24/05/2026
The following is a contribution made by Joshua Brady-Arnold, International Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Ireland, to the 3rd International Anti-Fascist Conference, organised by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.
Dear Comrades,
The Workers' Party of Ireland brings fraternal greetings to the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the parties assembled here, and all workers and volunteers whose labour made this event possible.
I. Definition
Imperialism is the process whereby the dominant politico-economic interests of one power expropriate for their own enrichment the land, labour, raw materials, and markets of another people - whether by direct or indirect means - reinforcing the subject people's own class hierarchies and ideological structures in doing so.
“If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.” — James Connolly
In the spirit of Connolly's quote, I would like to explore not so much the violence of terrorism, but rather those forces which sustain, legitimate, and reproduce imperialism and terrorism.
II. Goals, Aims, and Methods
The goals of 21st century imperialism are the same as they have always been: control of markets, access to cheap labour and raw materials, elimination of independent productive capacity in dominated territories.
The specific aim is the prevention of alternatives. Cuba has been targeted because it is a functioning alternative model, however small, which contradicts the ideological claim that no alternative exists. China is targeted for another reason. Its state-directed development, its technological rise, and its efforts to reduce dependence on the dollar system threaten the foundations of American power. The dollar system itself, which gives the United States the capacity to sanction, to run permanent deficits, to export inflation, is the central mechanism of 21st century imperialism. Any state that moves to trade outside it becomes a target.
Imperialism creates the monsters it later claims to fight. In Afghanistan in the 1980s, the United States and its allies armed and encouraged reactionary Islamist forces against the socialist government and the Soviet Union. Those networks fed into the later growth of Al-Qaeda and the wider machinery of terror unleashed across Iraq and Syria. Despite offering co-operation against Islamist terrorism, Russia was rebuffed by the US. NATO marched unerringly eastward, while arms-control agreements were abandoned. The War on Terror was clearly about preserving American freedom of action, never simply about terrorism.
However, the imperialist powers do not only bomb and sanction, they mostly fund. The high level of CIA financing for anti-communist left tendencies, avant-garde cultural production, and ostensibly radical magazines and organisations from the early 1960s onward is now openly documented. There is no particular reason to suppose this activity has diminished. On the contrary, in combination with social media infrastructure it has intensified.
The ideological product being promoted is what might be called human rights liberalism. This tendency is, in essence, anti-socialist. It is oriented toward individual rights and progressive reform within the capitalist system rather than toward the organised working class as an agent of systemic change. It does not threaten private ownership of capital because it is not oriented toward that question. Whereas the organised working class, by its nature, poses an alternative to private ownership of the means of production, Liberalism (when it is not applauding the bombing of recalcitrant states in the name of humanitarian intervention) is focused on distributional and representational questions within the existing system.
This tendency is generously funded. Liberal NGOs receive billions across the western world precisely because they perform an essential function: channelling the disaffected toward human rights liberalism and away from working class socialism. The 20th century, in which a mass labour movement was capable of competing for state power across much of Europe was an interregnum in the reign of capital. The imperialist powers have weakened working class organisations through capital export and deindustrialisation, and their ideological replacement by NGO-mediated progressivism.
History is increasingly obfuscated in recent years. The revolutions of the past are being suppressed in popular memory, even the bourgeois revolutions, Enlightenment, and resistance are being pushed out of textbooks. Meanwhile, Ursula von der Leyen and the German led European Union are overseeing the suppression of democratic rights and the arming of genocide. As the old imperialist powers now fall into decline, the rehabilitation of certain aspects of fascism becomes necessary. The sanitation of violence against political prisoners is surely a sign for things to come.
Today, we are witnessing the horrors of another genocide, perpetuated by the US and Israel against Palestinians. NATO expansion to Russia's borders mirrors past imperial aggression.
All of these ideological manoeuvres serve to legitimate the current order.
III. The Present
Among the imperialist powers today there are disagreements not on strategy but on tactics. The European powers differ from the US on Iran. The European powers are more invested in the Ukrainian conflict than in the Near & Middle East. The EU seeks better relations with China. The US has its priorities in Latin America. Nevertheless, these are tactical differences within a shared structural interest I.e. the maintenance of a global order organised for capital accumulation by the dominant powers.
The European Union is a junior partner in US imperialism, not a counterweight to it. Brzezinski stated the strategic logic plainly: "If a choice must be made between a larger Europe-Atlantic system and a better relationship with Russia, the former must rank higher." The Nord Stream pipeline destroyed in September 2022 but which went unpunished demonstrated this subordination. The energy crisis and accelerating deindustrialisation of German industry followed. European capital absorbed the costs without effective resistance.
Ireland is a peripheral case of the same structure. James Connolly identified that formal sovereignty without economic sovereignty is no sovereignty. The overwhelming majority of Irish exports by value are generated by foreign-owned multinationals, a dependency that successive governments have deepened rather than reduced. Shannon Airport has functioned as a US military transit hub for operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. The Irish state does not inspect those aircraft to maintain deniability.
The Irish government has tried to move our country closer to British, EU, and NATO military structures. However, Irish neutrality and solidarity for Palestine are so intertwined in our citizen's identity that the Government is unable to comply with its masters.
This is a contradiction we must lever.
IV. What Is To Be Done
The struggle against imperialism is inseparable from the struggle against capitalism; imperialism is a structural feature of capitalism in its monopoly stage, not a policy that can be reformed away. Capital will not voluntarily abandon the most lucrative routes.
In the immediate term, the tasks follow from the analysis.
Where imperialist forces and a non-compliant government are in conflict, the question is not which side is ideologically preferable but which outcome advances or retards the conditions for working class organisation. A victory for imperialism closes off space. A defeat for imperialism opens it.
There is no viable third position which can defeat imperialism and capitalism in conditions where the working class has not yet organised the capacity to do so. In these conditions, support for national sovereignty against imperial attack is the only position consistent with the long-term interests of the working class. One cannot end exploitation until super-exploitation has been defeated.
For Communist and Workers' parties operating within the imperialist bloc, the concrete tasks are determined by the specific forms of subordination in their own states. In Ireland: Shannon must be closed to US military transit; There must be no integration into EU defence structures; and our foreign policy ought to be determined by the interests of the Irish working class, not by the structural requirements of Washington and Brussels.
The construction of a multipolar order is not an end, but a means of weakening the dominant imperialist powers to suppress working class movements globally. Every successful challenge to unipolarity expands the terrain on which class struggle can be conducted.
It is imperative that we reach lower and deeper into the masses. The workers are not ignorant. Workers all over Europe are dissatisfied, disengaged, and disgusted with the mendacity and degeneracy of a ruling class not seen since the Versailles of Louis XVI.
We may be few, but comrades, we happy few will struggle on lest we see the common ruin of the contending classes and we are yet again plunged into the Dark Ages.
“The muscular arm of the working millions will be lifted, and the yoke of despotism, guarded by the soldiers’ bayonets, will be smashed to atoms!"
