Marx says, of Proudhon,
“If he has the advantage over Hegel of setting problems which he reserves the right of solving for the greater good of humanity, he has the drawback of being stricken with sterility when it is a question of engendering a new category by dialectical birth-throes. What constitutes dialectical movement is the coexistence of two contradictory sides, their conflict and their fusion into a new category. The very setting of the problem of eliminating the bad side cuts short the dialectic movement. It is not the category which is posed and opposed to itself, by its contradictory nature, it is M. Proudhon who gets excited, perplexed and frets and fumes between the two sides of the category.” (p 105)
As Trotsky noted, in relation to imperialism, the Marxist position was not to try to retain the “good” side, represented by the drive to abolish nation states, and borders, creating ever larger states, on the road to a single world market and state, whilst eliminating the “bad” side of imperialist wars, annexations and so on, because, to do so, would be utopian, idealism and reactionary. The Marxist position was for the working-class to posit itself as the global class that is the progressive element of that contradiction, in opposition to the bourgeoisie, whose continued division, along national lines, was the foundation of those imperialist wars, but, also, whose capitalist system, and competition, necessarily drives to such wars.
The goal of the working-class is not to leave the capitalist/imperialist system in place, whilst moralistically decrying its consequences of wars and annexations, but to overthrow the capitalist/imperialist system itself, and to institute, in its place, international socialism. The latter is not “imperialism” shorn of its “bad” side, but something completely different and new entirely. That is why Marxists can view imperialism as objectively progressive, because it engenders this contradiction that provides the basis of its own resolution, a global economy and global working-class, whilst opposing the means by which imperialism seeks to bring that about via wars and annexations.
The opposition, in itself, is only a means of mobilising that global working-class, on the basis of the requirement to overthrow capitalism/imperialism, and not some moralising, pacifist opposition to war. It is no different to workers organising a union to resist encroachments on their wages. Marxists support such action, not because we see it as adequate or an end in itself, but because it is necessary, in order that workers can be able to recognise the need to go beyond it, to the overthrow of the wages system itself. As Marx put it,
“They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these unavoidable guerrilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system simultaneously engenders the material conditions and the social forms necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto: “A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!” they ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword: “Abolition of the wages system!"”
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