Points of Unity

We, the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective (AISC), are scholars, educators, and knowledge workers engaged in a battle of ideas to support the forces of liberation and justice around the world. During a historical moment of widespread confusion over the nature of imperialism, we face an international counterrevolution waged by the forces of imperialism. Through collaboration and cooperation, our collective engages in mutual knowledge production that illuminates, clarifies, and critiques the historical and contemporary realities of imperialist power and revolutionary struggles.

Our central focus is US-led imperialism, which emerges from the capitalist world system. Capitalism has been an imperialist system since its inception over five hundred years ago. This system extracts capital and resources from the colonized and racialized peoples and nations of Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific—the Global Majority-–leading to the underdevelopment of the majority of the planet. Imperialist subordination is an incessantly violent historical process built upon the ruins of colonialism, trans-Atlantic slavery, unequal exchange, militarism, humanitarianism, financialization, neoliberalism, and white supremacy.

AISC coalesces around the following Principles of Unity:

1. US-LED IMPERIALISM IS THE PRIMARY CONTRADICTION IN THE MODERN WORLD SYSTEM.

US-led imperialism is the greatest threat to the planet and its peoples. As a global project, US-led imperialism apportions development unequally along race, class, and national lines. It is a set of material relations of exploitation between countries of the global North and South premised upon the use of coercive economic, political, and military policies. Imperialism constrains the sovereignty of popular forces in the South while enabling a process of class collaboration between ruling elites in the Global North and the neocolonial bourgeoisie in the Global South.

As a white supremacist system, imperialism subordinates the Global Majority, which encompasses over 80 percent of the planet’s population. Most of the Global Majority are workers, laborers, toilers, and producers of surplus value, as well as prisoners, the unemployed, and the stateless. However, the conditions of life and death are heterogeneous across racial, economic, and national lines. They are also uneven across time and space.

Imperialist powers maintain the world system through hybrid warfare, which includes military interventions, occupations, proxy wars, counterinsurgencies, repressive modes of domestic policing and surveillance, border violence, and other forms of militarism, along with dollar dominance, foreign aid, debt regimes and structural adjustment policies, sanctions, carceral regimes, land grabs, psychological warfare, systematic rape and torture, covert operations, assassinations, coups, weaponization of human rights, and a rigged international legal apparatus rooted in racial hierarchies and colonial legacies.

2. WE SUPPORT NATIONAL LIBERATION, ANTI-IMPERIALIST INTERNATIONALISM, AND REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALISM.

Imperialism must be defeated for the planet and the peoples of the Global Majority to live in dignity. Nothing short of self-determination, full sovereignty, and control over resources can free colonized peoples. We therefore honor all forms of resistance, up to and including armed struggle, as we build people’s power toward an ecologically sustainable, mutually prosperous world.

Victory demands a heightening of contradictions across the planet. This includes within the belly of the beast, where the working classes and racially subordinated populations of the Global North also suffer from imperialism’s oppressive, exploitative, and extractive nature. We join the popular struggles that the Global Majority wage through revolutionary processes like nationalization, collectivization, landback, and agroecology. These actions make the world anew and save the planet from the destruction and waste wrought by imperialism.

3. WE MUST LIBERATE INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS FROM THE CLUTCHES OF IMPERIALISM.

International political institutions and international law must be administered by and for the peoples of the Global Majority in order to bring justice and secure reparations for the harms committed by US-led imperialism. The existing international institutions emerge out of and are designed to uphold white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, and US-led imperialism in the world system.

Our world-making project aims to ensure that the Global Majority receives long overdue radical and transformative reparations from the imperialist powers. We also envision an international legal order that brings imperialist powers and their neocolonial compradores to justice. A world order for the Global Majority requires developing legal and financial institutions that are capable of adjudicating justice, upending polarized development, addressing imperialist-induced climate and ecological devastation, and enforcing reparations. Saving the planet demands no less.

4. WE EMPHASIZE A DIALECTICAL AND HISTORICAL MATERIALIST APPROACH TO OUR SCHOLARSHIP THAT IS COMMITTED TO THE LIBERATION OF OPPRESSED PEOPLES.

We believe that dialectical and historical materialism is the only methodological framework that can cultivate a grounded and genuine analysis of local, regional, and global developments and the connections between these different scales.

To analyze the present, we are committed to elevating history and the continually evolving relations between the forces of oppression and resistance. Our analysis places primacy on events, processes, and developments over abstract idealism. Dialectical and historical materialism helps explain not only how existing relations came into being but also how to dismantle those relations. We embrace dialectical and historical materialism because it provides the conceptual framework for the collapse of imperialist power and thereby lays the intellectual groundwork for liberation.

5. WE EMPLOY CRITICAL PEDAGOGY AND ANALYSIS WITH OUR STUDENTS TO FOSTER A LIBERATED WORLD ORDER.

We uphold a pedagogical approach that rejects conformity by the younger generation of students to the imperialist and fascist logics of the present decadent system. Our goal is to offer students the means to deal critically and creatively with their present reality in order that they may help transform the world. We are committed to an internationalist pedagogy that centers the knowledge and struggles of the Global Majority and in turn repudiates the wasteful and destructive character of US-led imperialism.

As educators, we refuse the methodological nationalism, compartmentalized knowledge, and disciplinary repression that obstructs a structural analysis geared toward liberatory politics. The foundational principles of the Western academy’s traditional disciplines, those that rationalize imperialist domination, are so normalized that they are accepted as common sense. This disguised ideology in turn serves the expansion and consolidation of administrative power in the university. The contemporary university—as a hedge fund, a real estate developer, a gentrifier, a counterinsurgent force, and a site for militarized repression of radical politics—developed from its history as the ideological arm of slavery and colonialism. We reject the professionalization and individualism of knowledge production in the colonial-capitalist neoliberal university and seek to root our knowledge production in the needs of the masses. We endeavor to build collective liberatory knowledge projects together with the communities in which our institutions are embedded and with Global Majority insurgent educators and students.

We, as anti-imperialist educators, are committed to nurturing a comprehensive, critical, and truthful analysis of the world our students inhabit.