The Return of Anti-Imperialism

Fidel Castro's Legacy for Internationalism, Social Rights and a Socialist Alternative

Bert De Belder, Workers’ Party of Belgium (PVDA-PTB)

Dear comrades,

It is an honor to participate in this 24th IMCWP in Havana, coinciding with the celebration of the centenary of Comandante Fidel Castro Ruz. It is a pleasure to extend our warm solidarity to the courageous people of Cuba, their revolution, their socialism, and their Communist Party.

The greatest tribute we can pay to Fidel is not to commemorate the past, but to understand the present with the same intellectual courage and revolutionary fervour that characterised his entire political life.

Today, we are told we are entering a new age of insecurity. Wars multiply. Military budgets explode. Economic sanctions have become routine instruments of international politics. Social rights that generations fought to win are increasingly presented as unaffordable luxuries.

Many experience these developments as separate crises: of war, of democracy, of international law. Marxism teaches us to search beneath appearances, to connect the dots. In order to understand today's international relations, we have to return to Lenin's analysis of imperialism as a stage in the historical development of capitalism itself. When capital becomes concentrated and centralised. When finance capital dominates productive investment. When monopolies seek new markets, strategic resources, and control over global value chains. When competition among corporations overlaps with competition among states protecting their interests.

Crucial to imperialism is its economic infrastructure. Upon that foundation rise its political institutions, military alliances, and ideological narratives.

1. Anti-Imperialism Back on Centre Stage

For almost three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we were told anti-imperialism had become obsolete. Globalisation would replace confrontation. Markets would replace politics. History itself had reached its final destination.

Today these certainties lie in ruins. The concentration of economic power Lenin identified has reached unprecedented dimensions. A handful of financial institutions manage assets exceeding entire continents' GDP. A small number of technology corporations control global digital infrastructure.

Today's conflicts cannot be understood merely as the consequence of ambitious leaders or diplomatic failures. The deeper logic lies in an economic system whose search for accumulation collides with the limits of the existing international order.

This is why international law is simultaneously more necessary and more fragile than ever.

Faced with today’s blatant attacks on international law, it is the task of anti-imperialists to defend its original principles of sovereignty, equality, non-intervention, and prohibition of wars of aggression. These are indeed major achievements of the post-World War II conjuncture and the anti-colonial struggle.

Of course we have no illusions about the limitations of international law. It is not a miracle solution. It is a battlefield among other and more important terrains for class struggle.

We know that imperialism is in no way confined to foreign policy, but is an all-encompassing system. Its exploitative and oppressive nature is at work in its own home countries, with increasing attacks on social and democratic rights and achievements of the working class and the people.

That is why anti-imperialism cannot be merely moral protest against injustice. It must become a project for transforming the economic foundations that generate injustice.

1. A War Economy, a Militarized Society, and Resistance at the Homefront

Anti-imperialism has returned because capitalism in its imperialist stage has entered a new phase. A phase of intensified crisis and cut-throat international competition, in which the bourgeois state becomes more aggressive. It defends capital accumulation in more direct ways, at the service of monopoly capital, Big Tech, Big Oil, and the military-industrial complex.

Aggressively creating more venues for capital expansion abroad goes hand in hand with intensified social expansion of capital at home.

Across Europe, governments speak of "war economy", "strategic autonomy", and "security". These technical-sounding expressions describe a profound political shift. Military preparedness and concrete military action are becoming permanent features at a rapid pace.

For decades, we were told austerity was unavoidable. That there was no money for pensions, healthcare, housing, or schools. Every social demand was met with fiscal discipline. Then, almost overnight, billions became available. Not for hospitals or schools. For rearmament.Governments claiming no money for nurses suddenly find unlimited resources for mi litary contracts. European institutions are willingly suspending budgetary discipline if it concerns arms spending.

In Belgium, this contradiction is particularly visible. Every ministry must reduce expenditure - except Defence. Its budget expands at an unprecedented pace, and priority goes to offensive capabilities: F-35 fighter aircraft, long-range drones, frigates designed for operations far beyond our borders.

Militarisation should not be understood as a response to international tensions. And even less as an unfortunate policy choice. In reality, it is becoming structural to contemporary capitalism. It reflects growing integration of military production into monopoly capital's strategies. Arms industries, digital corporations, financial institutions and energy interests converge around a new cycle of accumulation driven by technological competition and public investment in defence.

Military expenditure projects power abroad, subsidises strategic industries, accelerates innovation, and creates new accumulation opportunities under public guarantee.

For the labour movement, this has profound implications. Defence of public services cannot be separated from struggle against militarisation. The ecological transition cannot succeed if resources are diverted towards military production. The struggle for peace and the struggle for social rights increasingly become one and the same.

This is one of the most important lessons Europe can learn from Cuba. For over six decades, Cuba has defended its sovereignty under extraordinary external pressure. The Cuban Revolution consistently insisted that national independence and social justice cannot be separated. Sovereignty acquires meaning only when it enables a people to guarantee education, healthcare, and human development.

Which options are there for Europe? Clearly, Europe should not be or remain subordinate to the USA, or its “vassal”. But Europe’s self-proclaimed “strategic autonomy” cannot be the answer eitehr. A European imperialist project is not the answer to US imperialism. The peoples of Europe do not need their own aggressive military bloc.

They need a different political horizon: a Europe engaging and cooperating with China and the Global South rather than competing for spheres of influence; a Europe measuring security by well-being rather than by fighter aircraft; a Europe contributing to collective security through diplomacy and international law; an Europe, in the final analysis, that opts to promote and build a socialism. By changing the correlation of forces, shaping a different political power, and ultimately changing society.

III. Anti-Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century

Marx reminds us that the ruling ideas of every epoch are the ideas of its ruling class. Gramsci showed that domination requires consent. A ruling class must persuade society that its particular interests are the general interests of all.

Fidel Castro understood this profoundly. The Cuban Revolution survived not simply because it defended itself militarily, but because it continuously fought a battle of ideas.

Contemporary capitalism finds it increasingly difficult to obtain consent through rising living standards – actually, if anything, living standards are declining. It must seek legitimacy elsewhere. It attempts to ‘manufacture consent’ by transforming language. War becomes “security”. Militarisation becomes “responsibility”. Austerity becomes “sound management”. Corporate power becomes “freedom”.

In the opposite sense, solidarity becomes “interference”. Trade union militancy becomes “extremism”. International law becomes “naïve idealism”. Socialist alternatives become “unrealistic”, if not “madness”. Nowhere is this ideological inversion of meaning more visible than in debates on war and peace. Those calling for negotiations are accused of appeasement. Those opposing escalation suspected of disloyalty. Calling for peace itself seems to require justification.

We cannot let those lies and manipulations pass unchallenged. If we want to build a society offering a real alternative to capitalism and imperialism, we must wage - and win! - the battle of ideas. This also requires waging - and winning! - the struggle over knowledge and technology, and developing the intellectual and educational tools to understand today's contradictions.

Anti-imperialism cannot simply consist of opposing particular wars or defending nations under attack. The struggle for peace, for international law, for democracy, for social rights, against fascism, for ecological survival—these converge. They confront the same underlying logic: an economic system subordinating human development to monopoly capital accumulation.

That is why socialism remains not simply an ideal but the only real and viable alternative to capitalism and imperialism, and an historical necessity.

Anti-imperialism and the quest for socialism have returned not because we are looking backwards. They have returned because history is moving forwards.

Fidel Castro admonished us to keep this long-term view, even when facing severe setbacks and adverse conditions: “Time is the wind that blows in the sails of our revolution. And the ship of revolution will sail onward! (...) The past was that of colonialism and imperialism; the future belongs to humankind, to the peoples and the revolution.”

(Speech delivered by Fidel during the mass rally in honor of General Omar Torrijos, held at the School City 26 of July in Santiago de Cuba, January 12, 1976 )                                   

Conclusion

Let us transform hope into organisation and action.

Let us defend public ownership not only of land and industry but increasingly of knowledge, digital infrastructures and artificial intelligence.

Let us defend sovereignty not only against military intervention but against financial domination, technological monopolies and economic coercion.

Let us defend democracy not only in parliaments but in the economy itself.

Let us strengthen and rerejuvenate our parties, mass organisations, alliances and partnerships to render them better capable of confronting today's realities.

Let us promote socialism. A society in which scientific progress serves humanity rather than monopoly profit. In which international cooperation replaces imperialist rivalry. In which peace is very different than the interval between wars. In which economic development is measured by human development. In which the workers and the people, those who create society’s wealth, are the masters of what to do with that wealth.

Our task is not to preserve Fidel Castro's legacy as though it belonged to a museum. Our task is to continue the attitude that defined his political life: to analyse reality without illusions, to organise without sectarianism, to educate without dogmatism, to struggle without resignation, and to retain confidence that the working class and the people, acting collectively, are the greatest makers of history, and. will make socialism a reality.

Thank you.