I don’t want to hear about how your Wehrmacht soldiers are just following orders. Fuck the US Army and fuck the troops, too. Death to AmeriKKKa, death to “Israel”, death to the west.
I don’t want to hear about how your Wehrmacht soldiers are just following orders. Fuck the US Army and fuck the troops, too. Death to AmeriKKKa, death to “Israel”, death to the west.
The struggle against imperialism and neocolonism is class struggle.
On one side is the international bourgeoise and national bourgeoises (of many countries), on the other side is the national bourgeoise (of some countries), the proletariat, peasantry and indigenous populations.
(The class conflict is most complicated than that but I’m just making a point)
I appreciate the clarification, but the framing still conflates two distinct phases of struggle. My original point wasn’t that anti-imperialism exists outside class analysis, but that in neo-colonial conditions, the form class struggle takes must be strategically sequenced. The slogan “eat the rich” implies an immediate, undifferentiated domestic class war, which in practice fractures the broad coalition needed to first break imperialist domination. When foreign capital, military bases, and debt traps dictate a nation’s political economy, the principal contradiction lies between the oppressed nation and international imperialism, not yet between the domestic proletariat and the national bourgeoisie who may also be constrained by that same imperialist structure.
This is why popular fronts with patriotic sections of the national bourgeoisie are a, but a materialist application of class politics. As Chairman Mao argued in On the Policy of the Chinese Communist Party in the Anti-Japanese United Front,
This is a tactical necessity to isolate the primary enemy. To elevate the domestic “rich” as the immediate target while imperialist powers actively undermine sovereignty is to misidentify the principal contradiction and risk strengthening the external oppressor.
The enemy of our enemy is our friend, the national bourgeoisie, when objectively opposed to imperialist control, can be a conditional ally in the first stage of revolution.
Only after national liberation is secured (when the external fetters are broken and the people control their own state apparatus) can the internal class struggle proceed to its decisive phase. At that point, the proletariat, having built its strength and consciousness through the anti-imperialist struggle, can confront domestic exploiting classes without the distortion of foreign interference. As Chairman Mao put it in On New Democracy,
Absolutely. Even outside of neo-colonial conditions I would argue this. Revolution is not a one and done deal, nor can any class afford to fight a war on all fronts against everyone at once.
Not only that, but “rich” is a poor term that cannot be properly defined. The proletariat must be clear that the class boundaries lie in the ownership of industrial and mercantile/financial capital, not in some tax bracket.
However, there is a situation in which it makes sense for the loser classes to depose the upper classes even under colonial conditions. That’s if the national ruling class is too incompetent or collaborationist. I believe the overthrowing of the Qing dynasty can be such an example. Of course, this does not apply to modern day Iran.