In Moscow, the so-called new international socialist network, Sovintern, has been launched under the leadership of the Russian capital's own “left patriots.”
The initiative is presented with grand rhetoric about socialism, anti-imperialism, anti-colonial struggle, and international solidarity. Yet behind the red symbols, a different reality emerges: not proletarian internationalism, but bourgeois campism.
Particularly revealing are Sovintern’s connections with the World Anti-Imperialist Platform (WAP). For some time, this grouping has promoted a line that divides the world’s capitalist states into “good” and “bad” camps. The United States and NATO are correctly identified as imperialist forces, but at the same time other capitalist great powers—above all Russia and China—and their respective ruling classes are presented in an increasingly favorable light. In this way, the Marxist-Leninist analysis of imperialism as a global system is replaced by a simplified geopolitical map in which the working class is encouraged to choose sides between competing bourgeois powers.
This is not anti-imperialism. It is opportunism.
A communist line can never be based on subordinating the working class to the interests of one or another capitalist state. Imperialism is not merely the foreign policy of the United States. Imperialism is capitalism in its monopolistic stage: a world of capital export, competition for markets, the pursuit of raw materials, military expansion, and rivalry between capitalist states. To oppose U.S. imperialism by idealizing other bourgeois powers is therefore not Marxism, but a capitulation to campism.
The symbolism surrounding Sovintern’s leading figures makes this even clearer. Sergey Mironov, a central figure in both A Just Russia and the Sovintern project, has previously posed proudly with a sledgehammer he received as a gift from circles associated with Wagner. This is not a neutral symbol. Wagner has become synonymous with brutality, mercenary activity, and reactionary militarism. When a politician who claims to speak in the name of socialism displays such a symbol with a smile, it says more than a hundred programmatic declarations.
Here we encounter the method of red-painted reaction: speaking of anti-imperialism while glorifying militaristic symbols; speaking of socialism while refusing to stand on the independent class basis of the working class; speaking of international solidarity while tying it to the foreign-policy interests of a capitalist state. The result is an “anti-imperialism” that does not liberate the working class, but instead leads it into dependence on foreign bourgeoisies.
It is therefore necessary to distinguish between genuine anti-imperialism and false anti-imperialism. Genuine anti-imperialism is directed against the imperialist system as a whole—against all bourgeoisies, all imperialist alliances, and every attempt to mobilize workers behind “their own” capitalist state. False anti-imperialism, by contrast, tells workers to choose one great power against another, to regard certain capitalist states as inherently progressive, and to postpone the struggle against their own ruling class.
This line is dangerous. Historically, it has led the workers’ movement into social chauvinism, where workers are mobilized under red banners in defense of national capitalist interests. It has also opened the door to cooperation with reactionary and nationalist forces, so long as they happen to be in conflict with the United States or the European Union. But a working class that allows itself to be led by such forces loses its independence.
Communists can, of course, never be neutral in the face of the crimes, wars, and domination of the United States and NATO. But the answer can never be to extend political support to other capitalist power blocs. Our response must be the independent line of the working class: against NATO, against the militarization of the European Union, against U.S. imperialism, but also against every bourgeois state seeking markets, resources, and spheres of influence for its own benefit.
Sovintern and WAP demonstrate how necessary the ideological struggle remains. It is not enough to invoke the words socialism, anti-imperialism, and anti-fascism. The decisive question is what class line lies behind those words. If the working class is not at the center, if capitalism is not challenged as a system, if one’s own bourgeoisie is absolved, and if communists are encouraged to march behind capitalist states, then it is not Marxism-Leninism. It is opportunism wrapped in red packaging.
This does not apply only to Russia. WAP’s line also involves a systematic idealization of the Chinese state and Chinese capital. China is portrayed as a socialist counterweight to Western imperialism, despite the fact that the country’s development today is characterized by market relations, capital accumulation, monopoly formation, capital export, and an ever-growing participation in the struggle for raw materials, markets, and spheres of influence. To call this socialism is to strip the concept of its class content.
Here Konstantin Syomin’s expression “market communists” is particularly apt. It describes precisely this political tendency: forces that retain communist symbols and rhetoric while in practice defending the logic of the market, the development of capital, and the interests of a bourgeois state. They speak of socialism, but their analysis leads the working class toward support for a capitalist great power. They speak of anti-imperialism, but their “anti-imperialism” amounts to defending one imperialist pole against another.
The so-called multipolar world is often presented as a progressive alternative. But multipolarity under capitalism does not mean the liberation of the working class. It means multiple capitalist centers of power, multiple competing bourgeoisies, and multiple great powers struggling over markets, trade routes, technology, energy resources, and political influence. For the working class, this does not mean socialism, but rather the risk of once again being mobilized behind “its own” or some other bourgeoisie in imperialist competition.
This is why the WAP line is dangerous. It transforms anti-imperialism from a struggle against the imperialist system as a whole into a defense of particular capitalist states. Instead of developing an independent strategy of the working class against every bourgeoisie, it binds communists and workers to Chinese and Russian capital beneath red banners. That is not proletarian internationalism. It is bourgeois geopolitics dressed in socialist phrases.
Working-class internationalism is not built through state-loyal projects, parliamentary patriotism, or red-tinted geopolitical strategists. It is built through struggle against capital in every country, solidarity among workers across borders, and an independent strategy for workers’ power and socialism. For that reason, every attempt to replace proletarian internationalism with bourgeois camp politics must be exposed and fought.
