Anti-Imperialism and the Left in 2026

By Ron Jacobs
Counterpunch
September 11, 2026

Manijeh Maradian is a founder of the Raha Iranian Feminist Collective and the author of This Flame Within: Iranian Revolutionaries in the United States. The homepage of the website for the Collective makes the group’s position quite clear: it rejects US imperialism, its war on Iran and the repression of the current Iranian government. It also opposes violence, militarism and imperial war. In a conversation with five other Iranians currently in exile that was published in the Spring 2026 edition of Boston Review discussing the war and what it represents to Iranians, Palestinians and more, Maradian makes a rather unique observation which both deserves more notice and provides a more contemporary definition (and a somewhat poetic one) of what revolutionary anti-imperialism could and should be. The comment addresses the anti-imperialism of governments like Iran, which are anti-imperialist but also authoritarian, while simultaneously suggesting an alternative to the anti-imperialism tendencies described later in this piece and the Hilary Clinton type of feminism that supports imperial war. “Anti-imperialism without feminism,” says Maradian. “can easily collapse into support for authoritarianism, but feminism without anti-imperialism becomes cheerleading for empire.”[1]

The death of Gloria Steinem, whose back-and-forth support for US imperialism (i.e., opposed to the US war in Vietnam while rationalizing her work for the CIA, opposed to the UN General Assembly’s condemnation of Zionism as racist and calling the Israeli occupation “Israeli self-determination”, support for the US occupation of Afghanistan)[2] brought the truth of that sentence’s second clause back into public discussion. The dismissal of the Iranian government’s repression of women, the Left and other Iranians by various leftists who insist that Tehran should be uncritically supported in its war against US imperialism reminds us of the truth of the opening clause of the sentence.

The idea of a feminist anti-imperialism is not new in the international left, despite the Left’s historical replication of the patriarchal world it is trying to change. Indeed, some of its earliest public expressions are found in the post-World War Two statements and organizing of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) and the Revolutionary Feminist Conference of 1949.[3] The feminism these women espoused was a feminism that went beyond its bourgeois western roots. It is feminism that fights for the liberation of all women, not just the privileged few and, in doing so, fights for all oppressed humanity. At the time of the conference, this was understood to mean an opposition to imperialism and its wars. In 1949 and for years afterwards, that meant opposing the US wars in Korea, Vietnam and Latin America, British, Dutch and French wars in their rebelling colonies, and the comprehension that the US Marshall Plan for Europe was not a gift from Washington, but a means to incorporate Europe into Washington’s postwar empire. In today’s world, this feminist anti-imperialism supports the Palestinian resistance and opposes all US wars (I am including the actions of Washington’s cohort Israel here).

Broadly speaking, the usual framing of anti-imperialism today tends to be a binary one. One side in the binary bases its approach on the concept that Washington is the only imperialist nation and that all states that oppose US imperialism, whether that is China, Russia, Iran and perhaps a few other nations, should be supported because they oppose US imperialism. This position is historically based in the era following the 1917 Russian Revolution, which put an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist government in power in that country. During the period following World War Two known as the Cold War, it was the support of Cuba, the Soviet Union and, in some cases, China that made various revolutionary national liberation struggles victorious. Although that support was not without occasional problems, it was based in a common ideology. In today’s world, the competition among the most powerful nations is not based in ideology, but is solely a competition for profits. Those on the Left who do side with the Chinese or Russian governments are either convinced that those governments are still socialist (esp. in the case of China) or their frustration with US imperialism’s warmongering and intervention leads them to conclude that the enemy of their enemy (US imperialism) is their friend.

The opposite in this binary are those who see all imperialisms as equal and assume the governments of China and Russia are imperialist; in other words, US imperialism, Chinese imperialism and Russian imperialism are all equal enemies of humanity and should be opposed in the same manner. This approach disregards the hierarchy of power that exists among the world’s most powerful states; a hierarchy with the US at the top, mostly because of the US military’s vast resources and the fact that the US dollar remains the dominant reserve and trade currency in the world. Not only does this give Washington a huge military edge, it also provides it with a means to force other governments to go along with Washington’s trade manipulations via sanctions, agreements favorable to US capital, and tariffs. Among those who subscribe to this understanding are those whose historical perspective is often Russophobic in nature, which tends to result in their placing greater emphasis on Russia’s actions in the world and objectively siding with Russophobic elements in the governments of the West.

Of course, many of us who are anti-imperialist reject both of these positions for a number of reasons and in varying degrees. The first position often results in those agreeing with it supporting (tacitly and otherwise) human rights violations inside some of the countries they support; for example, tacitly supporting the repression of women and others (including leftist workers and artists) in Iran. Meanwhile, the second position results in those who hold it occasionally supporting the objectives of Washington and Israel. For example, a significant minority of the Left in the Global North have supported US and NATO arms shipments to Ukraine’s nazi-infiltrated military, ignored the crackdown on Ukrainian antiwar and anti-conscription activists while subscribing to the West’s description of Kyiv’s war with the people in Luhansk and Donetsk. Similarly, their support of the Syrian opposition often meant giving their support to the arming of mercenaries and socially reactionary religious militias in Syria. Like many other leftists and left-anarchists, I cannot go along with either position in this binary. Instead, I begin with the fact that US imperialism is historically one of the greatest enemies of humankind and is currently the greatest enemy of humankind (once again, this includes the wars fought by Israel).

Let me repeat, US imperialism is humanity’s greatest enemy. Other nations like Russia and China may be imperialist, and, if they are, then the world is certainly in some version of inter-imperialist rivalry not unlike the situation in the early twentieth century. However, it is Washington that has consistently and continually militarized that rivalry. I wrote a piece in the early 1990s for an Olympia, Washington monthly that noted even then that Washington’s economic situation represented by neoliberalism, its accompanying austerity measures (job cuts, educational cuts and growing homelessness among the working class, for example) and the increase in what was then called defense spending proved that Washington intended to use military force against the rest of the world in order to maintain its hegemonic position. Between outright war, kidnapping, murder on the high seas and the use of proxies from Ukraine to Israel, this is even more the case now. If one accepts the belief that Washington is the greatest enemy of humankind, it makes sense to conclude that economic competitors like China, Russia and Iran would find it useful to increase their military capabilities in response. It makes even greater sense that US anti-imperialists would make targeting the government in Washington and the financial world it serves their first priority. After all, if a movement against US imperialism can weaken the beast in its belly, then wouldn’t it follow that the rapidly militarizing conflicts in today’s world between the top three capitalist nations, mostly via proxy, would subside?

1. See Boston Review, Spring 2026, p. 41 ↑

2. For more on Steinem, Israel and the Palestinian movement, see “For Palestinian women, Gloria Steinem’s feminism is anything but”, https://www.newarab.com/opinion/palestinian-women-gloria-steinems-feminism-anything ↑

3. See Elizabeth B. Armstrong’s 2023 book Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference of 1949. My review is at https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/06/16/revolutionary-feminists-after-world-war-two/ ↑