On July 15, Jacobin founder and Nation editor, Bhaskar Sunkara, criticized the Argentinean futbol team for unfurling a sign at the end of the game that declared the Malvinas islands belong to Argentina, a slogan he claimed was the banner of the old military dictatorship.

This was the banner of a military dictatorship that murdered thousands of leftists and tried to salvage its collapsing rule through chauvinist irredentism. pic.twitter.com/a767ZVCdXT

— Bhaskar Sunkara (@sunraysunray) July 15, 2026

One of the main problems with Bhaskar Sunkara’s commentary is that it reduces the Malvinas question to the political use made of it by Argentina’s military dictatorship in 1982: “This was the banner of a military dictatorship…”. That framing does not withstand historical scrutiny. Argentina’s claim to the islands did not begin with the dictatorship, nor with Galtieri, the military ruler who launched the 1982 war, nor even in the twentieth century. It is rooted in a longer colonial dispute that dates back to the British occupation of the islands in 1833, when the Crown expelled the authorities of the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata, which were administering the islands at the time.

Since then, the British occupation of the islands has represented, quite simply, the continuation of a colonial enclave within a dependent country. Great Britain was the principal imperial power exerting influence over Argentina during the second half of the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth. Although the country retained its formal political independence — after breaking from the Spanish Crown in 1816 — its economy became increasingly tied to British capitalism: the railways, ports, meatpacking industry, banks, and much of its foreign trade were dominated by British capital. In that sense, the occupation of the Malvinas has functioned —and continues to function — as a constant reminder: the relationship between Argentina and Britain (or other powers) has never been, and never will be, one between two nations freely exchanging in a neutral global market (as free-market advocates like Javier Milei claim), but rather one between an oppressor country and an oppressed one.

That said, it is no coincidence that a government as closely aligned with the United States as Javier Milei’s has sought to strip the claim to sovereignty over the islands of its substance. Milei has not only repeatedly praised Margaret Thatcher, but his government also accepted without resistance FIFA’s decision to prohibit any reference to the islands during the match against England.

The Marxist Left’s Position

Indeed, the 1976–1983 dictatorship appropriated this preexisting national cause — including through a military adventure — in an attempt to regain legitimacy amid a deep economic, social, and political crisis. The Military Junta was far from representing an anti-imperialist project. From 1976 onward, it had built a close alliance with the United States, implementing an economic program favorable to international capital and actively participating in the counterinsurgency strategy promoted by Washington in Latin America.

According to various testimonies and later documents, Galtieri believed that the United States’ strategic priorities in the Cold War would lead the Reagan administration to mediate favorably — or even support Argentina —against the United Kingdom. In reality, the opposite occurred. When the conflict pitted a dependent nation against an imperial power like Britain, Washington closed ranks with London. Reagan provided diplomatic, military, and intelligence support to Thatcher, confirming that solidarity among the major powers outweighs any temporary alliance with peripheral governments. The Falklands War was also a lesson — once again — about the limits of any illusion in a “friendly” imperialism.

All of this shows that when a reactionary regime opportunistically takes up the Malvinas cause, it does not change the underlying historical content of the claim. If we accepted Sunkara’s logic, we would have to say that any cause embraced by a reactionary government is automatically discredited. Marxism cannot proceed on that basis. Ruling classes often appropriate popular demands for their own ends, but that does not negate the objective character of those demands, nor does it mechanically determine what position the left should take toward them.

Trotsky wrote in 1938 that if Britain went to war with Getúlio Vargas’s Brazil — a regime he described as “semi-fascist” in the 1930s — revolutionaries should place themselves, in military terms, on the side of Brazil and against “democratic” Great Britain. Not because Vargas represented progressive interests, but because a defeat for British imperialism would weaken a major colonial power and open better conditions for revolutionary struggle in both countries. We can apply the same criterion today when analyzing and taking a position on the imperialist attacks directed against Iran. Trotsky warned that reducing such conflicts to a simple opposition between democracy and dictatorship is the mark of “empty‑headed” politics.

From a socialist and working-class standpoint, an analysis of wars must start not from the political regimes of the states involved, but from the position they occupy within the global imperialist system. Britain was — and remains — an imperialist power that has maintained a colonial enclave in the South Atlantic since 1833 (among others). Argentina, by contrast, is a dependent country (increasingly so), whose bourgeoisie has not only failed to complete the tasks of national liberation in relation to the great powers, but continually drags the country deeper into backwardness and dependence on institutions like the IMF and multimillionaire magnates such as Peter Thiel.

During the Falklands War, Trotskyist organizations such as the Party of Socialist Workers (PST) maintained a stance of political independence from the military junta. They denounced the regime’s criminal character and the policies that made victory impossible, while still defending Argentina against British imperialism. The slogan was not “support Galtieri,” but “against the dictatorship and against imperialism.” A genuinely revolutionary strategy for winning the war would have meant, for example, calling for the international mobilization of the working class against Britain and expropriating all British-owned property in Argentina — steps the dictatorship, of course, refused to take. With this logic, we would have to overthrow the dictatorship to win the war.

Why is this perspective essential for the development of class struggle both nationally and internationally? For Lenin and the Third International, and in our view as well, class struggle does not unfold in the abstract. It takes place in a world structured by imperialism, where a handful of states concentrate economic, military, and financial power, while dozens of nations are subjected to varying forms of dependence. This global hierarchy shapes both the exploitation of the working class in oppressed countries and the prospects for international revolution.

This position required breaking with an inherited conception of the Second International — one that Sunkara reproduces — which treated the only truly decisive contradiction as that between workers and capitalists within each individual country. In Lenin’s view, this approach ignored a decisive reality: capitalism had entered its imperialist stage, and the oppression of nations had become a central mechanism for reproducing the system. The story is familiar: the main parties of the Second International, abandoning internationalism, voted for war credits and backed the imperialist slaughter of the First World War. From this experience, it follows that class struggle and the struggle against national oppression are not separate, parallel processes, but interconnected dimensions of a single revolutionary strategy.

Under this same analysis, Britain’s victory over Argentina in 1982 cannot be seen simply as the defeat of the Argentine dictatorship. It was also a strategic victory for imperialism: it strengthened Margaret Thatcher’s government, consolidated the neoliberal offensive, and marked a setback for the international working class.

Sunkara’s reaction is not historically novel. During the 1982 war, broad sectors of the British Left failed to break from the ideological pressure of “their” own imperialism. The Labour Party openly backed Thatcher’s military expedition, while other currents retreated into pacifism or a false neutrality between the imperialist power and Argentina. Even Trotskyist organizations such as Militant denied Argentina’s semi-colonial character and rejected the policy of defending an oppressed nation against imperialism. The strength Thatcher gained proved decisive two years later, when she launched an offensive against the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) during the 1984–1985 strike — a defeat that became a turning point in dismantling the power of the British labor movement and consolidating neoliberalism. Such errors carry a heavy price.

Lastly, Sunkara asks, “Why not let the islanders tend to their sheep and marry their cousins, and focus the fight on the capitalists?” We have already explained above how this relates to the struggle against capitalism; but seriously, does Sunkara believe that the United Kingdom has sustained a colony 13,000 kilometers from London for nearly two centuries out of solidarity with the islanders? The Malvinas are a strategic enclave: they host an important military base, allow Britain to project power over the South Atlantic and Antarctica, and secure control over valuable fishing resources, potential hydrocarbon reserves, and key maritime routes. To reduce the dispute to a caricature of “sheep and cousins” is to erase precisely what Marxism has always placed at the center of its analysis — relations of power, domination, and material interests that sustain imperialism. His caricature of the conflict ends up serving England’s imperialist interests quite well.

The Roots of the Problem

Sunkara’s reaction is not an isolated error. It expresses a tension that has shaped parts of the new U.S. Left for years: a difficulty in making anti‑imperialism a strategic criterion of analysis. The result is a shift in focus: the relationship between an imperialist power and an oppressed nation is absorbed into a simple contrast between democracy and dictatorship. The same problem, already noted in several articles by Left Voice (the U.S. sister organization of the Argentine PTS), resurfaces in Bhaskar Sunkara’s hasty posts, which once again repeat a historic mistake of much of the Left in imperialist countries: viewing the world from the standpoint of their own state.

Ultimately, this debate is not about a soccer celebration, nor about a flag shown for a few seconds. It is about an attempt to turn sport into a politically sanitized space, where the demands of oppressed peoples are dismissed as “provocations” while the relations of power that uphold the world order are kept invisible. It is no accident that FIFA seeks to police this boundary in advance by trying to ban any message about the Malvinas. An institution so closely tied to major sponsors, governments, and international bodies is hardly willing to allow one of the world’s biggest sporting events to become a platform for questioning a still‑existing colonial enclave. Yet, one way or another, cracks always open through which truth can force its way in — whether in the Egyptian coach speaking out for Palestinian children, or in the Argentinean players unfurling their banner for the Malvinas. The “neutrality” FIFA invokes does not mean keeping politics out of football; it means excluding those political expressions that disturb the established powers — and Sunkara as well.

This article was originally published in Spanish on July 16 inLa Izquierda Diario.

The post The Falklands Question and the World Cup: A Marxist Response to Bhaskar Sunkara appeared first on Left Voice.

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