It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, July 21, 2022
EXPLAINER-Luton Airport runway meltdown shows airports vulnerable to climate change
Jamie Freed Thu, July 21, 2022 By Jamie Freed
July 22 (Reuters) - The temporary disruption at London's Luton Airport on Monday when soaring temperatures caused a small section of the asphalt to lift is an example of the challenges airports face in making their infrastructure resilient to climate change, experts say.
Below is an explanation of how global airports are coping with extreme heat and what may be needed to prevent future interruption if there is another heatwave.
WHAT HAPPENED AT LUTON AND WHY?
The Luton runway was closed for nearly two hours on Monday, prompting airlines to delay or divert flights as temperatures rose above 37C (98.6 Fahrenheit), adding to industry headaches in what has been a chaotic summer travel season in Europe.
A long-standing patch repair to a small section of the runway - the equivalent of 0.2% of the entire surface area - became so hot that it de-bonded and began to lift, a spokesperson for the airport said on Friday, adding it was repaired within two hours.
It is built to the same specification as others in Britain, meeting industry safety standards and regulations, the spokesperson said.
"We continue to evaluate all options regarding the ongoing maintenance and long-term resilience of all of our infrastructure."
The spokesperson did not comment on questions about the timing of the runway's resurfacing, the type of asphalt used or any possible changes to the material.
Runways are typically resurfaced every 10 to 15 years.
Experts say the airport, one of Britain's busiest and used by budget airlines including Ryanair and EasyJet , may be more vulnerable to heat because it is at a higher elevation than the others surrounding the capital: Heathrow, Gatwick and Stansted.
Luton's climate change adaptation report released in November 2021 warned one of the key risks was high temperatures causing infrastructure damage or impacting operations.
The airport said in the medium term it would need to ensure all airfield resurfacing projects considered the impact of increasing temperatures.
HOW DO OTHER AIRPORTS COPE WITH EXTREME HEAT?
The surface materials used depend on the climate and local conditions as well as other factors such as cost.
In the Middle East, airports are more likely to use more expensive concrete runways because they are good at withstanding extreme heat, Greg White, director of the Airport Pavement Research Program at Australia's University of the Sunshine Coast, said this week.
In Britain and Australia, cheaper asphalt runways are more common, he said, though they use different stiffness levels depending on the local climate.
That means in Australia, where summer temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) are not unprecedented, asphalt runways do not melt like they did at Luton.
"This would only happen in Australia if Australia got to 50 degrees," White said. "You need something that's outside of the norm. But it can happen at the cold end as well. You'll get different failures, but it can happen in extreme cold if you've got something that's been engineered and designed for much warmer weather."
Luton could make its runway more resistant to a high temperature, but that would in turn make it more susceptible to an extremely low temperature, White said.
WHAT ARE THE OTHER CHALLENGES FOR AIRPORTS?
Airports Council International (ACI), a group representing airports globally, said it will soon publish an airfield maintenance handbook for members with a section dedicated to pavement management.
"This includes lists of probable cause of pavement distresses, and some are related to climate," an ACI spokesperson said.
Runway patches are only one of the potential challenges faced by airports as temperatures rise, with others including airplanes requiring longer take-off distances and weight restrictions in hotter conditions.
As temperatures get warmer, aeroplanes need a longer time and more fuel to take off, because hot air is thinner.
A Federal Aviation Administration study issued in November 2021 showed runways at eight or nine of the 30 busiest U.S. airports may need to be extended by at least 500 feet (152 metres) due to future increases in temperature or higher rainfall, which requires more braking distance.
Rising sea levels and more powerful storms mean many airport operators are also investing in measures https://www.reuters.com/article/us-airports-climatechange-idUKKCN1MB1OL such as higher runways, seawalls and better drainage systems to future-proof their immovable assets.
(Reporting by Jamie Freed in Sydney; additional reporting by David Shepardson and Paul Sandle in Farnborough, England; Editing by Josephine Mason and David Evans)
Sri Lanka security forces raid protest camp as new president takes office
Sri Lankan security forces raided a Colombo anti-government protest camp outside the president's office and evicted demonstrators early on Friday, multiple images from the scene show.
Why it matters: The crackdown came hours after former Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe was sworn in as president. The fixture of Sri Lanka's establishment is deeply distrusted by protesters who brought down his predecessor after months of demonstrations over the country's economic crisis, per Axios' Dave Lawler.
Sri Lanka: Forces raid anti-government protest camp
George Wright & Frances Mao - BBC News
Thu, July 21, 2022
In this article:
Security forces in Sri Lanka raided the main anti-government protest camp in the capital early on Friday, arresting protesters and dismantling tents.
Hundreds of troops and police commandos moved on the protesters outside the presidential offices in Colombo, hours before they were due to leave the area.
A BBC video journalist was beaten by the army and one soldier snatched his phone and deleted videos.
Nine people, including two who are injured, have been arrested by police.
It comes as Ranil Wickremesinghe was sworn in as president on Thursday, after ex-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country last week.
Mr Wickremesinghe - the former prime minister - is seen as deeply unpopular with the public, and has vowed tough action against demonstrators.
Separately on Friday, Dinesh Gunawardena - a senior politician considered to be a long-time Rajapaksa loyalist - took the oath as new prime minister, stepping into Mr Wickremesinghe's former shoes.
Sri Lanka has seen months of mass unrest over an economic crisis, and many blame the former government for mishandling the nation's finances.
Security forces have sealed off a section of the road
Protests had remained peaceful after Mr Wickremesinghe had been sworn into office on Wednesday. Despite deep distrust, many demonstrators had said they would give him a chance to lead the country out of its economic crisis.
In remarks after his inauguration, he said any attempt to topple the government or occupy government buildings was not "not democracy, it is against the law".
On Friday morning, security forces moved in on the protest camp and reclaimed the building from demonstrators, who had earlier pledged to hand the building back.
Police described the incident as a "special operation to take [back] control of the presidential secretariat".
When asked about the attack on the BBC journalist, one police spokesman said he was unaware of the incident.
The raid took place in the early hours of Friday, at around 01:00 local time (19:30 GMT Thursday). Security forces later completely sealed off a section of the road leading to the site.
BBC journalists attacked By Anbarasan Ethirajan, BBC News, Colombo
When we heard that troops might be raiding the anti-government protest site in Colombo after midnight, we went to the spot just in front of the Sri Lankan president's office.
Soon, hundreds of heavily armed soldiers and police commandos with riot gear descended from two directions, their faces covered.
When activists raised objections to their presence, the security personnel marched on and became aggressive. The protesters were pushed back.
Within seconds, we saw soldiers shouting, dismantling and destroying make-shift tents and other items on the pavement. Troops also moved into the president's office which was stormed by huge crowds last week.
Activists had earlier said they would hand over the building on Friday afternoon. As we followed the soldiers, we could see they were clearing everything in their way.
The protesters were pushed up to the designated protest site less than 100m away and steel barricades were set up to stop the activists.
When we were returning from the area, a man in civilian clothes, surrounded by troops, shouted at my colleague and said he wanted to delete the videos from his phone. Within seconds the man punched my colleague and snatched his phone.
Though I explained to them we were journalists and simply doing our job, they wouldn't listen. My colleague was attacked further and we raised strong objections. The mic of another BBC colleague was taken and thrown away.
The phone was returned after the videos were deleted from the device. Another army officer intervened and let us go.
My colleague was shaken but was able to walk back to the hotel, a few hundred metres away.
The BBC tried to get a response from the military and police on the attack, but no-one answered our calls. A state of emergency declared last week is still in place.
The government's violence against protesters has already been criticised by civil and legal groups.
"Unnecessary use of brute force will not help this country and its international image," said the nation's Bar Association leader, Saliya Peiris in a statement. Members of Sri Lankan security outside the Presidential Secretariat on Friday
The British High Commissioner to Sri Lanka, Sarah Hulton, also expressed concerns about the reports from the protest site.
"We have made clear the importance of the right to peaceful protest," she tweeted.
Sri Lanka has been wracked with protests for months because the country is effectively bankrupt and facing acute shortages of food, fuel and other basic supplies.
The country is currently in a state of emergency, which gives police and military the power to arrest and detain people without warrants.
It also allows for the detention of people without proof or the presumption of innocence, and severely restricts fundamental rights such as the freedom of movement and expression.
Sri Lanka: The basics
Sri Lanka is an island nation off southern India: It won independence from British rule in 1948. Three ethnic groups - Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim - make up 99% of the country's 22 million population.
One family of brothers has dominated for years: Mahinda Rajapaksa became a hero among the majority Sinhalese in 2009 when his government defeated Tamil separatist rebels after years of bitter and bloody civil war. His brother Gotabaya, who was defence secretary at the time and later became president, fled the country after mass unrest.
Presidential powers: The president is the head of state, government and the military in Sri Lanka, but does share a lot of executive responsibilities with the prime minister, who heads up the ruling party in parliament.
Now an economic crisis has led to fury on the streets: Soaring inflation has meant some foods, medication and fuel are in short supply, there are rolling blackouts and ordinary people have taken to the streets in anger, with many blaming the Rajapaksa family and their government for the situation.
UPDATE 3-Sri Lankan forces raid anti-gov't protest camp as new president takes office
Thu, July 21, 2022 at 6:43 p.m. By Devjyot Ghoshal and Uditha Jayasinghe
COLOMBO, July 22 (Reuters) - Sri Lankan security forces raided a protest camp occupying government grounds in the main city of Colombo early on Friday and cleared out a section of it, a sign that the country's new president was cracking down a day after his swearing-in.
Media footage showed soldiers in riot gear and armed with assault rifles tearing down the camp, set up in April by protesters enraged with the country's economic collapse that has caused severe shortages of fuel, food and medicines.
"A joint operation involving the military, police and police special forces was launched in the early hours to recover the presidential secretariat from the protesters as they have no legal right to hold it," police spokesperson Nalin Thalduwa told Reuters.
"Nine people, including two injured, have been arrested."
Protesters had feared a crackdown was imminent under new President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was seen as an ally of his ousted predecessor, Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
Protest organisers said hundreds of security personnel surrounded the "Gota Go Gama" protest camp, mockingly named after Rajapaksa, after midnight and then took apart a section of it.
As daylight broke, dozens of troops marched through the area and rows of protest tents that stood on both sides of the main road that passes in front of the office of the president completely cleared out. Dozens of protesters stood by, looking at newly set up barricades and security personnel.
At least 50 protesters were injured, the organisers said, including some journalists who were beaten by security forces. Hospital sources said two were hospitalised.
"They beat us really cruelly," said Buddhika Abeyrathne, 34, a protester who witnessed the raid but did not appear injured himself. "Mr Wickremesinghe doesn’t know what democracy is."
Sri Lanka is under a state of emergency since Monday. Previous emergency regulations have been used to give powers to the military to detain and arrest protesters, and curtail the right to protest.
Wickremesinghe, the former prime minister, was sworn into office on Thursday after winning a parliamentary vote this week, following the resignation of Rajapaksa who fled to Singapore in the wake of massive public protests triggered by the country's worst economic crisis in seven decades.
'DESPICABLE'
The president is expected to appoint Rajapaksa ally Dinesh Gunewardena as prime minister along with a new cabinet later on Friday.
After surrounding the protest camp, security personnel moved in front of the presidential secretariat, started dismantling some tents and assaulted protesters, protest organiser Manjula Samarasekara said.
Security forces appeared to have taken control of the entire secretariat, with many more personnel visible inside the building perimeter that was earlier this month seized by protesters, along with the president and prime minister's official residences. The residences were later handed back to government authorities.
Protest organiser Chameera Dedduwage told Reuters they had planned to hand over the presidential secretariat to government authorities on Friday afternoon. Police said they had no information on that.
"The excessive force and the violence used to remove protesters is a marked difference from what Sri Lanka needs right now, especially when the protesters had already said they will vacate the premises," said Bhavani Fonseka, a senior researcher at Colombo-based think tank Center for Policy Alternatives.
The Bar Association of Sri Lanka said the crackdown could destabilise the country, which is in need of foreign aid and a bailout from the International Monetary Fund.
"The use of the armed forces to suppress civilian protests on the very first day in office of the new president is despicable and will have serious consequences on our country’s social, economic and political stability," the collective of lawyers said in a statement.
U.S. and British diplomats also expressed concern.
"We urge restraint by authorities and immediate access to medical attention for those injured," U.S. Ambassador to Sri Lanka, Julie Chung, said on Twitter.
(Additional reporting by Maria Ponnezhath in Bengaluru; Writing by Devjyot Ghoshal and Krishna N. Das; Editing by Lincoln Feast)
World Court to Rule on Whether Myanmar Genocide Case Can Proceed
By Reuters July 21, 2022 An exhausted Rohingya refugee woman touches the shore after crossing the Bangladesh-Myanmar border by boat through the Bay of Bengal in Shah Porir Dwip, Bangladesh, September 11, 2017.
Picture taken September 11, 2017. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui
By Toby Sterling
THE HAGUE (Reuters) - The World Court is expected to rule on Friday on Myanmar's objections to a genocide case over its treatment of the Muslim Rohingya minority, a decision that could pave the way for the case to be heard in full.
Myanmar leader urges World Court to drop genocide case
Myanmar, currently ruled by a military junta that seized power in 2021, has argued that Gambia, which brought the suit, had no standing to do so at the top U.N. court, formally known as the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Gambia, which took up the cause after its then-attorney general visited a refugee camp in Bangladesh, argues that all countries have a duty to uphold the 1948 Genocide Convention. It is backed by the 57-nation Organisation for Islamic Cooperation in a suit aiming to hold Myanmar accountable and prevent further bloodshed.
A separate U.N. fact-finding mission concluded that a 2017 military campaign by Myanmar that drove 730,000 Rohingya into neighbouring Bangladesh had included "genocidal acts".
If judges reject Myanmar's objections, it paves the way for the case to be heard in full on its merits -- a process that will take years. A ruling in Myanmar's favour would end the ICJ case.
While the court's decisions are binding and countries generally follow them, it has no way of enforcing them.
In a 2020 provisional decision it ordered Myanmar to protect the Rohingya from genocide, a legal victory that established their right under international law as a protected minority.
However Rohingya groups and rights activists say there has been no meaningful attempt to end their systemic persecution and what Amnesty International has called a system of apartheid.
Rohingya are still denied citizenship and freedom of movement in Myanmar. Tens of thousands have now been confined to squalid displacement camps for a decade.
The junta has imprisoned democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who defended Myanmar personally in 2019 hearings in The Hague.
(Reporting by Toby Sterling and Poppy McPherson; Editing by Peter Graff)
Copyright 2022 Thomson Reuters.
Global slowdown fears darken prospects for Asian factories A man walks past Bank of Japan's headquarters in Tokyo
By Leika Kihara
Thu, July 21, 2022
TOKYO (Reuters) - Worries over a global slowdown are casting a shadow over Asia's recovery prospects with factory activity growth slowing in Japan and Australia, keeping pressure on policymakers to support their economies while tightening monetary policy to combat inflation.
Japan's manufacturing activity grew at the slowest pace in 10 months in July, the purchasing managers' index (PMI) survey showed on Friday, boding ill for an economy struggling to shake the wounds from the pandemic.
Factory activity also slowed in Australia with the index falling to 55.7 in July from 56.2 in June, a separate survey showed on Friday.
The surveys underscore the hit manufacturers are suffering from supply constraints, rising raw material costs and slowing global demand - all factors flagged by the Bank of Japan as among key risks to the country's economic recovery.
"July's PMIs suggest that the manufacturing sector is slowing as demand weakens, while the latest COVID-19 is starting to hit the services sector," Marcel Thieliant, senior Japan economist at Capital Economics, said on Japan's PMI.
"While that index never dropped as far as in other advanced economies, it is not showing the strong improvement seen elsewhere either."
PMI surveys for Britain, euro zone and the United States are due out later on Friday.
Soaring inflation, driven by Russia's war in Ukraine, has forced central banks across the globe to tighten monetary policy even at the cost of cooling their economies.
Despite suffering the economic pain from the Ukraine war, the European Central Bank raised interest rates for the first time in 11 years on Thursday as concerns about runaway inflation trumped worries about growth.
Aggressive rate hike plans by the Federal Reserve have stoked market worries over a U.S. recession. Many Asian central banks also found themselves scrambling to catch up tightening policy to tame inflation and keep their currencies from depreciating too much.
China and Japan remain exceptions by keeping monetary policy loose, a sign their economies - the second- and third-largest in the world - lack strength to offset the weaknesses in other parts of the globe.
China's economic growth slowed sharply in the second quarter, weighed by widespread COVID lockdowns and pointing to persistent pressure over coming months from a darkening global outlook.
The slowdown in the world's second-largest economy, as well as the fallout from aggressive central bank tightening, forced the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to slash its growth forecast for the region on Thursday.
(Reporting by Leika Kihara; Editing by Sam Holmes)
Imperialism and Financialism. A Story of a Nexus
Imperialism and Financialism. A Story of a Nexus Bichler, Shimshon and Nitzan, Jonathan. (2012). Journal of Critical Globalization Studies. No. 5, March. pp. 42-78. (Article - Journal; English).
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Abstract or Brief Description
Over the past century, the nexus of imperialism and financialism has become a major axis of Marxist theory and praxis. Many Marxists consider this nexus to be a prime cause of our worldly ills, but the historical role they ascribe to it has changed dramatically over time. The key change concerns the nature and direction of surplus and liquidity flows. The first incarnation of the nexus, articulated at the turn of the twentieth century, explained the imperialist scramble for colonies to which finance capital could export its excessive surplus. The next version posited a neo-imperial world of monopoly capitalism where the core's surplus is absorbed domestically, sucked into a black hole of military spending and financial intermediation. The third script postulated a World System where surplus is imported from the dependent periphery into the financial core. And the most recent edition explains the hollowing out of the U.S. core, a red giant that has already burned much of its own productive fuel and is now trying to financialize the rest of the world in order to use the system's external liquidity. The paper outlines this chameleon-like transformation, assesses what is left of the nexus and asks whether it is worth keeping.
Language
English
Publication Type
Article - Journal
Keywords
capital dependency finance hegemony imperialism Marxism monopoly world systems
What Is Imperialism? Finance Capitalism, Globalization and Ecological Sustainability
Jun 2, 2014 Haider Khan Haider Khan lectures on Imperialism, Finance Capitalism, and Ecological Sustainability by using a circuits of global capital theory
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.
— Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalist Development, from Lenin: Collected Works, Volume 22, pg. 266 (1915)
Modern imperialism is the social-economic policy of finance capital tending toward the creation of the most comprehensive economic territorial entities and world empires possible. It is characterized by the tendency to supplant free trade decisively with the system of protective tariffs and to subordinate economic life completely to the great monopolistic combines, such as the trusts, cartels, banking consortia, etc. Imperialism signifies the highest stage in the development of capitalism, in which not only commodity exports but capital exports as well occupy a place of quintessential importance. It characterizes an epoch in which the world is partitioned among a few great capitalist powers and in which the struggle proceeds along the lines of repartitioning it and partitioning the remaining areas.
The historian or economist who places under one denominator the structure of modern capitalism, i.e., modern production relations, and the numerous types of production relations that formerly led to wars of conquest, will understand nothing in the development of modern world economy. One must single out the specific elements which characterise our time, and analyse them. This was Marx’s method, and this is how a Marxist must approach the analysis of imperialism. We now understand that it is impossible to confine oneself to the analysis of the forms, in which a policy manifests itself; for instance, one cannot be satisfied with defining a policy as that of “conquest,” “expansion,” “violence,” etc. One must analyse the basis on which it rises and which it serves to widen. We have defined imperialism as the policy of finance capital. Therewith we uncovered the functional significance of that policy. It upholds the structure of finance capital; it subjugates the world to the domination of finance capital; in place of the old pre-capitalist, or the old capitalist, production relations, it put the production relations of finance capital. Just as finance capitalism (which must not be confused with money capital, for finance capital is characterised by being simultaneously banking and industrial capital) is an historically limited epoch, confined only to the last few decades, so imperialism, as the policy of finance capital, is a specific historic category.
— Nikolai Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, pg. 114 (1917)
Modern imperialism is not the prelude to the expansion of capital, as in Bauer’s model; on the contrary, it is only the last chapter of its historical process of expansion: it is the period of universally sharpened world competition between the capitalist states for the last remaining non-capitalist areas on earth. In this final phase, economic and political catastrophe is just as much the intrinsic, normal mode of existence for capital as it was in the ‘primitive accumulation’ of its development phase. The discovery of America and the sea route to India were not just Promethean achievements of the human mind and civilization but also, and inseparably, a series of mass murders of primitive peoples in the New World and large-scale slave trading with the peoples of Africa and Asia. Similarly, the economic expansion of capital in its imperialist final phase is inseparable from the series of colonial conquests and World Wars which we are now experiencing. What distinguishes imperialism as the last struggle for capitalist world domination is not simply the remarkable energy and universality of expansion but — and this is the specific sign that the circle of development is beginning to close — the return of the decisive struggle for expansion from those areas which are being fought over back to its home countries. In this way, imperialism brings catastrophe as a mode of existence back from the periphery of capitalist development to its point of departure. The expansion of capital, which for four centuries had given the existence and civilization of all non-capitalist peoples in Asia, Africa, America and Australia over to ceaseless convulsions and general and complete decline, is now plunging the civilized peoples of Europe itself into a series of catastrophes whose final result can only be the decline of civilization or the transition to the socialist mode of production. Seen in this light, the position of the proletariat with regard to imperialism leads to a general confrontation with the rule of capital. The specific rules of its conduct are given by that historical alternative.
According to official ‘expert’ Marxism, the rules are quite different. The belief in the possibility of accumulation in an ‘isolated capitalist society’, the belief that capitalism is conceivable even without expansion, is the theoretical formula of a quite distinct tactical tendency. The logical conclusion of this idea is to look on the phase of imperialism not as a historical necessity, as the decisive conflict for socialism, but as the wicked invention of a small group of people who profit from it. This leads to convincing the bourgeoisie that, even from the point of view of their capitalist interests, imperialism and militarism are harmful, thus isolating the alleged small group of beneficiaries of this imperialism and forming a bloc of the proletariat with broad sections of the bourgeoisie in order to ‘moderate’ imperialism, starve it out by ‘partial disarmament’ and ‘draw its claws’! Just as liberalism in the period of its decline appeals for a well-informed as against an ill-informed monarchy, the ‘Marxist center’ appeals for the bourgeoisie it will educate as against the ill-advised one, for international disarmament treaties as against the disaster course of imperialism, for the peaceful federation of democratic nation-states as against the struggle of the great powers for armed world domination. The final confrontation between proletariat and capital to settle their world-historical contradiction is converted into the utopia of a historical compromise between proletariat and bourgeoisie to ‘moderate’ the imperialist contradictions between capitalist states.
— Rosa Luxemburg, Anti-Critique (1915)
My reason for citing the above excerpts is that I feel that the Marxist theory of imperialism — as developed by Rudolf Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin, Grigorii Zinoviev, and Nikolai Bukharin — has been widely abused in recent decades in analyzing the intervention of advanced capitalist states (the U.S. or members of the European Union) into less developed countries. While there can be no doubt that there exist some parallels and continuities between the kind of self-interested exploitation of Third World countries, typically ex-colonies, that takes place today and the imperialism of old, these theorists understood it as a specific outgrowth of monopoly or finance capitalism. If I might be permitted to grant this phase of capitalism a periodicity, I would probably place it between 1880-1929. Since this time, capitalism has undergone not one but two drastic reconfigurations (Fordism and neoliberalism). For this reason, I think that the term should not be so loosely thrown around in describing current affairs, as many of these categories need to be reworked to fit the present day.
There are many fundamental differences between the phenomenon Lenin et al. described as “imperialism” and what has more recently been dubbed “imperialism” (or, perhaps more fittingly, “neo-imperialism”).
Lenin understood imperialism to entail a certain underlying logic, the bloody competition between great capitalist powers to carve up the earth according to zones of influence and direct colonial administration in pursuit of new markets, raw materials, and cheap labor. Moreover, he believed that this competition between the great capitalist powers of the world, which were at the time mostly European but also included Japan and the United States, would escalate to the point where an inter-imperialist war, by definition a world war, was inevitable. This was a multipolar world, in which no one great power could be said to predominate completely, and in which large-scale alliances were formed in anticipation of major conflict that everyone knew was on the horizon. Also, imperialism constituted the logical outgrowth of the shift from liberal capitalism, where the prevailing Manchester School ideology of “free markets” dominated and liberalism (quite contrary to its historical aspirations) held the reigns of state power, from 1848-1873, to monopoly or finance capitalism, where smaller competitors were gradually pushed out as major trusts swallowed up their rivals and cut deals with the governments in order to corner the market in the aftermath of the “long crisis” of 1873.
What leftists generally understand imperialism to mean today is the more or less cooperative domination of either the single world superpower, the US, or in tandem with its various allies in NATO (another Cold War holdover) or the UN. While military occupations clearly last over years of bloody conflict, the point is not direct colonial administration but the indirect establishment of quasi-independent regimes that will be “friendly” to US or European interests. No one really believes that these various military interventions around the world are actually going to lead to an armed conflict between, say, the European Union and the US, or between Russia and the US, or even China and the US. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a decidedly unipolar order. In terms of concurrent transformations in the organic composition of capital and the corresponding historical periodicities of capitalism, we seem to have reverted to a “neoliberal” valorization of free markets and the deregulation of capital flows. There is some debate as to whether neoliberalism is merely an ideological pretext that masks deep complicity with state powers, or whether it is a socioeconomic reality, but clearly the form of capitalism that Lenin felt specifically motivated imperialism in his time does not exist today.May
As part of my study of the spatial dialectics of capitalism, I have been reading not only the more recent Marxist literature by Henri Lefebvre on The Production of Space or David Harvey’s excellent Spaces of Capital, but also some of the more classic works on the subject.
Marx’s own account of the spatiality of capitalism can be found in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, his Grundrisse of the early 1860s, and his posthumously published Capital, Volume II. In the Manifesto, he talks at length in the first section of the globality of capitalism, of the formation of the world-market as part of the historical mission of the bourgeoisie. In the latter two works I mentioned, the spatial dimension of capital is raised in connection with the ever-improving means of transport and communication, in facilitating the circulation of commodities. Marx explains the dynamic in capitalism by which it breaks through every spatial barrier that it comes across, such that it seems to embody a sort of terrestrial infinity realizing itself through time.
But I am interested in some of the later work that was done on the Marxist theory of imperialism, both before and immediately after the 1917 Revolution. This would have an obvious bearing on the spatial extension of capitalism throughout the world. In this connection, I have drawn up a brief reading list:
John Atkinson Hobson. Imperialism: A Study (1902). Though a pacifist and political liberal, Lenin considered his study of imperialism vastly superior to Kautsky’s, which had by then joined forces with the bourgeois apologists.
Rudolf Hilferding. Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development (1910). This book was extremely influential in its time, and established a number of concepts regarding monopoly capitalism and finance capital that Lenin would later rely upon. The two chapters on “The Export of Capital” and “The Proletariat and Imperialism” are relevant to any study on imperialism.
Rosa Luxemburg. The Accumulation of Capital (1913). This is Luxemburg’s greatest contribution to the economic theory of Marxism. Though she and Lenin disagreed over some of its premises and conclusion, the book remains extremely important for the analysis of imperialism. The chapter on “Foreign Loans” addresses this directly.
Nikolai Bukharin. Imperialism and World Economy (1917). This book, which includes a favorable introduction from Lenin, seems to me to perhaps be the most pertinent to my own studies, since it places the “world economy” as a centerpiece for its analysis.
I am hoping perhaps a few of my Marxist friends will join me in reading some selections of these books. In my understanding of the subject, the imperialism described by Hilferding, Luxemburg, Lenin, and Bukharin were very specific to the time in which they were living. According to their theories, it involved vast capitalist trusts and cartels, gigantic monopolies, along with huge amounts of finance capital backing them through the banks. I think that Lenin’s theory of imperialism is all too often invoked in describing present-day imperialist ventures. It continues to be a force within the greater complex of capitalist globalization, which has been taking place ever since the social formation first emerged. But historical conditions have changed since Lenin’s time, and in light of the neo-liberalist recalibration of capitalism, I think some of the fundamental categories we retain from Lenin’s analysis of imperialism might have to be rethought or slightly modified to accommodate present-day realities.
I personally am interested in the historical imperialism that Lenin et al. were studying, i.e. the form of imperialism that existed between 1880 and 1939. Are there any other suggestions for reading on this subject? Ren, I’m looking to you. But others are welcome to make suggestions as well.
Excerpt from Introduction to International Political Economy by David N. Balaam and Michael Veseth, 2nd ed., 2001, pp. 76-78
Essay Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870-1924) is best known for his role in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the founding of the Soviet Union. Lenin symbolized for many people the principles and ideas of the 1917 Revolution. In fact, in many ways, Lenin turned Marx on his head by placing politics over economics when he argued that Russia had gone through its capitalist stage of history and was ready for a second, socialist revolution.
Here we focus on Lenin's ideas about imperialism more than on his revolutionary strategies. Lenin developed a perspective on IPE that took Marx's class struggle, based on the mode of production, and used it to explain capitalism's international effects as transmitted through the production and finance structures of rich industrial countries to the poorer developing regions of the world. Lenin's famous summary of his views is Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917).
Marx said that capitalism, driven by its three laws, would come to revolutionary crisis and suffer internal class revolt, paving the way for the transition to socialism. Lenin observed that capitalist nations had avoided this crisis by expanding the pool of workers they exploited. Capitalism, he argued, "had escaped its three laws of motion through overseas imperialism. The acquisition of colonies had enabled the capitalist economies to dispose of their unconsumed goods, to acquire cheap resources, and to vent their surplus capital."
In short, Lenin added to Marx what Robert Gilpin has called a "fourth law" of capitalism, which we might call the law of capitalist imperialism: "As capitalist economies mature, as capital accumulates, and as profit rates fall, the capitalist economies are compelled to seize colonies and create dependencies to serve as markets, investment outlets, and sources of food and raw materials. In competition with one another, they divide up the colonial world in accordance with their relative strengths.''
To Lenin, imperialism is another portion of the capitalist epoch of history that the world must endure on the road to communism. According to Lenin, "Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system.''
The critical element fueling imperialism, according to Lenin, was the decline of national economic competition and the growth of monopolies. Based on Marx's law of concentration, what emerged was an aggregation of market power into the hands of a few "cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks manipulating thousands of millions." Lenin went on to argue that.
"Monopoly is exactly the opposite of free competition; but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our very eyes, creating large-scale industry and eliminating small industry, replacing large-scale industry by still larger-scale industry, finally leading to such a concentration of production and capital that monopoly has been and is the result."
The key for Lenin was that because monopolies concentrated capital, they could not find sufficient investment opportunities in industrial regions of the world. They therefore found it necessary to export capital around the globe to earn sufficient profits.
Lenin argued that imperialist expansion allowed capitalism to postpone its inevitable crisis and metamorphose into socialism. It also created new, serious problems for the world. Lenin viewed World War I as an imperialist war, caused by tensions that arose from the simultaneous expansion of several European empires. As nations at the core of capitalism competed to expand their exploitative sphere, their interests intersected and conflicted with one another, producing the Great War.
Lenin's role in the Revolution of 1917 was to help defeat liberal political forces that sought to keep Russia within the European capitalist system. Under Lenin's leadership, Russia essentially withdrew from Europe and its imperialist conflicts, and resolved to move quickly and on its own toward a communist system free of class conflict and imperialist wars.
Lenin's imperialist theory of capitalism has been very influential, so it is worthwhile considering briefly a few other aspects of his analysis. Lenin sought to explain how it was that capitalism shifted from internal to international exploitation, and how the inequality among classes had as its parallel the law of uneven development among nations.
For Lenin, profit-seeking capitalists could not be expected to use surplus capital to improve the living standards of the proletariat. Therefore, capitalist societies would remain unevenly developed ones, with some classes prospering as others were mired in poverty. The imperial phase of capitalism simply transferred this duality of wealth and poverty onto the world stage, as capitalists, seeking to maintain and even increase their profits, exported to what contemporaries of Lenin called "backward" regions of the world. These poor peripheral countries were now integrated into the world economy as the new "proletariat" of the world.
According to Lenin, "Monopolist capitalist combines -- cartels, syndicates, trusts -- divide among themselves, first of all, the whole internal market of a country, and impose their control, more or less completely, upon the industry of that country. But under capitalism the home market is inevitably bound up with the foreign market. Capitalism long ago created a world market."
The uneven development of society within a nation now took place on an international scale.
Lenin saw imperial capitalism spreading through two structures of the IPE: production and finance. Both of these structures were so constituted, under capitalism, as to create dependency and facilitate exploitation. Cutthroat competition among poorer nations made them easy targets for monopolies in the production structure in the capitalist core. The same forces were at work within the finance structure, where the superabundance of finance capital, controlled by monopolistic banks, was used to exploit less developed countries.
The bottom line of imperialism, for Lenin, was that the rich capitalist nations were able to delay their final crisis by keeping the poorer nations underdeveloped and deep in debt, and dependent on them for manufactured goods, jobs, and financial resources. It is not surprising, then, that Lenin's theory of imperialism has been very influential, especially among intellectuals in the less developed countries, where his views have shaped policy and attitudes toward international trade and finance generally.
We include Lenin's imperialism under the general heading of "structuralism," as we did with Marx's theories, because its analysis is based on the assumption that it is in capitalism's nature for the finance and production structures among nations to be biased in favor of the owners of capital. While, in theory, the relationship between capital-abundant nations and capital-scarce nations should be one of interdependence, since each needs the other for maximum growth, in practice the result is dependence, exploitation, and uneven development. The same forces that drive the bourgeoisie to exploit the proletariat ultimately drive the capitalist core nations to dominate and exploit less developed countries.
Transcript of Interview on The Left Lens with Danny Haiphong May 25th, 2022
DANNY HAIPHONG: Good afternoon, everyone. Happy Wednesday, May 25th, welcome to the stream, to another left lens. Today we have a very special guest so as you’re coming in make sure you are liking the stream sharing it, make sure that you are subscribing to the channel and hitting that notifications bell, and as always you know please do support this work here at this channel and all the work that I do at patreon.com/dannyhaiphong. But with that said I want to introduce our guests because we have a lot to talk about over the next hour and it is economist Michael Hudson.
He is the author of the new book, The Destiny of Civilization: Finance capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism and I’ll pull that up from his website very soon but I want to just say about Michael Hudson is that he’s been someone I’ve been following for quite some time. He has been making the rounds on various programs talking about political economy and he’s one of the foremost voices of understanding political economy today. Hi Michael, good to be with you thanks so much for joining us today
MICHAEL HUDSON: Good to meet you, Danny.
DANNY HAIPHONG: Very very good to meet you. So I’m going to pull up your new book in a second just on your website so people know where to go and I’ll make sure to link that in the chat so people know where to get it but I want to talk about first, so I mean we’re in an economic catastrophe in a lot of ways currently and there’s a lot of talk about, inflation and money, prices are skyrocketing, and one thing I really appreciate about your work is that you really do focus on political economy and you have been talking a lot about finance capital and something called super imperialism which you’ve written a book about and that has been updated several times even just last year so I wanted to get your take on the role of finance capital uh under this imperialist arrangement and in this time of the neo-liberal era in the united states and across much of the West in the world.
What is finance capital’s role? It seems so dominant now, it seems like the dominant class at this moment that really does control the levers of economic development. Could you talk about what role it plays and how it has spurred the crises that we’re going through today and you could talk about inflation but I definitely want to just kick it to you there so our viewers can get an understanding of the economics and an analysis of this.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, most people think of all kinds of capitalism as being the same and the assumption is that industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century somehow was always financialized because there were always banks but financial capitalism is you just pointed out is a political system and as a political system it’s very different from the industrial capitalism dynamic. In industrial capitalism, the whole aim or the hope of the industrial capitalists in the late nineteenth century, especially in Germany and central Europe was that banking would no longer be just usury, it wouldn’t be just consumer lending to exploit labor, and it wouldn’t be lending to the government somehow.
The financial system would recycle the economy savings and money creation and credit into industrial production and would finance the means of production to make that productive instead of predatory and parasitic as it became and that seemed to be the way that industrial capitalism was evolving up until World War I. Everything changed after that all of a sudden you had the financial system take over as a result of the crisis caused in the 1920s by the German reparations debt that couldn’t be paid and the inter-ally debt that was insisted upon to repay the United States for the arms that have supplied Europe for a century into World War I. Well, the result was a huge depression.
The allies said, well, we didn’t expect to actually have to pay the United States. If we have to pay the United States, then we have to charge reparations on Germany and for a decade there was a debate between John Maynard Keynes and Harold Moulton and others saying that these debts can’t be paid. How are you going to handle a situation where the debts can’t be paid?
The finance capitalists then were the basically the ancestors of today’s neoliberals and they said any amount of debt can be paid by any country if it just lowers the living standards and squeezes labor enough and that’s what basically the philosophy of the IMF ever since world war II when third world countries can’t pay the debt, the IMF comes in with an austerity program and say you have to lower wages, you have to break up labor unions, if necessary you have to have a democracy, and you can’t have a democracy unless you’re willing to assassinate and arrest the labor leaders and the advocates of land redistribution because a democracy means basically rule by the financial sector centered in the united states. And so finance capitalism ever since WWI and especially WWII and especially since 1980 is the nationalistic doctrine of American banks and the American one percent, and the American financial sector that is sort of merged into a symbiotic unit with the finance insurance and real estate.
In other words, finance capitalism instead of trying to promote overall economic growth for the 99 percent, instead of financing the industrialization of an economy with rising productivity and rising living standards, is now cannibalizing the industrial sector, cannibalizing the corporate sector. As you’re seeing in the U.S., finance capitalism is the economic doctrine of deindustrialization that has occurred in America in England and is now occurring in Europe.
Well, the problem is how do you survive if you’re not industrializing, if you’re not producing your own means of subsistence and how are you going to get this from other countries? Well, the answer is you don’t go to war with them like countries used to go to war with each other to grab their money and their land, you use finance as the new means of war so finance capitalism is the tactic of economic warfare by the United States against Europe and the global south to sort of draw all of the economic surplus of these countries in the form of debt service and the debt service is supplied by basically economic rent seeking from land rent, natural resource rent, and just plain interest charges on economy. So, none of these are really the result of industrial profits that are made by employing labor and uh selling its products at a markup.
Finance capitalism is not based on surplus value like industrial capitalism was. In fact, it destroys industry and in this cannibalizing of industrial capital, it basically dries out the economy and makes it unable to break even or even to function and in the United States today, for instance, if you look at the balance sheets of corporate revenue much of it is spent on stock buybacks. You buy back your own stock or dividend payouts. Only eight percent of corporate earnings are spent on new capital investment research and development: factories, machinery, and means of production to employ labor.
How did General Electric (GE) go broke? Basically, Jack Welch said let’s use our income not to continue to invest in making more electronic goods and services and appliances, let’s use it to buy our own stock that’ll push up our stock and essentially, we’ll just sell off our divisions and we’ll use the money of selling off our washing machine companies and stoves and sell it off and we’ll just pay it to the stockholders. That’ll push it up and by the way his salary was based on how much he could push up the stock of GE and he was paid in the form of stock options. Well, all of this is now the normal corporate behavior in the United States and corporations are no longer led by industrial engineers as they were a few centuries ago in the nineteenth and twentieth century.
They’re led by financial engineers of the chief financial officer and the ideal of these corporations is to make money financially not by industrial investment….. so on the narrow microeconomic level finance capitalism is a way of basically selling out a company and giving the proceeds to the stockholders and the bondholders but as a political system, because it is so destructive of the economy as you’ve seen in the United States and you’ve seen in Britain through de-industrializing it, it becomes belligerent in an attempt to make other countries just as equally paralyzed by making these countries pay tribute to the U.S. and England and the financialized economies by means of financial engineering, by means of debt service, by means of selling their mineral resources, their public utilities, their land, their roads all to foreign investors–basically to who borrows the money that’s just simply created in the U.S. and to save all of their money in their central bank reserves in the forms of loans to the U.S. treasury holding treasury bonds which is how the international monetary system worked until just a few months ago when everything changed.
So if you’re England and America right now you can look at President Biden’s speeches and he said well, China is our number one enemy because it’s competing unfairly. China is actually subsidizing industrial development by having its own infrastructure. It gives free education instead of privatizing education and making its labor pay for it. It has public health instead of privatizing social medicine like we do in the United States and making employers and workers pay for it.
Well, industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century was all in favor of strong government infrastructure. The ideal of industrial capitalism was to keep the wage costs of production down not by reducing wages but having government provide a basic infrastructure to cover the basic needs of employees. The governments would provide free education so that employers didn’t have to pay for it. The governments would provide medical care so that employees didn’t have to pay for it and employers wouldn’t have to pay employees enough money to cover the education costs and to cover the medical care costs. The government would build roads and infrastructure and everything to facilitate the overall cost of doing business by industrial capital.
Well finance capitalism is just the reverse. Finance capitalism wants to privatize and take education, medical care, roads, turn the roads into toll roads, and take all of these and privatize them and make them financial corporations that will essentially pay out their economic rent to the bondholders and the stockholders and this economic rent adds to the cost of education and everything else that workers need to live on so the result is to make it a high cost economy and that’s why Biden has said China and Russia are America’s enemies because the only way that America can succeed given our privatized economy, given the fact that Americans have to pay up to forty three percent of their income for rent, given the fact that eighteen percent of America’s GDP is for medical care, given the heavy student loan debt–only if other countries tie themselves in the same knot, only if other countries impose the same economic overhead on their labor force and on their industry can there be equal competition.
If other countries have a mixed economy and are more efficient because they have an active government providing basic needs, that’s “autocracy” and that’s the opposite of “democracy.” Democracy is where everything is privatized and ultimately the one percent own everything.
Autocracy is any government that’s strong enough to have its own public investment. Any government strong enough to tax or regulate the financial sector is called “autocracy” so the U.S. in the 19th century would be called an autocracy as I guess the Austrian school called it – civilization is basically an “autocracy.”
There never has been an unmixed economy without government regulation, without a government investment, although Rome began to get to that point at the end of its empire and we all know what happened to it. So basically, finance capitalism is a predatory international economic policy aimed at draining the rest of the world all to pay the leading one percent of wealth holders in the U.S. and their satellite oligarchy in England and a few European countries.
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