believe that she could be “pushed left,” as if she didn’t have the power to enforce an arms embargo or sanction Israel when she was vice president.

Liberals don’t seem to understand that power does not concede without demand, and that trying to “hold Harris accountable” after she is elected is so beyond foolish, so deeply non-strategic, it’s hardly worth explaining.

Liberals also fail to understand the broader geopolitical issues at play in Palestine. In 1986 speaking at the Senate, Joe Biden proclaimed, “It is the best 3 billion dollars investment we make. Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”

What interest was he speaking of? One of the biggest reasons for modern U.S. imperialist wars: oil and gas. Israel and the U.S. are trying to counter the rise of BRICS and China’s Belt and Road Initiative by creating an economic corridor from India, through Palestine and Saudi Arabia, and into Europe for oil and gas.

Of course, this is far from the first time the U.S. has been willing to bomb a country, overthrow a democratically elected leader, or fund ethnic cleansing for domestic goods. Cobalt for our lithium-ion batteries used in computers, smart phones, and electric cars is extracted through modern-day slavery in Congo. Bananas are cheap and readily available in the U.S. due to The United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Banana) hit squads and a CIA funded coup throughout the 1950s in Guatemala. Coca-Cola has a long history of using paramilitary squads to murder union leaders in Colombia throughout the 1980s and early 2000s.

And these examples are barely scratching the surface.

A Sobering Reality

The American lifestyle is soaked in blood and as has been revealed by the Epstein files, we are being controlled by a satanic cannibals who are kidnapping, torturing, and murdering our children. America is the very definition of a fascist country. America has always maintained permanent second-class citizens. We have never had a decade or a single year with equal rights for everyone in this country. We have never had a decade or a single year where everyone had a livable wage. We have never had a decade or a single year without poverty.

Liberalism in this country was birthed in the blood of fascism, starting with the founding fathers who slaughtered Indigenous people across Turtle Island, stole West Africans and enslaved them, and then had the audacity to wax poetic about “all men are created equal” in the writing of their constitution.

Liberals have always cooperated with fascism and colonialism for their own interests. Fundamentally, liberalism is white supremacy’s right to comfort. Leftists believe that if we can only secure our own rights through endless bloodshed, we do not deserve them. Fundamentally, decolonialism denies the U.S.’s right to exist.

Leftists who study history through the lens of historical materialism understand that the U.S. is the biggest threat to humanity, world peace, and climate solutions around the world. Leftists who study historical materialism know that as long as the U.S. is able to bomb, murder, and torture countries and civilians on behalf of banks and corporations, we will never be free of the legacy of imperialism….that we will never have secured human rights for all citizens in this country…that any U.S. leader that is willing to slaughter humans will never give a damn about domestic policies such as a livable wage, housing for all, or equal rights…that fascism is colonialism turned inwards…that fascism is imperialism come home to roost…and that the U.S. must be overthrown and abolished if we want a habitable future at all.

Ultimately it is our job as anti-imperialist leftists to destroy the war machine, not further legitimize it for false promises of our own comfort and safety.

We do ourselves no favors by pretending liberals and leftists are interchangeable terms, and the longer we labor under that delusion, the more violence we will experience and be responsible for as a country. And we will lose everything… ourselves… our souls… our future.

We do ourselves no favors by pretending we can have nuanced conversations with the monsters of the imperial war machine. Frantz Fanon taught us that colonialism is not a person that can be reasoned with, it is an unthinking violent machine that will only be brought down by the suppression of a greater violence; a violence not for the sake of money and personal interests, but one rooted in survival, in love for the people and the land. For the violence of revolution will never compare to the incalculable and ongoing violence of colonialism, imperialism, and fascism. But until the settler left sees themselves in the same context as we understand Israeli citizens and Israel, we have no business advocating for this kind of revolution.

Decolonization & Land Back

Settlers have colonial biases, and if we do not begin to identify and reckon with those biases, we will continue to recreate our colonial legacy in our organizing, within our relationships, and our revolutions.

A working-class proletariat without decolonization is not enough to heal our colonial legacy on Turtle Island. Right now, land back is only a theoretical slogan for most settler leftists and is not something we have deeply studied or integrated into our politic. To live under “proletariat democratic socialism” while living on stolen land is a continuation of national socialism — the same kind that Hitler and the Nazis committed genocide for. The same kind that Israel has been building since the Nakba of 1948.

While liberals are different from leftists, settler leftists will always be just as susceptible to replicating colonialism and liberalism without addressing this contradiction. We cannot truly advocate for the kind of liberation Palestine is fighting for without returning the land to Indigenous stewardship of Turtle Island.

Our goals as decolonial and anti-imperialist leftists must be to practice the skills needed to sustain offline community relationships, build capacity and practice skills for conflict resolution; practice relationality with comrades; build education curriculum that is relational and done in community and not as an individual pursuit; and most importantly — grapple with our own internal contradictions as settlers on stolen land.

Once we have established these goals and begin the work to rectify the contradiction of settler-colonialism on the left, we will have the prima materia for an organized revolution that can take on the beast of western imperialism.

Reforming empire is impossible. The U.S. has committed too many crimes against humanity to justify its continued existence. Trump is not an aberration— he is America without the masks of freedom and liberty. It is our duty to pull the mask off. Genocide, ecocide, and forever-wars are the natural conclusions of capitalism. It is our responsibility to fight against the death-machine of imperialism— not to beg for crumbs or attempt at reforming a cannibalistic country that threatens all life on earth.

This is the work of our times.

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Recommended Reading:

Decolonial Marxism by Walter Rodney

Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law by James Q. Whitman

Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism by Michael Parenti

The American West and the Nazi East by Carroll P. Kakel III

The Ballot or the Bullet, speech by Malcolm X

Blood in My Eye by George L. Jackson

No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred by Klee Benally

Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought by Sandy Grande

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