Anti-Imperialism in the Core?: Dilemmas of Internationalism Before and Beyond Ecomodernism

What the paper says

Abstract This essay tracks a persistent dilemma for anti-imperial thought: that dominant sections of the working class in the industrialized core throughout the 20th century have endorsed imperial domination in the expectation of benefits from those arrangements. I call this social contract between core elites and dominant sectors of the core working class the “imperial bargain.” The basic contours of this imperial bargain have been laid out in a century of writings by anti-imperial feminist, pan-Africanist, and Marxian dependency thinkers (non-exclusive categories). Drawing specifically on the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois and other thinkers on US racial capitalism, I show how the dynamics of capital accumulation and “class” have been shaped in fundamental respects by the imperatives of empire, patriarchy, (settler) colonialism, and white supremacy. I argue that ecomodernist thinkers have long refused to acknowledge how capitalism is underpinned by the imperial bargain. Since the 1970s, the imperial bargain has fractured: empire remains but the material benefits that once flowed to favored sections of the working classes have been systematically eroded in favor of an even more heavily oligarchic political economy. As such, I show how ecomodernist thinkers from both the left and the right today are best understood as seeking in futile ways to repair this fractured imperial bargain. Rejecting their reasoning as both empirically wrong and (in the case of the left) politically self-defeating, I issue a call instead for an anti-imperial internationalism in the core that grapples directly with both the legacies of the imperial bargain and its contemporary obsolescence.