Lenin and Bukharin on imperialism

By Phil Gasper

Issue #100: Features ISR International Socialist Review

https://isreview.org/issue/100/lenin-and-bukharin-imperialism

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Imperialism since Lenin and Bukharin
But does Lenin and Bukharin’s approach help us to understand the modern world? After World War II, the structure of global politics changed dramatically. Before the war, the world was economically and politically multipolar. After the war it remained economically multipolar but became politically bipolar, with the formation of two rival global military alliances, one dominated by the United States, the other by the Soviet Union. While nominally socialist, the USSR was by this time ruled by a bureaucratic elite that exploited the majority of the population in order to compete with the West for power and influence. The stage was set for the Cold War. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union took over most of Eastern Europe (initially with the agreement of their wartime Western allies) and installed regimes modeled on its own, with one-party states that controlled in each case most of the economy. While state and capital never fully merged in most of the capitalist world, they did so in the Soviet bloc for several decades.¹¹

It would be hard to deny that this was a period of intense interimperialist rivalry. Wars continued on the periphery resulting in millions of deaths, and the two superpowers engaged in a massive arms race, but there was no war between the USA and the USSR, although they came extremely close at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and on several other occasions.¹² But with the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 and the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union itself, the structure of the global system changed again.

The end of the Cold War took place at the same time as the decisive US victory in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq, and was supposed to usher in a “new world order” of international stability, in which military conflict would decline, and we would all receive the benefits of a massive “peace dividend.” But despite a mood of triumphalism among US imperial strategists and propagandists in the early 1990s, the peace dividend never materialized because the US ruling class found itself almost immediately faced with new challenges.

For the United States, one positive consequence of the Cold War was that it gave Washington political dominance over the major capitalist countries in Europe and Asia, since they depended on the US military for their security. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Western Europe’s military dependency on the US decreased at the same time as its economic and political integration accelerated. US planners viewed this as a potential medium-term threat to continued American global dominance. In the mid-1990s, some European countries began floating the idea of a European Defense Force that could act independently of the US-dominated North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which had been formed to oppose the USSR and now seemed to have little reason for its existence. US policy makers were also concerned about the possibility of a German-Russian strategic alliance, as well as the emergence of China as a major economic and military power that might begin to replace the US as the dominant power in Asia.

The Clinton administration responded to these challenges both economically and militarily. It pushed through policies of economic globalization designed to bind the other major powers into relations of dependency on the US in the World Trade Organization. Simultaneously it followed a policy of strengthening and expanding NATO in order to maintain the US presence in Europe and weaken Russia. This culminated with military interventions in the former Yugoslavia, intended to maintain European dependence on US armed power.

In the 1990s, US strategists from both sides of the political aisle began to look for ways in which Washington could use its enormous military power to keep its main rivals in check. On the right, the most influential group was a neoconservative think-tank named the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), several of whose members became prominent figures in the George W. Bush administration. In a report issued in September 2000, PNAC outlines the key strategic goal of “maintaining global US pre-eminence . . . and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.” Key to achieving this goal, according to the report, was seizing control of the Persian Gulf region. “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”¹³ Regime change in Iraq would, it was assumed, not only give the United States control over the second largest oil reserves in the world but also significant leverage over its main rivals, particularly Europe and China, both highly dependent on Middle Eastern oil.

This was not just the fantasy of neoconservative extremists. By the end of the 1990s, there was bipartisan consensus that Saddam’s government needed to be removed, and it had become official US policy. Shortly after the PNAC report of September 2000, the bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies issued a report on the geopolitics of energy that pointed to a “fundamental contradiction” between the need to modernize Iraq’s oil infrastructure in order to increase production to meet growing world energy demand and continued sanctions.¹⁴ But if the sanctions were lifted while the Iraqi regime remained in power, then the chief beneficiaries would be France and Russia, which had negotiated major oil concessions with Saddam. 

Underlying this immediate concern were continuing imperial rivalries with other major powers, driven by the same intersecting logics of economic and military competition analyzed by Lenin and Bukharin in different geopolitical circumstances ninety years earlier. None of the other powers could threaten Washington’s hegemony on a global level, but they could erode US dominance in specific areas. The long-term goal of US imperialism was to maintain its control of Middle East oil—first established after World War II—by shoring up friendly governments in the area no matter what their records might be on human rights, and by containing and when possible replacing unfriendly ones. It was in fact the Democrat Jimmy Carter who articulated this most clearly in his January 1980 State of the Union address: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”¹⁵ The so-called “Carter Doctrine” is a reminder that control over what a 1945 State Department memorandum to President Harry Truman had described as “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history,”¹⁶ was always a bipartisan project.

When the Bush administration came to office in 2001, however, the goal of regime change in Iraq was not immediately achievable, since there was insufficient domestic support for an outright invasion. The PNAC report had bluntly noted in the previous year that what was needed to implement such a policy was “some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”¹⁷ The attacks of 9/11 thus provided the Bush administration with exactly the opportunity it needed to pursue an agenda that it had already decided on. As Gilbert Achcar puts it: “September 11, 2001 came as a terrific windfall for the Bush administration. . . . The spectacular blow struck by Islamic fundamentalists, former US allies who had become its sworn enemies, created such a huge political trauma in the United States that the Bush administration thought it was possible at last, for the first time, to break once and for all with the ‘Vietnam syndrome’ and return to the unbridled military interventionism of the first Cold War decades.”¹⁸

The important point to note is that while there were tactical differences between the administration and some other sections of the political establishment about how best to pursue the agenda, there was near unanimity on the goal itself. The shift to a much more aggressive and unilateralist foreign policy was not the result of a neoconservative coup but a consequence of radically new circumstances providing US imperialism with the opportunity to solve its problems in a new way.

Some in the Bush administration wanted to attack Iraq immediately, but for political reasons it was decided that an invasion of Afghanistan was politically more feasible and could be a stepping stone towards the goal of removing Saddam Hussein. It had the additional benefit of allowing Washington to set up a string of military bases in Central Asia, thus increasing its control over Caspian oil and gas, and giving it greater leverage against both Russia and China.

Once the operation in Afghanistan seemed to have been completed, the Bush administration turned its attention to Iraq, with support from nearly all the leading figures in the Democratic Party. The conflicts with France, Germany, Russia, and China in the buildup to the invasion revealed the key rivalries between the major powers that were at the root of US policy. The war on Iraq was supposed to assert US dominance not just over the Middle East but over these economic and military rivals too. The goal was to remove a regime hostile to US interests, to gain control over Iraqi oil, thereby increasing US leverage over Europe and China, and to use Iraq as a base to reshape the entire Middle East along lines congenial to Washington.

In an interview on BBC television, General Jay Garner, former head of the Iraq occupation authority, described Washington’s long-term vision of Iraq as a political and military base, modeled on America’s control of the Pacific in the early twentieth century. 

We used the Philippines. And the Philippines, for the lack of a better term, it was in essence a coaling station for the navy. And it allowed the US navy to maintain presence in the Pacific. They maintained great presence in the Pacific. 

I think . . . we should look right now at Iraq as our coaling station in the Middle East, where we have some presence there and it gives a settling effect there, and it also gives us a strategic advantage there, and I think we ought to just accept that and take that for a period of time, as long as the Iraqi people are willing to allow us to be guests in their country.¹⁹

This interview reveals some of the continuities of current policy with the long history of US imperialism. But the world that US policy has brought about over the past few decades has created new problems for US imperialism. The occupation of Iraq first bogged down the US militarily while at the same time removing Iran’s biggest rival in the region, leading in turn to an intensification of Washington’s confrontation with Tehran.

Even more importantly, while Washington has been largely successful in reintegrating the countries of Western Europe into a US-dominated international framework since the end of the Cold War, the same is not true for Russia (which is still a major military power, with thousands of nuclear missiles) or China (which is a rising economic and military power). Indeed US policy makers are obsessed by the rise of China and how they can prevent it from becoming a major challenger to US power on a regional or even a global level. The US used 9/11 to set up military bases in central Asia. In response, Russia and China formed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in an effort to maneuver the United States out of the region. They were successful in pushing it out of Uzbekistan, with Russia and China supporting the Uzbek regime. That is an illustration of a process unfolding on a much larger scale in which the major centers of economic and military power in the world continue to maneuver against each other for advantage. None of them are prepared to stand out against the United States directly because the costs are too high, but the process illustrates the fragmentation and instability of the global system.

The shift to a much more aggressive and unilateralist foreign policy by the Bush administration following 9/11 was not the result of neoconservatives hijacking the government,²⁰ but a consequence of radically new circumstances providing US imperialism with the opportunity to solve its problems in a new way. For that reason, little changed when Barack Obama replaced Bush as president, as the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat pointed out in 2011:

For those with eyes to see, the daylight between the foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama has been shrinking ever since the current president took the oath of office. But last week made it official: When the story of America’s post-9/11 wars is written, historians will be obliged to assess the two administrations together, and pass judgment on the Bush-Obama era.²¹

This is not exactly what most of Obama’s supporters had in mind when they voted for him in 2008, but two-and-a-half years later, the record speaks for itself. Troops were eventually withdrawn from Iraq in accordance with a plan begun under Bush, but the war in Afghanistan was expanded, with regular attacks across the border into neighboring Pakistan and high numbers of civilian deaths, a secret bombing campaign in Yemen exposed by Wikileaks, an open bombing campaign against Libya, and saber rattling against Iran. Obama also announced a “pivot to Asia” to challenge China’s growing power and greatly increased the US military presence in Africa. US imperialism did not end when George Bush left office.

These developments confirmed Lenin’s observation that imperialism is not simply a policy, but something built into the fabric of developed capitalism, as economic competition gives rise to geopolitical competition and military intervention. The form of that competition can change over time, but so long as capitalism exists, so will imperialism. That is why—apart from minor differences—both major political parties in the United States pursue the same foreign policy agenda.

Rosa Luxemburg: Accumulation of Capital and the Perennial Crisis

December 2010
Critique 38(4):675-685
DOI: 10.1080/03017605.2010.522129

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Abstract
Luxemburg's economic writings have always been subject to misinterpretations. Bukharin accused her of being an under-consumptionist, while Bauer gave a profound critique of her misreading of the reproduction schema in Marx's Capital (vol. II). During the Stalinist era Luxemburg's writings were considered incompatible with the Leninist notion of monopoly capitalism. Russian economists like Varga were repeatedly accused of being adherents of ‘Luxemburgian revisionism’. On the other hand, the radical Cambridge Keynesian Robinson linked Luxemburg's analysis of conditions of capital expansion to the capitalist's expectation of the rate of profit as a means to retranslate Marxian economics into a heterodox paradigm. Some aspects of the Luxemburgian perspective were incorporated in the post-war theories of Sweezy, Baran and Steindl, with an emphasis on the notion of a realisation crisis. Recent scholarship on Marxian economics has been influenced by the value-form paradigm in which the functions of money are a central focal point. In some cases, this new perspective leads to the abandonment of value-theoretical categories. In this collection of new essays, money and wages play a central role in the extended reproduction scheme. An eclectic mix of Leontief input–output, von Neumann-Morishima and Domar growth models are implemented in order to close the gap between Luxemburg and contemporary heterodox economics. It is of the utmost importance to investigate whether this methodology is still compatible with Luxemburg's initial perspective. Furthermore, a great amount of research has been devoted to the comparison between Luxemburg and Kalecki, because the latter was heavily influenced by ‘The Accumulation of Capital’. Other topics are the concept of the third market in late capitalist imperialism, the connection between the value of labour power and real wages, and the role of investment and the rate of profit regarding military interventions to maintain an imperialist power configuration.

The early reception of Rosa Luxemburg's theory of imperialism

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Capital & Class 37(3):437-455 · October 2013 

This article deals with the reception of Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital: A Contribution to the Economic Explanation of Imperialism in the Second International before the start of the First World War. Our analysis shows that, if the condemnation of The Accumulation of Capital by the political right and centre was almost unanimous, its acceptance by the left was far from universal. In fact, both Lenin and Pannekoek rejected Luxemburg’s theory, adopting instead the economic analysis of an important spokesman of the centre, the Austro-Marxist Rudolf Hilferding. Our work concludes by analysing the reasons for those theoretical differences.

Marxist Theories of Imperialism
A Critical Survey
Anthony Brewer

http://psi424.cankaya.edu.tr/uploads/files/Brewer,%20Marxist_Theories_of_Imperialism.pdf

This seminal account of Marxist theories of imperialism is now
appearing in a revised and expanded edition.

Covering figures as diverse as Hobson, Luxembourg, Hilferding,
Bukharin, Lenin, Frank, Wallerstein, Emmanuel and Warren, as
well as Marx himself, it analyses how Marxists have accounted for
the role of imperialism in the spread of world capitalism.

Marx had expected the spread of capitalism to lead to full
capitalist development everywhere (unless anticipated by socialist
revolution), while Lenin and his contemporaries concentrated on
the role of monopoly and inter-imperialist rivalry. More recently,
the focus of theory has shifted to the explanation of
underdevelopment, which has prompted a renaissance of Marxist
thought.

This book provides a clear guide to this important body of theory,
establishing how the competing theories relate to each other and
assessing them in terms of their logical coherence and their
relevance to real problems.

Anthony Brewer is senior lecturer in Economics at the University of
Bristol. He is the author of A Guide to Marx’s Capital, 1984, and of
a number of articles in learned journals.

Imperialism and the Question of System Stability 

Marcelo Fernandes

http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0102-85292018000100033

ABSTRACT

One of the main controversies within the Marxist theory of imperialism centres on the capacity of the capitalist system to organise itself economically and politically. Ultimately, this argument is linked to the notion of system stability: the end of economic crises, and lasting world peace. The famous polemic between Lenin and Kautsky in the early 20th century about whether capitalism could be peacefully managed by the great powers and private corporations that compete for global wealth persists in much of the current debate. Some authors emphasise economic stability, while others highlight political stability, using terms such as globalisation, transnational capital and Empire, but the central idea remains that of a more disciplined capitalist system. This implies that the Marxist concepts of interstate competition and imperialism have become outdated. This article examines the Marxist literature on imperialism which holds that capitalism has become more organised, to the point of overcoming the rivalries between the great powers. It concludes that the argument that capitalism has reached a degree of organisation which invalidates the concept of imperialism is questionable and does not recognise some fundamental features of the capitalist system.

Keywords Imperialism; Stability; Organised Capitalism; Transnational Capital; Lenin

CONTEXTO INTERNACIONAL VOL. 40(1) JAN/APR 2018 HTTP://DX.DOI.ORG/10.1590/S0102-8529.2017400100002 FERNANDES 

Marxist theories of imperialism: evolution of a concept
By Murray Noonan, BA (Hons)
Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
School of Communication and the Arts
Faculty of Arts, Education and Human Development
Victoria University, Australia
2010

http://vuir.vu.edu.au/16067/1/Murray_Noonan_PhD.pdf

ABSTRACT
Over the course of the twentieth century and into the new millennium, critical
analysis of imperialism has been a feature of Marxist thought. One of the salient
concerns of Marxist theorising of imperialism has been the uncovering of the
connections between the capitalist accumulation process and the political and
economic domination of the world by advanced capitalist countries. The
conceptualising and theorising of imperialism by Marxists has evolved in response to
developments in the global capitalist economy and in international politics.
For its methodological framework, this thesis employs conceptual and generational
typologies, which I term the ‘generational typology of Marxist theories of
imperialism’. This methodological approach is used to assess the concept of
imperialism as sets of ideas with specific concerns within three distinct phases.
The first phase, starting in 1902 with Hobson and finishing in 1917 with Lenin’s
pamphlet, covers who I call the ‘pioneers of imperialism theory’. They identified
changes to capitalism, where monopolies, financiers and finance capital and the
export of capital had become prominent. The second phase of imperialism theory, the
neo-Marxist phase, started with Sweezy in 1942. Neo-Marxist imperialism theory
had its peak of influence in the late 1960s to early 1980s, declining in influence
since. Writers in this cohort focussed on the lack of development of the peripheral
countries. The third or what I call the ‘globalisation-era’ Marxist phase of
imperialism theory started with Hardt’s and Negri’s Empire in 2000. Globalisation
and the hegemony of the United States fundamentally challenged the ‘globalisationera’ Marxists, some of whom have responded by clarifying and criticising problems
associated with the theories of the ‘pioneers’.
The phases of the ‘pioneers’ and neo-Marxists have been identified in previous critical
surveys of Marxist imperialism theory. In identifying the third phase, this thesis makes
a significant contribution to the literature. Despite a ‘renaissance’ in Marxist
imperialism theory over the past decade, there has not been a critical study of Marxist
imperialism theory published since 1991. This thesis covers the gap in the literature
and argues that the ‘renaissance’ brought about by the ‘globalisation-era’ Marxists has
enabled a clearer definition of imperialism to emerge. Moreover, the basis now exists
for richer, more sophisticated theorising of contemporary imperialism.

The New Imperialism of Globalized Monopoly-Finance Capital

EXCERPT 

The Imperialism of Monopoly-Finance Capital

A more realistic and thoroughgoing Marxian approach to the question of imperialism in our age, drawing on the fundamental parameters of classical imperialism theory while taking into consideration changing historical conditions, needs to center on capital accumulation. Here the crucial fact is the shift of manufacturing industry in recent decades from the global North to the global South. In 1980 the share of world industrial employment of developing countries had risen to 52 percent; by 2012 this had increased to 83 percent.33 In 2013, 61 percent of the total worldwide inward flow of foreign direct investment was in developing and transitional economies, up from 33 percent in 2006 and 51 percent in 2010.34

What needs to be explained, however, is that despite this tectonic shift of industry to the periphery, the basic conditions of center and periphery continue in most cases to hold. This is manifested in the seeming inability of countries in the global South, taken as a whole—and leaving out Greater China (including Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan Province)—to catch up economically with the nations at the center of the system. From 1970 to 1989 the average annual per capita GDP of the developing countries, excluding Greater China, was a mere 6.0 percent of the per capita GDP of the G7 countries (the United States, Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Canada). For the period of 1990 to 2013, this had dropped to only 5.6 percent. Meanwhile, for the forty-eight Least Developed Countries, average annual per capita GDP as a share of that of the G7 declined over the same periods from 1.5 percent to a mere 1.1 percent. (China, the leading emerging economy, is the most important exception to this overall tendency. If Greater China is included among the developing countries, average annual per capita income of developing countries as a percentage of that of G7 countries rises from 4.7 percent in 1970–1989 to 5.5 percent in 1990–2013.)35

In 2014 The Economist magazine declared that the signs in the opening decade of this century that emerging economies, excluding China, were catching up with the rich countries of the developed capitalist world, turned out to be “an aberration.” Referring to a 1997 statement by World Bank senior economist Lant Pritchett, that the widening income gap between rich and poor nations was “the dominant feature of modern economic history,” The Economist announced that this trend has now reasserted itself. At the present rate of growth in the developing world, The Economist insisted, it would take developing/emerging countries as a group (outside of China) more than a century—and even possibly as long as three centuries—to catch up with the income levels of the rich countries of the center.36

The reasons for this seeming reversal of the fortunes of developing/emerging economies, which for a decade were widely thought to be making large gains, can be traced (apart from the effects of the Great Financial Crisis itself) to the contradictory effects of the growing outsourcing of industrial production by multinational corporations—aimed at exploiting inequalities in the world economy, particularly with respect to labor. This is known variously in corporate financial circles as “outsourcing” labor costs, the “global labor arbitrage,” “low-cost labor arbitrage,” or simply as the Low-Cost Country Strategy (LCCS). Lowell Bryan, director of the New York office of the investor’s publication McKinsey Quarterly, wrote in 2010 that:

Any company sourcing its production or service operations in a lower-wage emerging-market country…can save enormously on labor costs…. Even today, the cost of labor in China or India is still only a fraction (often less than a third) of the equivalent labor in the developed world. Yet the productivity of Chinese and Indian labor is rapidly rising and, in specialized areas (such as high-tech assembly in China or software development in India), may equal or exceed the productivity of workers in wealthier nations.37

This means that not only overall unit labor costs are far lower, but also that in areas of increasing productivity they can be expected to fall even further. Such cheap, high-productivity labor in emerging/developing countries, the McKinsey Quarterly told its investment clientele, is available in the hundreds of millions, even billions—while the entire U.S. labor force is 150 million.

Behind such dirt wages in the periphery lies the whole history of imperialism and the fact that in 2011 the global reserve army of labor (adding up the unemployed, vulnerably employed, and economically inactive population) numbered some 2.4 billion people, compared to a global active labor army of only 1.4 billion. It is this global reserve army—predominantly in the global South, but also growing in the global North—which holds down the labor income in both center and periphery, keeping wages in the periphery well below the average value of labor power worldwide.38

The analysis of management strategist Pankaj Ghemawat, in his 2007 book, Redefining Global Strategy, suggests that the wage savings to Walmart from labor-arbitrage in China may be well over 15 percent and conceivably on the order of 30–45 percent of Walmart’s total 2006 operating profit (also known as operating income—defined as revenue net of operating cost before interest charges and taxes). The Low-Cost Country Strategy is particularly important for the assembly stage of manufactured goods, which is the most labor-intensive phase of global production. Most production for export via multinational corporations in China is assembly work, with Chinese factories relying heavily on cheap migrant labor from the countryside (the “floating population”) to assemble products, the main technological components of which are manufactured elsewhere and imported into China for final assembly. The assembled products are then primarily exported to the countries in the capitalist core (although China has an expanding internal market for such goods).

Chinese companies get a cut from these exports; but the big winners are the multinational corporations. Apple subcontracts the production of the component parts of its iPhones in a number of countries with the final assembly in China subcontracted to Foxconn. Due in large part to low-end wages paid for labor-intensive assembly operations, Apple’s profits on its iPhone 4 in 2010 were found to be 59 percent of the final sales price. The share of the final sales price actually going to labor in mainland China itself, where production assembly takes place, is only a tiny fraction of the whole. For each iPhone 4 imported from China to the United States in 2010, retailing at $549, about $10 went to labor costs for production of components and assembly in China, amounting to 1.8 percent of the final sales price.39

As an expression of this general trend, subcontracting (also known in financial circles as Non-Equity Modes of International Production) is increasingly common among multinationals in such areas of production as toys and sporting goods, consumer electronics, automotive components, footwear, and garments. Such subcontracting on the terms and conditions set by multinational corporations also applies to services. Call centers that chose to move from Ireland to India in 2002 were reportedly in a position to reduce the wage rates paid to workers by 90 percent.40

In the international garment industry, in which production takes place almost exclusively in the global South, direct labor cost per garment is typically around 1–3 percent of the final retail price, according to senior World Bank economist Zahid Hussain. Wage costs for an embroidered logo sweatshirt produced in the Dominican Republic run at around 1.3 percent of the final retail price in the United States, while the labor cost (including the wages of floor supervisors) of a knit shirt produced in the Philippines is 1.6 percent. Labor costs in countries such as China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Bangladesh were considerably lower than in the above cases.41 The surplus value captured from such workers is thus enormous, while being disguised by the fact that the lion’s share of so-called “value added” is attributed to activities (marketing, distribution, corporate salaries) in the wealthy importing country, removed from direct production costs. In 2010, the Swedish retailer Hennes & Mauritz was purchasing T-shirts from subcontractors in Bangladesh, paying the workers on the order of 2–5 cents (euro) per shirt produced.42

Nike, a pioneer in Non-Equity Modes of International Production, outsources all of its production to subcontractors in countries such as South Korea, China, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. In 1996, a single Nike shoe consisting of fifty-two components was manufactured by subcontractors in five different countries. The entire direct labor cost for the production of a pair of Nike basketball shoes retailing for $149.50 in the United States in the late 1990s was 1 percent, or $1.50.43

Imperialism also involves the race for resources, particularly strategic energy sources, such as hydrocarbons, but extending to all key minerals, as well as vital germplasm, foods, forests, land, and even water. For the core capitalist countries the issue of environmental limits has signaled—if anything—the need to control resources in the global South. The most extreme case of ecological imperialism is what Richard Haass (president for the past twelve years of the Council of Foreign Relations, and before that director of policy planning in the State Department under Colin Powell during the 2003 invasion of Iraq) is calling The New Thirty Years’ War in the Middle East, aimed at the control of a significant portion of world oil supplies. Moreover, this New Thirty Years’ War is only part of the U.S-led NATO alliance’s grand strategy to bring the whole vast geopolitical arc, now known as the “arc of instability,” from Eastern Europe and the Balkans to the Middle East and North Africa to Central Asia, within the triad’s sphere of influence—viewing it all as up for grabs following the Soviet Union’s departure from the historical stage in the early 1990s.44 So aggressive has this imperial advance been in the not quite quarter-century since the demise of the USSR that what is now being called a Second Cold War with Russia appears to be developing.

The growing race for resources behind the current geopolitical struggle is feeding a new extractivism, extending to every corner of the earth, and increasingly to the Arctic—where melting sea ice from climate change is opening up new realms for oil exploration. According to energy analyst Michael Klare this scramble for global resources can only point in one direction:

The accumulation of aggravations and resentments among the Great Powers stemming from the competitive pursuit of energy has not yet reached the point where a violent clash between any pair or group of them can be considered likely…. Nevertheless, the conflation of two key trends—the rise of energy nationalism and accumulating ill will between the Sino-Russian and U.S.-Japanese proto-blocs—should be taken as a dangerous sign for the future. Each of these phenomena may have its own roots, but the way they are beginning to intertwine in competitive struggles over prime energy-producing areas in the Caspian Sea basin, the Persian Gulf, and the East China Sea is ominous…. [I]f national leaders fear the loss of a major field to a rival state and are convinced that global energy supplies may be inadequate in a “tough oil” era, they may act irrationally and order a muscular show of force—setting in motion a chain of events whose ultimate course no one may be able to control.

Henryk Grossman on imperialism

Rick Kuhn

Grossman’s first published work, in 1905, was a contribution to the controversy in the European workers movement over the most effective strategy to counter national oppression, which was also an aspect of contemporary discussions of imperialism and colonialism. In an analysis heavily influenced by the Bund, he stressed the importance of the self-organisation of Jewish workers.

As a leader of the Jewish Social Democratic Party of Galicia, Grossman examined the
economic backwardness of Austria-Hungary’s Polish province. This analysis was an element in his higher doctoral thesis, completed in 1914, which dealt with an aspect of imperialism duringan early stage of the transition to capitalism in eastern Europe. He argued against the Polish nationalist orthodoxy that the Habsburg Empire was responsible for Galicia’s backwardness after its annexation. On the contrary, between 1772 and 1790 the mercantilist trade policies of Maria Theresia and Josef II for their new territory had promoted economic development.
Later he endorsed Lenin’s argument that the material basis of reformism was the emergence of a ‘labor aristocracy’, bought off with spoils from imperialism.
What follows, however, only deals with more strictly economic questions, particularly Grossman’s account of the relationship between economic crises and imperialism. It is a first sketch of a section of a larger project.
https://thenextrecession.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/henryk_grossman_on_imperialism.pdf

As US pulls back, China builds influence at UN

AFP/File / Fabrice COFFRINILe logo de l'Organisaiton mondiale de la santé (OMS) à son quartier-général de Genève.

As President Donald Trump announces a halt in World Health Organization funding, accusing it of kowtowing to China over the coronavirus outbreak, Beijing is building on a well-established strategy of leveraging its global standing wherever the US lets go of the wheel.

For years, Chinese nationals have been taking up positions at the head of and lower down UN agencies as the Asian powerhouse ploughs considerable resources into building on its international financial and military relationships.

China's long game on global influence is particularly apparent in Africa, where 10 years ago the continent's debt to the world's number two economy was minimal.

Today, a UN official said, it stands at some $140 billion as Beijing ramps up investments through the Belt and Road Initiative, President Xi Jinping's signature global infrastructure project.

Beijing's overtures have placed it in a powerful position to leverage African support on various issues and at international agencies.

Led by Ethiopian Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO is accused by Washington of uncritically accepting China's early assertions that the virus was not spread between humans and of wrongly praising Beijing's "transparency" over the magnitude of the crisis.

"What we have seen for more than 10 years, and especially since 2012 with Xi Jinping, is a real push from Chinese diplomacy to restructure global governance," Alice Ekman, the senior analyst in charge of the Asia portfolio at the European Union Institute for Security Studies, told AFP.

"It's a lofty ambition since China is talking about 'piloting' this restructuring."

The same phenomenon -- the US withdrawing and China making its mark, but never directly -- is notable at several UN agencies.

Along with its availability for an increasing number of peacekeeping missions, Beijing has become the second largest financial contributor to the UN, overtaking Japan but behind the US.

Away from the UN's activities directed from its New York headquarters, China has wielded its financial clout in the organization's many agencies worldwide, including UNESCO in Paris.

Washington's retreat since 2019 from the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, over alleged bias against Israel, came as China was increasing its influence to become the agency's largest compulsory net contributor.

Beijing has a strong presence in programs for the education of women and girls, and the second highest official at UNESCO, Xing Qu, is Chinese.

"They have succeeded in finding a balance -- being very present without imposing," an official told AFP, on condition of anonymity so that they could speak frankly.

- Void -

For many UN officials across the world, the void left by the withdrawal of some of the most influential players on the international stage spells danger ahead for the organization.

"With the US not leading internationally, with Europe disappearing into itself and China pursuing its own interests, we really are in trouble," Catia Batista, associate professor of economy at Nova University in Lisbon, told The Washington Post.

Chinese has also flexed its muscle at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) based in Montreal.

In 2019 Qu Dongyu, a former Chinese minister, became the head of the FAO, while ICAO has been co-managed since 2015 by another Chinese official, Fang Liu.

Beijing's influence is "real and growing" at ICAO, which governs global air transport, a specialist close to the agency said.

The source said Beijing is now the second-highest financial contributor to ICAO after Washington.

Since last year Washington has suspended financial contributions to ICAO in an attempt to accelerate reform.

But while US officials use their contributions for leverage, the tactic is not part of a broader attempt to abandon the UN as a whole, the source says.

At UNESCO a similar leverage of US cash for influence has not led to revolutionary reform -- but it remains to be seen how Trump's suspension of funding will affect the WHO.

AFP/File / MANDEL NGANReflet d'une image de Donald Trump dans un écran lors d'une conférence de presse sur le COVID-19 le 15 avril 2020 à Washington.

In Vienna, major Western powers have shown little interest in the UN Industrial Development Organization, a small agency which aims to promote inclusive and sustainable industrial development.

Eyeing an opportunity, China has used this apathy to use UNIDO as a stepping stone for its ascent in other UN agencies.

Another former Chinese minister, Li Yong, has been UNIDO's director general since its establishment 2013.

As for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Washington is the lead financial contributor, ahead of China.

The US says it has not lost influence despite the pullout by Trump from the 2015 accord reached between major powers and Iran over its nuclear program.

In reality, China is now in the driving seat, with Russia and the Europeans also taking up positions of influence.

"After the election of Donald Trump, China strengthened its position as a guarantor of multilateralism," Ekman said, adding that the COVID-19 pandemic was another chance for Beijing to "invest in global governance in all directions."

Ekman described China's approach as a "pragmatic and global" strategy in which the WHO is "just one institution among many."

"In the long run, China would like to see the advent of post-Western global governance, in which China would play a central role," she added.

The New Imperialism of Globalized Monopoly-Finance Capital

https://monthlyreview.org › 2015

Jul 1, 2015 - ... in Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital, as distinct from Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and Bukharin's Imperialism ...

Brazil's President Says Coronavirus Is Just ‘Hysteria’ and Went Ahead and Fired His Health Minister

Jair Bolsonaro has pushed unproven coronavirus 'cures' and claimed that his athletic prowess will protect him if he gets infected.
By Tim Hume Apr 17 2020, VICE


Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has fired his health minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta, after the pair clashed publicly over the far-right leader’s dismissive response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The sacking of the popular health minister, who had criticized Bolsonaro for undermining social distancing measures, has deepened concerns among Brazilians about the president’s unscientific approach to the pandemic. In protest, Brazilians banged pots on their balconies, and a senior lawmaker resigned from the senate.

Meanwhile, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva branded the populist leader a “troglodyte” who was “trying to lead society to the slaughterhouse” in an interview with The Guardian Friday.

In televised remarks discussing the health minister’s departure, Bolsonaro implicitly criticized Mandetta’s support for the continuation of lockdown restrictions that started last month, and renewed his calls for Brazilians to return to work to protect the economy.

“We need to return to normal, not as fast as possible, but we need to start having some flexibility,” he said. “The impoverished masses cannot stay stuck at home.”

With more than 30,000 confirmed cases and nearly 2,000 deaths, Brazil is battling the second biggest coronavirus outbreak in the Americas, one that’s not predicted to peak for weeks. Yet Bolsonaro, a brash populist known for his unscientific approach to climate and environmental issues, has consistently sought to downplay the threat of the virus, which he has described as “a little flu.”

READ: Bolsonaro is spreading conspiracy theories about the Amazon fires

He’s repeatedly denounced fears over the virus as “hysteria,” pushed unproven treatments like the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine, and claimed his athletic prowess would protect him if he were infected.

While state governors around the country have imposed social distancing measures, backed by the federal health ministry, Bolsonaro has called for an end to the lockdown, and even publicly breached the restrictions himself. During a visit to a clinic outside Brasilia last weekend, he walked into a crowd, took off his mask, and reached out his hand for a supporter to kiss.

“No one will hinder my right to come and go,” he said, shortly after shaking hands with a member of the public. “The virus is out there and we will have to face it, but like men, damn it, not kids.”

On Sunday, Mandetta gave a television interview in which he criticized Bolsonaro’s approach, saying: “Brazilians don’t know whether they should listen to their health minister or to their president.”

Christopher Sabatini, senior research fellow at the Chatham House international affairs think tank, told VICE News that Mandetta’s sacking was “inevitable,” as the tensions between the health minister’s science-led approach and Bolsonaro’s cavalier response became increasingly apparent.

“[Bolsonaro] has shown he has very little tolerance for dissent or criticism,” he said.

Mandetta’s departure had fuelled fears among Brazilians of a disastrous drift further away from a science-led response to the pandemic under Bolsonaro’s leadership, Sabatini said.

“The standard has been set that if you want to keep your job, you’ll either have to keep your mouth shut or parrot unscientific approaches.”

Mandetta’s replacement, Nelson Teich, said there would not be any “sudden changes” in policy, but stressed there is “complete alignment between me and the president.”

Right-wing Senator Major Olimpio predicted, in a video posted on social media, that Teich wouldn’t last long in the role if he continued to advocate for social distancing measures, in line with the prevailing public health opinion.

“Teich has defended social distancing. If he persists in this, he will have serious problems with President Bolsonaro and won’t last 30 days in office, or he will have to tear up his degree and contradict the entire global scientific community,” he said.

While Bolsonaro has claimed his anti-lockdown stance is to protect the country’s working poor, it hasn’t proved popular with ordinary Brazilians. A survey by polling company Datafolha found more than three-quarters rated the performance of the Healthy Ministry under Mandetta as good or great, while just a third gave Bolsonaro the same ratings.

His approach has alarmed state governors from across the political spectrum, and even sparked calls for his impeachment. On Friday, former Brazilian president Lula told The Guardian that impeachment was a possibility if Bolsonaro continued with his irresponsible approach to the pandemic.

“Unfortunately I fear Brazil is going to suffer a great deal because of Bolsonaro’s recklessness,” he said.

“If Bolsonaro continues to commit crimes of responsibility … [and] trying to lead society to the slaughterhouse — which is what he is doing — I think the institutions will need to find a way of sorting Bolsonaro out. And that will mean you’ll need to have an impeachment.”