Against Campism

Reckoning with the Anti-Imperialism of Idiots

It has been a fun year in geopolitics.

My country managed to kidnap Venezuela’s President, crash the Cuban economy, and launch a war against Iran just in the last three months.

It is clear that the American government under the leadership of Donald Trump is turning out to be a Neo-conservative wet dream, all while doing away with the remnants of the mask that gave plausible cover to the naked imperialism of the Bush era.

Then there is Israel, which, in just over two years, has attacked almost all of its neighbors, massacred hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, and is moving ahead with plans to annex the West Bank.

In addition to destroying the entire conventional arsenal of the Syrian Arab Republic, it has managed to obliterate the “Axis of Resistance,” chop the heads off of Hezbollah and Hamas, liquidate the leadership of the Ayatollahs, and drag its American partner into open war with its last major state threat, the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Israel is a mad dog on a long leash, and the United States is the inattentive owner making excuses for it. Both are dragging the Western world by the nose into the kind of conflict that could trigger–indeed already may have triggered–a third and possibly final World War.

Everyone sees this now. Even the Brahmin Left, whose cotton-stuffed ears could not forever keep out the wails of Gaza’s children. We are a compromised nation, hell-bent on carving up what remains of the world for the rent-seeking interests of speculative capital.

A Russian convoy during the “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine.

The Fracturing of the Palestinian Movement

These events have had manifold consequences for the global movement for solidarity with Palestine, which has expanded commensurately with Israel’s increasingly barbaric colonial ravages.

October 7th and its aftermath was an awakening for the modern Left, and Palestine quickly became an effective litmus test for what it meant to be an anti-imperialist.

The reality grew simpler the more people realized the extent to which Israel has compromised the “Rules Based International Order” towards its own ends. Liberals that looked away lost support, and elections. Liberals that couldn’t look away became Leftists, and Leftists set aside their differences to center Palestine.

Gaza seemed like a dagger pointed at the heart of the Western World. A brutal reality that, if it held our attention long enough, would drive our society insane.

What better way to radicalize a population of geopolitical sleepwalkers than showing them that the state-building project our entire political class has sworn fealty to is indiscriminately murdering children with our tax dollars?

But Palestine is not the only nor even the main target of the the Euro-American Zionist war machine, and as that machine turns its open maw to consume populations from Venezuela to Iran, it has created problems for the pro-Palestine movement.

Palestine vs. Zionism is an increasingly obvious binary. It is now so obvious and intuitive, that it feels incredible that more of us did not recognize it sooner. We can thank a trillion dollar propaganda engine for that.

The binaries that define the latest victims of imperialism are less obvious, and our failure to properly contextualize them is causing ruptures within our movement.

The fracturing of the pro-Palestine coalition has nothing to do with the willingness of the Western Left to oppose Israel, but rather its inability to hold multiple truths simultaneously.

These truths are the following:

Truth Nuke #1:

The United States, its European Allies, and its Israeli satellite are the leading driver of instability worldwide. They are, by and large, in league with the project of transnational capital and its ideology of rent-seeking ecocide.

They act together and separately to frustrate the labor struggles, economic autonomy, and political aspirations of the Global South.

Truth Nuke #2:

But they are not the only ones who do this. There are tyrannies that are opposed to Zionist tyranny. There are empires that are opposed to American imperialism. Their opposition to the same does not make them our allies. Sometimes “the enemy of my enemy” just means I have two enemies.

By “our” I mean Leftists.

By “Leftists” I mean people opposed to capitalism and imperialism and ostensibly in support of building economic and political structures that challenge and render these obsolete.

So, why do so many self-described Leftists routinely and vocally support other capitalist, imperialist powers when they oppose the United States?

The answers are many, and none of them satisfactory.

Average Campist melatonin dream.

The Anti-Imperialism of Idiots

We are told by these “anti-imperialists” that the United States and its Israeli satellite are so uniquely vicious that any entity that opposes them, no matter how vile, is worthy of critical support.

We are told that the massacre of civilians, the suppression and persecution of political dissidents, the crackdowns on Leftists by these entities is irrelevant to the broader project of Anti-Imperialism, by which they mean Anti-Americanism/Anti-Zionism.

Whenever protests in Iran, resistance movements in Burma, or Russian imperial misadventures in Ukraine occur, they insist on flattening all political commentary to a simple question: does this help the United States or hurt it?

The opinions of the people on the receiving end of such authoritarian and imperial fuckery are rarely solicited and often dismissed outright. They are deemed an acceptable sacrifice in the Great Game playing out between the American leviathan and the “Axis of Resistance.”

This positioning collapses all relevant geopolitical context into a witless binary that reeks of American exceptionalism. It is, after all, a kind of inverted American exceptionalism.

For these American exceptionalists, Instead of the United States being exceptionally good or strong or inventive or courageous, it must be exceptionally evil. The things the American empire does must be worse than the things other empires do, and they must be done for worse reasons.

It is no wonder that this is the preferred position of the American Campist–typically but not exclusively a white Marxist-Leninist–whose estimation of his own country is so high that even when advocating for its destruction, he grants it a special villainy.

The result is that this particular flavor of Leftist ties himself in knots every time one of his comfort regimes starts an imperialist war or persecutes an ethnic or religious minority. For him, moral atrocities that must be criticized when carried out by the United States, Europe, or Israel must be excused when carried out by Iran, Russia, China, Venezuela, or North Korea.

The reason they must be excused is that they might distract from the real battle: the ongoing war against the imperial core. A war in which these anti-imperialists of convenience imagine themselves and their comfort regimes as forming a necessary vanguard.

This is of course ridiculous. Not only are these people largely incapable of effective political action, their comfort regimes share precisely none of their values, aside from geopolitical rivalry with the US.

Russia is a Right Wing, capitalist authoritarian imperialist power waging proxy wars around the globe and destabilizing whole regions in service of oligarchs and a fascist cult of the state.

Iran is a Right Wing, capitalist authoritarian imperialist power waging proxy wars and backing tyrants abroad (Assad) while mercilessly cracking down on dissent at home.

China is a Left Wing, capitalist authoritarian imperialist power attempting to turn all of Southeast Asia and much of Africa and Latin America into vassal states in an inter-imperialist contest against the United States to control the flow of global capital.

The tendency of many on the authoritarian Left to support horrible people simply because they oppose the American regime is encapsulated in what the Syrian author Leila al-Shami aptly dubbed the “Anti-Imperialism of idiots.”

She writes, in an eponymous essay on the subject:

This Left exhibits deeply authoritarian tendencies, one that places states themselves at the centre of political analysis. Solidarity is therefore extended to states (seen as the main actor in a struggle for liberation) rather than oppressed or underprivileged groups in any given society, no matter that state’s tyranny.

Blind to the social war occurring within Syria itself, the Syrian people (where they exist) are viewed as mere pawns in a geo-political chess game.

Swap “Syria” for Iran, or Kurdistan, or Ukraine or Venezuela and the argument proceeds in much the same fashion. The material conditions of people living under despotic regimes and local imperialism are deemed irrelevant to the grander contest between American Imperialism/Zionism and the alliance of its (mostly imagined) opponents.

This perspective is indicative of a pathological geopolitics that professor Rafael Bernabe refers to as Alter-Imperialism. I.e., a preference not for the absence of imperialism but merely for a different flavor of it.

Allow me a moment to prove my point.

Ok. What kind of Leftist are you?

Material Conditions and Material Support

My friend Radical Dumpling, an Eastern European Leftist, published an essay on this very topic the other day that was so good I delayed publishing this one, which I had already written.

But as of this writing, their important piece of analysis has just 7 likes and 3 restacks. I aim to change that by including it here.

the reductionist dogma of campist anti-imperialism

One of my favorite rants that Radical Dumpling likes to go on is about material conditions. It is a phrase often invoked but rarely explained by Marxists, who usually just use it to beat other types of Leftists over the head as a kind of tribal dominance signal.

Anyway, you should read Marx, but basically material analysis asserts that people do not form their beliefs in a vacuum. Their beliefs emerge from how and where and when they live and work and organize.

Pretty intuitive, right?

The material conditions of a nation include things like what resources exist there (oil, farmland, minerals), who owns those resources, who controls the factories, land, and banks. Material analysis includes looking at things like whether people are starving or employed, whether the country is in debt to foreign powers, and whether outside countries depend on the resources that nation provides.

These conditions determine who has power.

A materialist analysis asks who controls resources, who does the work, and who benefits from it. Campist politics often replaces those questions with a worn out geopolitical shortcut: whether a government is aligned with or against Western power.

By centering that question and only that question, the actual material conditions of people living under those governments often disappear from view. This is because power imbalances inside a country or region matter just as much for working people as power imbalances between countries.

A state like Iran or Russia may oppose Western imperial dominance and still exploit workers, suppress dissent, or concentrate wealth among elites. If the Left ignores those realities, it ends up offering solidarity to repressive foreign governments rather than to the people struggling under their rule.

Campists will tell you that Western intervention is bad because it makes people in those countries suffer. Fair enough. But when you point out that such people are already suffering intensely because of the repressive regimes they live under and are protesting, Campists discard their mask of concern for the people in those countries and point back to the grand geopolitical chessboard that they and only they are enlightened enough to understand.

The result is that the collective lived experience of these peoples’ actual suffering is treated as less severe and less urgent than any potential future suffering caused by Western imperialists. It is not the suffering, then, that the Campists are “deeply concerned” with, but rather, which side caused it.

Radical Dumpling writes:

“The problem with contemporary campist anti-imperialism is not that it opposes Western power. The problem is that it increasingly treats geopolitical alignment as more analytically important than the material realities experienced by the people living within these conflicts.”

Campists fail to reckon with the fact that the actual people in these countries largely experience oppression as a local phenomenon. Life sucks for them mostly because of one tyrant fifty miles away than because of fifty tyrants one thousand miles away. Because their material realities place them between the anvil of state repression and the hammer of Western imperialism.

Protests in Georgia against Russian meddling in Georgia’s political landscape, 2025.

Alter-Imperialism

For the Campist, the socialist “brand” of a state is often more important than the socialist policies. If one of their comfort regimes claims to be doing everything for the revolution, or at least the Antizionist, anti-Imperial struggle, they are inclined to defend them. Whether they are actually doing anything for that struggle is largely irrelevant.

Hence why the mere act of pointing out how the governments of Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, or Syria create awful material realities for their own citizens gets you branded a NATO apologist and CIA shill.

This does not change the fact that the material reality of being a Ukrainian is that you suffer far more because of Russians than because of Americans. The material reality of a being Palestinian is almost precisely the opposite. This begs us to approach such subjects with nuance.

Of the quarter-million Syrians killed between 2011 and 2018, 94% were killed by the Russo-Iranian-Assadist alliance.

This alliance is–or rather, was–what is referred to as the Axis of Resistance, an Iranian-led movement of non-state actors and their state backers like Russia, Syria, and North Korea, united by their opposition to the US and Israel, and little else.

It includes Hezbollah and the Houthis, as well as a number of Shiite militias in Iraq, and (unreliably and only on occasion) includes Palestinian liberation organizations like HAMAS and PIJ.

Israel, with the help of the US, basically obliterated the whole thing in two years.

Time and again, we were told by the Alter-Imperialists that the suffering of Syrians, the executions of 16-year-old girls for adultery by the Islamic Republic, and the siege of Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon by the Assad Regime were distracting, irrelevant criticisms of these actors.

We were told that, regardless of their flaws, we should–nay, we must–support them in the larger battle of bringing American imperialism and Zionism to heel. The suffering of these captive populations was, in the balance, a worthwhile sacrifice to defeat the American empire.

Only, they didn’t defeat it. They got walked on. They got rolled up in a matter of months. Even with all that firepower, all that inter-state cooperation, all that internal repression and external expansion, they were no match for the Zionist imperialists. Two years since October 7th, the Axis is nothing but a tattered patchwork, fractured with ease and swiftly swept aside.

Now thankfully, Israel is faltering. But it is not faltering because of the Axis of Resistance. It is faltering because of its own morally atrocious, self-defeating action, and a resulting global movement of solidarity with the Palestine. Israel has not suffered defeat on the battlefield at the hands of the Axis of Resistance. It has suffered a moral defeat at the hands of all of us. They have completely lost the propaganda war. Their once unquestioned narrative control has completely reversed. Their soft power has dried up.

Israel is closer than it has ever been to being dismantled, and like all empires, it arrived at this point not from military defeat, but from external pressure and internal collapse.

That said, it is important that we not discount the efforts of the Palestinian resistance, which struck the first blow to Zionism, and the one that, after 78 years may yet prove the most fatal. But that resistance is, importantly, Palestinian, not Iranian. It has before, and likely will again, find itself at odds with the Axis of Resistance, and while we can point to its accomplishments and offer it solidarity, that does not require us to simultaneously support the geopolitical interests of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

If you buy into the Axis of Resistance rhetoric, if you decide to treat geopolitics as the Campist treats them, you are going to find yourself getting tangled in knots trying to remember which regime you’re supposed to support and which ones you’re supposed to condemn. You will mixed up with which protests you are supposed to call democratic uprisings and which ones you must dismiss as color revolutions.

Many. Such. Cases.

Primitive Politics and Resistance

We’re already over 3,000 words here, so I don’t want to launch into the subject of my next article in full, but I will offer a teaser as a means of solving the dilemma in which the Campist Left finds themselves.

If you choose not to take the Campist line, the only principal that you need to remember in order to successfully navigate conflict in Iran, Venezuela, Ukraine, or Palestine, is this very simple sentence: resistance is Pre-Political. Resistance against tyranny at home or colonialism from abroad is what the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny called a kind of “primitive politics.”

It is “pre-political” in both senses of the phrase. The right of a people to resist comes before any extraneous political considerations and forms a necessary precondition to any sort of political organization. Resistance, then, is by its nature a kind of “pre-politics,” a necessary, but not sufficient, prelude to more sophisticated forms of political organizing that can be weighed and criticized in the realm of ideas, rather than material realities.

The only principal that you need to remember in order to successfully navigate geopolitical conflict is this very simple sentence: resistance is Pre-Political.

You should support the Palestinian resistance, no matter where they get their weapons and ammunition, and no matter what their political leadership looks like, because their right to resist comes before such considerations. You should do so for the same reason that you should support Ukrainian people in their attempt to prevent their historical bully from forcibly, dragging them back under Moscow’s rule. It is the same reason that you should support the Iranian protestors against the clerical fascism of the mullahs, while acknowledging that those same actors are enabling the Lebanese resistance to carry on a rearguard action against Zionist expansionism. You should support all people against tyrannies of all sorts, even when it upends your geopolitical frame of reference.

That might all sound a bit confusing, but I promise you it is a more robust and reliable geopolitical outlook than Campism. If you simply adhere to this simple principle–that resistance always comes before other geopolitical considerations–you will be able to navigate the harrowing landscape of geopolitics with your moral integrity intact.

---