By Howie Hawkins

There is a longstanding critique of Vulgar Marxism as a simplistic economic determinism that claims that the ideological and social superstructure of a society is determined by its economic infrastructure or mode of production.

Vulgar Marxists (notably Stalinists) have tended to support as societies as “socialist” simply because they had state ownership of the means of production, no matter how much that state exploited its workers and denied democratic rights to its people in violation of the socialist values of freedom, equality, and democracy.

Vulgar Marxism was not the approach of Marx who analyzed society as an interacting whole in which economic, social, and ideological conditions mutually affect each other.

We also need a critique of Vulgar Anti-Imperialism, which considers U.S.-led Western imperialism as the only imperialism in the world today, and which therefore supports any state in conflict with the United States as anti-imperialist and “objectively” progressive, no matter how oppressive that state may be toward its own people and imperialist toward other nations.