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In a world context marked by the war in Ukraine, the genocide in Palestine, the return of Donald Trump to the White House and the emergence of a new Right, the debates on war and imperialism, notions that seemed to have been filed in the drawer of memories by a large part of critical theories, are coming back to the forefront. But what do we mean when we speak of imperialism, and what is the relationship between imperialism and capitalism? What is the centrality of the anti-imperialist struggle for socialist strategy in the 21st century? On all these issues, there are important divisions on the Left. In what follows, we will focus in particular on some recent debates. On the one hand, there are those who argue that the Marxist theory of imperialism is obsolete, either because of the transformations of capitalism at the global level, or because it has always been wrong. For Vivek Chibber, editor of Catalyst Magazine and other authors of Jacobin Magazine, it isn’t necessary to build an “anti-imperialist Left,” but the key is to develop “class struggle at home” around “bread and butter” demands, namely, the elementary economic demands of the working class. From another angle, there are those who emphasize the inequalities between the “Global South” and the “Global North” while considering China and Russia as new axes of support for the struggle against imperialism. While the former seeks to recreate a kind of “welfare chauvinism,” the latter “Global South” positions denounce Western imperialism, but align themselves with other powers with strong imperialist traits. In the following, we will address some of these debates, in a counterpoint with Vivek Chibber and John Bellamy Foster. The first position is the one defended by the editors of Jacobin magazine in the United States, a magazine linked to the DSA (Democratic Socialist of America). In several articles, such as here and here , Matías Maiello polemicizes with the recovery of Karl Kautsky’s work by these authors and points out that there is no struggle for socialism without anti-imperialism. The debate is not secondary. In an interview published in the Jacobin Review , Vivek Chibber argued that the theory of imperialism developed by Lenin in his classic pamphlet “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” was wrong. For Chibber, as far as this question is concerned, the “Leninist legacy produced much damage” in the Marxist left. His arguments can be synthesized as follows: 1) imperialism must be distinguished from capitalism, to confuse them would be a serious mistake; 2) the idea that capitalism entered a “new stage” characterized by monopolies is wrong; 3) the thesis that the confrontation between “rich countries” would be a constant in the following decades was “spectacularly wrong”; 4) Kautsky was right with his theory of ultra-imperialism when he “predicted that what there would be would be cooperation between capitalist countries, not competition”; 5) Lenin’s errors led to a mistaken position on “bourgeois revolutions” in countries like China and others, which gave rise to support for “anti-feudal” or “anti-imperialist” bourgeois nationalist sectors; and 6) there never existed a “labor aristocracy” in the central countries. Chibber artificially separates imperialism from capitalism , as if the former referred only to the “aggressions” of some nations over others, and the latter to economic or class relations. On that basis, he concludes that anti-imperialism means nothing more than “collective action in your country against militarism and aggression by your government against other countries, and convincing your working class that its material interests are tied to the de-escalation of conflict and the demilitarization of its own state.” We will return to these conclusions, but first let us address their foundations. The Marxist theory of imperialism, developed by Lenin, Luxemburg, and Trotsky, among others, is precisely counter to the idea that imperialism was a “militaristic excess” of some states, which could be contained by diplomatic means, as if wars between powers or colonial plunder were not inscribed in the tendencies of capitalism itself. In this sense, taking up the studies of Hilferding and other Marxist authors on financial capital, Lenin defined that the transformation of “free competition” capitalism into monopoly capitalism had given rise to a new stage of development of the capitalist system, its imperialist stage. And that this opened the way to an epoch marked by the tendency to wars, crises, and also revolutions. Chibber, like other authors, centered his criticisms of Lenin’s theory of imperialism on the definitions of his classic pamphlet “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” focused above all on the economic dynamics of monopoly capitalism and on the inter-imperialist contradictions. While authors like Bellamy Foster rightly point out that to “understand the complex theoretical and historical issues involved” in this theory, one must put this work “in relation to his entire body of writings on imperialism from 1916-1920,” where the political elements and the question of national oppression have much more weight. In the Second International, the debate on imperialism divided the waters between Marxists and revisionists. At the beginning of the 20th century, the sector headed by Bernstein came to propose that there was a progressive, civilizing colonialism, and that there could even be a “socialist colonialism.” These positions were not in the majority and were rejected by different socialist congresses, which approved internationalist resolutions in the face of the possibility of the outbreak of a world war. At that time, Kautsky was still in the left-wing of the International. However, the chauvinist positions were becoming increasingly more pervasive in the leadership of the social democratic parties, gaining a foothold among the trade union bureaucracies and the labor aristocracy. From 1910 onwards, Kautsky moved towards centrist positions that diluted the struggle against imperialism and conciliated with the reformist and social chauvinist wing. Kautsky–as Chibber now proposes–in his analysis of imperialism, separated militarist tendencies from economic tendencies. He argued that capitalist expansion into new regions could be carried out by violent as well as peaceful means. He asserted that “imperialist methods,” which involved clash and confrontation between powers, were more a hindrance than a foothold for capitalist development, so that the capitalists themselves would seek ways to “coordinate” on an international scale. On this basis, Kautsky formulated the theory of “ultra-imperialism.” Just as capitalism had given rise to monopolies, these could give rise to the “cartelization” of the foreign policy of the states. That is to say, a phase that would not be marked by geopolitical and military confrontation between powers, but by their unification in a “Holy Alliance.” Remarkably, the article in which Kautsky formulated these ideas was published in September 1914, a few weeks after the outbreak of the First World War. We need hardly recall that what followed was not anything like greater concord among the states, but several years of imperialist carnage. The brutal tendencies towards military clashes between powers would explode again on a new scale in the Second World War. Yet, even after the whole 20th century passed with two world wars and was plagued by regional wars, Chibber affirms that Lenin was wrong, since from the 1950s onwards, the world had become “more Kautskyan.” However, in the postwar years, what there was was not an “ultra-imperialist” tendency toward harmony among the powers, but a “ Pax Americana” imposed after the defeat of the Axis powers (with the end of the war being a huge demonstration of imperial power with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). The post-war “boom,” which followed the previous enormous destruction of productive forces, was not the beginning of a new “ultra-imperialist” epoch as Kautsky announced. The pact with the Stalinist bureaucracy at Yalta and Potsdam allowed imperialism to avoid the danger of revolution in the capitalist center for an entire period (not so in the periphery) and to postpone the confrontations between powers. But that would not last forever. That post-war order was questioned on all its flanks at the end of the 1960s, with a profound workers’ and popular upsurge in the central countries, the capitalist periphery, and the countries behind the “iron curtain” (which was combined with the economic crisis from 1973 onwards). The defeats and deviations of these processes gave way to the neoliberal period, the leap in the internationalization of value chains, and the formation of an Atlanticist global order from which all major powers benefited for several decades. Now, was this the proof that Kautsky was right, that as a result of the internationalization of capital a harmonization of the interests of the powers had been achieved in an “ultra-imperialism”? The disputes between the imperialist states were partially suspended during the period of “globalization,” even with the formation of supranational structures such as the WTO, the European Union, or free trade agreements between regional blocs. But that does not mean that contradictions were eliminated. Chibber confuses here American hegemony (undisputed for a long period) with the historical overcoming of the imperialist epoch. And although the tendencies to clash between powers were largely contained since the second post-war period (there was no new world war), the current crisis of the neoliberal order poses its actualization in a violent way. Chibber’s timing for the defense of the thesis of “ultra-imperialism” does not seem much better than that of Kautsky. At present, it is not difficult to recognize the leap towards greater conflagrations between rival powers, with the return of war to European territory. Mainstream analysts write in the latest Foreign Affairs Magazine about a dynamic towards what they call a “total war,” with Donald Trump’s upcoming presidency adding uncertainty to the global outlook. Imperialism’s warmongering tendencies are also on display in the Middle East, with the brutal genocide in Palestine, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, and Israel’s escalation with Iran. In Gaza, Netanyahu has deployed old-school colonial violence with state-of-the-art weapons provided by the U.S., Germany, and others. Now, Israel’s massacres and the complicity of Western powers have generated a wave of outrage and solidarity with the Palestinian cause not seen for decades. In the streets and on university campuses in the U.S., UK, France, and Spain, a massive youth movement emerged in support of the Palestinian people and against Zionist crimes. Hundreds of thousands of young people point the finger at their own imperialist governments as accomplices of genocide. In the United States, this led many to break politically with the Democratic Party and “ Genocide Joe,” and refuse to support Kamala Harris as the “lesser evil,” as Bernie Sanders or Alexandra Ocasio Cortez called for. Those who believe that the socialist Left in the U.S. can recreate itself with one foot in and one foot out of the Democratic Party, like Jacobin ‘s editors and DSA leaders suggest, are opposed to fighting for an anti-imperialist Left. The theory of ultra-imperialism served Kautsky to reconcile positions with the chauvinist wing of social democracy, which closed ranks with its own bourgeoisie in the war. It enables Chibber to continue to harbor illusions that the Democrats can be a progressive alternative, should they decide to take up the “bread and butter” agenda to seduce the working class. Let us now return to Chibber’s conclusions about what “anti-imperialism” means. In the interview with Jacobin , he states that it would be to push for “collective action in your country against your government’s militarism and aggression against other countries, and convincing your working class that their material interests are bound up with the de-escalation of conflict and the demilitarization of their own state.” In other words, it would be a matter of demanding, on a national level, that less money be allocated to military budgets, to be reinvested in schools and hospitals. This policy, while partially correct, when considered in isolation from a consistent anti-imperialist program, has enormous contradictions. In the first place, it seeks to obtain partial improvements for a sector of the working class in the central countries, without questioning the imperialist oppression of the semicolonial and dependent peoples. In the United States, paradoxically, it has been Donald Trump who has questioned the billionaire funds destined to the war in Ukraine, demagoguing that these funds should be dedicated to “making America great again.” Second, he generates illusions that militaristic tendencies and greater clashes between powers can be moderated with a little union pressure. And, finally, he believes that all of this would be possible with a Democratic government, if it were to adopt some old-fashioned social-democratic policies. In a recent article, John Bellamy Foster puts forward in a very suggestive way that: It is a sign of the depth of the structural crisis of capital in our time that not since the onset of the First World War and the dissolution of the Second International — during which nearly all of the European social democratic parties joined the inter-imperialist war on the side of their respective nation-states — has the split on imperialism on the left taken on such serious dimensions. He finds that “the gap between the views of imperialism held by the Western left and those of revolutionary movements in the Global South is wider than at any time in the last century.” He goes on to list some of the (contradictory) ideas that characterize what he defines as a Eurocentric Left. These include the denial of national oppression by imperialism and the idea that imperialism “is simply a political policy of aggression of one state against another” as we have already seen in the case of Chibber. This is also often accompanied by the justification of a “humanitarian imperialism aimed at protecting human rights.” He also notes the idea that “imperialist rivalry and exploitation between nations has been displaced by global class struggles within a fully globalized transnational capitalism,” or, in other occasions, the idea that “economic imperialism has been ‘reversed’ with the Global East/South now exploiting the Global West/North.” In the article, Bellamy Foster traces various debates on the Marxist Left about imperialism in the 20th century, from the Second and Third Internationals, to the elaborations of dependency theory, world-system theory, the cultural turn of the post-colonial left, and the more contemporary debates on global value chains and uneven development. He rightly points out that at the heart of all Eurocentric positions is the negation of Engels’ and Lenin’s theses on the labor aristocracy. In response, he responds that “existence of a labor aristocracy at some level is difficult to deny on any realistic basis.” As an example, he points out that the AFL-CIO leadership has historically been linked to the military-industrial complex in the United States and “has worked with the CIA throughout the post-Second World War era to repress progressive unions throughout the Global South, backing the most exploitative regimes.” As part of the “abandonment of the theory of imperialism on the left,” Bellamy Foster mentions among others, Empire by Toni Negri and Michael Hardt; David Harvey’s elaborations on the so-called accumulation by dispossession or the positions of Vivek Chibber, to which we refer. In particular, he argues that Chibber’s attack on the concept of monopoly capital shows “his ignorance of the enormous growth in recent decades in the concentration and centralization of capital associated with successive merger waves, leading to the continuing augmentation of monopoly power, along with the centralization of finance.” Now, while Chibber and other sectors of the Left deny the existence of imperialism from an abstract definition of class, Bellamy Foster tends to make the national question absolute in the periphery, diluting the struggle for class independence in what he calls “the Global South.” Vivek Chibber considers that the “Leninist legacy” has been detrimental to the Left, because in the case of revolutions in the periphery it meant support for the national bourgeoisies, with the idea of “anti-feudal” or “anti-imperialist revolutions.” One of the examples he gives is the support of the Chinese Communist Party to Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist party, the Kuomintang, during the Revolution of 1925-28. However, what he omits is that there was no continuity between the Marxist theses on imperialism and the policy of Stalinism: the latter took up Menshevik stagism, subordinating the workers vanguard to the leadership of the reactionary Chinese bourgeoisie, which led to the defeat of the revolution. The important lessons on the Chinese Revolution and the opposition to that stagist orientation were the basis for the generalization of the Theory of the Permanent Revolution by Leon Trotsky. For his part, Bellamy Foster correctly questions Chibber for denying the national oppression imposed by imperialism on the “third world” or “Global South.” However, he does so by aligning himself politically with the national bourgeoisies (as in his defense of Chavism) and with China, which is another bloc with a strong dynamic of imperialist development. On this particular issue, he deploys several arguments. On the one hand, he argues that it is wrong to present “the People’s Republic of China as an imperialist (and straightforwardly capitalist) power in the same sense as the United States, disregarding the role of “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and the whole Chinese road to development, as well as processes of unequal exchange.” He goes on to state that China’s foreign policy is geared towards “promoting the self-determination of nations, while opposing bloc geopolitics and military interventions. Beijing’s threefold Global Security Initiative, Global Development Initiative, and Global Civilization Initiative together constitute the leading proposals for world peace in our era.” For Bellamy Foster it would be necessary to stand politically with the “underdeveloped nations” (he includes China among them) against imperialism. He points out that this would not mean “abandoning the class struggle in the core capitalist nations themselves, quite the contrary.” But what about class struggle in the nations of the “global south”? What he proposes is a new stagism of the 21st century, as if imperialism could be confronted without fighting the national bourgeoisies in Latin America, Asia and Africa. It is as if there were a progressive way out of imperialist warmongering, on the basis of the proposals “for world peace” of the authoritarian Chinese government. A Left that leaves aside the struggle against imperialism, as Chibber proposes, is evidently contrary to the increasingly warlike tendencies of the world situation and also of the international movement in solidarity with Palestine. But the struggle against imperialism and capitalism are intertwined, so it is not possible to recreate a socialist and anti-imperialist perspective without class independence. To deepen these debates seems more and more necessary. Originally published in Spanish in La Izquierda Diario . Translated by Sou Mi. Capitalism China Imperialism Karl KautskyIs Fortis Stock a Buy for Its Dividend Yield?

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Chandigarh, Dec 22 (PTI) Punjab has sought Rs 1,000 crore Central assistance to strengthen its police infrastructure and security efforts in the border districts, among a slew of other demands, at a pre-budget meeting with Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman held in Jaisalmer, an official statement said on Sunday. Industrial incentives similar to those provided to Jammu and Kashmir and the neighbouring hill states were also sought to support the MSMEs in Punjab's border and sub-mountainous regions, a Punjab government statement said on Sunday. Also Read | Suicide Attempt at Sovabazar Metro Station: Kolkata Metro Services Partially Disrupted After Man Jumps in Front of Moving Train. Quoting Punjab Finance Minister Harpal Singh Cheema, the statement said the state has strongly raised the demand to restore NABARD's Short-Term Seasonal Agricultural Operations (ST-SAO) limit to Rs 3,041 crore, from the reduced limit of Rs 1,100 crore, for FY 2024-25. Cheema said this restoration is vital to prevent farmers from turning to moneylenders, aligning with the 'Sahakar se Samriddhi' principle. Also Read | BPSC Students Protest: Tejashwi Yadav Meets Protesters, Writes to Bihar CM Nitish Kumar for Exams Cancellation (Watch Video). Several states raised this issue which was discussed at length, he added. For road connectivity under PM Gati Shakti in Rajpura, the Punjab government has requested Rs 100 crore to construct a 5.6 km long, 45 mt wide approach road connecting NH-44 to the integrated manufacturing cluster (IMC) in Rajpura. This funding is essential for the timely completion of road construction and the successful implementation of the industrial cluster, Cheema said. Referring to the Vande Bharat train connecting Amritsar with New Delhi, Punjab government requested for a similar train to connect Bathinda, Punjab's agricultural and commercial hub, with the national capital to ensure seamless connectivity for the Malwa region of the state. Cheema also proposed financial support to address crop residue management in Punjab, saying despite providing 1.45 lakh crop residue management (CRM) machines since 2018, high operational costs remain a challenge. The Punjab government has proposed an incentive of Rs 2,500 per acre, with Rs 2,000 per acre from the Centre and Rs 500 per acre from the state, as per the statement. Out of the total estimated cost of Rs 2,000 crore for this initiative, the government of India has been requested to provide Rs 1,600 crore as budgetary support, the statement said. Cheema also requested the Centre for a special budgetary allocation for paddy diversification, saying diversifying cultivation across 10 lakh hectares could result in substantial savings of more than Rs 30,000 crore. The Punjab government has proposed allocating a portion of these savings towards a comprehensive diversification package, Cheema said. For the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Gramin) scheme, Cheema proposed enhancing the grant from Rs 1.2 lakh to Rs 2.5 lakh per beneficiary to accommodate rising construction costs. The minister also highlighted the need to release pending funds under the National Health Mission (NHM) amounting to Rs 1,119 crore, besides requesting an increase in the honorarium for cook-cum-helpers under the PM Poshan Abhiyaan from Rs 600 to Rs 2,000 per month. Additionally, Punjab sought support for urban transportation, requesting Rs 300 crore for the procurement of 250 electric buses and the installation of charging points. The state also called for reimbursement of procurement costs by the government of India, modernisation of driving licence testing with advanced technology, and reimbursement of pending rural development fee (RDF) amounting to Rs 6,857 crore. Expressing gratitude to Sitharaman for giving Punjab the opportunity to present its suggestions, Cheema said the state's demand for an incentive package to address the unique challenges faced by it, particularly due to its proximity to a hostile border with Pakistan, is crucial to bolster infrastructure and security measures. He also expressed hope that the upcoming Union Budget will act as a catalyst for fostering citizen welfare, driving regional development, and spurring economic growth, the statement said. (This is an unedited and auto-generated story from Syndicated News feed, LatestLY Staff may not have modified or edited the content body)