2025-9-9 Political Education Theory Session #9: Colonialism & Imperialism
This session of our Theory Series will introduce attendees to socialist theories of colonialism and imperialism. In exploring how and why some nation-states and power blocs have subjugated other nations and peoples, we will approach the important and highly contentious question of how socialists in the imperial United States should orient ourselves to politics on the global stage. We will discuss the various uses of the terms “colonialism,” “imperialism,” “settler colonialism,” and “neo-colonialism” to understand the multiple–and changing–forms of international domination that have appeared in capitalist modernity. We will discuss the destructive impact of colonialism on colonized populations–from racist and genocidal violence, cultural domination, and economic extraction–and how many of these practices find their way back to the metropole. We will examine classical Marxist theories that view modern imperialism as inherent to capitalism’s need to export surplus and conquer new markets, as well as leftist critiques that seek to complicate the traditional theories. Finally, we will consider the debate on the Left, between a so-called “campism,” that supports national liberation struggles and states opposed to U.S. hegemony as a matter of principle, and a “third campism” said to oppose both Western imperialism and regimes and movements of the Global South that are insufficiently socialist or democratic.
Core Reading:
- Aimé Césaire - excerpt from Discourse on Colonialism
- Ania Loomba - excerpt from Colonialism/Postcolonialism
- Glen Clouthard (interview) - “The Colonialism of the Present”
Further Reading:
- John Bellamy Foster - "The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left"
- Salar Mohandesi - "The Specificity of Imperialism"
When
September 9th, 2025 at 7:00pm - 9pm
Where
RSVP with the form below to get the Zoom link.