Harry Targ
Council on Foreign Relations, October 31, 2022
Leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, commonly known as Lula, won Brazil’s presidential runoff (Reuters) yesterday, defeating incumbent Jair Bolsonaro by less than two percentage points. Bolsonaro did not concede the election last night nor make any public statement. Heads of state from around the world congratulated Lula on his victory.
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. Also, and of particular relevance to the Brazilian case, was the opening up of natural resources and land to global corporations. 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
T\\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. And today the
writings of V J Prashad and his colleagues at Tricontinental carry on the
tradition.
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 of 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. The electoral victory
of Lula is the most recent example.
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 2022, 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, of course, the Cuban Revolution, and now the transition to democracy in Brazil.
