The Anti-Imperialist Horizon

Confronted with the predations of empire and global capitalism, peoples historically subjected to colonial occupation, racialized oppression, and imperial dominion have by necessity worked to build transnational alliances and to struggle in solidarity. During the 1920s and the 1930s, when what was named fascism first became a mass movement, a number of prominent anticolonial activists and scholars insisted that any condemnation of fascism that did not likewise denounce all forms of imperialism was both incomplete and inadequate. Writing in 1936, George Padmore noted the hypocrisy of England’s rebuke of Nazi Germany “when fascism and racial terrorism are flourishing within their own Colonial Empire,” maintaining that “the fight against fascism cannot be separated from the right of all colonial peoples and subject races to Self-Determination.”1 The Indian National Congress, closely paraphrasing Jawaharlal Nehru, likewise declared in 1937 that “imperialism and fascism march hand in hand; they are blood brothers.”2 Earlier campaigns of outright genocide—such as by the United States against Native peoples in the process of continental colonization, by Germany against the Herero and Nama in South West Africa (1904–1908), and by Belgium in what at the time was called the Congo Free State (1880–1908)—were manifestations of this vicious confluence and at times understood as antecedents to the systematic mass slaughter perpetrated by Nazism.3 But as Padmore, Nehru, and others pointed out, these horrors were not aberrations but rather fully within the continuum of conquest and colonial rule.

Following World War II, with the struggle for decolonization escalating worldwide, writers of the Black and colonial diaspora reasserted the nonexceptionality of Nazism and the fact that colonized and racially subjected peoples had long experienced the forms of genocide, forced labor, and rule by segregation, terror, and violence that engulfed Europe from the 1920s to the 1940s. In an often quoted passage from The World and Africa (1946), W. E. B. Du Bois observed that “there was no Nazi atrocity—concentration camps, wholesale maiming and murder, defilement of women or ghastly blasphemy of children—which the Christian civilization of Europe had not long been practicing against colored folk in all parts of the world in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world.”4 In Discourse on Colonialism (1950/1955), Aimé Césaire famously described Nazism as a colonial “boomerang effect” that provoked international outrage only because Hitler “applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘coolies’ of India, and the ‘[n*ggers]’ of Africa.”5 Writing in 1957, Albert Memmi observed: “What is fascism, if not a regime of oppression for the benefit of a few? The entire administrative and political machinery of a colony has no other goal.… There is no doubt in the minds of those who have lived through it that colonialism is one variety of fascism.”6 In 1958, Claudia Jones argued, “Imperialism is the root cause of racialism. It is the ideology which upholds colonial rule and exploitation. It preaches the ‘superiority’ of the white race whose ‘destiny’ it is to rule over those with coloured skins, and to treat them with contempt. It is the ideology which breeds Fascism.”7 Grace Lee Boggs recalled an exchange of letters between James Boggs and Bertrand Russell in the early 1960s where Boggs “patiently explain[ed] to Russell that what has historically been considered democracy in the United States has actually been fascism for millions of Negroes.”8

Now, when in the United States the racist despotism of Donald Trump provides a lurid foil against which the Biden administration declares its benign governance and enlightened multiculturalism, the constitutive link between imperialism and fascism is crucial for parsing the historical continuities and disjunctures of the present moment. With such a framing in mind, this essay sketches the relationship between anti-imperialism and antifascism as they have been articulated toward internationalist approaches to revolution, decolonization, and other global justice movements since World War I. This partial outline is intended to suggest how an anti-imperialist internationalist project fully engaged in the specificities of anticolonial and antiracist struggle might be conceived as the horizon for struggles against fascism or variations on authoritarianism.9 I situate this history of anti-imperialism in relation to the liberation struggles of Indigenous peoples in what George Manuel called the “Fourth World.”10 Native liberation is indispensable to collective struggle against and beyond the imperialist crisis of which fascism and its associated constellation of reactionary far-right movements are symptomatic and that neoliberal multiculturalism only further compounds.

This has at least partially to do with, but is not limited to, the specific ways in which variations on fascism and white supremacy continue to shape settler colonial nations and imperial nation-states. Thus, how might fascism—or forms of racist authoritarian revanchism akin to fascism—and imperialism be interconnected in especially acute and volatile ways in twenty-first-century colonial, settler colonial, and postcolonial contexts? The counterpart to the liberal and popular naming of fascism today is an obstinate silence as to how the question of fascism is entangled with settler colonial occupation, imperial predation, and perpetual war. In a place such as what is presently the United States, where the electoral defeat of Trump appears to have diminished or narrowed concerns over contemporary fascism, a reinvigorated imperialism, militarism, and neoliberal multiculturalism has accompanied the reductive framing of far-right violence and white supremacy as a decidedly national predicament of political division and polarization. This framing fundamentally misdirects attention away from the far-reaching imperial entanglements of racial capitalism as a horizon of struggle.

Each of the contemporary regimes most frequently indicted as fascist or as harbingers of fascism to come—Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Rodrigo Duterte, among others—have typically been treated as examples of discrete national trends associated primarily by authoritarian affinities but without more systemic or material reciprocities. After all, taken on their own terms, each regime insistently speaks its own version of the language of nationalist exceptionalism. Yet, the particular nationalism evoked in each case nonetheless remains inextricably entwined with the accelerated crisis of global capitalism, militarism, border imperialism, and racialized and anti-Muslim violence at once catalyzed by and in excess of nation-states. It is worth recalling that, even apart from those making an explicitly anticolonial critique, during the 1920s and 1930s observers on the left emphasized fascism’s international context as key for understanding its reactionary formation. For instance, building on Lenin’s analysis of imperialism, Clara Zetkin argued in 1923 to the Third Enlarged Plenum of the Communist International’s Executive Committee that fascism emerged as a reaction to two specific historical conditions: first, it was shaped by the interimperial conflicts that sought to resolve the world economic contraction of the 1870s–1890s through accelerated European and U.S. imperialism, negotiated through the frenzy of colonization and plunder sanctioned by such maneuvers as the 1884–1885 Berlin conference but ultimately erupting into the carnage of World War I; and second, it was a counterrevolutionary response to the successes of the insurrectionary international movements of communism and anarchism in the context of the Russian and Mexican Revolutions, as well the failed revolutions in Germany, Hungary, Spain, and Egypt.11

During this same time, the United States, as a settler colony and aspiring global empire, expanded its campaigns of overseas conquest and consolidated its continental colonial control through military force and then assimilationist efforts, such as allotment and boarding schools for Native peoples. This was likewise the era of what Du Bois called the “counter-revolution of property” against the emancipation of enslaved people of African descent and the promise of radical Reconstruction.12 U.S. imperialism gained rapacious momentum with—as only a partial list—the 1893 military takeover of the Hawaiian Kingdom, the 1898 wars for overseas colonization, protracted warfare in the Philippines, seizure of territory for the Panama Canal zone, occupation of Haiti (1915–1934), and the 1926 invasion of Nicaragua.13 The surge of racist, anticommunist, and xenophobic retrenchment during and after World War I included large-scale white terrorism (including the massacres in East St. Louis in 1917; Elaine, Arkansas, and Chicago in 1919; and Tulsa in 1921), the 1919–1920 Red Scare, the 1921 trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and the 1921 and 1924 legislation severely limiting immigration by racially targeted national quotas. State-sanctioned and extralegal racial violence in the United States further proliferated with Jim Crow laws, lynching, and the revival of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s.14 Following the decisive turning point of World War I, the United States as an ascendant world hegemon reproduced and expanded its capacities for racial terror, settler colonialism, global capitalism, and imperial militarism.

Starkly divergent internationalist projects emerged from the Russian Revolution and the devastation of the so-called Great War. For the liberal internationalism of Woodrow Wilson and Jan Smuts, given institutional form in the League of Nations, this moment was a recalibration of the methods of world order intended to shore up capitalism and global white supremacy under the auspices of an ostensibly kinder, gentler tutelary disposition. Compelled by the threat of anticolonial insurgency to offer some form of symbolic value for colonized peoples as a counterpoint to the Communist International, the League of Nations promised, if it did not fully deliver, a platform for those seeking to gain international leverage against colonial rule. Wilson’s infamous snub of Nguyễn Ái Quốc (later known as Ho Chi Minh) at Versailles in 1919 seems to be retrospectively more indicative of the new order than any of the U.S. president’s public proclamations or the grand declarations of the league.

Nevertheless, the creation of a multilateral forum by colonial powers acknowledging the right of self-determination provided a new space for Indigenous15 and colonized and racially subjected peoples to petition for redress at an international scale. This was, of course, not a unique moment for Indigenous peoples, whose political alliances and confederacies were already in effect international relations that long preceded colonization as well as subsequently serving directly anticolonial objectives (as was the case with, for example, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the Andean insurrection of the early 1780s, and Tecumseh’s confederacy during the early nineteenth century). Zitkála-Šá, Charles Eastman, Carlos Montezuma, Laura Cornelius Kellogg, and others affiliated with the Society of American Indians were among those who sought to make use of the promise of the league.16 The Cayuga leader Deskaheh (Levi General), the Australian Aboriginal activist Anthony Martin Fernando, the Māori emissary Tahupotiki Wiremu Ratana, and Ta’isi Olaf Nelson on behalf of Samoa were among a number of petitioners who traveled to Geneva in pursuit of redress for colonial dispossession.17 In Peru, by contrast, José Carlos Mariátegui’s conception of revolution during the 1920s was predicated on alliances with Indigenous peoples rather than an appeal to liberal internationalism. “Fascism,” he wrote, “collaborates with the League of Nations.”18 Mariátegui argued that since the masses “are four-fifths Indian … our socialism would not be Peruvian—nor would it be socialism—if it did not establish its solidarity principally with the Indian,” with this solidarity in turn serving as the basis of anti-imperialist politics in Peru.19

The Communist International (the Third International, or Comintern), from its prefiguration at the 1915 Zimmerwald conference until the Stalinist purges of the mid- to late 1930s, was animated in part by the failures of the Second International to either oppose imperialist nationalisms or to substantively include colonized peoples. The Comintern thus sought in various ways to build anti-imperialist alliances with colonized peoples on behalf of the project of world revolution.20 During its meeting in 1920, at sessions devoted to the “national and colonial questions,” M. N. Roy and V. I. Lenin famously debated how best to bring together a global communist movement and anticolonial liberation.21 Korean Communist Party leader Pak Chin-Sun argued that “the whole history of the ignominious collapse of the Second International has shown that the western European proletariat cannot win the fight against its bourgeoisie as long as the bourgeoisie has a source of strength in the colonies.”22 Ahmed Sultanzadeh of the Communist Party of Iran commented that while the Second International “drew up elegant resolutions,” these were deliberated and “adopted without the participation of representatives” from the colonies and “were never put into effect.” According to Sultanzadeh, the 1920 meeting “marked the first time that this question is being dealt with thoroughly, with the participation of representatives of almost all of the colonized and semicolonized countries.”23 The Comintern’s position on the “Negro question” emerged in tandem with this new orientation, with Claude McKay and Otto Huiswoud invited to address the Fourth Congress in 1922 and subsequent debates leading to the resolutions of 1928 and 1930 on African Americans in the U.S. South as an oppressed nation with a rightful claim to self-determination. The League against Imperialism established in 1927 and the founding of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers in 1928 were significant if nonetheless fraught organizational initiatives that followed from this expanded alignment.24

The so-called interwar period was in fact a time of intensifying anticolonial insurgency and imperial counterrevolution. The militant internationalism of the 1920s and 1930s emerged in conjunction with widespread anticolonial insurrection.25 The ongoing Irish uprising, the Iraqi Revolt of 1920, the Rif War of 1921–1926 in North Africa, the Turkish War of Independence, the Palestinian uprisings of the 1920s and 1930s, the Syrian Revolt of 1925, the communist rebellions of 1926–1927 in Indonesia, and Samoa’s Mau movement each belied the self-serving platitudes of imperial prerogative. In the Philippines, despite his public criticism of U.S. colonial rule, Commonwealth president Manuel Quezon viciously suppressed the independence movement and outlawed the Communist Party of the Philippines.26 Pedro Albizu Campos led the National Party seeking Puerto Rican independence, while the U.S. responded with brutal repression, including the 1937 Ponce massacre, during the heyday of its “good neighbor” policy.27

Yet, by the mid-1930s, sectarian conflicts within the Communist International had fractured a key political forum for connecting antifascism and anti-imperialism. John Munro describes the decade between 1935 and 1945 as the “antifascist interregnum,” during which the popular front–era Comintern largely withdrew support for anticolonial and anti-imperial movements in favor of prioritizing alliances with imperialist powers against the threat of fascist expansionism.28 Despite the loss of the Comintern’s infrastructure, African diasporic and colonized peoples continued to link antifascism and anti-imperialist solidarity further driven by the exigencies of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia (Abyssinia), the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), and subsequent rule of Francisco Franco in Spain (1939–1975) and the Estado Novo in Portugal (1933–1974). This was in a context where the United States was increasingly hostile to supposedly misdirected antifascism. U.S. propagandists, policy makers, and federal agencies sought to redirect campaigns against fascism toward virulent anticommunism and Cold War bipolar opposition to left internationalism. The FBI infamously targeted Abraham Lincoln Brigade volunteers who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War as “premature antifascists.” Such reactionary efforts in the United States to preempt movements for solidarity and antiracist internationalism intensified in reaction to the high-profile campaign to raise global awareness against the false charges in the Scottsboro trial and became pervasive by the early Cold War.29

Mussolini’s war of conquest in Ethiopia in 1935 was a pivotal moment in the overt confluence and blatant assertion of colonialism and fascism. The invasion sparked widespread mobilization throughout the African Diaspora.30 The International African Friends of Ethiopia formed in London in 1935, later serving as the basis for the International African Service Bureau (IASB) founded in 1937 by George Padmore, C. L. R. James, Amy Ashwood Garvey, T. Ras Makonnen, Jomo Kenyatta, and I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson. As Minkah Makalani argues, a significant aspect of the bureau was its refusal of “the role of the diasporic vanguard that would direct colonial struggles,” describing its purpose as instead supporting “the demands of Africans and other colonial peoples for democratic rights, civil liberties, and self-determination.” To build a “link between Africans at home (in Africa) and the Africans abroad,” the IASB combined an analysis of imperialism and colonialism with “facilitating intercolonial exchanges and engagements” through such venues as its monthly journal, the International African Opinion.31 The IASB was indicative of a Pan-Africanist break with the Comintern during the late 1930s that sought to promote a left anticapitialist, anticolonial internationalism attentive to race and racism.32

Black diasporic internationalism and anticolonial coalition building gained momentum following World War II. The World Trade Union Conference, held in London in February 1945, set the stage for the All Colonial Peoples’ Conference (also called the Subject Peoples’ Conference) four months later, with its manifesto declaring that “for peoples in the colonies, Allied Victory would have no real meaning ‘if it does not lead to their own liberation from the tentacles of imperialism.”33 Following the conference, a committee was created and charged with drafting a program and constitution with the goal of establishing a “Colonial International.”34 Although this aim did not materialize, the Fifth Pan-African Congress, held in October 1945 in Manchester, expanded on these themes. The congress issued a “challenge to the colonial powers” asserting that “we are unwilling to starve any longer while doing the world’s drudgery” to prop up “a discredited imperialism. We condemn the monopoly of capital and the rule of private wealth.”35 The congress’s “Declaration to the Colonial Workers, Farmers, and Intellectuals” affirmed “all Colonies must be free from foreign imperialist control, whether political or economic.… Colonial and Subject Peoples of the World—Unite!”36

Regardless of the ostentatious proclamations of the 1941 Atlantic Charter and the 1945 United Nations Conference in San Francisco, the imperial powers had little initial interest in substantively addressing the issue of colonialism or the full inclusion of colonized peoples in their new multilateral forum. The United Nations largely rebooted the League of Nations mandate system in the form of international trusteeship. In Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire references Truman’s pronouncement that “the time of the old colonialism has passed” to note that, contrary to U.S. posturing, “this means that American high finance considers the time has come to raid every colony in the world.” Césaire wryly observes: “American domination—the only domination from which … one never recovers unscarred.”37 Partially carrying forward and expanding on the agendas of the anticolonial and Pan-Africanist meetings in 1945, while also contending with the new alignments of the Cold War, the 1955 Bandung Conference, the 1957 Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference in Cairo, and the 1966 Tricontinental Conference of African, Asian, and Latin American Peoples in Havana further developed the means for an anti-imperialist internationalism.38

Still largely left out of such oppositional solidarity however were Indigenous peoples under settler colonial rule.39 This disconnection was buttressed by the United States’ successful maneuver in 1960 to exclude peoples under settler colonial occupation—who were not separated by “saltwater” or otherwise territorially noncontiguous with respect to the colonizing country—from qualifying for recognition as a “non-self-governing territory” under chapter 11 of the UN Charter and hence ineligible for decolonization according to the UN framework.40 Native peoples under U.S. colonial occupation were forced to devote their energy to fighting against “termination” policy aimed at ending U.S. recognition of their political authority, established treaty rights, and collective existence. But by the early 1970s, Red Power activists began to reassert this shared anti-imperial horizon for action and militant redress.

Fascism was again an important referent at this time. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panther Party consistently denounced the United States as fascist for its unremitting racist police violence, imperial war in Vietnam, and ubiquitous capitalist predation. The Black Panther Party’s 1969 United Front against Fascism conference assembled a broad coalition of activists with the intention of developing a “common revolutionary ideology and political program which answers the basic desires and needs of all people in fascist, capitalist, racist America.” Party cofounder and chairman Bobby Seale opened the conference insisting that “we will not be free until Brown, Red, Yellow, Black, and all other peoples of color are unchained.”41 Penny Nakatsu of the Asian American Political Alliance spoke at the conference as someone from “a generation of children born in [U.S.] concentration camps,” noting the continuity from Executive Order 9066 in 1942 to the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950 to then pending legislative domestic security updates as indicative of “American fascism today” and a threat to “all people … who will work for liberation, who will work for the defeat of fascism and imperialism.”42 Attributions of fascism in this sense were not limited to the U.S. context. Describing her experience in Canada, Lee Maracle wrote in 1975: “Toronto is really quite a fascist town; a lot of reactionary politics tied with Nazi-type racism against East Indians, Blacks, Native Americans, and so on.… [The fascists are] anti-Indian, anti-communist, anti-everything that wasn’t white and patriotic.”43 To invoke fascism at this time was both to identify the racist, militaristic, and colonialist authoritarianism that underwrote liberal settler capitalist nation-states (on behalf of freedom for the white and privileged and oppression for everyone else) and to name an overarching framework against which to assert anticapitalist, antiracist, and anti-imperial solidarities and movement building.

Among the many groups inspired by the Panthers’ combination of community survival programs, self-defense, and revolutionary intercommunalism (a version of internationalism focusing on translocal solidarities against racial capitalism) were such Indigenous organizations as the Polynesian Panther Party in Aotearoa/New Zealand, the Australian Black Panther Party, the Native Alliance for Red Power in Canada, and the American Indian Movement (AIM) in the United States.44 Protest initiatives like the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, established in Canberra, Australia, in 1972, mobilized through the framework of Black Power and underscored the international setting of colonial occupation. Gary Foley recalls that the organizers of the embassy sardonically concluded that “the government had declared us aliens in our own land and so we need an Embassy.”45 A speaker at an embassy event mused, “I don’t know whether we should be trying to establish diplomatic relations with [the Australian government]. I believe they should be trying to establish diplomatic relations with us,” but he doubted they would “due to their fascist right attitude.”46 In the aftermath of a violent police offensive against the embassy, Roberta “Bobbi” Sykes observed that “escalating oppression has forced the people to realize the government’s policy of assimilation is false and that the real policy is genocide.”47 Other initiatives during this period were conceived as mechanisms for publicizing and pursuing Indigenous demands for self-determination multilaterally. Toward this goal, AIM founded the International Indian Treaty Council in 1974, and the World Council of Indigenous Peoples was established in 1975.48

The Secwépemc (Shuswap) Nation leader and founding member of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples George Manuel’s idea of the Fourth World generatively linked disparate anticolonial struggles. After spending time in Tanzania during the early 1970s, Manuel drew on this experience in his theorization of the Fourth World as a political project of building alliances between Indigenous peoples worldwide and a critical revisioning of Third World liberation. In his introduction to the republication of Manuel’s book, Glen Coulthard argues that the conception of the Fourth World is a “crucial Indigenous intervention into the ideological influence that the decolonization struggles for the ‘Third World’ had on the North American left’s critique of racial capitalism and imperialism in the 1960s and early 1970s.” According to Coulthard, “the inherited conceptual apparatus associated with this ‘turn to the Third World’ provided Indigenous organizers with an appealing international language of political contestation structured around the concept of self-determination—economically, politically, and culturally—that they not only inherited but also fundamentally adapted and transformed through a critical engagement with their own local, land-informed situations.”49 If some elements of this radical international Indigenous movement were subsequently rerouted toward juridical arenas and building the momentum to achieve the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, others remained committed to militant direct action and frontline community organizing for land and water defense as the basis for international solidarity and global decolonization.

The solidarities of Fourth World Indigenous internationalism are key to the unfinished world project of dismantling colonialism and imperialism. This radical world-making project was in certain respects historically neutralized and redirected through official UN protocols for decolonization, with its nation-state-based framework, and the neocolonial instruments of debt entrapment and fiscal oversight deployed by multilateral financial institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Today, settler colonial counterinsurgency labels and tyrannizes Native activists as terrorists; capitalist extractivism pursues its catastrophic assault on the human and more-than-human world; Indigenous land defenders and organizers throughout the Americas—such as Berta Cáceres or the massacre of Awá people in Colombia—are assassinated with impunity; vigilante and police violence target unsheltered and otherwise vulnerable Native peoples; and the escalation of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls continues.50 Fully linking settler colonial contexts and the overarching parasitism and avarice of empires is work that remains to be done, although Native-led coalitional challenges to the global infrastructure of fossil fuel extraction and the platform of such organizations as the Red Nation offer important ways forward with a focus on anti-imperialist internationalism and the militant politics of solidarity.51

In the United States, mainstream denunciations of Donald Trump as a fascist menace—ranging from Madeleine Albright to the cofounder of the Federalist Society Steven Calabresi—have sought to recuperate U.S. exceptionalism and disavow the constitutive global economies of dispossession and violence that are the U.S. imperial nation-state.52 In fact, both Trump’s revivification of “America First” and the Democratic Party’s neoliberal multiculturalism and “one indispensable nation” rely on exceptionalism and disavowal in different ways to politically cohere and give credence to the premise of U.S. “democracy.” To understand fascism or similar authoritarianisms and white supremacy as constitutively linked to imperialism and colonialism is to refuse the framing of such recent mainstream debates. Fascism as a heuristic can be useful in this moment for addressing the crises and contradictions of imperialism (as an organizing imperative for capitalism rather than one sequential stage) and settler colonial occupation. Ultimately it is the collective work toward the anti-imperial horizon that matters most of all.

Alyosha Goldstein is a professor of American studies at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Poverty in Common: The Politics of Community Action during the American Century (2012), the editor of Formations of United States Colonialism (2014), and has coedited special issues of Social Text, Theory and Event, and South Atlantic Quarterly. Goldstein is completing a book manuscript on colonial governance, racial capitalism, the jurisprudence of redress, and histories of Native and Black dispossession in what is presently called the United States.