It is not a secret for anyone that the Empire is crumbling. The downfall started not a few years ago but decades ago. Perhaps with the defeat in Vietnam, a cycle of violence, wars and continuous defeats was started that has now reached at its end as we see the destruction of the world around us. Echoing the famous phrase by revolutionary and political theorist Antonio Gramsci, “The old is dying and the new is struggling to be born. The time in between is the time of monsters.” As we see monsters creeping in one government after another from South Asia to Latin America, United States to Germany and the UK. We don’t see any alternative to the old world except for the mythical anti-historical past, in other words Fascism in a ‘new packaging’ as if rebranded for the 21st century. Another kind of romanticization that we see is an effort to reincarnate the Third World revolutionary spirit of the 60’s by the global left mostly led by the western left. Sometimes in the glorification of BRICS, other times portraying China (or even India) as anti-imperialist force and a ray of hope for the humanity. They do not realize that while the multipolar world is a breath of fresh air considering the suffocating last two or three decades, it is not the end.
Any force that doesn’t challenge capitalism and neoliberalism is not an answer to the problems that the world is facing today. The most important being the ecological disaster that we face today. No one in the sane mind with a little bit of historical knowledge would doubt that ecological disaster is a result of imperial and capitalist led development in the last two centuries. As the billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg put in all their stakes to the ‘AI Rush’ similar to the Gold Rush of mid 19th century, the global majority witnesses one ecological disaster after another. Those at the bottom of the hierarchy particularly poor and racialized men and women in the global south suffer the most. The most recent victims of the imperial made ecological crisis are the countless people in Saraiki waseb and other places in Pakistan last year. In addition to the ecological crisis there is the crisis of democracy itself. Many political theorists like Nancy Fraser and Wendy Brown in recent times have theorized this crisis as not just a biproduct but an active agent of neoliberal capitalism. Fascism and far right ideologies across the world have a lot of similarities, the biggest that they all agree and enforce militantly the idea of free market, intense privatization and cutting down the welfare spending on health and education. With Argentina being the laboratory of this new monstrous face of neoliberalism led by Javier Melei. In short, we are living in a dystopia where the poor and racialized are dying every day at the hands of slow violence of neoliberalism, ecological disasters, and patriarchy while the liberal democracy is crumbling down, the world saw its first trillionaire in Elon Musk. The trillionaire holds a lot of influence on the global opinion since he owns the biggest social media platform, the same trillionaire actively supports fascist, anti-immigrant, Islamophobic and nazis across the world. On the other hand, a live telecast genocide has been going on for the last 3 years. If you were in the 50’s you would read such things in dystopian sci fi books. However, this is not a complete picture. This is also the time of historic significance when it comes to the anti-imperialist resistance.
For the first time in 400 years the western imperialism is clearly in crisis. It is contradicting its own ‘values’ that it spread over the last few centuries. The two sides of the same coin i.e. extreme violence and values of enlightenment are emerging together. People across the world are for the first time seeing the hypocrisy and lies underneath the human face of empire that has always been used to wage war against the people in the global south. For the first time, people are looking for some kind of alternative to this suffocating imperial order. Hundreds of thousands of localized struggles against mining, development projects, and militarization are emerging across the world. These new multidimensional struggles are not segmented as in the past but built of comradery among workers, women, students, and ecological movements etc. These localized movements hold the key to the new world, the alternative that the people need. However, only the localized movements cannot build a new world alone. There has to be some sort of international solidarity amongst them for a new world. A basic consensus on strategies, knowledge sharing and principles. Instead of romanticizing the state led third World-ism of the 60’s we need third World-ism of the people and local movements of the 21st century. It seems like that kind of third World-ism is already emerging. As Faiz Ahmed Faiz wrote ‘Hum Dekhenge’!
