Death Rides Out: How to understand imperialism in the age of Gaza

Tomáš Tengely-Evans' Death Rides Out: Imperialism in the 21st Century is a short book about an immense subject, written with the urgency of someone who knows that the question of imperialism is not an academic puzzle but a matter of life, death and political orientation.

At its best, it restores to the word "imperialism" the force that liberal commentary has tried to drain from it: not a relic of pith helmets and colonial maps, but the living logic of a capitalist world system hurtling through war, genocide, ecological plunder and great-power rivalry. 

Tengely-Evans, a Slovak Welsh Marxist based in East London, is the editor of Socialist Worker newspaper and a member of the British Socialist Workers Party. The book's acknowledgements also locate his political formation in living struggle, including the workers of Mahalla and the Egyptian revolution; he writes that he was convinced of Marxism in 2011. 

That biographical detail is not decorative. It explains the pulse of the book. Death Rides Out is not written from the armchair of detached commentary. It is written from within a tradition that insists theory must clarify the world so that people can change it.

The prose has the compactness of a pamphlet, but the ambition of a much larger work: to restate the Marxist theory of imperialism for a generation shaped by Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Congo, Taiwan, the return of Trumpism, the decline of US hegemony and the rise of China. 

The book opens in Sarajevo, near the place where the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand helped ignite the First World War.

It is a literary and political gesture at once. Sarajevo is more than simply scenery; it is a warning. The author wants us to feel the echo between 1914 and the present, between an overstretched British Empire facing rising challengers then and an overstretched American Empire confronting China, Russia and a host of regional powers now.

The image is effective because it refuses nostalgia. History here is not an archive of dead empires. It is a battlefield whose ghosts still issue commands. 

The core argument is clear and persuasive: imperialism is not simply stronger states bullying weaker ones, though it certainly includes that.

It is a global system of competing capitalist states in which economic rivalry and geopolitical conflict fuse. 

Such an argument allows Tengely-Evans to avoid two common traps.

The first is liberal hypocrisy, which recognises Russian aggression in Ukraine or Chinese threats towards Taiwan as imperialist, while treating Western wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria or Gaza as tragic mistakes committed in the name of higher ideals.

The second is "campist" fantasy, which sees every enemy of Washington as progressive by definition. 

Understanding empire today 

The current debates on imperialism are not happening in the realm of the abstract.

They shape how people understand Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, China, Russia, NATO, the US and the future of war. They shape what slogans movements raise, which states they excuse, whose victims they remember and whose they erase.

In a world where Israel's destruction of Gaza has exposed the obscene moral bankruptcy of the Western order, millions have rediscovered the language of anti-imperialism.

But anger at the West, however justified, is not enough. Without a serious theory of the system, anti-imperialism can curdle into a politics of substitutes, in which Moscow, Beijing, or Tehran are imagined as agents of liberation merely because they clash with Washington. 

Tengely-Evans does not ask readers to choose between the Pentagon and its rivals. He asks them to understand the system that produces both.

Russia, in this account, is not a defensive victim of NATO alone, nor is its invasion of Ukraine reducible to the psychology of Vladimir Putin. It is an imperialist power, weaker than the US but still driven by its own ruling-class interests, regional ambitions and need to dominate its "near abroad".

China, likewise, is not a benevolent counterweight to the West. It is a rising capitalist power, increasingly central to the world economy, locked into confrontation with the US, and capable of coercion, militarism and imperial ambition in its own right. 

The left, Tengely-Evans charges, has long had a weakness for romanticising distant states that appear to resist the dominant empire of the day.

During the Cold War, that often meant looking to the Soviet Union as an anti-imperialist pole despite its tanks, satellites and bureaucratic despotism.

Today, similar illusions are gathering again around Russia and China. The author cuts through this sentiment without conceding anything to Western apologetics.

To oppose NATO expansion does not require prettifying Russian imperialism. To oppose US encirclement of China does not require pretending Beijing is a socialist alternative. To defend Palestine does not require outsourcing liberation to regional states whose own ruling classes pursue power, markets and influence. 

The book is also animated by confidence in ordinary people's capacity to act. Its Marxism is not a theory of helplessness before giants.

Tengely-Evans explicitly rejects the view of the world as a chessboard on which great powers move smaller countries and populations like pieces.

His Marxism insists on class antagonism, popular agency and the possibility of revolt. That gives the book its moral centre. The world system may be monstrous, but it is not divine. It was made by human beings under specific historical conditions, and it can be challenged by human beings acting collectively. 

Some of the most useful passages return to Lenin and Bukharin without treating them as scripture.

Tengely-Evans distinguishes the "rational kernel" of classical Marxist theories of imperialism from the dated or overgeneralised claims of their time.

Too much Marxist writing either recites Lenin as catechism or discards him as a relic. 

Death Rides Out does neither. It reads the tradition historically, critically and politically, drawing out what remains alive: the concentration and centralisation of capital, the structural interdependence of state and capital, uneven development, rivalry, war and the impossibility of abolishing imperialism without confronting capitalism itself. 

The collapse of old promises

The book also makes good use of images of acceleration and exposure.

"The film of history is speeding up," Tengely-Evans writes, and the phrase captures the vertigo of the present. Old masks fall quickly now. The rhetoric of humanitarian intervention has been shredded by Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Gaza.

The liberal world order increasingly looks less like a rules-based system than a decaying architecture of domination, kept upright by arms, sanctions, debt, bases and client states.

Trump's crudity, in this reading, is not an aberration from US power but its obscene confession. He says aloud what others wrap in velvet. 

A review should also say where the book's polemical compression may leave readers wanting more.

At times, the sweep is so vast that some arguments move faster than the controversies they address. Readers unfamiliar with debates over state capitalism, NATO, Ukraine, or China may wish for more space, more examples, more patient unpacking. 

The book repeatedly attempts to speak to 'Generation Palestine', but not by flattering it. It challenges that generation to deepen its anti-imperialism, to refuse selective outrage, and to understand that the enemy is not only one capital, one flag, one alliance or one grotesque president.

The enemy is a world system in which rival ruling classes, old and new, compete over territory, resources, labour and strategic advantage. 

Hossam el-Hamalawy is an Egyptian scholar-activist in Germany, focusing on the military, policing, and labour

Follow him on Instagram: @countermaspero