In what follows, I expand beyond the explicit scope of Legacy of Violence, but remain focused on the question of imperial empire and its ideological justifications that the book sharply poses and investigates.

VIII. The “American Century” Sets New Standards of Imperialist Barbarism

The so-called “American Century” was borne of the devastation of World War 2. In dropping two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed over 200,000 people, the U.S. imperialists were delivering a message to adversaries and allies alike that America was setting the terms for the postwar order.

Legacy of Violence details the rivalry between the U.S. and Britain following World War 2. Initially, the U.S. was aiming to block attempts by Britain to retake the global stage. But this rivalry evolved in the direction of the U.S.-British “special relationship.” As spoken to in Part 2, this was decisively influenced by the development in the early 1950s of a socialist bloc of the Soviet Union and China and the spread of national liberation struggles. Great Britain was becoming a “junior partner” in the new imperialist world order. Meanwhile, the U.S. oversaw the economic reconstruction of Germany and Japan as strategic bulwarks. The U.S. forged and has led NATO, the Western military alliance established in 1949.

An Empire Rooted in a Definite Mode of Production

To speak of a specific and historically unprecedented American empire is to understand that the domestic economy of the U.S. is the “home base” of a global network of exploitation and plunder. It is rooted in the capitalist mode of production.

–The U.S. empire is bound together by trillions of dollars in overseas investments. It obtains profits from operations in other capitalist-imperialist countries. It extracts superprofits from direct investments in factories and mines in the “Global South”—as well as through global supply chains combining conditions of 19th century sweatshop and child labor with 21st century advanced-technology, communication, and coordination. To put it plainly, there is no Apple without the 40,000 children digging tunnels and hauling coltan from the mines of Congo. It is a country in which the U.S. helped overthrow and murder the leader of a legally elected government in 1960, and installed a “friendly” puppet neocolonial regime.

–The U.S. empire spreads its tentacles of influence and control through global institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and World Trade Organization. Other imperialist powers (like Japan, Germany and Great Britain, and now China) are part of and pursue their own imperialist interests within these institutions. But the U.S. dominates.

With respect to independent regimes in the Third World, these U.S.-dominated global institutions, along with private imperialist banks, are vehicles for U.S. imperialist domination and penetration. Loans and “development projects” (like dam and port construction), the creation of special export processing zones to assemble goods for the imperialist countries, austerity and “adjustment” programs that require Third World countries to restructure their economies—all this creates forms of control and dependency in Third World economies. This dependency is manifested in what these countries produce, export, and import; their reliance on world markets for food; the fact that millions of workers must migrate abroad to earn a living (and send back a portion of earnings to support families).

While the oppressed countries of the Global South are formally independent, that sovereignty is limited and undermined by this kind of economic domination and penetration.  

–The U.S. dollar plays a special role as the key currency in the highly integrated financial system of world imperialism. Oil is priced in dollars; loans to Third World countries are mainly paid back in dollars; and the privileged international position of the dollar enables the U.S. to run up unheard of government deficits to sustain and lubricate an empire of misery.

Role of the Neocolonial State

The U.S. imperial empire subordinates oppressed nations of the Third World to its economic needs and strategic interests, and enforces that subordination, through the controlling mechanism of the neocolonial state.

The U.S. “perfected” this neocolonial (indirect) mode of governance through the 20th century. These are highly repressive “client regimes.” Some are more centralized than others; some rely on the military openly managing the state apparatus; some on royal family networks; some with foreign-educated officialdom closely linked to local exploiting classes and foreign capital; some legitimized by elections and trappings of democracy. (Puerto Rico is under direct U.S. colonial control.) 

The allegiance and subordination of neocolonial regimes to U.S. imperialism is secured through trade and investment agreements, weapons transfers and training of militaries, aid programs, and more. Not least, these are often governments installed through coups and invasions. Between 1950 and 2017, the U.S. intervened militarily over 300 times in other countries: coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile; military invasions in the Dominican Republic and Panama; the list goes on. [See Fletcher Center for Strategic Studies, Tufts University, The Military Intervention Project.]

The U.S. Empire Rests on History's Most Massive and Destructive Military Machine

The U.S. has constructed a high-tech military machine that has rained death and destruction on more people in the world than any other power in the last 75 years. U.S. imperialism presently girdles the globe with more than 700 military bases in at least 70 countries. It spends more on its military than the next nine countries combined (including China and Russia). [See Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Military Expenditure Data Base, 2022.]

The U.S. has waged massive wars in Korea and Vietnam to suppress national liberation and revolution: flattening cities, creating “free-fire” zones in the countryside, causing the deaths of some two million in Korea and three million in Vietnam. Since the U.S. launched its so-called “war on terror” in 2001, more than 385,000 civilians have died violent deaths as a direct result of U.S.-engineered wars and military occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Pakistan (and many have died indirectly as a result of dislocation, disease, and civil wars). [See CNN, “How a New Library Sheds Light on the U.S. 'Secret War' in Laos,” June 14, 2022; Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University, Costs of War: Civilians Killed and Wounded, September 2021.]

The U.S. “refined” the British method of paramilitaries and special terror and assassination programs. After World War 2, the U.S. launched a mass extermination program of leftists and communists. It helped the Indonesian military kill one million civilians in 1965—eliminating the third largest communist party in the world. The U.S. government/CIA trained “death squads” in Central America for the purpose of terrorizing people out of villages. The U.S. conducted Operation Condor in South America in the 1970s and 1980s—the intentional murder of 60,000-80,000 people suspected of being left-wing enemies of the state. [Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method (New York: Public Affairs, 2020), Appendix 5, pp. 266-67]

The "American Crime" series, a feature of revcom.us, is essential reading for documentation of America's crimes and atrocities. As revcom.us explains: “Each installment focuses on one of the 100 worst crimes committed by the U.S. rulers—out of countless bloody crimes they have carried out against people around the world, from the founding of the U.S. to the present day.”

IX. A Refurbished Ideology of Liberal Imperialism, Imperialist Chauvinism and Parasitism

Who was the U.S. to be doing this? It is the (self-proclaimed) “leader of the free world.” Why is the U.S. carrying out war crimes and crimes against humanity? Because it is the “force for good in the world,” that stands and fights for “democracy against tyranny.” The U.S. imperialists cast their proxy (inter-imperialist) war between the U.S./NATO and Putin's Russia is as “democracy versus autocracy.” [See The Bob Avakian Interviews, Part 2]

Until now, I have discussed the ideology of “liberal imperialism” promulgated by the British, as analyzed in Legacy of Violence. The American colossus has put its own spin on the ideology of “liberal imperialism.”

America presents itself as the leader of a global order that has transcended empire. It tells the world that it has no claims to empire. Rather, as the imperialist ideologues and officials rationalize domination, it falls on the U.S. to play a different and unique great-power role than that of empires past. That mission is to shape and defend global rules and institutions that foster liberal democracy: elections, free markets, the legal enshrinement of individual right.

This global liberal order for which the U.S. is the “indispensable power” is said to be founded uniquely on a) multilateral institutions like the World Bank and United Nations involving participation and agreements reached among different countries; b) global interdependence made possible by new technologies and massive flows of goods and information across borders; c) an end to the hierarchy and geographical divides of empires past; and d) the unique “perfectibility” of American democracy.

In this self-serving fable, the world has become “flattened”—countries and regions and investors can access and plug into, can partake of, the benefits of this global system, if they play by the rules. Never mind the vast networks of exploitation, the howling economic and social inequalities, the wars and invasions, the massive death tolls, the environmental devastation.  

Bob Avakian has attached enormous importance to calling out American chauvinism and training people in internationalism—"American Lives Are Not More Important Than Other People's Lives," "The Whole World Comes First"—as a crucial and central element of building the movement for revolution in the “belly of the beast.” 

It is about waging ideological struggle, for people to understand and to stand against what the U.S. does in the world; coming to see the reality of “thank you for your service” (for crimes against humanity). Avakian has spoken and written trenchantly on what he has termed the “Great Tautological Fallacy”: that when America does something in the world, however horrific, and even if these are acts and practices that it condemns other governments for... still this must be “good,” because America after all is... “a force for good.”

Further, Avakian has analyzed how, on the pedestal of America's global exploitation and its plunder of the planet, there is, in the “home base,” the numbing ideological effect of imperialist parasitism... and parasitic individualism as a “unifying element” of the mind set in the home base of America's empire. Keep in mind that it would take four or five planet Earths were the rest of the world to replicate America's standard of living.

X. Democracy: Can't We Do Better Than That?

Given the relationship between the horrors of empire and the ideology of liberal democracy, both in its British and American renderings, I want to return now at a more fundamental level to the nature of and illusions spawned by democracy.

Bob Avakian has written on the historical context and class-social content of different kinds of democracy throughout history. This has ranged from ancient Greek and Roman societies founded on enslavement and exploitation and in which democracy belonged to a narrow sliver of society, to the democracy of U.S. imperialism, a democracy founded on genocide and slavery, a democracy where people have the “democratic right” to vote for this or that representative of the ruling class.

Importantly, Avakian has addressed the inability of people

to see beyond what Marx characterized as the narrow horizon of bourgeois right—right as defined by, and delimited within the confines of, bourgeois production relations and the corresponding social relations.

And this is often expressed in terms of a kind of magical "democracy" which at one and the same time is inextricably linked with capitalism yet somehow does not have social and class content—is a metaphysical  "pure" democracy—when in reality ... the democracy that is being spoken of and exalted in this way is a form of class dictatorship that facilitates and enforces capitalist production relations and the overall capitalist system of exploitation and oppression. [Bob Avakian, BREAKTHROUGHS—The Historic Breakthrough by Marx, and the Further Breakthrough With the New Communism, A Basic Summary, p. 3]

This “magical democracy” that so many who seek fundamental change cling to is an ideological shackle to real emancipation—towards making the communist revolution needed to overcome all forms of exploitation and oppression, and the very division of human society into classes, and creating a genuine world community of humanity. 

The socialist revolution establishes a new and radically different state power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is a transition to a communist world. The socialist system envisioned by the new communism opens up whole new vistas of democracy for the formerly oppressed and exploited, along with the great majority of society.

The Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America authored by Bob Avakian sets out the instrumentalities of political rule in the future society that will empower the formerly oppressed and exploited, and broader masses of society, to play the decisive role in determining the direction of society. A new state power will enable and give backing to people to consciously transform society to finally abolish all relations of exploitation and oppression—and to increasingly play the determining role in the government which serves that goal.  

By contrast, the illusory quest for “pure democracy” keeps people, even as they rebel, contained within the exploitative framework of liberal democracy/imperialism. In Democracy: Can't We Do Better Than That? and other works, Avakian shows

that, in order to put an end to all systems and relations of oppression and exploitation, it is necessary to transcend all states—in other words, all dictatorships—and eventually get to a classless society where we would no longer need, and would have transcended, the institutions and formal structures of any kind of democracy, and where the people themselves would be able to handle their affairs collectively without the need for one part of society to exercise democracy in its ranks while it  exercised dictatorship over the rest of society. [Bob Avakian, From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist, A Memoir (Chicago: Insight Press, 2005), p. 427]

There is a higher form of social organization and social consciousness... beyond democracy!*

Part 4-Conclusion will be posted soon.

*Bob Avakian has produced the most comprehensive Marxist treatment of democracy and equality. These writings include Democracy: Can't We Do Better Than That?; Dictatorship and Democracy, and the Socialist Transition to Communism; Communism and Jeffersonian Democracy; Making Revolution and Emancipating Humanity, Part 1; Birds Cannot Give Birth to Crocodiles, But Humanity Can Soar Above the Horizon: Part 1—Revolution and the State; BREAKTHROUGHS: The Historic Breakthrough by Marx, and the Further Breakthrough with the New Communism, A Basic Summary. See the "BA's Collected Works" page at revcom.us.