To win the debate against the KKE’s “neither Washington nor Beijing” camp, what we need to focus on is the role of finance capital. Specifically what purpose finance capital has in the system of imperialism, and why Marxist economic analysis shows that it has an indispensable role in the imperial superstructure. In this debate, the goal of the KKE and the Trotskyist forces the KKE aligns with is to obscure the essential part that finance plays within imperialism; and the purpose of this obfuscation is to depict the present global conflict as an “inter-imperialist” conflict, instead of as the anti-imperialist fight which it actually is.
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The deeper purpose behind this is to assist the reformist, opportunist, and wrecker forces that are tied to the KKE, such as the Trotskyist faction within Venezuela’s socialist movement. That this faction instigated a grievously damaging split in the Venezuelan workers movement proves this isn’t just a theoretical debate, it has very consequential implications. When the Trotskyists spun a false narrative about Maduro’s government having betrayed the workers, it greatly weakened the communist movement; and one of the core supporting ideas behind this narrative was that we must also take a “neither Washington nor Beijing” position. That all countries in the world have imperialist tendencies, as the KKE argues, and therefore we shouldn’t side with any countries resisting the U.S. hegemon.

It’s this notion that’s contained within all arguments which assert the USA is not today’s sole imperialist power. A recent example of this is the rebuttal that Greg Godels from Marxism-Leninism Today made towards Carlos Garrido’s article on why Russia and China are not imperialist. Within this piece, there’s a part where Godels challenges Garrido’s premise about imperialism having taken on a new form, yet in the process admits the imperial system has in fact become centralized within the United States:

The “transformation” that Garrido believes he sees is simply a reordering of the international system that existed before the war with New York now replacing London as the financial center of the capitalist universe. It is the replacement of the vast colonial world and the bloody rivalries and shifting alliances and hierarchies of the interwar world with the creation of a neo-colonial system dominated by the US and reinforced by its assumption of the role of guardian of capitalism in the Cold War. The monopoly capitalist base is qualitatively the same, but its superstructure changes with historical circumstances. The Bretton Woods system and the later discarding of the gold standard reflect those changing circumstances.

What I find interesting about this argument is that Godels does not try to find alleged examples of Russia or China engaging in imperialist actions. This is something that you consistently see liberals, anarchists, or right-wingers do when confronted with the question of whether we should align with these countries, but somebody can’t really do this when they have the theoretical knowledge that Godels shows he has. In the article, Godels explains why imperialism is not a policy but a system, so it would be contradictory for him to point towards this or that policy as proof of Washington’s rivals being imperialist. Therefore in order to win this debate from a Marxist perspective, the “neither Washington nor Beijing” camp needs to prove that finance—which as Godels concedes is centralized in the USA—isn’t synonymous with imperialism.

To make this argument, Godels attempts to refute Garrido’s statement that the bulk of imperialism’s profits come from finance:

Garrido’s misunderstanding of the international role of finance capital leads him to make the claim that “…the lion’s share of profits made by the imperialist system are accumulated through debt and interest.” At its peak before the great crash of 2007-2009, finance (broadly speaking, finance, insurance, real estate) accounted for maybe forty percent of US profits; today, with the NASDAQ techs, the percentage is likely less. But that is only US profits. With deindustrialization, industrial commodity production has shifted to the PRC, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Brazil, Eastern Europe, and other low-wage areas and the US has become the center of world finance. If commodity production sneezes, the whole edifice of fictitious capital collapses, along with its fictitious profits.
As all three volumes of Capital explain in great detail, commodity production is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and wage-labor is the source of value, not the mystifying maneuvers of Wall Street grifters.

The notion this argument depends on is that because of the difference between the illusory speculative financial profits, and the materially tangible profits that come from labor, finance is not necessarily a prerequisite to imperialism. Why, then, does Godels recognize that the imperialist superstructure has been reordered to center around New York? Why is it evidently impossible to dispute that the capitalist universe has come to revolve around U.S. finance, even when one rejects Garrido’s idea that imperialism has transitioned into a new phase? (Which is also true; Garrido is referring to how finance has taken on such a big role that the U.S. can solely use it as a tool for leverage.)

To properly see the argument Garrido was making here, it’s best to include more of what he wrote about that “lion’s share” idea:

Today, the lion’s share of profits made by the imperialist system are accumulated through debt and interest. The U.S. can run perpetual deficits without the normal constraints other nations face, effectively getting the rest of the world to finance its military spending and overseas investments. Instead of weakening the U.S., the deficits tie other countries’ financial systems to the dollar, reinforcing its geopolitical and economic dominance.

​The U.S. could print in less than a second more money than any country could produce in a span of years of real investment in labor, resources, and time. This is what imperialism is today. Its skeletal body are the global financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, institutions that only the U.S. has – in the last instance – control over. Neither China nor Russia could leverage these global financial apparatuses to enforce their so-called “imperial” interests. On the contrary, these institutions are often utilized by the U.S. as a weapon against them and their allies.

This context is essential to understanding why imperialism is synonymous with U.S. hegemony, and why the imperial system can’t be separated from finance. Lenin clarified that “Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.” After this division was completed, and the United States took on the role of the banking hub for capital in all other countries, the task of the workers movement changed. In this era, one of our foremost missions is to defeat U.S. dominance in particular, which would thereby cause the imperial system as a whole to unravel.

For this to happen, there will need to be a workers revolution in the United States; which pertains to a certain contradiction within our movement, that being the difference between the class struggle and the anti-imperialist struggle. These struggles are overwhelmingly aligned in their goals, but they are not one and the same. This reality is something that cynical actors like the KKE seek to exploit when they depict the countries fighting imperialism as not being worthy of the workers’ support; they act as if defeating U.S. hegemony should be de-prioritized due to the class contradictions within these anti-imperialist countries. This comes from the crude economism that prevails within the communist parties which have fallen into dogmatic thinking.

It’s useful to point out these economistic errors, but to build a political force that’s truly effective at waging all fronts of the struggle, we will need to reckon with the contradictions regarding class and anti-imperialism. I readily admit that this reckoning needs to happen among those who support multipolarity; far too much “multipolarist” politics disregards the class struggle, and behaves as if multipolar institutions such as BRICS will do the work for us. It is necessary to warn against this idealism. The biggest problem with the position the KKE takes towards the BRICS countries is that due to its treating these countries like potential incubators of imperialism, it acts as if their local capitalist classes are independent. Which is a notion that actually obscures the real danger they pose.

The risk is not that the national bourgeoisie in Russia, Iran, or other places will launch upstart imperialist projects, because they lack the financial capacity to do this. The risk is that they’ll sell their peoples out to the hegemon. It’s this danger that we need to focus on, and the only way we can address it is by building the workers movement. A key thing, though, is to not do this in an economistic way, but rather reach a synthesis that accounts for the anti-imperialist struggle. This is the balance that can let us win the ideological battle with the KKE’s camp, and act as effective leaders for the workers.

As of now everyone has seen at least snippets of Charlie Kirk’s memorial. Most sane human beings have had the same response to that event – what the fuck was that? The internet, as usual, has done its job to spread a flurry of memes about the occasion, which resembled a WWE event more than a memorial.

We would be foolish to consider such events accidental. Capitalism shrinks from genuine memorialization. It is a system which produces an ever-present cycle of Neuralyzer flashes, readily available to try to wipe any semblance of memory.

When memories are allowed to linger it is in the form of a commodity, a real abstraction woven into the fabric of capital accumulation. It is not the memory of St. Nicholas which we keep but of Coca-Cola’s Santa Claus, a commodity we fill our homes with in December.

Likewise, irrespective of one’s thoughts on Kirk, what most substantially remains is not a real memory but a caricature, deified into a symbolic commodity whose purpose is not just accumulation, but an ideological social function used to unify people for the Zionist right’s political projects. While his persona has not died, he has neither remained alive in the form of genuine memorialization. He remains what Slavoj Žižek calls, “undead… neither alive nor dead, precisely the monstrous ‘living dead.’” He’s been turned into a zombie-like symbolic commodity for the Zionist right, an interesting appropriation considering his criticisms of Israel and AIPAC toward the end of his life.
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The erasure and commodification of memory breed a memoryless people of the surface, weak and without historical depth. Like the Eloi in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, we are conditioned to only seek immediate gratification, to shun anything that requires effort and sacrifice.

Capitalism seeks to strip us of any sense of a common historical past. It is through collective memory that a great deal of meaning is imbued to the current battles of our world – it is because our present struggles, as Walter Benjamin would say, redeem those who have fought before us that they are meaningful. It is this sense of fighting “in light” of a tradition which precedes us that sheds historical depth on our present struggles.

A people without a memory are politically paralyzed. They have the form of a people but are devoid of content. The shared identity rooted in a common tradition of struggle, its memorialization as a basic component of their being-in-the-world, is the background on which all emancipatory political projects are undertaken. This need not only take conceptual form; it is embodied in their practices, rituals, and basic ways of skillfully coping in the world.

​Capitalism seeks not only to destroy how memory exists in our conceptual understanding of the world, but also in our fundamental existence in it, in the pre-conceptual practices through which we skillfully navigate the world most of the time. It seeks to uproot us from the practices, rituals, and ways of being-in-the world through which memory is sustained.

This is a fundamental mechanism of capitalism’s reproduction. It isn’t an accident or an arbitrary policy; it is a systemic necessity to continuously reproduce the system. What is at stake here is people’s willingness to sacrifice. As Boris Groys writes, humans are willing to sacrifice themselves, but there must be some semblance of compensation for it. This need not be an immediate gratification, or even one that is in our lifetime. Groys writes that “in the Christian tradition this compensation is divine grace. In our time it is the collective memory of people sacrificing themselves for the common good.”

Sacrifice is often rewarded in the form of martyrdom, where the death itself becomes a testimony to the revolutionary cause. This can be seen in both Jesus and Che Guevara. Their deaths were transfigured into the collective memory of a people, their martyrdom inscribed meaning into the world from the moment of death itself. Their deaths are of the kind Chairman Mao said were “weightier than Mount Tai.” They died for the people and because of it they continued living through genuine memorialization in the people’s being-in-the-world.
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Not all lives of sacrifices end in martyrdom, where the death itself is marked as a revolutionary event – a staple in the memory of the cause itself. Almost all forms of sacrifice, however, seek to be remembered, that is, to not have occurred in vain.

“It was very characteristic of the Christian church,” Groys writes, “to create an archive for sacrifice, for martyrdom. Sacrifice is always connected to the process of archiving. Capitalism tends to negate archives; today physical archives are financially in a very bad position. This economic dissolution of archives creates a feeling that whatever we do, it all disappears—it is all for nothing. If people don’t have the feeling that their sacrifice is valued, then they just enjoy life. They think the only thing they have is life here and now, so they want their life to be a life of pleasure.”

It is precisely here where we see what is at stake in capitalism’s erasure of memory and genuine memorialization. It is the uprooting of the conditions for the possibility of sacrifice – an integral quality of any revolutionary struggle. If a people are unwilling to sacrifice themselves for a cause, if they consider all sacrifices to ultimately be in vain due to the fate befallen those who have sacrificed themselves in the past, there will ultimately be no impetus to fight. Political paralysis ensues and the masses are reduced to a cattle-like existence that merely continues life to satisfy cravings and ephemeral desires.
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While far from sufficient for revolutionary change, today memorialization is an essential revolutionary act. It reminds us of our forefathers who carried on the fight we wage today, in their own time. The men and women who sacrificed themselves to push things forward, even if it was not them who would reap the rewards of their struggles. Their memory must be kept alive so that their struggles don’t die in vain. So that our struggles don’t either. To remember the struggles of the past is to affirm – in the face of capitalism’s attempt to erase memory and make us into tabula rasas – that there is meaning in our sacrifices today. That our efforts will not be in vain. That however much capitalism will seek to expunge the memory of our plight from the annals of history, our descendants in the struggle will keep us alive, as we did to our forefathers. To remember is to resist a system that wants us to forget.

Author
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Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy professor. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the Secretary of Education of the American Communist Party. He has authored a few books, including The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming On Losurdo’s Western Marxism (2025) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2025). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Carlos’ just made a public Instagram, which you can follow HERE.