Three Cautions for the Anti-Imperialism Movement

— by Bharat Dogra — 06/10/2023

The anti-imperialism movement has always been a very noble effort and at the same time it is an effort that is essential at a very basic level in present day conditions. Its nobility is linked to its capacity for advancing justice and equality, in the process saving many human lives. In addition the opposition to imperialism is also an essential part of the wider efforts to check the survival crisis created by several serious environmental problems led by climate change as well as weapons of mass destruction. Imperialism has an important role in creating and accentuating the survival crisis. Those efforts which are most likely to succeed in checking the survival crisis need to have an important component of opposing imperialism.

However while the centrality and significance of the role of opposing imperialism is well-established, in keeping with the needs and conditions of our times the movement of opposing imperialism must observe some important cautions.

Firstly, it should be made very clear all along that the movement is always directed only against the imperialist forces of any country behaving in imperialist ways, and never against the people of any country. At present the biggest center of imperialism and the most important and powerful imperialist country is the USA. However most of the people of the USA are also suffering from increasing difficulties which are caused essentially by the same imperialist forces becoming aggressive and unjust internally too. The assassinations of President John Kennedy and of President Allende, or of Martin Luther King and of Patrice Lumumba are related as essentially the same forces of aggression and injustice are responsible for all of these big tragedies, sometimes turning on their firepower outside the country and sometimes inside the country. What is more, the guns pointing outwards turn inwards when someone inside tries to check them from firing outside. As a result, the forces of injustice inside the biggest imperialist power too are strengthened. Hence while the forces of imperialism in the USA are unleashing great destruction on other countries, these are also unleashing destruction on their own people by increasing injustice, inequality, denial of basic needs, homelessness, racism, alienation, depression, self-harm, violence, arms proliferation, crime and incarceration. In this sense, a large number of people within the USA are also the victims of the forces of imperialism.

Such an understanding prepares the anti-imperialism movement for more specifically targeting the forces of imperialism and never the people of any country or nationality or color or creed. The anti-imperialism movement is essentially a movement for creating justice, equality and peace among all people of world, regardless of nationality, color or creed.

Secondly, particularly in the conditions of the present day world, the anti-imperialism movement must aim for solving all problems in peaceful ways and for peaceful solutions to emerge. The weapons of destruction available to the forces of imperialism are so dangerous that the path of peace is the best path for the anti-imperialism movement and the effort should always be to resolve issues in such a way that solutions based on durable peace can emerge.

Thirdly, while there is no doubt that the the most powerful and aggressive imperialist forces today are concentrated in the USA and its close allies, this does not exclude the possibility of very aggressive forces of imperialism at a future date being concentrated in some other countries, particularly China. One should be conscious of this all the time, so that there can be a constant strengthening of people against not just the imperialist forces in the USA and its major allies but against imperialist forces in any country from a future perspective as well.

There has been a lot of discussion of US preparations of a war against China in the near future before it becomes even stronger in economic, technological and military terms. Clearly in such a situation the anti-imperialism movement must be protective towards China and try it best to prevent US aggression. However this does not prevent the movement from ignoring the imperialist streak exhibited by China from time to time, and its strong territorial ambitions with the associated aggression.

In fact with the possibility always open that any big breakthrough in weapons of mass destruction technology can give a country a decisive edge at least for some years, the possibilities of either alternative centers of imperialism emerging or the USA further strengthening its imperialist grip cannot be ruled out and the anti-imperialism movement must be willing to target whatever is the most aggressive imperialist force on a priority basis.

Creating a strong anti-imperialism peaceful movement within the big centers of imperialism is a very important challenge ahead. This movement should be active on a continuing basis. Many more people here can come forward on a platform of peace rather than a platform of anti-imperialism. So the peace movement can be the bigger mass movement but the peace movement without a perspective of anti-imperialism cannot go very far. Hence the continuing presence of anti-imperialism movement is very important even for the peace movement to realize its proper potential.

Briefly, the anti-imperialism movement should try to create a wide space on the basis of three very obvious facts or truths. Firstly, the most important task today is to save the life-nurturing conditions of our planet which are threatened by very serious environmental problems led by climate change and by weapons of mass destruction. Secondly, this task cannot be accomplished without resisting and defeating the forces of imperialism because in their quest for dominance these forces of imperialism search relentlessly for more and more destructive weapons as well as for those ‘get-ahead-at-all-costs’ patterns of economic growth which generally involve more hazards and pollution. Thirdly, opposition to imperialism is a must for increasing justice and equality at world level which in turn is necessary for meeting the basic needs and for the dignity of all people. Based on this understanding, the anti-imperialism movement can attract more and more people and also create very creative linkages with several other social movements of high relevance.

Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril, Protecting Earth for Children and A Day in 2071.

On the Historical Specificity of the Marxist Theory of Imperialism

Nikolai Bukharin

Grigorii Zinoviev

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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.

— Grigorii Zinoviev, “What is Imperialism?” (1916)

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

06

A Study of the Marxist (and Non-Marxist) Theory of Imperialism

The Death of Global Imperialism (1920s-1930s)

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. Vladimir Lenin.  Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalist Development (1915-1916).  This work scarcely needs any introduction.  The entire book is a study of imperialism as a stage in capitalist development.
5. 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.

thecharnelhouse.org

 

Some clarity on imperialism and anti-imperialism today — A response to Steve Ellner

By Greg Godels

Published 13 December, 2024

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First published at ZZ’s Blog.

Imperialism is not the creation of any one or of any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognizable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will… Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of German Social Democracy (1916)

The arguments embroiling the left on the nature of imperialism and whether the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) or Russia are capitalist or imperialist, whether the Pink Tide in Latin America is a socialist trend, whether the BRICS development is an anti-imperialist movement, and so forth, are becoming more and more heated as they proceed further and further into the academic weeds. There are a host of issues and positions entangled in these debates, as well as numerous vested interests: deeply felt, long held theories, research platforms, and networks of intellectual allies. Moreover, these arguments are decidedly one-sided: long on academic opinion, short on working-class or activist participation. That said, they are important and deserve discussion.

A recent interview with Steve Ellner by Federico Fuentes in LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal is a place to begin to unravel some of these disputes. Ellner is neither a surrogate nor a straw man for this discussion. Ellner is a thoughtful, analytical academic with a long-committed history in the Latin American solidarity movement and a background on the left. He is more likely to say “X may mean…” rather than “X must mean…” than many of his academic colleagues. That is to say, he is no enemy of nuance.

Lenin on imperialism

Ellner begins with Vladimir Lenin, as he should, asserting that his theory is both “political-military” and “economic.” This, of course, is correct. In chapter seven of Imperialism, Lenin specifies five characteristics of the imperialist system. Four are economic: the decisive role of monopoly capital; the merging of financial and industrial capital; the export of capital; and the internationalization of monopoly capital. One is political-military: the division of the world between the greatest capitalist powers. Lenin gives no weight to these characteristics because they are together necessary and sufficient for defining imperialism as a system emerging in the late nineteenth century. Imperialism, for Lenin, is a stage and not a club.

Following John Bellamy Foster, the editor of Monthly Review, Ellner posits that there are two interpretations of imperialism that some believe flow from the two aspects of imperialism. Indeed, there may well be two interpretations, but given Lenin’s unitary interpretation of imperialism in Chapter seven, they are misinterpretations of Lenin’s thought. Recognizing that Lenin explicitly says that he offers a definition “that will embrace the following five essential features…,” there is, perhaps to the dismay of some, only one valid interpretation — an interpretation that combines the economic with the political-military.

That said, Foster and Ellner are correct in critically appraising those who do misinterpret imperialism as solely political-military (contestation of territories among great powers) or as solely economic (capitalist exploitation). Truly, most of the misunderstandings about imperialism since Lenin’s time come from advocating one misinterpretation rather than the other, while failing to perceive imperialism as a system.

Ellner gently rejects one political-military interpretation that he associates with Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, equating “imperialism with the political domination of the US empire, backed of course by military power…” Ellner rejects that thesis, “given declining US prestige and global economic instability.” An interpretation that separates and privileges the political-military from the economic necessarily decouples imperialism from capitalism — something that Lenin explicitly denies. Accordingly, it follows that modern-day imperialism — including US imperialism — would be akin to the adventures of Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan, leaving exploitation as, at best, a contingent feature. A solely political-military explanation of imperialism is a step removed from the more robust Leninist explanation.

Regarding the economic interpretation, Ellner says: “At the other extreme are those left theorists who focus on the dominance of global capital and minimize the importance of the nation-state.” Ellner has in mind as his immediate target the position staked out by William I Robinson, Jerry Harris, and others in the late 1990s, a position that rode the then-dramatic wave of globalization to posit a supremely powerful Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) that overshadows, even renders obsolete, the nation-state. At the time, others pointed out that the substantial quantitative changes in trade and investment and their global sweep had been seen before and were simply a repeat of the past, most telling in the decades before World War I. Were these changes not a continuation of the qualitative changes addressed in Lenin’s Imperialism?

Like many speculations that overshoot the evidence, the projected decline or death of the nation-state was made irrelevant by the march of history. The many endless and expanding wars of the twenty-first century underscored the vitality of the nation-state as an historical actor. And the intense economic nationalism spawned by the economic crises of recent decades signals the demise of globalization — a phenomenon that proved to be a phase and not a new stage of capitalism. Sanctions and tariffs are the mark of robust, aggressive nation-states.

The tempest in an academic teapot stirred by the artificial separation of the economic and the political-military in Lenin’s theory of imperialism is enabled by a lack of clarity regarding the nature of the state. Left thinkers, especially in the Anglophone world, have neglected or derided the Leninist concept of State-Monopoly Capitalism — the process of fusion between the state and the influence and interests of monopoly capitalism — which explains exactly how and why the nation-state functions today in the energy wars between Russia and the US and the technology wars between the PRC and the US. Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran’s casual dismissal of the concept of State-Monopoly Capitalism in Monopoly Capital (1966) is representative of the utter contempt shown for Communist research projects by many so-called “Western Marxists”. While the theory of State-Monopoly Capitalism gets no hearing among Marxist academics, the slippery, but ominous-sounding concept of “deep state” has achieved wide-spread acceptance, while not taxing the comfort of Western intellectuals.

Nonetheless, Robinson’s stress on the political economy of imperialism cannot easily be dismissed. His reliance on the key concepts of class and exploitation are certainly essential to Lenin’s theory. In fact, the greatest challenge to the political-military aspect of Lenin’s theory was not the alleged decline of the nation-state, but the demise of the colonial system, especially with the widespread independence movements after World War II. The crude and totalizing domination of weaker nations favored by the Spanish, French, Portuguese, and British Empires — the division of the world into administered colonies — was, with nominal independence, replaced by a system of more benign economic domination.

Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian revolutionary, designated this system “neo-colonialism” in his book, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah’s elaboration of Lenin’s theory preserved the integrity of Lenin’s “political-military” aspect by reconstituting the colonial division of the world by the great powers into a neo-colonial division of the world into spheres of interest and of prevailing economic influence.

China

Since Ellner correctly acknowledges that Lenin’s economic and political-military aspects are essential to his theory of imperialism, he must contend with an awkward, vexing question that continually divides the left: how does the PRC fit into the world imperialist system? What does its deep and broad participation in the global market mean? Ellner appeals to the facts that the PRC does not have bases throughout the world, does not use sanctions (not true), and does not exploit the excuse of human rights to intervene in the affairs of other countries. But surely this side steps Nkrumah’s powerful thesis that imperialism in the post-World War II era is not simply the vulgar exercise of administrative and military power and the exhibition of national chauvinism. It is, rather, the division of the world into spheres of interest that both benefit the great powers through exploitation and competition with other great powers for shares of the bounty.

Certainly, the PRC does not avow a policy of imperial predation, but neither does the US or any other great power from the past. Indeed, imperialism has always been presented — sincerely or not — as beneficial to all parties, whether it is a civilizing function, a paternalistic boost, or protection from other powers. The Chinese leadership may well truthfully believe that their trade, investment, and partnership with other countries is a victory for all — a “win-win” as some like to say. But that is always the answer that great powers give when using their capital, know-how, and trade to make profit for their corporations.

Perhaps, the most notorious of these “win-win” projects was the Marshall Plan. Sold to Europe as a “win-win” based on Europe’s impoverishment and the US’s generosity, billions were allocated for loans, grants, and investments in Europe. History shows that billions in new business for US corporations were thus created, Cold War political dependency and loyalty were achieved, and the US retained new markets for decades. The big winners, of course, were US corporations and their capital-starved European counterparts. Other US investment and “aid” projects, like the Alliance for Progress, were more blatantly guided by US interests and even less a “win” for their targets.

This was the era of the development theories of W. W. Rostow that offered a blueprint and a justification for the investment of capital in and corporate penetration of poorer countries. It was, in fact, a justification for neo-colonialism. Yet Rostow’s stage theory of lifting countries from poverty can appear surprisingly consonant with the logic of the PRC’s foreign investment strategies. It is hard to resist the temptation to ask: How is this different from the PRC’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)? How is the BRI different from the Marshall Plan? Or, to use an example from Lenin’s time, the Berlin-Baghdad railroad project?

It is beyond dispute that the PRC — whatever the goals of its ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) — has a massive capitalist sector, with many corporations arguably of monopoly concentration rivaling their US and European counterparts, which similarly seek investment opportunities for their accumulated capital. That is, after all, the motion of capitalism. What is baffling and frustrating for those sympathetic to the CPC is the failure of its leaders to frame their economic policies towards other states in the language of class or employ the concept of exploitation.

In President Xi Jinping’s recent speeches at the Kazan meeting of BRICS+, there were many references to “multilateralism,” “equitable global development,” “security,” “cooperation,” “advancing global governance reform,” “innovation,” “green development,” “harmonious coexistence,” “common prosperity,” and “modernization” — all ideas that would resonate with the audience of the G7. How would these values change the class relations of the BRICS+ nations? What does this thinking do to alleviate the exploitation of capitalist corporations? These are the questions Ellner and others should be asking of the PRC’s leaders and BRICS+ advocates. These are the questions that probe how today’s nation-states participate in the imperialist system and how that participation affects working people.

The problem is that many on the left would like to believe that there is a form of anti-imperialism that is not anti-capitalist. They find in the BRI and BRICS+ a model that competes with US imperialism and could therefore be said to be anti-US imperialist, but leaves capitalism intact. Of course, it is impossible to embrace this view and retain Lenin’s theory of imperialism. Every page in the pamphlet, Imperialism, affirms the intimate relation between imperialism and capitalism. The very subtitle — The Final Stage of Capitalism — is testimony to that connection.

Ellner suggests that a political case can be made in the US for singling out US imperialism over imperialism in general. He wants us to believe, through an example of Bernie Sanders’ strategic thinking, that criticizing US foreign policy is far more threatening to the ruling class than Sanders’ “socialism.” That may be true of Sanders’ tepid social democratic posture, but not of any serious “socialist” stance against capitalism and its international face.

We get a taste of Ellner’s vision of the role of BRICS-style anti-imperialism when he conjectures that: “Anti-imperialism is one effective way to drive a wedge between the Democratic Party machine and large sectors of the party who are progressive but vote for Democratic candidates as a lesser of two evils.” Rather than take the failed “lesser-of-two-evils” policy head on and contest the idea of always voting for candidates who are bad but maybe not as bad as an opponent, Ellner argues the left might instead wean Democrats away from slavish support for the Democratic Party agenda by standing against US foreign policy (which is largely bipartisan). If trickery and parlor games count as a left strategy within the Democratic Party orbit, maybe it is time to leave that orbit and look to building a third party.

Ellner’s interrogator, Federico Fuentes, correctly questions how making US imperialism the Western left’s immediate target might possibly overshadow or even conflict with the class struggle and fight for socialism. Fuentes opines: “There can be a problem when prioritising US imperialism leads to a kind of ‘lesser evil’ politics in which genuine democratic and worker struggles are not just underrated, but directly opposed on the basis that they weaken the struggle against US imperialism…”

Venezuela

Fuentes and Ellner, in this regard, are fully aware of the recent dispute between the Maduro government and the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) over the direction of the Bolivarian process, a dispute that resulted in an attempt to eviscerate the PCV on the part of Maduro’s governing party. Because the PCV opposed Maduro’s party in the July 2024 presidential election, Maduro maneuvered to have the PCV stripped of its identity, securing an endorsement from a bogus PCV constructed of whole cloth by Venezuelan courts.

From the PCV’s perspective, the Maduro government had abandoned the struggle for socialism in deed, if not word, and turned on the working class, compromising Chavismo in order to hold on to power. As a Leninist party, the PCV held fast to the view that there is no anti-imperialism without anti-capitalism. Thus, the government’s reversal of many working-class gains had lost working-class support and, therefore, the support of the PCV.

Some Western leftists uncritically support the Maduro government and deny or ignore the facts of the matter. They are delusional. The facts are indisputable. Ellner is not among those denying them. Still others argue that defense of the Bolivarian process against the machinations of US imperialism should be an unconditional obligation of all progressive Venezuelans, including Communists. Therefore, the Communists are wrong to not support the government. But surely this thinking calls for Venezuelan workers to set aside their interests to serve some bourgeois notion of national sovereignty. It is one thing to defend the interests of the workers against the enslavement or exploitation of a foreign power. It is quite another to defend the bourgeois state and its own exploiters without taking exception.

This was the question that workers and their political parties faced on many occasions in the twentieth century: whether they would rally around a flag of national sovereignty when they essentially had little to gain but a fleeting national pride. As Lenin, Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and their contemporaries argued during the brutal bloodletting of World War I, workers should refuse to participate in the “anti-imperialism” of national chauvinism, the clash of capitalist states.

The road to defeating imperial aggression — US or any other — is to win the working class to the fight with a class-oriented program that attacks the roots of imperialism: capitalism. Unity around the goal of defeating the imperialist enemy — in Russia, China, Vietnam, or anywhere else — was won by siding with workers against capital, not accommodating or compromising with it. That was the message that the PCV tried to deliver to the Maduro government. Restraining, containing, or deflecting US imperialism will not defeat the system of imperialism, anymore than restraining, containing, deflecting, or even overwhelming British imperialism, as occurred in the past, defeated imperialism. Only replacing capitalism with socialism will end imperialism.

That in no way diminishes the day-to-day struggle against US domination. It does, however, mean that countries participating in the global capitalist market will reinforce the existing imperialist system until they exit capitalism. While there can be an anti-US imperialist coalition among capitalist-based countries, there can be no anti-imperialist coalition made up of countries committed to the capitalist road.

The left must be clear: a multipolar capitalist world has no more chance of escaping the ravages of imperialism than a unipolar capitalist world. If anything, multipolarity multiples and intensifies inter-imperialist rivalry.

 

Some Clarity on Imperialism Today

by Greg Godels / December 14th, 2024

Imperialism is not the creation of any one or of any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognizable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will…

— Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of German Social Democracy (1916)

The arguments embroiling the left on the nature of imperialism, over whether Peoples’ China or Russia is capitalist or imperialist, whether the pink tide in Latin America is a socialist trend, whether the BRICS development is an anti-imperialist movement, and so forth, are becoming more and more heated as they proceed further and further into the academic weeds.

There is a host of issues and positions entangled in these debates, as well as numerous vested interests: deeply felt, long held theories, research platforms, and networks of intellectual allies.

Moreover, these arguments are decidedly one-sided: long on academic opinion, short on working-class or activist participation.

That said, they are important and deserve discussion.

A recent interview of Steve Ellner by Federico Fuentes in LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal is a place to begin to unravel some of these disputes. Now Steve Ellner is neither a surrogate in nor a straw man for this discussion. Ellner is a thoughtful, analytical academic with a long-committed history in the Latin American solidarity movement and with a background on the left. He is more likely to say “X may mean…” rather than “X must mean…” than many of his academic colleagues. That is to say, he is no enemy of nuance.

Ellner begins with Lenin, as he should, and asserts that Lenin’s theory is both “political-military” and “economic.” This, of course, is correct. In Chapter seven of Imperialism, Lenin specifies five characteristics of the imperialist system. Four are economic: the decisive role of monopoly capital, the merging of financial and industrial capital, the export of capital, and the internationalization of monopoly capital. One is political-military: the division of the world between the greatest capitalist powers.

Lenin gives no weight to these characteristics because they are together necessary and sufficient for defining imperialism as a system emerging in the late nineteenth century. Imperialism, for Lenin, is a stage and not a club.

Following John Bellamy Foster, the editor of Monthly Review, Ellner posits that there are two interpretations of imperialism that some believe follow from the two aspects of imperialism. Indeed, there may well be two interpretations, but given Lenin’s unitary interpretation of imperialism in Chapter seven, they are misinterpretations of Lenin’s thought. Recognizing that Lenin explicitly says that he offers a definition “that will embrace the following five essential features…,” there is, perhaps to the dismay of some, only one valid interpretation– an interpretation that combines the economic with the political-military.

That said, Foster and Ellner are correct in critically appraising those who do misinterpret imperialism as solely political-military (contestation of territories among great powers) or as solely economic (capitalist exploitation). Truly, most of the misunderstandings about imperialism since Lenin’s time come from advocating one misinterpretation rather than the other, while failing to perceive imperialism as a system.

Ellner gently rejects one political-military interpretation that he associates with Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin: equating “imperialism with the political domination of the US empire, backed of course by military power…” Ellner rejects that thesis, “given declining US prestige and global economic instability.” An interpretation that separates and privileges the political-military from the economic necessarily decouples imperialism from capitalism — something that Lenin explicitly denies. Accordingly, it follows that modern-day imperialism — including US imperialism — would be akin to the adventures of Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan, leaving exploitation as, at best, a contingent feature.

A solely political-military explanation of imperialism is a step removed from the more robust Leninist explanation.

Ellner considers the economic interpretation: “At the other extreme are those left theorists who focus on the dominance of global capital and minimize the importance of the nation-state.” Ellner has in mind as his immediate target the position staked out by William I Robinson, Jerry Harris, and others in the late 1990s, a position that rides the then-dramatic wave of globalization to posit a supremely powerful Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC) that overshadows, even renders obsolete, the nation-state.

At the time, others pointed out that the substantial quantitative changes in trade and investment and their global sweep had been seen before and were simply a repeat of the past, most telling in the decades before the first world war. Were these changes not a continuation of the qualitative changes addressed in Lenin’s Imperialism?

Like many speculations that overshoot the evidence, the projected decline or death of the nation-state was made irrelevant by the march of history. The many endless and expanding wars of the twenty-first century underscored the vitality of the nation-state as an historical actor. And the intense economic nationalism spawned by the economic crises of recent decades signals the demise of globalization — a phenomenon that proved to be a phase and not a new stage of capitalism. Sanctions and tariffs are the mark of robust, aggressive nation-states.

The tempest in an academic teapot stirred by the artificial separation of the economic and the political-military in Lenin’s theory of imperialism is enabled by lack of clarity about the nature of the state. Left thinkers, especially in the Anglophone world, have neglected or derided the Leninist concept of State-Monopoly Capitalism — the process of fusion between the state and the influence and interests of monopoly capitalism — which explains exactly how and why the nation-state functions today in the energy wars between Russia and the US and the technology wars between Peoples’ China (e.g., Huawei) and the US. Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran’s casual dismissal of the concept of State-Monopoly Capitalism in Monopoly Capital (1966) is representative of the utter contempt shown for Communist research projects by many so-called “Western Marxists.” While the theory of State-Monopoly Capitalism gets no hearing among Marxist academics, the slippery, but ominous-sounding concept of “deep state” has achieved wide-spread acceptance, while not taxing the comfort of Western intellectuals.

Nonetheless, Robinson’s stress on the political economy of imperialism cannot easily be dismissed. His reliance on the key concepts of class and exploitation are certainly essential to Lenin’s theory.

In fact, the greatest challenge to the political-military aspect of Lenin’s theory was not the alleged decline of the nation-state, but the demise of the colonial system, especially with the wide-spread independence movements after World War II. The crude and totalizing domination of weaker nations favored by the Spanish, French, Portuguese, and British Empires– the division of the world into administered colonies– was, with nominal independence, replaced by a system of more benign economic domination. Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian revolutionary, designated this system “neo-colonialism” in his book, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah’s elaboration of Lenin’s theory preserved the integrity of Lenin’s “political-military” aspect by reconstituting the colonial division of the world by the great powers into a neo-colonial division of the world into spheres of interest and of prevailing economic influence.

Since Ellner correctly acknowledges that Lenin’s economic and political-military aspects are essential to his theory of imperialism, he must contend with an awkward, vexing question that continually divides the left: how does the People’s Republic of China (PRC) fit into the world imperialist system? What does its deep and broad participation in the global market mean?

Ellner appeals to the facts that the PRC does not have bases throughout the world, does not use sanctions (not true!), and does not exploit the excuse of human rights to intervene in the affairs of other countries.

But surely this side steps Nkrumah’s powerful thesis that imperialism in the post-World War II era is not simply the vulgar exercise of administrative and military power and the exhibition of national chauvinism. It is, rather, the division of the world into spheres of interest that both benefit the great powers through exploitation and the competition with other great powers for shares of the bounty.

Certainly, the PRC does not avow a policy of imperial predation, but neither does the US or any other great power from the past. Indeed, imperialism has always been presented — sincerely or not — as beneficial to all parties, whether it is a civilizing function, a paternalistic boost, or protection from other powers. The Chinese leadership may well truthfully believe that their trade, investment, and partnership with other countries is a victory for all — a “win-win” as some like to say.

But that is always the answer that great powers give that are using their capital, their know-how, and their trade to profit their corporations. Perhaps, the most notorious of these “win-win” projects was the Marshall Plan. Sold to Europe as a “win-win” based on Europe’s impoverishment and the US’s generosity, billions were allocated for loans, grants, and investments in Europe. History shows that billions in new business for US corporations were thus created, Cold War political dependency and loyalty were achieved, and the US retained new markets for decades. The big winners, of course, were US corporations and their capital-starved European counterparts.

Other US investment and “aid” projects, like The Alliance for Progress, were more blatantly guided by US interests and even less a “win” for their targets.

This was the era of the development theories of W.W. Rostow that offered a blueprint and a justification for the investment of capital in and the corporate penetration of poorer countries. It was, in fact, a justification for neo-colonialism. Yet Rostow’s stage theory of lifting countries from poverty can appear surprisingly consonant with the logic of the PRC’s foreign investment strategies.

It is hard to resist the temptation to ask: How is this different from the PRC Belt and Road Initiative? How is the BRI different from the Marshall Plan? Or, to use an example from Lenin’s time, the Berlin-Baghdad railroad project?

It is beyond dispute that Peoples’ China — whatever the goals of its ruling Communist Party — has a massive capitalist sector, with many corporations arguably of monopoly concentration rivaling their US and European counterparts, that similarly seek investment opportunities for their accumulated capital. That is, after all, the motion of capitalism.

What is baffling and frustrating for those sympathetic to the Communist Party of China is the failure for the CPC’s leaders to frame their economic policies towards other states in the language of class or employ the concept of exploitation. In Comrade Xi’s recent speeches at the Kazan meeting of BRICS+, there are many references to “multilateralism,” “equitable global development,” “security,” “cooperation,” “advancing global governance reform,” “innovation,” “green development,” “harmonious coexistence,” “common prosperity,” and “modernization,” — all ideas that would resonate with the audience of the G7. How would these values change the class relations of the BRICS+ nations? What does this thinking do to alleviate the exploitation of capitalist corporations?

These are the questions Ellner and others should be asking of the PRC’s leaders and the advocates of BRICS+. These are the questions that probe how today’s nation-states participate in the imperialist system and how that participation affects working people.

The problem is that many on the left would like to believe that there is a form of anti-imperialism that is not anti-capitalist. They find in the BRI and BRICS+ a model that competes with United States imperialism and could be said to be therefore anti-US imperialist, but leaves capitalism intact. Of course, it is impossible to embrace this view and retain Lenin’s theory of imperialism. Every page in the pamphlet, Imperialism, affirms the intimate relation between imperialism and capitalism. The very subtitle — The Final Stage of Capitalism — is testimony to that connection.

Ellner suggests that a political case can be made in the US for singling out US imperialism over imperialism, in general. He wants us to believe, through an example of Bernie Sanders’ strategic thinking, that criticizing US foreign policy is far more threatening to the ruling class than Sanders’ “socialism.” That may be true of Sanders’ tepid social democratic posture, but not of any serious “socialist” stance against capitalism and its international face.

We get a taste of Ellner’s vision of the role of BRICS-style anti-imperialism when he conjectures that “Anti-imperialism is one effective way to drive a wedge between the Democratic Party machine and large sectors of the party who are progressive but vote for Democratic candidates as a lesser of two evils.” Rather than take the failed “lesser-of-two-evils” policy head on, rather than contesting the idea of always voting for candidates who are bad, but maybe not as bad as an opponent, the left might instead wean Democrats away from slavish support for the Democratic Party agenda by standing against US foreign policy (which is largely bipartisan!). If trickery and parlor games count as a left strategy within the Democratic Party orbit, maybe it’s time to leave that orbit and look to building a third party.

Ellner’s interrogator, Federico Fuentes, correctly questions how making US imperialism the immediate target of the Western left might possibly overshadow or even conflict with the class struggle, the fight for socialism. He opines: “There can be a problem when prioritising US imperialism leads to a kind of ‘lesser evil’ politics in which genuine democratic and worker struggles are not just underrated, but directly opposed on the basis that they weaken the struggle against US imperialism…”

Fuentes and Ellner, in this regard, are fully aware of the recent dispute between the Maduro government and the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) over the direction of the Bolivarian process, a dispute that resulted in an attempt to eviscerate the PCV on the part of Maduro’s governing party. Because the PCV was opposing the Maduro party in the July, 2024 election, Maduro maneuvered to have the PCV stripped of its identity, securing an endorsement from a bogus PCV constructed of whole cloth by Venezuelan courts.

From the PCV’s perspective, the Maduro government had abandoned the struggle for socialism in deed, if not word, and turned on the working class, compromising Chavismo in order to hold on to power. As a Leninist party, PCV held fast to the view that there is no anti-imperialism without anti-capitalism. Thus, the government’s reversal of many working-class gains had lost working-class support and, therefore, the support of the PCV.

Some Western leftists uncritically support the Maduro government and deny or ignore the facts of the matter. They are delusional. The facts are indisputable. Ellner is not among those denying them.

Still others argue that defense of the Bolivarian process against the machinations of US imperialism should be an unconditional obligation of all progressive Venezuelans, including the Communists. Therefore, the Communists were wrong to not support the government.

But surely this thinking calls for Venezuelan workers to set aside their interests to serve some bourgeois notion of national sovereignty. It is one thing to defend the interests of the workers against the enslavement or exploitation of a foreign power. It is quite another to defend the bourgeois state and its own exploiters without taking exception.

This was the question that workers and their political parties faced on many occasions in the twentieth century: whether they would rally around a flag of national sovereignty when they essentially had little to gain but a fleeting national pride.

As Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and their contemporaries argued during the brutal bloodletting of the First World War, workers should refuse to participate in the “anti-imperialism” of national chauvinism, the clash of capitalist states.

The road to defeating imperial aggression — US or any other — is to win the working class to the fight, with a class-oriented program that attacks the roots of imperialism: capitalism. Unity around the goal of defeating the imperialist enemy — in Russia, China, Vietnam, or anywhere else — was won by siding with workers against capital, not accommodating or compromising with it. That was the message that the Communist Party tried to deliver to the Maduro government.

Restraining, containing, or deflecting US imperialism will not defeat the system of imperialism, anymore than restraining, containing, deflecting, or even overwhelming British imperialism, as occurred in the past, defeated imperialism. Only replacing capitalism with socialism will end imperialism.

That in no way diminishes the day-to-day struggle against US domination. It does, however, mean that the countries participating in the global capitalist market will reinforce the existing imperialist system until they exit capitalism. While there can be an anti-US imperialist coalition among capitalist-based countries, there can be no anti-imperialist coalition made up of countries committed to the capitalist road.

The left must be clear: a multipolar capitalist world has no more chance of escaping the ravages of imperialism than a unipolar capitalist world. If anything, multipolarity multiples and intensifies inter-imperialist rivalry.FacebookTwitterRedditEmail

Greg Godels writes on current events, political economy, and the Communist movement from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. Read other articles by Greg, or visit Greg's website.