Imperialism
Students
of imperialism appropriately refer to the polemical but theoretically relevant
essay authored by Marx and Engels, The
Communist Manifesto. In this essay, the authors argue that capitalism as a
mode of production is driven to traverse the globe, for investment
opportunities, for cheap labor, for natural resources, for land. One can argue
that Marx and Engels were among the first to theorize about globalization.
Lenin
advanced the theory of imperialism in his famous essay Imperialism, the Highest
Stage of Capitalism. In addition to the inspiration from Marx and Engels,
he drew from the sophisticated writings of Rudolf Hilferding and John Hobson.
For him, writing in the midst of the bloodshed of World War I and revolutionary
ferment in Russia, there was a need to understand the connections between the
expansionist needs of capitalism, competition among capitalist states, and imperialist
war. With that motivation, Lenin postulated five key features of what he called
imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. This new stage of capitalist
development in the twentieth century included:
1) The
concentration of production and capital developed to such a high stage that it
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," or a "financial oligarchy."
3) The
export of capital, which has become extremely important, as distinguished from
the export of commodities.
4) The
formation of international capitalist monopolies, which share the world among
themselves.
5) The
territorial division of the whole world among the greatest capitalist powers is
completed.
Lenin’s
descriptions of these five features of twentieth century imperialism were
prescient as to their long-term vision. Imperialism was not just a way in which
powerful states acted in the world but a global stage of capitalism. The
political, military, and economic dimensions of the world were inextricably
connected in a profoundly new way, different from prior periods of human
history.
In
this stage national economies and the global economy were dominated by
monopolies. That is, small numbers of banks and corporations controlled the majority
of the wealth and productive capacity of the world. (The Brandt Commission in
the early 1980s estimated, for example, that 200 corporations and banks controlled
twenty-five percent of the world’s wealth). Monopolization included a shrinking
number of economic actors that controlled larger and larger shares of each
economic sector (steel, auto, fossil fuels, for example) and fewer and fewer
actors controlling more of the totality of all these sectors.
Lenin
added that twentieth century finance capital assumed a primary role in the
global economy compared to prior centuries when banks were merely the
bookkeepers of the capitalist system. Corporate capital and financial capital
had become indistinguishable. This, in our own day, became known as "financialization.”
The
development of finance capital, Lenin argued, led to the export of capital, the
promotion of investments, the enticement of a debt system, and the expanding
control of all financial transactions by the few hundred global banks.
Capitalism was no longer just about expropriating labor and natural resources,
processing these into products for sale on a world market but it now was about
financial speculation, the flow of currencies as much as the flow of products
of labor. It was in this stage of capitalism that the financial system was used
as a lever to transform all of the world’s economies, particularly by increasing
profits through imposing policies of austerity. Austerity included cutting
government programs, deregulating economies so banks and corporations could act
more freely, and, further, instituting public policies to maximize the
privatization of virtually every public institution. These policies were
referred to as “neoliberal.”
And lastly, Lenin observed, world politics was shaped by economic and political collusion of international monopolies to collaborate, routinize, and regulate economic competition. But, as he saw in 1916, that world of routinized global finance capital had broken down, states representing their own financial conglomerates engaged in massive violence, in World War, to maintain their share of territory and wealth. So that imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, always had embedded within it, the seeds of ever-expanding war between states driven by their own monopolies.
Dependency
Theorists
and revolutionaries from the Global South found Lenin’s theory of imperialism
to be a compelling explanation of the historical development of capitalism as a
world system and its connections to war, violence, colonialism, and
neo-colonialism. However, they argued that Lenin’s narrative was incomplete in
its description of imperialism’s impact on the countries and peoples of the
Global South. Several revolutionary writers and activists from the Global South
added a “bottom up” narrative about imperialism. Theorists such as Andre Gunter
Frank, Samir Amin, Frantz Fanon, Walter Rodney, Fernando Cardoso, Theotonio Dos
Santos, and Jose Carlos Mariategui added an understanding of “dependency” to
the discussion of imperialism.
Dependency
theorists suggested that the imperialist stage of capitalism was not enforced
in the Global South only at the point of a gun. Dependency required the
institutionalization of class structures in the Global South. Ruling classes in
the Global South, local owners of factories, fields, and natural resources, and
their armies, collaborated with the ruling classes of the global centers of
power in the Global North. In fact, the imperial system required collaboration
between ruling classes in the global centers with ruling classes in the
periphery of the international system. And ultimately, imperialism, the highest
stage of capitalism, was a political and economic system in which the ruling
classes in the centers of power worked in collaboration with the ruling classes
in the Global South to exploit and repress the vast majority of human beings in
the world.
Dependency
theory, therefore, added insights to the Leninist analysis. First, the imperial
system required collaboration from the rich and powerful classes in the centers
of global power, the Global North, developing and recruiting the rich and
powerful classes in the countries of the Global South. It also meant that there was a need to understand that the imperial
system required smooth flows of profits from the Global South to the Global
North. Therefore, there was a mutuality of interests among ruling classes
everywhere. The addition of dependency theory also argued that people in the
periphery, workers and peasants in poor countries, had objective interests not
only opposed to the imperial countries from the north but to the interests of
their own national ruling classes. And, if this imperial system exploited
workers in the centers of power and also in the peripheral areas of the world,
then there ultimately was a commonality
of interests in the poor, oppressed, and exploited all across the face of the
globe.
Relevance
for the Twenty-First Century
Although
the world of the twenty-first century is different from that of the twentieth
century, commonalities exist. These include the expansion of finance capital,
rising resistance to it everywhere, and conflicts in the Global North and the
Global South between powerful ruling classes and masses of people seeking
democracy and economic well-being. In the recent past, the resurgence of
protest by workers, students, farmers and peasants, the popular classes, has
been reflected in mass movements against neoliberal globalization and
international financial institutions. These include Arab Spring, the Fight for
Fifteen, and a number of campaigns that challenge racism, sexism, joblessness,
the destruction of the environment, land grabs, and removal of indigenous
peoples from their land.
In
Latin America, movements emerged that have been labeled “the Pink Tide” or the
“Bolivarian Revolution.” These are movements driven by struggles between the
Global North and the Global South and class struggles within countries
of the Global South. Workers and peasants from the Global South have been
motivated to create, albeit within powerful historical constraints, alternative
economic and political institutions in their own countries. The awakening of
the masses of people in the Global South constitute one of the two main threats
to Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. The first threat is the
movements that are struggling to break the link between their own ruling
classes and those of the North. That includes working with leaders who are
standing up against the imperial system (leaders such as in Venezuela, Bolivia,
and, of course Cuba). The other threat to Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism, is, as Lenin observed in 1916, war between imperial powers.
In
sum, as activists mobilize to oppose US war against the peoples of Latin
America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, it is critical to be aware of the
imperial system of finance capital, class systems in the Global North and
Global South, and to realize that solidarity involves understanding the common
material interests of popular classes in both the Global North and South. In
2019, solidarity includes opposing United States militarism in Latin America,
economic blockades against peoples seeking their own liberation, and covert
operations to support current and former ruling classes in their countries that
collaborate with imperialism.
Concretely,
this means supporting the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela and throughout the
Western Hemisphere, protests in Haiti, and, of course, the Cuban Revolution.
