Lenin identified imperialism and its corollary of anti-imperialism as the principal contradiction of the global capitalist system in his day. This remains the case today, as evidenced in further monopolisation and concentration trends, labour and tax arbitrage, war and market creation and control, and the distinctive role of finance capital as it drives an ultimately suicidal and ecocidal logic of destruction.
New sectors that may start with some level of competition ultimately end in a handful of companies dominating. Economic dominance leads to political dominance, as even a cursory glance at key US government figures demonstrates, or closer to home, exemplified by the disproportionate number of landlords in the Oireachtas.
The core focus of communists, therefore, must be the anti-imperialist struggle and avoiding often deliberate and manufactured, or at least hyped-up, distractions: keeping focussed on the long struggle at hand. This long struggle means showing solidarity and support to those people at the sharpest edge of the battle, like in Palestine and West Africa, supporting global alliances and blocs that weaken US imperialist hegemony and developing plans for delinking Ireland from the imperialist system in a sustainable way that will win allies and support at home and abroad.
The March 2025 issue of Monthly Review contained an article with a clear contemporary definition of Imperialism in the Leninist tradition, by Gabriel Rockhill:
I mean “imperialism” in the most expansive sense, as a process of establishing and enforcing systematic value transfers from certain regions of the world, namely the Global South, to others (the Global North), through the extraction of natural resources, the use of free or cheap labor, the creation of markets for offloading commodities, and more. This socioeconomic process has been the driving force behind the underdevelopment of the majority of the planet and the hyper-development of the imperial core, including its industries of knowledge production. Within the leading imperialist countries, this has given rise to an imperial superstructure, which is comprised of the politico-legal apparatus of the state and a material system of cultural production, circulation, and consumption that we can call, following Brecht, “the cultural apparatus.” The dominant industries of knowledge production in the imperial core are part of the cultural apparatus of the leading imperialist states.
We must seek to disrupt this system and bring unity to the maximum number of workers and people into struggle against this system. This means focusing on those issues that unite the maximum number of working people and expose the sharpest contradictions of the system. We also must be wary of deliberate distractions and ideological warfare by the ruling class who seek to divide and confuse.
It’s worth remembering that the Rockefeller oligarchs in the ‘60s were significant funders of “Western” Marxism as a deliberate tactic to move Marxism and socialists/communists away from an anti-imperialist strategy as the CIA also funded splinter communist parties to divide the movement. Today, liberal ideology, identity politics, culture wars, etc. are all used as distractions for socialists building a unified anti-imperialist strategy and bloc, and to sow division within the people.
Tech oligarchs and politicians use their power and control to hype up arguments and conflicts that either don’t exist or affect tiny percentages of people so that unity cannot be built while financially benefiting from the clicks, comments and votes.
In an Irish context we need to demonstrate clearly the connection between the housing crisis and global financialisaton and seek to delink the housing system of provision and ownership from imperialism. We need to demonstrate that the only way to secure decent housing for all is remove it from the profit economy. In our national finances where taxation is so reliant on being a financial conduit in the unequal exchange from the global south to global north, we need to demonstrate the fragility of this reliance and the real consequences it has – for example in the use of Shannon as a genocide facilitator for Israel via the US – and delink taxation and public service funding from this exploitative process.
We need to gradually wean the economy off its addiction to US MNCs. In healthcare, we need to clearly demonstrate to working people that the only way to guarantee decent health care from birth to grave is through a publicly funded universal all-Ireland national service and that the double apartheid system currently functioning is starving the public service, leaving working people dying to save the wealthier 50% who have private coverage.
In short, the Communist Party needs to continue its efforts to demonstrate to working people the direct link between the many crises we face and the imperialist system here in Ireland, and to continue to show solidarity to those at the violent end of anti-imperialist struggle while avoiding the distractions that are presented on a daily basis.
