capitalism and imperialism essay

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Developing Economics

A critical perspective on development economics, the changing face of imperialism: colonialism to contemporary capitalism.

By  Sunanda Sen and Maria Cristina Marcuzzo

How is imperialism relevant today? How has it mutated over the past century? What are different theoretical and empirical angles through which we can study imperialism? These are the questions we deal with in our edited volume on The Changing Face of Imperialism (2018) .

We understand imperialism as a continuing arrangement since the early years of empire-colonies to the prevailing pattern of expropriations, on part of those who wield power vis-à-vis those who are weak. The pattern of ‘old imperialism’, in the writings of Hobson, Hilferding and Lenin, were framed in the context of the imperial relations between the ruling nations and their colonies with political subjugation of the latter, captured by force or by commerce, providing the groundwork for their economic domination in the interest of the ruling nations. Forms of such arrogation varied, across regions and over time; including  the early European invasions of South America, use of slaves or indentured labour across oceans, and the draining off of surpluses from colonies by using trade and financial channels. Imperialism, however, has considerably changed its pattern since then, especially with institutional changes in the  prevailing power structure.

The essays in the volume offer a renewed interpretation, which include the alternate interpretations of imperialism and its changing pattern over space and time, incorporating the changing pattern of oppression which reflects the dynamics underlying the specific  patterns of oppression. The pattern can be characterised as ‘new imperialism’ under contemporary capitalism as distinct from its ‘old’ form under colonialism. The varied interpretations of imperialism  as in the literature do not lessen the significance of the common ground underlying the alternate positions, including the diverse pattern of expropriations under imperialism.

The volume offers fourteen chapters by renowned authors. In this blog, we organise them in the following manner: the first five of those deal with the conceptual basis of imperialism from different angles, the next three chapters deal with contemporary imperialism, and then the rest six chapters of book deal with India, colonialism and contemporary issues with imperialism.

The conceptual basis of imperialism: different angles

Satyaki Roy’s Imperialism: the old and the new, departures and continuities sets the tone of the volume by making the point that we do not have a single theory of imperialism applicable to all times, but several which correspond to multiple historical manifestations of imperialism in the contemporary phase of capitalism. Roy sees in earlier theories of imperialism a focus on the conflicts between nations representing interests of national capitals, while nation-states  currently are no longer the organizing unit in the context of globalisation and universal capitalism. Thus, the characterisation of imperialism today cannot be limited to a rivalry between advanced capitalist countries nor as an expression of conflict between developed and underdeveloped nations. Rather, it has to encompass the power structure and internal articulation of global capitalism.

Above is followed by a paper on Marx’s capital and the global crisis by John Smith dwelling on the current status of the working class worldwide (workers as ‘global labour’). The paper looks at the cost-cutting exercises by Multi-National Corporations, which displaces the domestic workers by cheaper foreign labour, achieved either through emigration of production (“outsourcing”) to overseas or through immigration of workers. This so-called neoliberal globalisation is the new imperialist stage of capitalist development, where imperialism is characterised by the exploitation of “southern” labour by northern “capital”.

The next chapter is on Reflections on Contemporary Capitalism by Prabhat Patnaik. It takes us from the original formulation of imperialism by Lenin, who associated imperialism with centralisation of capital in industry and among banks, along the different phases of imperialism since then, to its present form marked by the hegemony of international finance capital, globalisation and neoliberal policies. Interestingly, Patnaik takes issue with interpretations of imperialism as a political project undertaken by the ruling state of US, through enlisting the support of other advanced capitalist States. For him, taking the leading country as the driving force behind imperialism means attributing to its state an autonomy , which none of the present capitalists countries have. Instead, as he argues, today’s imperialism is marked by the retreat and subservience of the state to international finance and, consequently, as the only political option, a selective delinking of the national economy from the global economy.

The particularity of imperialism today is also the topic addressed in Anjan Chakrabarti in the following chapter. Neoliberal globalisation has re-shaped the international division of labour and intra-national division of labour by mechanisms of offshoring, outsourcing and subcontracting, so that globalisation has been able to fragment activities across time zones, spaces and enterprises within the nation states. The methodology of the analysis draws on Bukharin (1915) and his notion of policy of conquest. Thus, for Chakrabarti, today’s imperialism is a policy of conquest through force and violence over the “outside” of the capitalist world.

Subhanil Chowdhury ’ s chapter departs from the classical notion of imperialism based on the division of the world into two clear segments of advanced and the other (third world). Imperialism, seen as a thwarting capitalist development in the developing countries, is no longer true in today’s world, at least for a set of large countries, such as India and China. The “third world” countries, now located within the overall circuit of global capital, have access to global finance, markets and technology, and their big bourgeoisie have become major players in the international market However, the significant factor remains that the workers in these countries are way behind those of the United States, in terms of their wages, and their lives are not on par with those of the workers in developed countries. Through reforms and globalisation, we witness a process of enrichment of the ruling classes, while the vast masses of people remain detached from these capitalist processes and remain impoverished.

Contemporary imperialism

The variety of imperialism as domination through financialisation and neo-mercantilism is the background of all three following chapters. The discussion looks at the region where this domination originated (the United States) and examines how it impacted on Latin America and other world regions.

Noemi Levy’s Latin America in the new international order: new forms of economic organisations and old forms of surplus appropriation examines the performance of six Latin American economies and points out that the region failed to adopt a successful neomercantilist model, also that the region did not benefit from the new international division of labour, which shifted the manufacturing industry from the United States to developing economies. The imperialist relationship between the United States and Latin America forms the core of Amiya Bagchi’s chapter, which reviews the US domination through military and political control, with complicity of the domestic elite in Latin America.

The points raised tally with the next chapter by Gerald Epstein on the role of military spending in US, with imperialism as the velvet glove as opposed to the iron fist of the rise of neoliberal policies and globalisation. Quantifying the effects of the military expenses  Epstein  arrives at the conclusion that workers do not, on balance, gain from US imperialism, at least since 1985. This contrasts the  previous three decades when US workers had much more power to get a piece of the imperialist pie. Oil prices were extremely low and very stable. Taxes were more progressive and trade competition was not as intense.

India, colonialism and contemporary issues with imperialism

Utsa Patnaik’s chapter provides the general framework of British domination by providing data on the exceptionally large magnitude of India’s export earning appropriated by Britain. The mode shows the major role the colony was made to play in providing real and financial resources for sustaining the British Empire. Britain largely re-exported imported tropical goods and secured imports from temperate lands, providing wage goods (corn) and raw materials (cotton, iron) without which a large part of its domestic output could not be produced.  She concludes that Britain, the world capitalist leader at the centre of the global payments system, was crucially dependent on India’s export earnings for financing the current account deficits with the rest of world.  With access to the rising foreign exchange earnings of its colonies, Britain could settle its own external deficits as well as to export capital overseas.

In the next chapter Sunanda Sen looks at another dimension of the imperialist relationship between India and Britain in colonial times. This include the “trading” so to say, of indentured labour’ from India. Faced with a shortage of labourers at the end of slavery, the planters in the British colonial islands pressurised their imperial government to find ways to supplement labour cheaply. The desperately poor and famine-stricken populations of colonies in Asia and in India, in particular, turned out as the target of an organised large-scale emigration of indentured labourers from India to plantation colonies, on basis of coerced labour in sugar plantations. It can also be seen that the waves in immigrant flows were singularly linked to the fortunes of sugar plantations. A triangular network involving labour (indentured), commodities (both raw sugarcane and processed) and finance characterised the relationship between Britain and the such colonies. This was the variety of imperialism, rooted initially in slave trade and later in movements of indentured labour which proved a lucrative source of earning surpluses and it’s appropriation  by commercial and financial interests of imperial Britain.

Indenturing of labour, as above from India (and China) continued till the 1920s, followed by the commencement of a new era in labour welfare and labour control in colonial India. This is the theme of the next chapter by Sabyasachi Bhattacharya that looks at the interaction between the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the welfare and labour legislation in India between 1919 and 1929. The post-First World War time saw the emerging global economic system, the growth of transnational capital and the internationalisation of the labour market, which required the devising of an international normative on labour. One of those aims was to make sure that the higher wages and benefits did not become an impediment in developed countries to compete with less developed countries where wage costs were lower. As for labour laws in India, the colonial state put on the statute books an impressive number of labour laws, however ineffective in terms of applications.  Those only  show the pressure coming from Britain, where lobbying was active to promoting labour legislation in India  since cheaper labour in India was perceived as a threat.

Next chapters of the book address the issues connected with liberalisation and deregulation in contemporary India,  viewed  as a process  in  new pattern of imperialism, with effects damaging in terms of income distribution, poverty and social inequality within the country. The piece by Sukanya Bose and Abhishek Kumar looks at the role of finance and services in the Indian economy. Examining the contrasting evidence  in empirical studies  the authors offer their main hypothesis that several service sectors, namely, banking, insurance, real estate and business services, did not contribute to the growth of industrial sectors and vice-versa. The linkages of these sectors with the rest of the economy have “probably been weak such that their expansionary phase has not been accompanied by a revival of overall economic  growth”. The hypothesis is put to test in the paper by using empirical exercises, which confirms their hypothesis that there has not been any finance/service-led growth in India. Next, Byasdeb Dasgupta looks at the Indian labour market and the effects of the neoliberal reforms, in particular the dismantling of the welfare-state and of the system of labour protections, especially in India. This is followed by Surajit Mazumdar’s closing piece bringing together various threads of analysis relating to  imperialism as presented in the previous chapters, and with particular reference to India. Attention is drawn to  the distribution of income  moving very sharply in favour of corporates, which is to the disadvantage of India’s working population, mostly in agriculture and in the informal non-agricultural sectors.

The volume seeks to provide a global panorama of imperialism, across time and space. The conceptual arguments support the analysis of the disadvantaged part of the world in South America and major parts of Asia, like India. The study will provide new ideas and insights in the continuing pattern of expropriation in the global economy.

Sunanda Sen is former Professor of Economics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. She researches contemporary capitalism, international finance, economic history and development. She tweets at @sensunanda .

Maria Cristina Marcuzzo is Professor of Economics, University of Rome, ‘La Sapienza’, Italy, and Fellow of the Italian Academy of Lincei. She has worked on classical monetary theory, the Cambridge School of Economics, Keynesian economics and, more recently, on Keynes’s investments in financial markets.

Photo : Andreas Lehner

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Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, a popular outline, vii. imperialism as a special stage of capitalism.

We must now try to sum up, to draw together the threads of what has been said above on the subject of imperialism. Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general. But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, when certain of its fundamental characteristics began to change into their opposites, when the features of the epoch of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic system had taken shape and revealed themselves in all spheres. Economically, the main thing in this process is the displacement of capitalist free competition by capitalist monopoly. Free competition is the basic feature of capitalism, and of commodity production generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale industry and forcing out small industry, replacing large-scale by still larger-scale industry, and carrying concentration of production and capital to the point where out of it has grown and is growing monopoly: cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks, which manipulate thousands of millions. At the same time the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system.

If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. Such a definition would include what is most important, for, on the one hand, finance capital is the bank capital of a few very big monopolist banks, merged with the capital of the monopolist associations of industrialists; and, on the other hand, the division of the world is the transition from a colonial policy which has extended without hindrance to territories unseized by any capitalist power, to a colonial policy of monopolist possession of the territory of the world, which has been completely divided up.

But very brief definitions, although convenient, for they sum up the main points, are nevertheless inadequate, since we have to deduce from them some especially important features of the phenomenon that has to be defined. And so, without forgetting the conditional and relative value of all definitions in general, which can never embrace all the concatenations of a phenomenon in its full development, we must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features:

(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital,” of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.

We shall see later that imperialism can and must be defined differently if we bear in mind not only the basic, purely economic concepts—to which the above definition is limited—but also the historical place of this stage of capitalism in relation to capitalism in general, or the relation between imperialism and the two main trends in the working-class movement. The thing to be noted at this point is that imperialism, as interpreted above, undoubtedly represents a special stage in the development of capitalism. To enable the reader to obtain the most well-grounded idea of imperialism, I deliberately tried to quote as extensively as possible bourgeois economists who have to admit the particularly incontrovertible facts concerning the latest stage of capitalist economy. With the same object in view, I have quoted detailed statistics which enable one to see to what degree bank capital, etc., has grown, in what precisely the transformation of quantity into quality, of developed capitalism into imperialism, was expressed. Needless to say, of course, all boundaries in nature and in society are conventional and changeable, and it would be absurd to argue, for example, about the particular year or decade in which imperialism “definitely” became established.

In the matter of defining imperialism, however, we have to enter into controversy, primarily, with Karl Kautsky, the principal Marxist theoretician of the epoch of the so-called Second International—that is, of the twenty-five years between 1889 and 1914. The fundamental ideas expressed in our definition of imperialism were very resolutely attacked by Kautsky in 1915, and even in November 1914, when he said that imperialism must not be regarded as a “phase” or stage of economy, but as a policy, a definite policy “preferred” by finance capital; that imperialism must not be “identified” with “present-day capitalism”; that if imperialism is to be understood to mean “all the phenomena of present-day capitalism”—cartels, protection, the domination of the financiers, and colonial policy—then the question as to whether imperialism is necessary to capitalism becomes reduced to the “flattest tautology”, because, in that case, “imperialism is naturally a vital necessity for capitalism”, and so on. The best way to present Kautsky’s idea is to quote his own definition of imperialism, which is diametrically opposed to the substance of the ideas which I have set forth (for the objections coming from the camp of the German Marxists, who have been advocating similar ideas for many years already, have been long known to Kautsky as the objections of a definite trend in Marxism).

Kautsky’s definition is as follows:

“Imperialism is a product of highly developed industrial capitalism. It consists in the striving of every industrial capitalist nation to bring under its control or to annex all large areas of agrarian [Kautsky’s italics] territory, irrespective of what nations inhabit it.” [1]

This definition is of no use at all because it one-sidedly, i.e., arbitrarily, singles out only the national question (although the latter is extremely important in itself as well as in its relation to imperialism), it arbitrarily and inaccurately connects this question only with industrial capital in the countries which annex other nations, and in an equally arbitrary and inaccurate manner pushes into the forefront the annexation of agrarian regions.

Imperialism is a striving for annexations—this is what the political part of Kautsky’s definition amounts to. It is correct, but very incomplete, for politically, imperialism is, in general, a striving towards violence and reaction. For the moment, however, we are interested in the economic aspect of the question, which Kautsky himself introduced into his definition. The inaccuracies in Kautsky’s definition are glaring. The characteristic feature of imperialism is not industrial but finance capital. It is not an accident that in France it was precisely the extraordinarily rapid development of finance capital, and the weakening of industrial capital, that from the eighties onwards gave rise to the extreme intensification of annexationist (colonial) policy. The characteristic feature of imperialism is precisely that it strives to annex not only agrarian territories, but even most highly industrialised regions (German appetite for Belgium; French appetite for Lorraine), because (1) the fact that the world is already partitioned obliges those contemplating a redivision to reach out for every kind of territory, and (2) an essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between several great powers in the striving for hegemony, i.e., for the conquest of territory, not so much directly for themselves as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony. (Belgium is particularly important for Germany as a base for operations against Britain; Britain needs Baghdad as a base for operations against Germany, etc.)

Kautsky refers especially—and repeatedly—to English writers who, he alleges, have given a purely political meaning to the word “imperialism” in the sense that he, Kautsky, understands it. We take up the work by the English writer Hobson, Imperialism , which appeared in 1902, and there we read:

“The new imperialism differs from the older, first, in substituting for the ambition of a single growing empire the theory and the practice of competing empires, each motivated by similar lusts of political aggrandisement and commercial gain; secondly, in the dominance of financial or investing over mercantile interests.” [2]

We see that Kautsky is absolutely wrong in referring to English writers generally (unless he meant the vulgar English imperialists, or the avowed apologists for imperialism). We see that Kautsky, while claiming that he continues to advocate Marxism, as a matter of fact takes a step backward compared with the social-liberal Hobson, who more correctly takes into account two “historically concrete” (Kautsky’s definition is a mockery of historical concreteness!) features of modern imperialism: (1) the competition between several imperialisms, and (2) the predominance of the financier over the merchant. If it is chiefly a question of the annexation of agrarian countries by industrial countries, then the role of the merchant is put in the forefront.

Kautsky’s definition is not only wrong and un-Marxist. It serves as a basis for a whole system of views which signify a rupture with Marxist theory and Marxist practice all along the line. I shall refer to this later. The argument about words which Kautsky raises as to whether the latest stage of capitalism should be called imperialism or the stage of finance capital is not worth serious attention. Call it what you will, it makes no difference. The essence of the matter is that Kautsky detaches the politics of imperialism from its economics, speaks of annexations as being a policy “preferred” by finance capital, and opposes to it another bourgeois policy which, he alleges, is possible on this very same basis of finance capital. It follows, then, that monopolies in the economy are compatible with non-monopolistic, non-violent, non-annexationist methods in politics. It follows, then, that the territorial division of the world, which was completed during this very epoch of finance capital, and which constitutes the basis of the present peculiar forms of rivalry between the biggest capitalist states, is compatible with a non-imperialist policy. The result is a slurring-over and a blunting of the most profound contradictions of the latest stage of capitalism, instead of an exposure of their depth; the result is bourgeois reformism instead of Marxism.

Kautsky enters into controversy with the German apologist of imperialism and annexations, Cunow, who clumsily and cynically argues that imperialism is present-day capitalism; the development of capitalism is inevitable and progressive; therefore imperialism is progressive; therefore, we should grovel before it and glorify it! This is something like the caricature of the Russian Marxists which the Narodniks drew in 1894-95. They argued: if the Marxists believe that capitalism is inevitable in Russia, that it is progressive, then they ought to open a tavern and begin to implant capitalism! Kautsky’s reply to Cunow is as follows: imperialism is not present-day capitalism; it is only one of the forms of the policy of present-day capitalism. This policy we can and should fight, fight imperialism, annexations, etc.

The reply seems quite plausible, but in effect it is a more subtle and more disguised (and therefore more dangerous) advocacy of conciliation with imperialism, because a “fight” against the policy of the trusts and banks that does not affect the economic basis of the trusts and banks is mere bourgeois reformism and pacifism, the benevolent and innocent expression of pious wishes. Evasion of existing contradictions, forgetting the most important of them, instead of revealing their full depth—such is Kautsky’s theory, which has nothing in common with Marxism. Naturally, such a “theory” can only serve the purpose of advocating unity with the Cunows!

“From the purely economic point of view,” writes Kautsky, “it is not impossible that capitalism will yet go through a new phase, that of the extension of the policy of the cartels to foreign policy, the phase of ultra-imperialism,” [3] i.e., of a superimperialism, of a union of the imperialisms of the whole world and not struggles among them, a phase when wars shall cease under capitalism, a phase of “the joint exploitation of the world by internationally united finance capital.” [4]

We shall have to deal with this “theory of ultra-imperialism” later on in order to show in detail how decisively and completely it breaks with Marxism. At present, in keeping with the general plan of the present work, we must examine the exact economic data on this question. “From the purely economic point of view,” is “ultra-imperialism” possible, or is it ultra-nonsense?

If the purely economic point of view is meant to be a “pure” abstraction, then all that can be said reduces itself to the following proposition: development is proceeding towards monopolies, hence, towards a single world monopoly, towards a single world trust. This is indisputable, but it is also as completely meaningless as is the statement that “development is proceeding” towards the manufacture of foodstuffs in laboratories. In this sense the “theory” of ultra-imperialism is no less absurd than a “theory of ultra-agriculture” would be.

If, however, we are discussing the “purely economic” conditions of the epoch of finance capital as a historically concrete epoch which began at the turn of the twentieth century, then the best reply that one can make to the lifeless abstractions of “ultra-imperialism” (which serve exclusively a most reactionary aim: that of diverting attention from the depth of existing antagonisms) is to contrast them with the concrete economic realities of the present-day world economy. Kautsky’s utterly meaningless talk about ultra-imperialism encourages, among other things, that profoundly mistaken idea which only brings grist to the mill of the apologists of imperialism, i.e., that the rule of finance capital lessens the unevenness and contradictions inherent in the world economy, whereas in reality it increases them.

R. Calwer, in his little book, An Introduction to the World Economy , [5] made an attempt to summarise the main, purely economic, data that enable one to obtain a concrete picture of the internal relations of the world economy at the turn of the twentieth century. He divides the world into five “main economic areas”, as follows: (1) Central Europe (the whole of Europe with the exception of Russia and Great Britain); (2) Great Britain; (3) Russia; (4) Eastern Asia; (5) America; he includes the colonies in the “areas” of the states to which they belong and “leaves aside” a few countries not distributed according to areas, such as Persia, Afghanistan, and Arabia in Asia, Morocco and Abyssinia in Africa, etc.

Here is a brief summary of the economic data he quotes on these regions.

NOTE: The figures in parentheses show the area and population of the colonies .

We see three areas of highly developed capitalism (high development of means of transport, of trade and of industry): the Central European, the British and the American areas. Among these are three states which dominate the world: Germany, Great Britain, and the United States. Imperialist rivalry and the struggle between these countries have become extremely keen because Germany has only an insignificant area and few colonies; the creation of “Central Europe” is still a matter for the future, it is being born in the midst of a desperate struggle. For the moment the distinctive feature of the whole of Europe is political disunity. In the British and American areas, on the other hand, political concentration is very highly developed, but there is a vast disparity between the immense colonies of the one and the insignificant colonies of the other. In the colonies, however, capitalism is only beginning to develop. The struggle for South America is becoming more and more acute.

There are two areas where capitalism is little developed: Russia and Eastern Asia. In the former, the population is extremely sparse, in the latter it is extremely dense; in the former political concentration is high, in the latter it does not exist. The partitioning of China is only just beginning, and the struggle for it between Japan, the U.S., etc., is continually gaining in intensity.

Compare this reality—the vast diversity of economic and political conditions, the extreme disparity in the rate of development of the various countries, etc., and the violent struggles among the imperialist states—with Kautsky’s silly little fable about “peaceful” ultra-imperialism. Is this not the reactionary attempt of a frightened philistine to hide from stern reality? Are not the international cartels which Kautsky imagines are the embryos of “ultra-imperialism” (in the same way as one “can” describe the manufacture of tablets in a laboratory as ultra-agriculture in embryo) an example of the division and the redivision of the world, the transition from peaceful division to non-peaceful division and vice versa? Is not American and other finance capital, which divided the whole world peacefully with Germany’s participation in, for example, the international rail syndicate, or in the international mercantile shipping trust, now engaged in redividing the world on the basis of a new relation of forces that is being changed by methods anything but peaceful?

Finance capital and the trusts do not diminish but increase the differences in the rate of growth of the various parts of the world economy. Once the relation of forces is changed, what other solution of the contradictions can be found under capitalism than that of force ? Railway statistics [6] provide remarkably exact data on the different rates of growth of capitalism and finance capital in world economy. In the last decades of imperialist development, the total length of railways has changed as follows:

Thus, the development of railways has been most rapid in the colonies and in the independent (and semi-independent) states of Asia and America. Here, as we know, the finance capital of the four or five biggest capitalist states holds undisputed sway. Two hundred thousand kilometres of new railways in the colonies and in the other countries of Asia and America represent a capital of more than 40,000 million marks newly invested on particularly advantageous terms, with special guarantees of a good return and with profitable orders for steel works, etc., etc.

Capitalism is growing with the greatest rapidity in the colonies and in overseas countries. Among the latter, new imperialist powers are emerging (e.g., Japan). The struggle among the world imperialisms is becoming more acute. The tribute levied by finance capital on the most profitable colonial and overseas enterprises is increasing. In the division of this “booty,” an exceptionally large part goes to countries which do not always stand at the top of the list in the rapidity of the development of their productive forces. In the case of the biggest countries, together with their colonies, the total length of railways was as follows:

Thus, about 80 per cent of the total existing railways are concentrated in the hands of the five biggest powers. But the concentration of the ownership of these railways, the concentration of finance capital, is immeasurably greater since the French and British millionaires, for example, own an enormous amount of shares and bonds in American, Russian and other railways.

Thanks to her colonies, Great Britain has increased the length of “her” railways by 100,000 kilometres, four times as much as Germany. And yet, it is well known that the development of productive forces in Germany, and especially the development of the coal and iron industries, has been incomparably more rapid during this period than in Britain—not to speak of France and Russia. In 1892, Germany produced 4,900,000 tons of pig-iron and Great Britain produced 6,800,000 tons; in 1912, Germany produced 17,600,000 tons and Great Britain, 9,000,000 tons. Germany, therefore, had an overwhelming superiority over Britain in this respect. [7] The question is: what means other than war could there be under capitalism to overcome the disparity between the development of productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of colonies and spheres of influence for finance capital on the other?

[1] [1] Die Neue Zeit , 1914, 2 (B. 32), S. 909, Sept. 11, 1914; cf. 1915, 2, S. 107 et seq. — Lenin

[2] [2] Hobson, Imperialism , London, 1902, p. 324. — Lenin

[3] [3] Die Neue Zeit , 1914, 2 (B. 32), S. 921, Sept. 11, 1914. Cf. 1915, 2, S. 107 et seq. — Lenin

[4] [4] Ibid ., 1915, 1, S. 144, April 30, 1915. — Lenin

[5] [5] R. Calwer, Einfü hrung in die Weltwirtschaft , Berlin, 1906. — Lenin

[6] [6] Statistisches Jahrbuch für das deutsche Reich, 1915; Archiv für Eisenbahnwesen, 1892. Minor details for the distribution of railways among the colonies of the various countries in 1890 had to be estimated approximately. — Lenin

[7] [7] Cf. also Edgar Crammond, “The Economic Relations of the British and German Empires” in The Journal of the Royal Statistical Society , July 1914, p. 777 et seq. — Lenin

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6 Capitalism, Imperialism and the Emergence of an Industrialized Global Economy

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Speculating about expressions of capitalism that emerged in Western Europe, this chapter will explore the nature and impact of overseas expansion from the North Atlantic world, assessing connexions between different forms of colonialism and types of industrial growth. It offers a stylised assessment of interactions among regions of the world economy following colonial ‘encounters’ of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. How did forms of capitalism and ‘models’ of industrialism interact, and the relationship between states and markets change as industry became more capital- and scale-intensive and manufacturing businesses became more integrated? Was there a correspondence between different forms capitalism (mercantile, industrial and financial), imperialism (‘old’, ‘new’ and neo-colonialism) and industrialisation (market-led, government-supported, and late or ‘very late’ driven and co-ordinated by the state)? And who offers the most plausible explanation: Smith, Hamilton-List, Marx-Lenin, Rostow, Chandler, Prebisch-Sunkel-Hirschman, Gallagher-and-Robinson, Cain-and-Hopkins, Gerschenkron-Amsden or O’Brien?

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Idea of Imperialism and Capitalism

• First Online: 18 August 2020

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• Dipak Basu 3 &
• Victoria Miroshnik 4  

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There is a very close relationship between capitalism and imperialism. The German philosopher thinker Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) argued in her book The Accumulation of Capital (Luxemburg 1913) that capitalism cannot survive without imperialism. In the first chapter, we narrated the history of capitalism in India and the consequences; how the economy of India, the first major colony of Britain, was destroyed to bring about the capitalist development of Britain.

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Basu, D., Miroshnik, V. (2020). Idea of Imperialism and Capitalism. In: Imperialism and Capitalism, Volume I. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47368-6_1

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Contemporary Imperialism

Lessons from the twentieth century.

Lenin, Bukharin, Stalin, and Trotsky in Russia, as well as Mao, Zhou Enlai, and Den Xiaoping in China, shaped the history of the two great revolutions of the twentieth century. 1 As leaders of revolutionary communist parties and then later as leaders of revolutionary states, they were confronted with the problems faced by a triumphant revolution in countries of peripheral capitalism and forced to “revise” (I deliberately use this term, considered sacrilegious by many) the theses inherited from the historical Marxism of the Second International. Lenin and Bukharin went much further than Hobson and Hilferding in their analyses of monopoly capitalism and imperialism and drew this major political conclusion: the imperialist war of 1914–1918 (they were among the few, if not the only ones, to anticipate it) made necessary and possible a revolution led by the proletariat.

With the benefit of hindsight, I will indicate here the limitations of their analyses. Lenin and Bukharin considered imperialism to be a new stage (“the highest”) of capitalism associated with the development of monopolies. I question this thesis and contend that historical capitalism has always been imperialist, in the sense that it has led to a polarization between centers and peripheries since its origin (the sixteenth century), which has only increased over the course of its later globalized development. The nineteenth-century pre-monopolist system was not less imperialist. Great Britain maintained its hegemony precisely because of its colonial domination of India. Lenin and Bukharin thought that the revolution, begun in Russia (“the weak link”), would continue in the centers (Germany in particular). Their hope was based on an underestimate of the effects of imperialist polarization, which destroyed revolutionary prospects in the centers.

Nevertheless, Lenin, and even more Bukharin, quickly learned the necessary historical lesson. The revolution, made in the name of socialism (and communism), was, in fact, something else: mainly a peasant revolution. So what to do? How can the peasantry be linked with the construction of socialism? By making concessions to the market and by respecting newly acquired peasant property; hence by progressing slowly towards socialism? The New Economic Plan (NEP) implemented this strategy.

Yes, but … . Lenin, Bukharin, and Stalin also understood that the imperialist powers would never accept the Revolution or even the NEP. After the hot wars of intervention, the cold war was to become permanent, from 1920 to 1990. 2 Soviet Russia, even though it was far from being able to construct socialism, was able to free itself from the straightjacket that imperialism always strives to impose on all peripheries of the world system that it dominates. In effect, Soviet Russia delinked. So what to do now? Attempt to push for peaceful coexistence, by making concessions if necessary and refraining from intervening too actively on the international stage? But at the same time, it was necessary to be armed to face new and unavoidable attacks. And that implied rapid industrialization, which, in turn, came into conflict with the interests of the peasantry and thus threatened to break the worker-peasant alliance, the foundation of the revolutionary state.

It is possible, then, to understand the equivocations of Lenin, Bukharin, and Stalin. In theoretical terms, there were U-turns from one extreme to the other. Sometimes a determinist attitude inspired by the phased approach inherited from earlier Marxism (first the bourgeois democratic revolution, then the socialist one) predominated, sometimes a voluntarist approach (political action would make it possible to leap over stages). Finally, from 1930–1933, Stalin chose rapid industrialization and armament (and this choice was not without some connection to the rise of fascism). Collectivization was the price of that choice. Here again we must beware of judging too quickly: all socialists of that period (and even more the capitalists) shared Kautsky’s analyses on this point and were persuaded that the future belonged to large-scale agriculture. 3 The break in the worker-peasant alliance that this choice implied lay behind the abandonment of revolutionary democracy and the autocratic turn.

In my opinion, Trotsky would certainly not have done better. His attitude towards the rebellion of the Kronstadt sailors and his later equivocations demonstrate that he was no different than the other Bolshevik leaders in government. But, after 1927, living in exile and no longer having responsibility for managing the Soviet state, he could delight in endlessly repeating the sacred principles of socialism. He became like many academic Marxists who have the luxury of asserting their attachment to principles without having to be concerned about effectiveness in transforming reality. 4

The Chinese communists appeared later on the revolutionary stage. Mao was able to learn from Bolshevik equivocations. China was confronted with the same problems as Soviet Russia: revolution in a backward country, the necessity of including the peasantry in revolutionary transformation, and the hostility of the imperialist powers. But Mao was able to see more clearly than Lenin, Bukharin, and Stalin. Yes, the Chinese revolution was anti-imperialist and peasant (anti-feudal). But it was not bourgeois democratic; it was popular democratic. The difference is important: the latter type of revolution requires maintaining the worker-peasant alliance over a long period. China was thus able to avoid the fatal error of forced collectivization and invent another way: make all agricultural land state property, give the peasantry equal access to use of this land, and renovate family agriculture. 5

The two revolutions had difficulty in achieving stability because they were forced to reconcile support for a socialist outlook and concessions to capitalism. Which of these two tendencies would prevail? These revolutions only achieved stability after their “Thermidor,” to use Trotsky’s term. But when was the Thermidor in Russia? Was it in 1930, as Trotsky said? Or was it in the 1920s, with the NEP? Or was it the ice age of the Brezhnev period? And in China, did Mao choose Thermidor beginning in 1950? Or do we have to wait until Deng Xiaoping to speak of the Thermidor of 1980?

It is not by chance that reference is made to lessons of the French Revolution. The three great revolutions of modern times (the French, Russian, and Chinese) are great precisely because they looked forward beyond the immediate requirements of the moment. With the rise of the Mountain, led by Robespierre, in the National Convention, the French Revolution was consolidated as both popular and bourgeois and, just like the Russian and Chinese Revolutions—which strove to go all the way to communism even if it were not on the agenda due to the necessity of averting defeat—retained the prospect of going much further later. Thermidor is not the Restoration. The latter occurred in France, not with Napoleon, but only beginning in 1815. Still it should be remembered that the Restoration could not completely do away with the gigantic social transformation caused by the Revolution. In Russia, the restoration occurred even later in its revolutionary history, with Gorbachev and Yeltsin. It should be noted that this restoration remains fragile, as can be seen in the challenges Putin must still confront. In China, there has not been (or not yet!) a restoration. 6

A New Stage of Monopoly Capital

The contemporary world is still confronted with the same challenges encountered by the revolutions of the twentieth century. The continued deepening of the center/periphery contrast, characteristic of the spread of globalized capitalism, still leads to the same major political consequence: transformation of the world begins with anti-imperialist, national, popular—and potentially anti-capitalist—revolutions, which are the only ones on the agenda for the foreseeable future. But this transformation will only be able to go beyond the first steps and proceed on the path to socialism later if and when the peoples of the centers, in turn, begin the struggle for communism, viewed as a higher stage of universal human civilization. The systemic crisis of capitalism in the centers gives a chance for this possibility to be translated into reality.

In the meantime, there is a two-fold challenge confronting the peoples and states of the South: (1) the lumpen development that contemporary capitalism forces on all peripheries of the system has nothing to offer three-quarters of humanity; in particular, it leads to the rapid destruction of peasant societies in Asia and Africa, and consequently the response given to the peasant question will largely govern the nature of future changes; 7 (2) the aggressive geostrategy of the imperialist powers, which is opposed to any attempt by the peoples and states of the periphery to get out of the impasse, forces the peoples concerned to defeat the military control of the world by the United States and its subaltern European and Japanese allies.

The first long systemic crisis of capitalism got underway in the 1870s. The version of historic capitalism’s extension over the long span that I have put forward suggests a succession of three epochs: ten centuries of incubation from the year 1000 in China to the eighteenth-century revolutions in England and France, a short century of triumphal flourishing (the nineteenth century), probably a long decline comprising in itself the first long crisis (1875–1945) and then the second (begun in 1975 and still ongoing). In each of those two long crises, capital responds to the challenge by the same triple formula: concentration of capital’s control, deepening of uneven globalization, financialization of the system’s management. 8 Two major thinkers (Hobson and Hilferding) immediately grasped the enormous importance of capitalism’s transformation into monopoly capitalism. But it was Lenin and Bukharin who drew the political conclusion from this transformation, a transformation that initiated the decline of capitalism and thus moved the socialist revolution onto the agenda. 9

The primary formation of monopoly capitalism thus goes back to the end of the nineteenth century, but in the United States it really established itself as a system only from the 1920s, to conquer next the Western Europe and Japan of the “thirty glorious years” following the Second World War. The concept of surplus, put forth by Baran and Sweezy in the 1950–1960 decade, allows a grasp of what is essential in the transformation of capitalism. Convinced at the moment of its publication by that work of enrichment to the Marxist critique of capitalism, I undertook as soon as the 1970s its reformulation which required, in my opinion, the transformation of the “first” (1920–1970) monopoly capitalism into generalized-monopoly capitalism, analyzed as a qualitatively new phase of the system.

In the previous forms of competition among firms producing the same use value—numerous then, and independent of each other—decisions were made by the capitalist owners of those firms on the basis of a recognized market price which imposed itself as an external datum. Baran and Sweezy observed that the new monopolies act differently: they set their prices simultaneously with the nature and volume of their outputs. So it is an end to “fair and open competition,” which remains, quite contrary to reality, at the heart of conventional economics’ rhetoric! The abolition of competition—the radical transformation of that term’s meaning, of its functioning and of its results—detaches the price system from its basis, the system of values, and in that very way hides from sight the referential framework which used to define capitalism’s rationality. Although use values used to constitute to a great extent autonomous realities, they become, in monopoly capitalism, the object of actual fabrications produced systematically through aggressive and particularized sales strategies (advertising, brands, etc.). In monopoly capitalism, a coherent reproduction of the productive system is no longer possible merely by mutual adjustment of the two departments discussed in the second volume of Capital : it is thenceforward necessary to take into account a Department III, conceived by Baran and Sweezy. This allows for added surplus absorption promoted by the state—beyond Department I (private investment) and beyond the portion of Department II (private consumption) devoted to capitalist consumption. The classic example of Department III spending is military expenditure. However, the notion of Department III can be expanded to cover the wider array of socially unreproductive expenditures promoted by generalized-monopoly capitalism. 10

The excrescence of Department III, in turn, favors in fact the erasure of the distinction made by Marx between productive (of surplus-value) labor and unproductive labor. All forms of wage labor can—and do—become sources of possible profits. A hairdresser sells his services to a customer who pays him out of his income. But if that hairdresser becomes the employee of a beauty parlor, the business must realize a profit for its owner. If the country at issue puts ten million wage workers to work in Departments I, II, and III, providing the equivalent of twelve million years of abstract labor, and if the wages received by those workers allow them to buy goods and services requiring merely six million years of abstract labor, the rate of exploitation for all of them, productive and unproductive confounded, is the same 100 percent. But the six million years of abstract labor that the workers do not receive cannot all be invested in the purchase of producer goods destined to expand Departments I and II; part of them will be put toward the expansion of Department III.

Generalized-Monopoly Capitalism (Since 1975)

Passage from the initial monopoly capitalism to its current form (generalized-monopoly capitalism) was accomplished in a short time (between 1975 and 2000) in response to the second long crisis of declining capitalism. In fifteen years, monopoly power’s centralization and its capacity for control over the entire productive system reached summits incomparable with what had until then been the case.

My first formulation of generalized-monopoly capitalism dates from 1978, when I put forward an interpretation of capital’s responses to the challenge of its long systemic crisis, which opened starting from 1971–1975. In that interpretation I accentuated the three directions of this expected reply, then barely under way: strengthened centralization of control over the economy by the monopolies, deepening of globalization (and the outsourcing of the manufacturing industry to the peripheries), and financialization. The work that André Gunder Frank and I published together in 1978 drew no notice probably because our theses were ahead of their time. But today the three characteristics at issue have become blindingly obvious to everybody. 11

A name had to be given to this new phase of monopoly capitalism. The adjective “generalized” specifies what is new: the monopolies are thenceforward in a position that gives them the capability of reducing all (or nearly all) economic activities to subcontractor status. The example of family farming in the capitalist centers provides the finest example of this. These farmers are controlled upstream by the monopolies that provide their inputs and financing, and downstream by the marketing chains, to the point that the price structures forced on them wipe out the income from their labor. Farmers survive only thanks to public subsidies paid for by the taxpayers. This extraction is thus at the origin of the monopolies’ profits! As likewise has been observed with bank failures, the new principal of economic management is summed up in a phrase: privatization of the monopolies’ profits, socialization of their losses! To go on talking of “fair and open competition” and of “truth of the prices revealed by the markets”—that belongs in a farce.

The fragmented, and by that fact concrete, economic power of proprietary bourgeois families gives way to a centralized power exercised by the directors of the monopolies and their cohort of salaried servitors. For generalized-monopoly capitalism involves not the concentration of property, which on the contrary is more dispersed than ever, but of the power to manage it. That is why it is deceptive to attach the adjective “patrimonial” to contemporary capitalism. It is only in appearance that “shareholders” rule. Absolute monarchs, the top executives of the monopolies, decide everything in their name. Moreover, the deepening globalization of the system wipes out the holistic (i.e., simultaneously economic, political, and social) logic of national systems without putting in its place any global logic whatsoever. This is the empire of chaos—the title of one of my works, published in 1991 and subsequently taken up by others: in fact international political violence takes the place of economic competition. 12

Financialization of Accumulation

The new financialization of economic life crowns this transformation in capital’s power. In place of strategies set out by real owners of fragmented capital are those of the managers of ownership titles over capital. What is vulgarly called fictitious capital (the estimated value of ownership certificates) is nothing but the expression of this displacement, this disconnect between the virtual and real worlds.

By its very nature capitalist accumulation has always been synonymous with disorder, in the sense that Marx gave to that term: a system moving from disequilibrium to disequilibrium (driven by class struggles and conflicts among the powers) without ever tending toward an equilibrium. But this disorder resulting from competition among fragmented capitals was kept within reasonable limits through management of the credit system carried out under the control of the national state. With contemporary financialized and globalized capitalism those frontiers disappear; the violence of the movements from disequilibrium to disequilibrium is reinforced. The successor of disorder is chaos.

Domination by the capital of the generalized monopolies is exercised on the world scale through global integration of the monetary and financial market, based henceforward on the principle of flexible exchange rates, and giving up national controls over the flow of capital. Nevertheless, this domination is called into question, to varying degrees, by state policies of the emerging countries. The conflict between these latter policies and the strategic objectives of the triad’s collective imperialism becomes by that fact one of the central axes for possibly putting generalized-monopoly capitalism once more on trial. 13

The Decline of Democracy

In the system’s centers, generalized-monopoly capitalism has brought with it generalization of the wage-form. Upper managers are thenceforward employees who do not participate in the formation of surplus-value, of which they have become consumers. At the other social pole, the generalized proletarianization that the wage-form suggests is accompanied by multiplication in forms of segmentation of the labor force. In other words, the “proletariat” (in its forms as known in the past) disappears at the very moment when proletarianization becomes generalized. In the peripheries, the effects of domination by generalized-monopoly capital are no less visible. Above an already diverse social structure made up of local ruling classes and the subordinate classes and status groups there is placed a dominant superclass emerging in the wake of globalization. This superclass is sometimes that of “neo-comprador insiders,” sometimes that of the governing political class (or class-state-party), or a mixture of the two.

Far from being synonyms, “market” and “democracy” are, on the contrary, antonyms. In the centers a new political consensus-culture (only seeming, perhaps, but nevertheless active) synonymous with depolitization, has taken the place of the former political culture based on the right-left confrontation that used to give significance to bourgeois democracy and the contradictory inscription of class struggles within its framework. In the peripheries, the monopoly of power captured by the dominant local superclass likewise involves the negation of democracy. The rise of political Islam provides an example of such a regression.

The Aggressive Geostrategy of Contemporary Imperialism

The collective imperialism of the triad; the state in contemporary capitalism.

In the 1970s, Sweezy, Magdoff, and I had already advanced this thesis, formulated by André Gunder Frank and me in a work published in 1978. We said that monopoly capitalism was entering a new age, characterized by the gradual—but rapid—dismantling of national production systems. The production of a growing number of market goods can no longer be defined by the label “made in France” (or the Soviet Union or the United States), but becomes “made in the world,” because its manufacture is now broken into segments, located here and there throughout the whole world.

Recognizing this fact, now a commonplace, does not imply that there is only one explanation of the major cause for the transformation in question. For my part, I explain it by the leap forward in the degree of centralization in the control of capital by the monopolies, which I have described as the move from the capitalism of monopolies to the capitalism of generalized monopolies. The information revolution, among other factors, provides the means that make possible the management of this globally dispersed production system. But for me, these means are only implemented in response to a new objective need created by the leap forward in the centralized control of capital.

The emergence of this globalized production system eliminates coherent “national development” policies (diverse and unequally effective), but it does not substitute a new coherence, which would be that of the globalized system. The reason for that is the absence of a globalized bourgeoisie and globalized state, which I will examine later. Consequently, the globalized production system is incoherent by nature.

Another important consequence of this qualitative transformation of contemporary capitalism is the emergence of the collective imperialism of the triad, which takes the place of the historical national imperialisms (of the United States, Great Britain, Japan, Germany, France, and a few others). Collective imperialism finds its raison d’être in the awareness by the bourgeoisies in the triad nations of the necessity for their joint management of the world and particularly of the subjected, and yet to be subjected, societies of the peripheries.

Some draw two correlates from the thesis of the emergence of a globalized production system: the emergence of a globalized bourgeoisie and the emergence of a globalized state, both of which would find their objective foundation in this new production system. My interpretation of the current changes and crises leads me to reject these two correlates.

There is no globalized bourgeoisie (or dominant class) in the process of being formed, either on the world scale or in the countries of the imperialist triad. I am led to emphasize the fact that the centralization of control over the capital of the monopolies takes place within the nation-states of the triad (United States, each member of the European Union, Japan) much more than it does in the relations between the partners of the triad, or even between members of the European Union. The bourgeoisies (or oligopolistic groups) are in competition within nations (and the national state manages this competition, in part at least) and between nations. Thus the German oligopolies (and the German state) took on the leadership of European affairs, not for the equal benefit of everyone, but first of all for their own benefit. At the level of the triad, it is obviously the bourgeoisie of the United States that leads the alliance, once again with an unequal distribution of the benefits. The idea that the objective cause—the emergence of the globalized production system—entails ipso facto the emergence of a globalized dominant class is based on the underlying hypothesis that the system must be coherent. In reality, it is possible for it not to be coherent. In fact, it is not coherent and hence this chaotic system is not viable.

In the peripheries, the globalization of the production system occurs in conjunction with the replacement of the hegemonic blocs of earlier eras by a new hegemonic bloc dominated by the new comprador bourgeoisies, which are not constitutive elements of a globalized bourgeoisie, but only subaltern allies of the bourgeoisies of the dominant triad. Just like there is no globalized bourgeoisie in the process of formation, there is also no globalized state on the horizon. The major reason for this is that the current globalized system does not attenuate, but actually accentuates conflict (already visible or potential) between the societies of the triad and those of the rest of the world. I do indeed mean conflict between societies and, consequently, potentially conflict between states. The advantage derived from the triad’s dominant position (imperialist rent) allows the hegemonic bloc formed around the generalized monopolies to benefit from a legitimacy that is expressed, in turn, by the convergence of all major electoral parties, right and left, and their equal commitment to neoliberal economic policies and continual intervention in the affairs of the peripheries. On the other hand, the neo-comprador bourgeoisies of the peripheries are neither legitimate nor credible in the eyes of their own people (because the policies they serve do not make it possible to “catch up,” and most often lead to the impasse of lumpen-development). Instability of the current governments is thus the rule in this context.

Just as there is no globalized bourgeoisie even at the level of the triad or that of the European Union, there is also no globalized state at these levels. Instead, there is only an alliance of states. These states, in turn, willingly accept the hierarchy that allows that alliance to function: general leadership is taken on by Washington, and leadership in Europe by Berlin. The national state remains in place to serve globalization as it is.

There is an idea circulating in postmodernist currents that contemporary capitalism no longer needs the state to manage the world economy and thus that the state system is in the process of withering away to the benefit of the emergence of civil society. I will not go back over the arguments that I have developed elsewhere against this naive thesis, one moreover that is propagated by the dominant governments and the media clergy in their service. There is no capitalism without the state. Capitalist globalization could not be pursued without the interventions of the United States armed forces and the management of the dollar. Clearly, the armed forces and money are instruments of the state, not of the market.

But since there is no world state, the United States intends to fulfill this function. The societies of the triad consider this function to be legitimate; other societies do not. But what does that matter? The self-proclaimed “international community,” i.e., the G7 plus Saudi Arabia, which has surely become a democratic republic, does not recognize the legitimacy of the opinion of 85 percent of the world’s population!

There is thus an asymmetry between the functions of the state in the dominant imperialist centers and those of the state in the subject, or yet to be subjected, peripheries. The state in the compradorized peripheries is inherently unstable and, consequently, a potential enemy, when it is not already one.

There are enemies with which the dominant imperialist powers have been forced to coexist—at least up until now. This is the case with China because it has rejected (up until now) the neo-comprador option and is pursuing its sovereign project of integrated and coherent national development. Russia became an enemy as soon as Putin refused to align politically with the triad and wanted to block the expansionist ambitions of the latter in Ukraine, even if he does not envision (or not yet?) leaving the rut of economic liberalism. The great majority of comprador states in the South (that is, states in the service of their comprador bourgeoisies) are allies, not enemies—as long as each of these comprador states gives the appearance of being in charge of its country. But leaders in Washington, London, Berlin, and Paris know that these states are fragile. As soon as a popular movement of revolt—with or without a viable alternative strategy—threatens one of these states, the triad arrogates to itself the right to intervene. Intervention can even lead to contemplating the destruction of these states and, beyond them, of the societies concerned. This strategy is currently at work in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. The raison d’être of the strategy for military control of the world by the triad led by Washington is located entirely in this “realist” vision, which is in direct counterpoint to the naive view—à la Negri—of a globalized state in the process of formation. 14

Responses of the Peoples and States of the South

The ongoing offensive of United States/Europe/Japan collective imperialism against all the peoples of the South walks on two legs: the economic leg—globalized neoliberalism forced as the exclusive possible economic policy; and the political leg—continuous interventions including preemptive wars against those who reject imperialist interventions. In response, some countries of the South, such as the BRICS, at best walk on only one leg: they reject the geopolitics of imperialism but accept economic neoliberalism. They remain, for that reason, vulnerable, as the current case of Russia shows. 15 Yes, they have to understand that “trade is war,” as Yash Tandon wrote. 16

All countries of the world outside the triad are enemies or potential enemies, except those who accept complete submission to its economic and political strategy. In that frame Russia is “an enemy.” 17 Whatever might be our assessment of what the Soviet Union was, the triad fought it simply because it was an attempt to develop independently of dominant capitalism/imperialism. After the breakdown of the Soviet system, some people (in Russia in particular) thought that the “West” would not antagonize a “capitalist Russia”—just as Germany and Japan had “lost the war but won the peace.” They forgot that the Western powers supported the reconstruction of the former fascist countries precisely to face the challenge of the independent policies of the Soviet Union. Now, this challenge having disappeared, the target of the triad is complete submission, to destroy the capacity of Russia to resist. The current development of the Ukraine tragedy illustrates the reality of the strategic target of the triad. The triad organized in Kiev what ought to be called a “Euro/Nazi putsch.” The rhetoric of the Western medias, claiming that the policies of the Triad aim at promoting democracy, is simply a lie. Eastern Europe has been “integrated” in the European Union not as equal partners, but as “semi-colonies” of major Western and Central European capitalist/imperialist powers. The relation between West and East in the European system is in some degree similar to that which rules the relations between the United States and Latin America!

Therefore the policy of Russia to resist the project of colonization of Ukraine must be supported. But this positive Russian “international policy” is bound to fail if it is not supported by the Russian people. And this support cannot be won on the exclusive basis of “nationalism.” The support can be won only if the internal economic and social policy pursued promotes the interests of the majority of the working people. A people-oriented policy implies therefore moving away, as much as possible, from the “liberal” recipe and the electoral masquerade associated with it, which claims to give legitimacy to regressive social policies. I would suggest setting up in its place a brand of new state capitalism with a social dimension (I say social, not socialist). That system would open the road to eventual advances toward a socialization of the management of the economy and therefore authentic new advances toward an invention of democracy responding to the challenges of a modern economy.

Russian state power remaining within the strict limits of the neoliberal recipe annihilates the chances of success of an independent foreign policy and the chances of Russia becoming a really emerging country acting as an important international actor. Neoliberalism can produce for Russia only a tragic economic and social regression, a pattern of “lumpen development,” and a growing subordinate status in the global imperialist order. Russia would provide the triad with oil, gas, and some other natural resources; its industries would be reduced to the status of sub-contracting for the benefit of Western financial monopolies. In such a position, which is not very far from that of Russia today in the global system, attempts to act independently in the international area will remain extremely fragile, threatened by “sanctions” which will strengthen the disastrous alignment of the ruling economic oligarchy to the demands of dominant monopolies of the triad. The current outflow of “Russian capital” associated with the Ukraine crisis illustrates the danger. Reestablishing state control over the movements of capital is the only effective response to that danger.

Outside of China, which is implementing a national project of modern industrial development in connection with the renovation of family agriculture, the other so-called emergent countries of the South (the BRICS) still walk only on one leg: they are opposed to the depredations of militarized globalization, but remain imprisoned in the straightjacket of neoliberalism. 18

• ↩ In this article, I am limiting myself to examining the experiences of Russia and China, with no intention of ignoring the other twentieth-century socialist revolutions (North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba).
• ↩ Before the Second World War, Stalin had desperately, and unsuccessfully, sought an alliance with the Western democracies against Nazism. After the war, Washington chose to pursue the Cold War, while Stalin sought to extend friendship with the Western powers, again without success. See Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939–1953 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). See the important preface by Annie Lacroix Riz to the French edition: Les guerres de Staline: De la guerre mondiale à la guerre froide (Paris: Éditions Delga, 2014).
• ↩ I am alluding here to Kautsky’s theses in The Agrarian Question , 2 vols. (London: Pluto Press, 1988; first edition, 1899).
• ↩ There are pleasant exceptions among Marxist intellectuals who, without having had responsibilities in the leadership of revolutionary parties or, still less, of revolutionary states, have nonetheless remained attentive to the challenges confronted by state socialisms (I am thinking here of Baran, Sweezy, Hobsbawn, and others).
• ↩ See Samir Amin, “ China 2013 ,” Monthly Review 64, no. 10 (March 2013): 14–33, in particular for analyses concerning Maoism’s treatment of the agrarian question.
• ↩ See Eric J. Hobsbawn, Echoes of the Marseillaise: Two Centuries Look Back on the French Revolution (London: Verso, 1990); also see the works of Florence Gauthier. These authors do not assimilate Thermidor to restoration, as the Trotskyist simplification suggests.
• ↩ Concerning the destruction of the Asian and African peasantry currently underway, see Samir Amin, “ Contemporary Imperialism and the Agrarian Question ,” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 1, no. 1 (April 2012): 11–26, http://ags.sagepub.com .
• ↩ I discuss here only some of the major consequences of the move to generalized monopolies (financialization, decline of democracy). As for ecological questions, I refer to the remarkable works of John Bellamy Foster.
• ↩ Nicolai Bukharin, Imperialism and the World Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973; written in 1915); V. I. Lenin, Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1969; written in 1916).
• ↩ For further discussions of the Department III analysis and its relation to Baran and Sweezy’s theory of surplus absorption see Samir Amin, Three Essays on Marx’s Value Theory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013), 67–76; and John Bellamy Foster, “Marxian Crisis Theory and the State,” in John Bellamy Foster and Henryk Szlajfer, eds., The Faltering Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984), 325–49.
• ↩ Andre Gunder Frank and Samir Amin, “Let’s Not Wait for 1984,” in Frank, Reflections on the World Economic Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981).
• ↩ Samir Amin, Empire of Chaos (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1992).
• ↩ Concerning the challenge to financial globalization, see Samir Amin, “From Bandung (1955) to 2015: New and Old Challenges for the Peoples and States of the South,” paper presented at the World Social Forum, Tunis, March 2015, and “The Chinese Yuan,” published in Chinese, 2013.
• ↩ “ Contra Hardt and Negri ,” Monthly Review 66, no. 6 (November 2014): 25–36.
• ↩ The choice to delink is inevitable. The extreme centralization of the surplus at the world level in the form of imperialist rent for the monopolies of the imperialist powers is unsupportable by all societies in the periphery. It is necessary to deconstruct this system with the prospect of reconstructing it later in another form of globalization compatible with communism understood as a more advanced stage of universal civilization. I have suggested, in this context, a comparison with the necessary destruction of the centralization of the Roman Empire, which opened the way to feudal decentralization.
• ↩ Yash Tandon, Trade is War (New York: OR Books, forthcoming).
• ↩ Samir Amin, “Russia in the World System,” chapter 7 in Global History: A View from the South (London: Pambazuka Press, 2010), “ The Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism ,” Monthly Review 66, no. 4 (September 2014): 1–12.
• ↩ Concerning the inadequate responses of India and Brazil, see Samir Amin, The Implosion of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013), chapter 2, and “ Latin America Confronts the Challenge of Globalization ,” Monthly Review 66, no. 7 (December 2014): 1–6.

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• Introduction

Background and characteristics

Economic imperialism, noneconomic imperialism, quest for a general theory of imperialism.

• When did the British Empire begin?

New Imperialism

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• Table Of Contents

New Imperialism , period of intensified imperialistic expansion from the latter half of the 19th century until the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The renewed push to expand territorial control included not only the earlier colonial powers of western Europe but also newcomers such as Germany , Italy , Japan , Russia , and the United States .

After years of rapid growth under free trade policy regimes, an international financial crisis hit much of the industrialized world in 1873. In response to the economic and social fallout of the crisis, states began taking a more proactive approach in managing their economic affairs. In the 1870s and 1880s, the great powers of Europe suddenly shook off almost a century of apathy toward overseas colonies and, in the space of 20 years, partitioned almost the entire uncolonized portion of the globe. Once the scramble for colonies was complete, pressure groups formed in the various countries to argue the economic promise of imperialism , but just as often governments had to foster colonial development. In most cases, trade did not lead but followed the flag.

One necessary condition that characterized this New Imperialism, often overlooked, is technological. Prior to the 1870s Europeans could overawe native peoples along the coasts of Africa and Asia but lacked the firepower, mobility, and communications that would have been needed to pacify the interior. ( India was the exception, where the British East India Company exploited an anarchic situation and allied itself with selected native rulers against others.) The tsetse fly and the Anopheles mosquito —bearers of sleeping sickness and malaria —were the ultimate defenders of African and Asian jungles . The correlation of forces between Europe and the colonizable world shifted, however, with the invention of shallow-draft riverboats, the steamship and telegraph , the repeater rifle and Maxim gun , and the discovery (in India) that quinine is an effective prophylactic against malaria. By 1880 small groups of European regulars, armed with modern weapons and exercising fire discipline , could overwhelm many times their number of native troops.

Apart from the ability to now expand into uncolonized regions, technological advances from the co-occuring second Industrial Revolution also enabled newcomers to the imperialist drive to compete with the old powers. Mass-produced steel, electric power and oil as sources of energy, industrial chemistry, and the internal-combustion engine helped additional states, including Germany, the United States, and, eventually, Japan, to join the colonial scramble on roughly equal footing. Both the new technology and the added competition also contributed to the rapid speed of the New Imperialism.

To operate efficiently, the new industries of the second Industrial Revolution required heavy capital investment in large-scale units. Accordingly, they encouraged the development of capital markets and banking institutions that were large and flexible enough to finance the new enterprises. The larger capital markets and industrial enterprises, in turn, helped push forward the geographic scale of operations of the industrialized nations: more capital could now be mobilized for foreign loans and investment, and the bigger businesses had the resources for the worldwide search for and development of the raw materials essential to the success and security of their investments. Not only did the new industrialism generate a voracious appetite for raw materials, but food for the swelling urban populations was now also sought in the far corners of the world. Advances in ship construction (steamships using steel hulls, twin screws, and compound engines) made feasible the inexpensive movement of bulk raw materials and food over long ocean distances. Under the pressures and opportunities of the later decades of the 19th century, more and more of the world was drawn upon as primary producers for the industrialized nations. Self-contained economic regions dissolved into a world economy, involving an international division of labour whereby the leading industrial nations made and sold manufactured products and the rest of the world supplied them with raw materials and food.

Ship construction was also of special importance to the revival of militarism in this period. Although Great Britain had long enjoyed naval supremacy, it now had to build a completely new navy , comprising steam-powered armour-plated warships, while the other industrialized nations were doing the same.

Renewed colonial rivalry, moreover, brought an end to the relatively peaceful conditions of the mid-19th century, with the South African War (the Boer War), the First Sino-Japanese War , the Spanish-American War , and the Russo-Japanese War among those that ushered in this new era. Much of the conflict arose from the intensification of tendencies that originated in earlier periods. The decision by the United States to go to war with Spain, for example, cannot be isolated from the long-standing interest of the United States in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Dominance of the Caribbean after Spain’s defeat was consistent with the Monroe Doctrine , which set up the United States as a guarantor of a Latin America free of European domination; possession of the Philippines was consistent with the historic interest of the United States in the commerce of the Pacific, as it had already manifested by its long interest in Hawaii (annexed in 1898).

The annexations during this new phase of imperial growth differed significantly from the expansionism earlier in the 19th century. While the latter was substantial in magnitude, it was primarily devoted to the consolidation of claimed territory (by penetration of continental interiors and more effective rule over indigenous populations) and only secondarily to new acquisitions. On the other hand, the New Imperialism was characterized by a burst of activity in carving up as yet independent areas: taking over almost all Africa, a good part of Asia, and many Pacific islands. This new vigour in the pursuit of colonies is reflected in the fact that the rate of new territorial acquisitions of the New Imperialism was almost three times that of the earlier period. Thus, the increase in new territories claimed in the first 75 years of the 19th century averaged about 83,000 square miles (215,000 square kilometres) a year. As against this, the colonial powers added an average of about 240,000 square miles (620,000 square kilometres) a year between the late 1870s and World War I (1914–18). By the beginning of that war, the new territory claimed was for the most part fully conquered, and the main military resistance of the indigenous populations had been suppressed . Hence, in 1914, as a consequence of this new expansion and conquest on top of that of preceding centuries, the colonial powers, their colonies, and their former colonies extended over approximately 85 percent of Earth’s surface. Economic and political control by leading powers reached almost the entire globe, for, in addition to colonial rule, other means of domination were exercised in the form of spheres of influence , special commercial treaties, and the subordination that lenders often impose on debtor nations.

Historiographical debate

The New Imperialism marked the end of vacillation over the choice of imperialist military and political policies; similar decisions to push imperialist programs to the forefront were made by the leading industrial nations over a relatively short period. This historical conjuncture requires explanation and still remains the subject of debate among historians and social scientists. The pivot of the controversy is the degree to which the New Imperialism was the product of primarily economic forces and in particular whether it was a necessary attribute of the capitalist system.

Serious analysts on both sides of the argument recognize that there is a multitude of factors involved: the main protagonists of economic imperialism recognize that political, military, and ideological influences were also at work; similarly, many who dispute the economic imperialism thesis acknowledge that economic interests played a significant role. The problem, however, is one of assigning priority to causes.

The father of the economic interpretation of the New Imperialism was the British liberal economist John Atkinson Hobson. In his seminal study, Imperialism, a Study (first published in 1902), he pointed to the role of such drives as patriotism, philanthropy, and the spirit of adventure in advancing the imperialist cause. As he saw it, however, the critical question was why the energy of these active agents takes the particular form of imperialist expansion. Hobson located the answer in the financial interests of the capitalist class as “the governor of the imperial engine.” Imperialist policy had to be considered irrational if viewed from the vantage point of the nation as a whole: the economic benefits derived were far less than the costs of wars and armaments; and needed social reforms were shunted aside in the excitement of imperial adventure. But it was rational, indeed, in the eyes of the minority of financial interest groups. The reason for this, in Hobson’s view, was the persistent congestion of capital in manufacturing. The pressure of capital needing investment outlets arose in part from a maldistribution of income: low mass consuming power blocks the absorption of goods and capital inside the country. Moreover, the practices of the larger firms, especially those operating in trusts and combines, foster restrictions on output, thus avoiding the risks and waste of overproduction. Because of this, the large firms are faced with limited opportunities to invest in expanding domestic production. The result of both the maldistribution of income and monopolistic behaviour is a need to open up new markets and new investment opportunities in foreign countries.

Hobson’s study covered a broader spectrum than the analysis of what he called its economic taproot. It also examined the associated features of the New Imperialism, such as political changes, racial attitudes, and nationalism . The book as a whole made a strong impression on, and greatly influenced, Marxist thinkers who were becoming more involved with the struggle against imperialism. The most influential of the Marxist studies was a small book published by Vladimir Lenin in 1917, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Despite many similarities, at bottom there is a wide gulf between Hobson’s and Lenin’s frameworks of analysis and also between their respective conclusions. While Hobson saw the New Imperialism serving the interests of certain capitalist groups, he believed that imperialism could be eliminated by social reforms while maintaining the capitalist system. This would require restricting the profits of those classes whose interests were closely tied to imperialism and attaining a more equitable distribution of income so that consumers would be able to buy up a nation’s production. Lenin, on the other hand, saw imperialism as being so closely integrated with the structure and normal functioning of an advanced capitalism that he believed that only the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, with the substitution of socialism , would rid the world of imperialism.

Lenin placed the issues of imperialism in a context broader than the interests of a special sector of the capitalist class. According to Lenin, capitalism itself changed in the late 19th century; moreover, because this happened at pretty much the same time in several leading capitalist nations, it explains why the new phase of capitalist development came when it did. This new phase, Lenin believed, involves political and social as well as economic changes; but its economic essence is the replacement of competitive capitalism by monopoly capitalism, a more advanced stage in which finance capital, an alliance between large industrial and banking firms, dominates the economic and political life of society. Competition continues, but among a relatively small number of giants who are able to control large sectors of the national and international economy. It is this monopoly capitalism and the resulting rivalry generated among monopoly capitalist nations that foster imperialism; in turn, the processes of imperialism stimulate the further development of monopoly capital and its influence over the whole society.

The difference between Lenin’s more complex paradigm and Hobson’s shows up clearly in the treatment of capital export. Like Hobson, Lenin maintained that the increasing importance of capital exports is a key figure of imperialism, but he attributed the phenomenon to much more than pressure from an overabundance of capital. He also saw the acceleration of capital migration arising from the desire to obtain exclusive control over raw material sources and to get a tighter grip on foreign markets. He thus shifted the emphasis from the general problem of surplus capital, inherent in capitalism in all its stages, to the imperatives of control over raw materials and markets in the monopoly stage. With this perspective, Lenin also broadened the concept of imperialism. Because the thrust is to divide the world among monopoly interest groups, the ensuing rivalry extends to a struggle over markets in the leading capitalist nations as well as in the less advanced capitalist and colonial countries. This rivalry is intensified because of the uneven development of different capitalist nations: the latecomers aggressively seek a share of the markets and colonies controlled by those who got there first, who naturally resist such a redivision. Other forces—political, military, and ideological—are at play in shaping the contours of imperialist policy, but Lenin insisted that these influences germinate in the seedbed of monopoly capitalism.

Perhaps the most systematic alternative theory of imperialism was proposed by Joseph Alois Schumpeter , one of the best known economists of the first half of the 20th century. His essay “Zur Soziologie des Imperialismus” (“The Sociology of Imperialism”) was first published in Germany in the form of two articles in 1919. Although Schumpeter was probably not familiar with Lenin’s Imperialism at the time he wrote his essay, his arguments were directed against the Marxist currents of thought of the early 20th century and in particular against the idea that imperialism grows naturally out of capitalism. Unlike other critics, however, Schumpeter accepted some of the components of the Marxist thesis , and to a certain extent he followed the Marxist tradition of looking for the influence of class forces and class interests as major levers of social change . In doing so, he in effect used the weapons of Marxist thought to rebut the essence of Marxist theory.

A survey of empires, beginning with the earliest days of written history , led Schumpeter to conclude that there are three generic characteristics of imperialism: (1) At root is a persistent tendency to war and conquest, often producing nonrational expansions that have no sound utilitarian aim. (2) These urges are not innate in man. They evolved from critical experiences when peoples and classes were molded into warriors to avoid extinction; the warrior mentality and the interests of warrior classes live on, however, and influence events even after the vital need for wars and conquests disappears. (3) The drift to war and conquest is sustained and conditioned by the domestic interests of ruling classes, often under the leadership of those individuals who have most to gain economically and socially from war. But for these factors, Schumpeter believed, imperialism would have been swept away into the dustbin of history as capitalist society ripened; for capitalism in its purest form is antithetical to imperialism: it thrives best with peace and free trade. Yet despite the innate peaceful nature of capitalism, interest groups do emerge that benefit from aggressive foreign conquests. Under monopoly capitalism the fusion of big banks and cartels creates a powerful and influential social group that pressures for exclusive control in colonies and protectorates, for the sake of higher profits.

Notwithstanding the resemblance between Schumpeter’s discussion of monopoly and that of Lenin and other Marxists, a crucial difference does remain. Monopoly capitalism in Lenin’s frame of reference is a natural outgrowth of the previous stage of competitive capitalism. But according to Schumpeter, it is an artificial graft on the more natural competitive capitalism, made possible by the catalytic effect of the residue from the preceding feudal society. Schumpeter argued that monopoly capitalism can only grow and prosper under the protection of high tariff walls; without that shield there would be large-scale industry but no cartels or other monopolistic arrangements. Because tariff walls are erected by political decisions, it is the state and not a natural economic process that promotes monopoly. Therefore, it is in the nature of the state—and especially those features that blend the heritage of the previous autocratic state, the old war machine, and feudal interests and ideas along with capitalist interests—that the cause of imperialism will be discovered. The particular form of imperialism in modern times is affected by capitalism, and capitalism itself is modified by the imperialist experience. In Schumpeter’s analysis, however, imperialism is not an inevitable product of capitalism.

The main trend of academic thought in the Western world is to follow Schumpeter’s conclusion—that modern imperialism is not a product of capitalism—without paying close attention to Schumpeter’s sophisticated sociological analysis. Specialized studies have produced a variety of interpretations of the origin or reawakening of the New Imperialism: for France , bolstering of national prestige after its defeat in the Franco-German War (1870–71); for Germany, Otto von Bismarck ’s design to stay in power when threatened by political rivals; for England, the desire for greater military security in the Mediterranean and India. These reasons—along with other frequently mentioned contributing causes, such as the spirit of national and racial superiority and the drive for power—are still matters of controversy with respect to specific cases and to the problem of fitting them into a general theory of imperialism. For example, if it is found that a new colony was acquired for better military defense of existing colonies, the questions still remain as to why the existing colonies were acquired in the first place and why it was considered necessary to defend them rather than to give them up. Similarly, explanations in terms of the search for power still have to account for the close relationship between power and wealth, because in the real world adequate economic resources are needed for a nation to hold on to its power, let alone to increase it. Conversely, increasing a nation’s wealth often requires power. As is characteristic of historical phenomena, imperialist expansion is conditioned by a nation’s previous history and the particular situation preceding each expansionist move. Moreover, it is carried forth in the midst of a complex of political, military, economic, and psychological impulses. It would seem, therefore, that the attempt to arrive at a theory that explains each and every imperialist action—ranging from a semifeudal Russia to a relatively undeveloped Italy to an industrially powerful Germany—is a vain pursuit. But this does not eliminate the more important challenge of constructing a theory that will provide a meaningful interpretation of the almost simultaneous eruption of the New Imperialism in a whole group of leading powers.

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Computer Science > Social and Information Networks

Title: confrontation of capitalism and socialism in wikipedia networks.

Abstract: We introduce the Ising Network Opinion Formation (INOF) model and apply it for the analysis of networks of 6 Wikipedia language editions. In the model, Ising spins are placed at network nodes/articles and the steady-state opinion polarization of spins is determined from the Monte Carlo iterations in which a given spin orientation is determined by in-going links from other spins. The main consideration is done for opinion confrontation between {\it capitalism, imperialism} (blue opinion) and {\it socialism, communism} (red opinion). These nodes have fixed spin/opinion orientation while other nodes achieve their steady-state opinions in the process of Monte Carlo iterations. We find that the global network opinion favors {\it socialism, communism} for all 6 editions. The model also determines the opinion preferences for world countries and political leaders, showing good agreement with heuristic expectations. We also present results for opinion competition between {\it Christianity} and {\it Islam}, and USA Democratic and Republican parties. We argue that the INOF approach can find numerous applications for directed complex networks.

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