The Method of Anti-Imperialism

In his 1924 book Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought, Lukács argues that Lenin not only offers the means to seize the opportunity that imperialism opens for socialist revolution, he provides the essential method for Marxists to discern theoretical clarity in the face of imperialism. Lenin’s method instructs the worker’s movement in how to take decisive action in the class struggle in the face of imperialist dynamics that fragment the workers from their collective interest. So important is Lenin’s intervention into imperialism that Lukács argues that it incorporates a new element into the tradition of historical materialism. This new element is discovered in the way that Lenin pinpoints how the different currents within the working-class movement relate to opportunism, chauvinism and revisionism.

Chauvinism emerges as rampant in imperialist times but chauvinism is not to be understood as a moral critique and nor is it reducible to an individualist posture of racism or bigotry; it is rather an effect of opportunism, and opportunism occurs when the proletariat has become bound up with bourgeois interests. The problem of both opportunism and chauvinism is thus strategic: when a worker adopts either position they adopt a faulty perspective on the nature of the class struggle itself, one that leads other workers to see exploitation as normal. Chauvinism is defined as the tendency to distort and manipulate the worker’s movement in such a way that exploitation is construed as normal or natural. This is why chauvinism breeds a depolitcizing tendency that is spawned from and made intensified by imperialist conditions.

Chauvinism is often centered around the theory of the labor aristocracy which maintains that imperialist war leads a privileged stratum of the working class to abandon the working class movement because they are financially incentivized to do so. Labor aristocracy is based on the idea that the spoils of war lead to a bourgeoisification of the worker’s movement. One of the major limitations to labor aristocracy theory emerges from the fact that contemporary imperialist war is no longer directly parasitical on the labor movement as it was in the lead up and immediate aftermath of World War I. Although the labor aristocracy does not function in the way it did historically—which was tied directly to total war and the imminent status