Isabel Ringrose explains that imperialism is about more than major countries dominating the smaller ones

Brutal, violent and deadly. That summarises the system behind the Israeli assault on the Palestinians.

This is a genocide unfolding not on the fringes of the world system, but with the full backing and supplies of arms from the world’s major power the US, as well as European nations and Australia.

Many people use the word imperialism to describe the structure that produces such horror—and that’s right.

But the term is used in many different ways. One common usage is to describe the process whereby bigger states bully and oppress smaller ones.

Another is the way great powers seek to extract or control the raw materials and other resources of weaker countries.

Both of those are features of imperialism.

But for Marxists imperialism is a specific phase of capitalism that emerged in the years before the First World War—and led to the most terrible bloodletting in history up to that point.

Imperialism is a product of a system based on ruthless competition for profit. Capitalism sees economic competition between rival companies produce vast sums of wealth, which is concentrated into the hands of a tiny minority at the top of society.

There are now around 2600 billionaires globally who hold $18 trillion between them. The world’s top 1 per cent hold 44.5 per cent of global wealth.

This ruling class and its hangers on are prepared to use force to defend their wealth and privileges if necessary—not just against the workers they exploit but against each other.

Ferocious capitalist rivalry has caused appalling levels of armed conflict and suffering for people across the world.

Imperialism is inseparable from the competition that also develops between rival capitalist states that struggle for domination economically and often militarily.

The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin wrote his short book Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1916 to explain the economic underpinning of the war and the features of a global system of conflict between capitalist states.

He wrote, “Imperialism means the partitioning of the world” and “High monopoly profits for a handful of very rich countries.”

Some at the time thought that the terrible destruction war unleashes, and the chaos it would cause for capitalist profits, meant the rich and powerful would increasingly avoid war.

Contrary to those who argued that bosses and states would cooperate with each other and become a force for peace, Lenin said that any balance of power between the contending imperialists could only be temporary.

When the economic weight of one state or group of states shifted new bloody struggles burst out, destroying any agreements peacefully to divide the world market made previously.

The early stage of capitalism sees relatively small firms competing with each other mainly inside a domestic market.

But the process of competition sees some crush their adversaries. The victors emerge bigger, more powerful and ready to expand internationally.

As they move beyond the home market, they demand their state backs them to ensure smooth profit-making. Sometimes they also want armed force to batter down barriers to trade or to clear out “unhelpful” rulers.

The gunboat blasting away on some foreign shore became a key symbol of the British Empire because of this method.

Imperialism is the fusing of economic and geopolitical competition. And states’ warmongering also reacted back on economic systems.

Shifting balance of power

Fifty years before the First World War Britain was the dominant industrial power. But in the run up to the war, Germany was challenging it as the second biggest economy.

Germany and other states challenged Britain militarily, and economically.

At some points, such as at the Congress of Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century, all the powers could agree to divide up Africa between them—without involving any Africans, of course. But when almost all such sharing of the spoils was exhausted, any new expansion could happen only by taking away from some other state.

No state was content to “freeze” its areas of domination and control. Instead their economic accumulation led to world war.

Victory for Britain and its allies in 1918 pushed back others for a time. But it could not indefinitely block the rise of other European powers like Germany and, in particular, the United States.

As Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote, “During the war, the enormous economic preponderance of the United States was developed and revealed in its full proportions.

“The emergence of that country from the stage of an overseas provincialism suddenly forced Great Britain into second place.”

This mismatch of political structures, economic power and international control was the basis of the Second World War. And that war intensified the rise of the US and its imperialist rival the USSR.

As late as 1939 the US lay at number 19 in the league table of military power—behind Portugal.

But between then and its entry into the war in late 1941, the US increased its armed forces eightfold to 1.5 million people.

A changing world

Imperialism has constant features, but it also shifts and changes in very important ways.

In one phase a “multipolar” world saw six or more imperialist countries slug it out.

After the Second World War, two great blocks confronted each other. The US forced states to bend to its will either through economic pressure or by violence. It fixed elections, eliminated leaders who seemed a threat, and sent troops to ensure domination.

The US, for example, overthrew the Iranian government of Mohammed Mossadeq in 1953 because he nationalised the country’s oil industry.

It fought years of war in Vietnam, murdering 1.5 million Vietnamese people and hundreds of thousands in neighbouring Cambodia.

Meanwhile the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 and backed its friends when they crushed workers’ uprisings.

State capitalism in Russia and capitalism in the US drove each to produce more industrial output and grab more geopolitical influence than the other.

The Cold War between the two blocks at points threatened to become a hot war—fought with nuclear weaponry. Workers and the poor everywhere lost out.

That’s why the political tradition Solidarity comes from put forward the slogan “Neither Washington nor Moscow but International Socialism.”

At the end of the Cold War, the US was the dominant superpower but this was far from the “end of history” as some supporters of neoliberalism predicted. Economic power has continued to shift.

In 1980 Russia produced 14.8 per cent of global manufacturing output, about half the US share of 31.5 per cent. Thirty years later Russia accounted for just 3.2 per cent of world gross domestic product, and the US share had fallen to 22 per cent.

The rise of Japan, China and others has squeezed US economic dominance, so it massively stepped up its military spending to compensate.

But the other problem for imperialism is that its victims have rarely accepted their fate without resistance. People across the world rose against the British, French and Spanish empires, even when they were outgunned by the imperialists.

And eventually they won, either by defeating the empires or by sending enough fear through them to prompt their withdrawal.

The US lost in Vietnam, just as the French had done in an earlier period. Despite mounds of dead and the destruction of a whole society, the US lost in Iraq and then in Afghanistan.

US President Joe Biden humiliatingly withdrew US forces from Afghanistan in order to concentrate on the rivalry with China.

Today the rival imperialist powers of the US and Russia are again fighting each other through a proxy war in Ukraine. Russia is trying to show that it can still act on the world stage.

And, through the NATO military alliance, the US has marshalled its allies to pour in weapons to boost the Ukrainian forces.

Revolt against war

It is possible to win a world without war. But the solution isn’t to back one imperialist against the other—it’s to tackle the system that produces war and competition head on.

That means solidarity and support for the oppressed peoples and nationalities that revolt against imperialism.

This can weaken the imperialist power overseas and also at home, giving more space to revolutionary movements.

It means backing liberation movements and turning the fight against imperialism on our leaders.

Australia is locked into an alliance with the US and backs it whether it comes to killing Palestinians or sending troops and money to Ukraine.

A blow to the ruling class here can mean a blow to imperialists across the world, and be a spark for revolt. The First World War came to an end through revolutions in Russia and then Germany.

This encouraged the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements everywhere. Fighting for a free Palestine seeks to strike a blow to imperialism—smashing Israel and its backers.

That could detonate wider uprisings in the Middle East and internationally. But ridding the world of imperialism also means widening the battle and striking at the very capitalist system that causes war and competition in the first place.

Republished from Socialist Worker UK

The post Why capitalism breeds imperialism and war first appeared on Solidarity Online.

Lesbian relationships in Britain were regulated and silenced for centuries, through the courts and though wider patriarchal structures. In an interview with Anna D’Alton (LSE Review of Books), Caroline Derry speaks about research from her book, Lesbianism and the Criminal Law: Three centuries of regulation in England and Wales (2020) and what the portrayal of same-sex relationships in Agatha Christie’s novels reveals about attitudes towards homosexuality – and specifically lesbianism – in post-war Britain.

Caroline Derry will speak at a hybrid event hosted by LSE Library, Agatha Christie, lesbians, and criminal courts on Thursday 15 February at 6.00 pm.

Q: In your book, Lesbianism and the Criminal Law: Three Centuries of Legal Regulation in England and Wales, you speak of lesbianism being silenced in upper-class British society “because of acute anxieties about female sexual autonomy.” Where did these anxieties stem from? 

Women’s autonomy posed a profound threat to patriarchal structures. Marriage, particularly for elite men, was central to maintaining those structures: transfer of property, inheritance, and control over their household all depended upon it. Legally, the wife’s existence was subsumed in her husband’s, giving him power over her property, actions, and sexuality. This was not only true in the 18th century, when the book begins; it persisted through the 19th century and has only slowly been dismantled over the past century and a half. For example, the legal rule that a man could not be convicted of raping his wife was finally abolished in 1991.

There was anxiety that if women ‘discovered’ lesbianism, both individual marriages and the institution itself would be undermined.

There was anxiety that if women “discovered” lesbianism, both individual marriages and the institution itself would be undermined. That was explicitly stated by lawmakers at various points in history. In 1811, Scottish judge Lord Meadowbank said that “the virtues, the comforts, and the freedom of domestic intercourse, mainly depend on the purity of female manners”.  In 1921, judge and MP Sir Ernest Wild asserted in Parliament that “it is a well-known fact that any woman who indulges in this vice will have nothing whatever to do with the other sex”. And the 1957 Wolfenden Report, which proposed reform of the law on male homosexuality, spoke of lesbianism as damaging to “the basic unit of society”, marriage.

Q: Why do you write in Lesbianism and the Criminal Law that “Patriarchal oppression […] made the criminalisation of lesbianism almost redundant”? 

There were many other ways of regulating women’s lives and relationships that could offer more effective control and less public scandal. These included economic constraints: in the 18th and 19th centuries, married women of all classes had little or no legal control of their own money. Single women without private incomes were little better off. For example, servants’ employers regulated most aspects of their lives under threat of dismissal without a reference.

Social norms set strict limits for unmarried women’s behaviour and gave families a great deal of control over them – although this could sometimes be evaded, as we know from Anne Lister’s diaries! Religious regulation of moral conduct was important, while medicalisation became more significant from the 19th century. Lesbian relationships were pathologised as a symptom of mental illness and the consequences could be awful: an extreme example was the use of clitoridectomy by surgeon Dr Isaac Baker Brown in the 1860s. In the 20th century, “treatments” included aversion therapies and even brain surgery. And until relatively recently, the courts themselves had the power to detain young women in “moral danger”.

Q: Although lesbianism may not have been strictly outlawed, you refer to a “regulation by silencing” of lesbianism within the British court systems. How did this operate? 

Legal silencing was based on the assumption that if women – particularly “respectable”, higher class, white, British women – were not told that lesbianism existed, they probably wouldn’t try it. Eighteenth-century models of sexuality assumed women craved men’s greater “heat”, while 19th-century models (which still influence today’s courts) emphasised women’s passivity and lack of independent desire. It was unlikely that two passive and desireless creatures would discover lesbian sex for themselves.

19th-century models (which still influence today’s courts) emphasised women’s passivity and lack of independent desire.

In the criminal courts, silencing worked in several ways. The most obvious was to avoid criminal prosecutions altogether, because court hearings are public and could be reported in the press. So, there has never been a specific offence criminalising sex between women (unlike sex between men, which was wholly illegal until 1967). However, when a prosecution did seem necessary, silencing could be maintained by choosing an offence which concealed the sexual element of the case. There is a long history of prosecutions for fraud where one partner presented as male (cases relevant to both lesbian and transgender history). In the 18th century, this was supposed financial fraud to obtain a “wife’s” possessions; in the later 19th and 20th centuries, making false statements on official documents. And throughout these periods, women have been brought before magistrates for disorderly behaviour and breach of the peace – although few records survive.

Q: What does analysis of the defamation case Woods and Pirie v. Cumming Gordon (1810-1812) reveal about how legal discourses defined morality in relation to race and class? 

This Scottish case offers a really potent example of those discourses. A half-Scottish, half-Indian teenager, Jane Cumming, told her grandmother Lady Helen Cumming Gordon that her schoolmistresses were having a sexual relationship. Cumming Gordon urged other families to withdraw their daughters, forcing the school to close, and the teachers brought a defamation claim for their lost livelihood.

The court had to wrestle with difficult questions: could two middle-class women of good character have done what was alleged? If not, how did their accuser come to know of such things? At the initial hearings, the judge’s answer was that the story must been invented by a working-class maid. But when witness evidence was heard, it became apparent that the story originated with Jane Cumming. Attention then shifted to her early life in India. The climate, the supposedly immoral culture, her race, or – in a mixture of race and class discourses – the bad influence of “native’” servants were all blamed.

This supposed contrast between Indian immorality and British, Christian morality was no accident. In the early 19th century, there was a shift in justifications of British imperialism.

This supposed contrast between Indian immorality and British, Christian morality was no accident. In the early 19th century, there was a shift in justifications of British imperialism. Greater awareness of the horrors of violence, corruption and exploitation by the East India Company made it difficult to present their activities as legitimate trading. Instead, a moral justification was claimed: that Indian people needed to be rescued from iniquity by the imposition of superior British law and standards, exemplified by virtuous British womanhood. Many of the judges and witnesses in this case had connections to India, so it is unsurprising that these discourses made a particularly powerful appearance here.

Q: What were the legal implications of the 1957 Wolfenden report for homosexual activity in Britain? What did the report (or its omissions) reveal about attitudes towards women’s sexuality? 

The Wolfenden Report recommended partially decriminalising sex between men, but barely acknowledged sex between women. The few mentions implied that lesbianism was “less libidinous” and thus less of a threat to public order. That was important because politically, equality for gay men through full decriminalisation was not attainable at that time. Wolfenden therefore took the pragmatic approach of silencing lesbianism as far as possible, to avoid the question of why women were treated differently by the law, and focusing on arguments specific to male homosexuality. It was successful: Parliament eventually implemented the recommendations in the Sexual Offences Act 1967.

Wolfenden […] took the pragmatic approach of silencing lesbianism as far as possible, to avoid the question of why women were treated differently by the law

Nonetheless, the Report was a watershed event in the legal regulation of lesbianism. Until then, the law had treated male and female sexuality as very different things. Wolfenden introduced the term “homosexuality” into law, and lesbianism became seen as “female homosexuality”. Combined with the Report’s characterisation of lesbians as less sexual than gay men, this meant that lesbianism was treated as a lesser variant of male homosexuality – an attitude that has never gone away.

Q: Was it remarkable that Agatha Christie included or suggested homosexuality in her novels? 

Yes and no. These were not issues that were generally discussed in polite conversation. At the same time, lesbian (and gay) people were a fact of life, even if not directly acknowledged. In 1950, most people knew of women living quietly living together like Miss Hinchcliffe and Miss Murgatroyd in A Murder is Announced. Christie walked a careful line in that book, portraying an intimate and deeply loving relationship but showing nothing explicitly sexual about it.

By 1971, when [Christie] wrote of one woman’s love for another in Nemesis, it was no longer possible to directly silence lesbianism in law or society.

And of course, Christie was a rather more daring writer than people often realise: it’s unfair to treat her as a narrowly conservative author of formulaic novels. By 1971, when she wrote of one woman’s love for another in Nemesis, it was no longer possible to directly silence lesbianism in law or society. But Christie was in any event happy to engage with difficult issues in her work, even quite taboo ones like child murderers.

Q: What insights do these portrayals provide into the criminal justice system’s attitudes to lesbianism in post-war England? 

Christie’s novels reflect wider middle-class attitudes at the specific times they were written, so they offer insights that we can’t get from court reports alone. They also come from a woman’s perspective rather than that of the elite men who mostly made the law, and gender does make a difference here. Men were convinced that respectable women did not know of such things, but women didn’t necessarily agree!

The novels reveal how the extent to which the courts were keeping pace with wider societal attitudes and understandings.

In particular, the novels reveal how the extent to which the courts were keeping pace with wider societal attitudes and understandings. If we look at medical, psychological and sexological work on women’s same-sex relationships in post-war Britain, the courts seem hopelessly old-fashioned in comparison. But Christie’s books show us that outside expert circles, attitudes were indeed decades behind the latest science. In other words, the courts were reflecting and contributing to mainstream opinions, not falling behind them.

Note: This interview gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credit: A still from the the episode, “A Murder is Announced” of the BBC Miss Marple series (1984 to 1992), adapted from Agatha Christie’s novels, featuring Joan Hickson as Miss Marple (left) and Paola Dionisotti as Miss Hinchcliffe (right). This image is reproduced under the “Fair Dealing” exception to UK Copyright law.

Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

https://medium.com/media/93b896568a5fd9adb332188674fbbe45/href

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So it turns out the IDF has been running a Telegram channel featuring homemade snuff films in which Gazans are brutally murdered by Israeli forces, captioned with celebrations of the gore and pain therein like “Burning their mother… You won’t believe the video we got! You can hear their bones crunch.” The IDF had previously denied any association with the channel, but Haaretz now reports that it was directly run by an IDF psychological warfare unit.

This is one of those many, many times where Israel is so awful that at first you’re not sure what you’re looking at. You think you must be misreading the report. Then you read it again and go “Oh wow, that’s SO much worse than I would have guessed.”

However bad you think Israel is, you can always be sure that information will come out later that proves it’s even worse.

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Tucker Carlson has been spotted in Moscow, generating speculation that he’s there to interview President Vladimir Putin, and the liberal commentariat are losing their minds about it.

There’s no valid basis for westerners to object to Putin being interviewed by a western pundit. There’s no moral basis because Israeli officials have had unfettered access to a wildly sympathetic western press throughout four months of administering an active genocide. There’s no basis on the grounds that it hurts US information interests, because that would be admitting that US information interests depend on hiding information from the public about matters as basic as what a foreign leader thinks about his own actions, and essentially acknowledging that the western media are supposed to function as propaganda services for US military and intelligence agencies.

Every possible objection is also a confession about what the US empire and its media actually are.

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Americans: healthcare please

US government: Sorry did you say bomb Syria, Iraq and Yemen in facilitation of an active genocide?

Americans: no, healthcare

US government: Alright you drive a hard bargain but let’s go bomb Syria, Iraq and Yemen in facilitation of an active genocide.

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Biden isn’t technically lying when he says the US does not seek conflict in the middle east. The US seeks DOMINATION in the middle east, and would prefer to receive that domination willingly from submissive subjects. Only when middle easterners refuse to submit is there conflict.

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The US has never done anything good for the middle east. All it’s brought to the region is a bunch of murderous military operations and the nonstop murderous military operation that is the state of Israel.

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Setting up a bunch of military bases in countries on the other side of the planet and then going to war with anyone who tries to kick them out is pretty much the exact opposite of how a sane and ethical military would be used.

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US foreign policy is essentially one big long war against disobedience. Bombing, regime changing, starving and destabilizing any population anywhere on earth who dares to insist on its own self-sovereignty instead of letting itself be absorbed into the folds of the global empire.

They call different parts of it the Israel-Hamas War, the Iraq War, the War on Terror, but really it’s all the same war: the war on disobedience. One long operation to brutalize the global population into obedience and submission, year after year, decade after decade.

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When it comes to Israel the main difference between liberals and conservatives is that conservatives support Israel because they like it when Muslims get murdered while liberals support Israel because mumble mumble something something antisemitism Israel has a right to defend itself but we have serious concerns about the humanitarian HEY LOOK OVER THERE IT’S TRUMP!

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If the Gaza genocide had happened pre-internet it would’ve been a fringe issue hardly anyone knew about. The western press would have been able to get away with exponentially more cover-ups of Israeli crimes, western politicians would’ve been able to get away with way more lies about what’s really happening, Israeli officials would have been far less careful about their statements of genocidal intent in their own media, and the IDF would’ve been vastly more blatant and obvious about its extermination campaign.

It’s only because normal people are getting eyes into what’s really happening that this issue is subject to worldwide outcry and condemnation that has placed the empire on the back foot. The political/media class never does the right thing because it wants to, it does the right thing when it is forced to by normal human beings with healthy consciences. The fate of humanity rests on the ability of ordinary people to freely circulate truth.

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We’ve got a podcast coming out soon. Stay tuned.

________________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

https://medium.com/media/0a36cdbeb89dfdc1773a34bb40cd9b58/href

If you’re among those who have only just begun paying attention to US foreign policy and western media bias in light of Israel’s destruction of Gaza and Biden’s act of war against Yemen, it’s important to understand that none of the depravity you’re seeing is new. The lies. The insane double standards. The murderousness. The western political/media class always does this.

Every war the US involves itself in is always facilitated by lies promulgated in one voice by the official government in Washington and by the “independent” “free” press (actually propaganda services) of the western world. They deceived the world about Ukraine. They deceived the world about Yemen. They deceived the world about Syria, Libya and Iraq. There are always, always lies, obfuscations and manipulations involved in marketing a new war to the public, or in hiding its involvement in foreign wars from public attention.

All of this manipulation and deceit is necessary to hide the fact that the US-centralized empire is the most tyrannical power structure on this planet. And make no mistake, it is an empire. Washington serves as the hub of an undeclared empire comprised of alliances, partnerships, assets, public deals and secret agreements which knit a large number of nations together into what functions as a single power structure with regard to international affairs.

Most of the beneficiaries of this power structure reside in the west, or global north, while the most exploited and abused victims of this power structure tend to reside in the east, or global south. There are all sorts of rules and regulations and narratives and justifications for why this all happens the way it happens, but if you mentally “mute” the soundtrack on the verbal overlay and just look at what’s actually happening, what you will see is the lion’s share of the world’s wealth and resources moving northward and westward from populations of a darker average skin tone toward populations of a paler average skin tone. Wherever that movement is hindered, diverted, threatened or inconvenienced, you will see western war machinery moving southward and eastward to get it back on the desired track.

Most major international conflicts can be understood as either direct or indirect efforts by the US empire to shore up planetary domination, which are often met with resistance by populations who wish to retain their sovereignty. Much of this conflict happens in the middle east because that’s where the world gets a lot of its oil from, with US-aligned nations like Israel and Saudi Arabia frequently serving as the frontline for hostilities with non-US-aligned nations like Iran and Syria as well as non-US-aligned forces like Hezbollah, Ansarallah and Hamas.

This struggle for US planetary hegemony is disguised by the western political/media class as something other than what it is, because you can’t allow the public in a democratic nation to understand clearly that their government is on the side of evil. They’ll frame it as a US-led international coalition to liberate a nation from a tyrannical dictator. As a humanitarian intervention to protect human rights. As support for Israel’s right to defend itself. As protection of freedom of navigation in the Red Sea. But what’s actually happening is the world’s most powerful and murderous power structure killing human beings in western Asia in order to secure control over a crucial resource.

You see this all over the world against nations which refuse to allow themselves to be absorbed into the US-centralized power structure like North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba, with China being by far the strongest of these and Russia a distant second. And you will notice that you have heard every nation I just mentioned cast in a very negative light by the western press over the years. This is not a coincidence.

You don’t need to believe anything I’m saying on faith. If you just keep in mind what I said and start watching the patterns for yourself while seeking out the truth day by day, you will see it for yourself. You will see the same patterns emerging over and over again, year after year. Over and over again you will see the US and the states that are aligned with it acting with extreme aggression toward non-US-aligned powers in ways that benefit the US-centralized power structure, and you will see the western press deceiving the world about what’s happening. The next Official Bad Guy you see dominating western press coverage on international affairs will be a non-US-aligned power, and if you apply diligent research and critical thinking you will find that they are not presenting an accurate picture of what’s happening.

Just keep learning and studying the patterns with open curiosity and self-honesty, and the picture will inevitably become clear to you. And then you will clearly see who’s really driving the bulk of the violence and disorder in our world.

_______________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

Featured image via Adobe Stock.