news

the left wing parties are correct in their critiques about capitalism and corporations but seem to have a blind spot against their own imperialism on the Global South and even keen on perpetuating anti-China propaganda.

What left wing parties are these? There are certainly no major ones in the US. The two largest formations that actually criticize capitalism are PSL and a few caucuses in DSA. PSL is anti-imperialist and defends against imperialist attacks on China. Red Star caucus in DSA does as well. There are DSA caucuses that criticize capitalism and are still imperialism. These are either Trot or are Bernie liberals that retain substantial reactionary sentiment and are quite ignorant.

In the US, liberalism and imperialist apologetics are the baseline. Most people are politically illiterate in a deep sense and have nobody around to explain why they are exploited or how it is connected to exported violence. Most don't even know about the exported violence. When they are informed they often recede and become defensive, having been raised in a culture where not knowing something is an unforgivable weakness and politics is about being in camp A or B where the camps differentiate themselves by how explicit their racism is.

Really, your question is asking why there are no popular and proper socialist parties in the imperial core.

First, it is very difficult to have non-socialist anti-imperialist parties in the imperial core because they are in the oppressor country and have no framework by which to accidentally become anti-imperialist - and their entire state apparatus is set up around imperial extraction. You can see some legacy anti-imperialism in e.g. Ireland due to their recent history of resisting colonization, though their best anti-imperialists are still socialist. The closest that non-socialist parties come to anti-imperialist stances is through anti-warism. They don't know what imperialism is, how it ties to the economic system, etc. They draw on a simple moralism of seeing war and being against it. They might say "no wars for oil" and be accidentally correct due to the petrodollar and a need to control trade and use energy as a weapon. But they are easily coopted because they don't understand power or build out orgs realistically. The idea of building and using leverage never enters the equation. They are fundamentally idealists and there are large propaganda apparatuses that reaffirm their ineffectual idealism.

So then the question vis why aren't there major socialist parties in the West? Why are they all liberal parties that want social programs, labor imperialists, and reactionary legacy parties? That would take a long time to properly answer. It is many things. Propaganda. Gladio. Red scare. The education system. Bad organizing. Being "bought off" with treats and/or free equity.

To me, the question should be what success looks like, what you hope to achieve, and how to realistically work towards that goal given a historical education in failures. Look to what is currently deficient and ask how to change it and see who stands in your path. Becoming familiar with real OTG failures, if stagnating organizations, of anti-imperialist work that accomplishes nothing, these are the important questions. And they should be inverted: how do you grow your org? How do you set real and material goals and achieve them? Who do you work with? How do you educate? How will you protect yourself?