Lenin's Imperialism nearly 100 years on: an outdated paradigm?
Marshall, A. (2014)
Critique: A Journal of Socialist Theory, 42 (3). pp. 317-333.
ISSN 0301-7605
Copyright © 2014 Taylor and Francis
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/42356878.pdf
Lenin’s Imperialism nearly 100 years on: an outdated paradigm?
Abstract: Lenin’s Imperialism. The Highest Stage of Capitalism formed part of the canon of
mainstream Marxist writing for much of the twentieth century, and also represented a critical
reference point for Marxist attempts to interpret international relations for much of the same period.
At one and the same time both a stinging condemnation of the betrayal of the European working class by their political leaders in 1914, and a synthesis, with some original elements, of existing contemporary Marxist theory on imperialism, Lenin’s ‘popular outline’ subsequently (from around the time of the ‘New Left’ onwards) came under increasing fire for being both incoherent, irrelevant, and overrated. This article revisits both the contemporary genesis of the text, and the question of its longer term pertinence and relevance in the light of capitalism’s current crisis.
Friday, April 17, 2020
Marx’s Concept of Socialism
Peter Hudis
The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx
Edited by Matt Vidal, Tony Smith, Tomás Rotta, and Paul Prew
Print Publication Date: Jun 2019
Peter Hudis
The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx
Edited by Matt Vidal, Tony Smith, Tomás Rotta, and Paul Prew
Print Publication Date: Jun 2019
Subject: Sociology, Social Theory
Online Publication Date: Sep 2018
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695545.013.50
In This Article
1. The Vision of a Post-Capitalist Society in the Young Marx
2. The Impact of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy on his Concept of Socialism
3. The Vision of a New Society in Marx’s Capital
4. The 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program
5. Conclusion
References
View PDF
Abstract and Keywords
One of the most important theoretical challenges facing us is developing a viable alternative to capitalism. Achieving this requires rethinking basic premises of social theory and practice, given the difficulties of freeing humanity from such problems as alienation, class domination, and the capitalist law of value. Taking off from Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, this article explores how Marx’s critique of capital, value production, and abstract universal labor time is grounded in an emancipatory vision of a post-capitalist society—a vision that has been largely overlooked. While Marx never wrote “blueprints of the future,” the full breadth of his work as revealed in the Marx-Engels Gesaumtausgabe indicates that his vision of a post-capitalist society went further than specifying the need to abolish private property and “anarchic” exchange relations. This chapter seeks to show how Marx’s writings on this issue provide important theoretical ground for envisioning a non-capitalist future in the twenty-first century.
Keywords: socialism, value production, abstract labor, Communism, state
When Karl Marx broke from bourgeois society and became a revolutionary in the early 1840s, he joined an already-existing socialist movement that long predated his entrance upon the political and ideological scene. Neither he nor any other radical intellectual of the time invented the idea of socialism and Communism. A general notion of an alternative to capitalism, even if vague and misdirected, was already in circulation. It consisted of replacing an anarchic, market-driven competitive society with a planned, organized one controlled by the working class. It may seem that Marx had little to add to this notion, since he refrained from speculating about the future and sharply criticized the utopian socialists who spent their time doing so. Moreover, since Marx’s theoretical contribution consisted of an extended critique of the existing capitalist mode of production and he wrote relatively little about post-capitalist society, it may appear that his work has little to offer those seeking to develop a viable alternative to capitalism in the twenty-first century. However, as with so much in life, the appearance is deceptive
In This Article
1. The Vision of a Post-Capitalist Society in the Young Marx
2. The Impact of Marx’s Critique of Political Economy on his Concept of Socialism
3. The Vision of a New Society in Marx’s Capital
4. The 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program
5. Conclusion
References
View PDF
Abstract and Keywords
One of the most important theoretical challenges facing us is developing a viable alternative to capitalism. Achieving this requires rethinking basic premises of social theory and practice, given the difficulties of freeing humanity from such problems as alienation, class domination, and the capitalist law of value. Taking off from Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, this article explores how Marx’s critique of capital, value production, and abstract universal labor time is grounded in an emancipatory vision of a post-capitalist society—a vision that has been largely overlooked. While Marx never wrote “blueprints of the future,” the full breadth of his work as revealed in the Marx-Engels Gesaumtausgabe indicates that his vision of a post-capitalist society went further than specifying the need to abolish private property and “anarchic” exchange relations. This chapter seeks to show how Marx’s writings on this issue provide important theoretical ground for envisioning a non-capitalist future in the twenty-first century.
Keywords: socialism, value production, abstract labor, Communism, state
When Karl Marx broke from bourgeois society and became a revolutionary in the early 1840s, he joined an already-existing socialist movement that long predated his entrance upon the political and ideological scene. Neither he nor any other radical intellectual of the time invented the idea of socialism and Communism. A general notion of an alternative to capitalism, even if vague and misdirected, was already in circulation. It consisted of replacing an anarchic, market-driven competitive society with a planned, organized one controlled by the working class. It may seem that Marx had little to add to this notion, since he refrained from speculating about the future and sharply criticized the utopian socialists who spent their time doing so. Moreover, since Marx’s theoretical contribution consisted of an extended critique of the existing capitalist mode of production and he wrote relatively little about post-capitalist society, it may appear that his work has little to offer those seeking to develop a viable alternative to capitalism in the twenty-first century. However, as with so much in life, the appearance is deceptive
Stages of Capitalism and Social Structures of Accumulation: A Long View
Terrence McDonough
The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx
Edited by Matt Vidal, Tony Smith, Tomás Rotta, and Paul Prew
Print Publication Date: Jun 2019Subject: Sociology, Social Theory, Economic Sociology
Terrence McDonough
The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx
Edited by Matt Vidal, Tony Smith, Tomás Rotta, and Paul Prew
Print Publication Date: Jun 2019Subject: Sociology, Social Theory, Economic Sociology
Online Publication Date: Nov 2018DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695545.013.33
Abstract and Keywords
The Marxian theory of stages of capitalism emerged in two waves. The first wave, at the turn of the twentieth century, was rooted in the Marxist response to the recovery of capitalism from its late nineteenth-century crisis. Conversely, the second wave in the 1970s grew out of the faltering of the relatively unproblematic accumulation associated with the post–World War II capitalist order. One wave was concerned with the beginning of a period of long-run accumulation. The second wave was concerned with the advent of a downturn in capitalist accumulation and a period of crisis. These turning points marked the inauguration of a period of relatively unproblematic reproduction of capitalist social relations and, symmetrically, the beginning of a period of stagnation and crisis. This chapter examines the Marxist concept of a stage of capitalism and concludes with an application to the contemporary crisis at a global, regional and national level.
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Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx
Chris Harman
Haymarket Books, 2010 - Business & Economics - 424 pages
We've been told for years that the capitalist free market is a self-correcting perpetual growth machine in which sellers always find buyers, precluding any major crisis in the system. Then the credit crunch of August 2007 turned into the great crash of September-October 2008, leading one apologist for the system, Willem Buiter, to write of "the end of capitalism as we knew it."
As the crisis unfolded, the world witnessed the way in which the runaway speculation of the "shadow" banking system wreaked havoc on world markets, leaving real human devastation in its wake. Faced with the financial crisis, some economic commentators began to talk of "zombie banks"-financial institutions that were in an "undead state" and incapable of fulfilling any positive function but a threat to everything else. What they do not realize is that twenty-first century capitalism as a whole is a zombie system, seemingly dead when it comes to achieving human goals.
PDF https://archive.org/details/pdfy-kvzhB4k4AcAT-7iA/page/n1/mode/2up
Chris Harman
Haymarket Books, 2010 - Business & Economics - 424 pages
We've been told for years that the capitalist free market is a self-correcting perpetual growth machine in which sellers always find buyers, precluding any major crisis in the system. Then the credit crunch of August 2007 turned into the great crash of September-October 2008, leading one apologist for the system, Willem Buiter, to write of "the end of capitalism as we knew it."
As the crisis unfolded, the world witnessed the way in which the runaway speculation of the "shadow" banking system wreaked havoc on world markets, leaving real human devastation in its wake. Faced with the financial crisis, some economic commentators began to talk of "zombie banks"-financial institutions that were in an "undead state" and incapable of fulfilling any positive function but a threat to everything else. What they do not realize is that twenty-first century capitalism as a whole is a zombie system, seemingly dead when it comes to achieving human goals.
PDF https://archive.org/details/pdfy-kvzhB4k4AcAT-7iA/page/n1/mode/2up
Contents
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| 87 |
| 121 |
| 141 |
| 161 |
| 191 |
| 305 |
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| 353 |
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| 410 |
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| 227 |
Global Politics, Capitalism, Socio-Ecological Crisis, and Resistance:
Exploring the Linkages and the Challenges
Mark Tilzey
Abstract
This paper engages critically with a set of broadly Marxian-based approaches to the relationship
between global politics and processes of capital accumulation. This is then used to inform analysis of
the dynamics underlying the multiple but inter-linked crises of food, environment
(energy/climate/biodiversity), and finance. The first section assesses the work of Callinicos in his
focus on renewed inter-imperialist rivalry, in which the USA is seen as wanting to secure access to,
and control over, key resources to secure capital accumulation in intensifying competition with China
and other capitalist powers. This approach is compared to the work of Panitch, Gindin, and Kiely in
which they revive Kautsky’s notion of ultra-imperialism – here US hegemonic power is assumed to
lead other capitalist states in the re-organisation of the global economy. It is argued that, ultimately,
both approaches examine only the external relations between the separate but linked logics of capital
and global politics. They also neglect the crucial role of the biophysical domain in defining key
parameters surrounding capital accumulation.
In the second section, the paper develops an alternative approach to understanding capitalist
expansion, its relation to global politics and current crises. By drawing from Rosa Luxembourg’s
spatial account of the accumulation of capital and expansion into non-capitalist spaces
through ongoing processes of primitive accumulation, the structuring conditions of capitalist
expansion are conceptualised.
Through a critical engagement with William Robinson’s work on the emergence of the
transnational state, and that of Jason Moore on ‘world ecology’, the paper develops a
conceptualisation of the agency of different class fractions within the inter-state system and their
relationship to the crises of food, environment, and finance. In the third section, the paper addresses
resistances to these crises.
The hegemony of trans-nationalised fractions of capital, often, although not
always, led by the USA through ‘ultra-imperialism’, is challenged by sub-hegemonic national capital
fractions of some BRICS, notably China and Brazil. But this merely perpetuates the crises of
capitalism through policies of neo-developmentalism and neo-extractivism. These are challenged in
turn by counter-hegemonic forces seeking food/land/territorial sovereignty. The dynamics of this
relationship between hegemonic, sub-hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces – between global
politics, the state, and social movements – are examined, particularly in relation to Latin America.
State, Capital and World Economy: Bukharin's Marxism and the “Dependency/Class” Controversy in Canadian Political Economy*
Paul Kellogg
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique
Volume 22, Issue 2
June 1989 , pp. 337-362
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423900001335
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
Abstract
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, “left-nationalist” dependency theories dominated Canadian political economy. However, Canada defied the predictions of dependency theory and developed all the class relations appropriate to advanced capitalist societies. The origins of Canadian industrial capitalism were not such that the country was locked into a staple-trap, notwithstanding the very real reliance of the economy on staple-export. In recent years, a number of political economists have offered an “orthodox” Marxist critique of dependency to account for these and other weaknesses in its overall framework. This article first summarizes the dependency arguments, then the arguments of its Marxist critics, and finally introduces a summary look at the ideas of Nikolai Bukharin, a little-examined but nonetheless important theorist whose insights on the relationship between the state as a capitalist and the growing internationalization of economic life are key to a Marxist re-theorization of Canadian political economy.
Vers la fin des années soixante et le début des années soixante-dix, les théories de la dépendance « nationalistes de gauche » dominaient l'économie politique du Canada. Le Canada a pourtant défié les prévisions de ces théories et développé tous les rapports entre les classes qui caractérisent les sociétés capitalistes avancées. Les débuts du capitalisme industriel au Canada n'étaient pas au point de nous rendre totalement dépendants des produits de base, même s'il ne faut pas ignorer l'importance de l'exportation de ces produits. Dans les dernières annees, un certain nombre de spécialistes en économie politique ont présenté une critique marxiste de type orthodoxes des théories de la dépendance afin d'expliquer certaines faiblesses de son cadre générale d'analyse. Cet article résume d'abord les arguments portant sur les théories de la dépendance, puis ceux des critiques marxistes et présente enfin un bref aperçu des idées de Nikolai Bukharin, un théoricien important mais relativement peu connu. Ses théories du rapport entre l'État vu comme capitaliste et l'internationalisation croissante de la vie économique sont présentées comme étant la clé d'une re-théorisation marxiste de l'économie politique du Canada.
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References Hide All
1 Cited in Clement, Wallace and Drache, Daniel, A Practical Guide to Canadian Political Economy (Toronto: Lorimer, 1978), 43.Google Scholar
2 Carroll, William, “Dependency, Imperialism and the Capitalist Class in Canada,” in Brym, Robert J. (ed.), The Structure of the Canadian Capitalist Class (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1985), 42.Google Scholar
3 Porter, John, The Vertical Mosaic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 273.CrossRef | Google Scholar
4 See Lumsden, Ian (ed.), Close the 49th Parallel Etc. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Teeple, Gary (ed.), Capitalism and the National Question in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973)Google Scholar; and Laxer, Robert (ed.), (Canada) Ltd. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973).Google Scholar
5 Resnick, Philip, “The Maturing of Canadian Capitalism,” Our Generation 15, (1982), 11–24.Google Scholar
6 Carroll, “Dependency, Imperialism and the Capitalist Class in Canada.”
7 Moore, Steve and Wells, Debi, Imperialism and the National Question in Canada (Toronto: S. Moore, 1975), 113.Google Scholar
8 Panitch, Leo, “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy,” Studies in Political Economy: A Socialist Review 6 (autumn 1981), 7–33CrossRef | Google Scholar; David McNally, “Staple Theory as Commodity Fetishism,” Ibid., 35–63; and Ray Schmidt, “Canadian Political Economy: A Critique,” Ibid., 65–92.
9 This will not involve a complete survey of all Marxist political economy. In particular, I shall not refer to the numerous and important contributions of Niosi, Jorge including The Economy of Canada: A Study of Ownership and Control (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1979)Google Scholar; Canadian Capitalism (Toronto: Lorimer, 1981); and Canadian Multinationals (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1985). While it does not deal directly with Canada, Niosi's work co-authored with Bellon, Bertram, The Decline of the American Economy (Montreal: Black Rose, 1988)Google Scholar, is also relevant. I have restricted my horizons to those Marxists who have directly taken up the dialogue with the dependency theorists.
10 Marx, Karl, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 20.Google Scholar
11 Levitt, Kari, Silent Surrender (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1970).Google Scholar
12 In saying this, I do not wish to imply that the dependency theorists were by and large elite theorists. However, in developing a society-centred framework to understand the Canadian economy, many dependency theorists did use elite theory (whose classic Canadian formulation is found in John Porter's The Vertical Mosaic) as a starting point and developed their analysis through a critique of this approach. The attitude of the dependency theorists to elite theory was fraternal (agreeing that society was in fact based on manifest inequalities) but critical. Dependency theorists disagreed with the purely descriptive bias of this type of sociology and with its acceptance of the inevitability of inequality. They posited an explanation of the inequalities inside Canadian society that implicitly or explicitly contained a prescription—independence and socialism.
13 Porter, The Vertical Mosaic, 557, 54 and 166.
14 John Hutcheson, “Class and Income Distribution in Canada,” in Laxer, (Canada) Ltd., 59.
15 Panitch, “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy,” 7.
16 Drache, Daniel, “The Crisis of Canadian Political Economy,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 7 (1983), 25, 34–36.Google Scholar
17 See Baran, Paul, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957)Google Scholar; Emmanuel, Arghiri, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Free Trade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972)Google Scholar; and Frank, André Gunder, Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979).Google Scholar
18 Carroll, “Dependency, Imperialism and the Capitalist Class in Canada,” 21.
19 Ibid., 22–23.
20 See Moore and Wells, Imperialism and the National Question in Canada, 115.
21 Cited in Penner, Norman, The Canadian Left (Toronto: Prentice-Hall, 1977), 86–87.Google Scholar
22 Ibid., 91, 100.
23 Ibid., 103.
24 Cited in Ibid., 104.
25 Resnick, Philip, The Land of Cain (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1977), 202–03, 70.Google Scholar
26 Ibid., 203.
27 Moore and Wells, Imperialism and the National Question in Canada, 112. Moore and Wells here do not mean to argue that this unity is a “good” thing. While there might be one central Canadian state, there is very definitely more than one nation. According to their analysis, the historic oppression of the Quebec nation is intensified precisely because the central state is independent and unified.
28 Panitch, “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy,” 8.
29 Ibid., 9, 13.
30 Ibid., 14.
31 Levitt, Silent Surrender, 24.
32 McCallum, John, Unequal Beginnings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980).CrossRef | Google Scholar
33 Panitch, “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy,” 15.
34 Ibid., 10. For a more extensive discussion of this approach to the early years of Canadian industrialization, see Paul Kellogg, “The Early Years of Capitalism in Canada: A Defence of the Home-market Approach,” unpublished paper, York University, 1987.
35 Panitch, “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy,” 16.
36 Ibid., 17, 19.
37 Drache, “The Crisis of Canadian Political Economy,” 28.
38 McNally, “Staple Theory as Commodity Fetishism,” 44.
39 Drache, “The Crisis of Canadian Political Economy,” 25–43.
40 To be fair, Panitch has recently developed his analysis in a somewhat different direction, one which is more complex than simply a “branch-plant” approach that makes much of the location of head office. See Panitch, Leo, “Class and Power in Canada,” Monthly Review 36, 11 (1985), 1–13Google Scholar, which makes a coherent case for his rich dependency approach, developing an argument that incorporates dependency from an angle that does not rely on the “Frank school.” In “terms of the extent of foreign ownership and control over the economy and of Canada's international trade pattern… Canada looks more like belonging in the company of Venezuela or Nigeria” (Ibid., 1). He argues that “the material foundations for a centralized Canadian state simply do not exist.” In Canada, industrial and financial capital have not merged into a unified and concentrated national bourgeoisie to form “finance capital”; rather, “Canada's commercially oriented bourgeoisie… entered into a partnership with American industrial capital in Canada.” This has resulted in the “implantation within the social formation of a powerful fraction of foreign industrial capital on a scale unmatched anywhere in the developed capitalist world” (Ibid., 4–5). Canada has a “neo-colonial relationship” with the United States and “nothing approaching a national bourgeoisie with its own political, ideological and economic unity vis-à-vis other national capitals has emerged” (Ibid., 10–11). This allows Panitch to theorize a dependent relationship with the United States that does not rest on the assumptions of the underdevelopment school. The crux of the case is the weakness in Canada of a national bourgeosie. While this phenomenon has not led to the underdevelopment predicted by the Frank school, it has held important implications for the ability of the state to direct the economy. This is an interesting approach, one that merits detailed examination in a separate paper. It does not, however, detract from the thrust of the argument presented here. Dependency in the sense of the Frank school was intimately bound up with a notion of underdevelopment. This underdevelopment was rooted in several structures of the relationship between the centre and the periphery, all of which have been shown by Marxist critics of dependency to be empirically and theoretically weak.
41 Porter, The Vertical Mosaic, 266.
42 Ibid., 269.
43 Ibid., 269–70.
44 Ibid., 271–72.
45 Ibid., 273.
46 Resnick, “The Maturing of Canadian Capitalism,” 12.
47 Ibid., 17, 22.
48 For a compilation of the various official statistics which attempts to prove just that, see Kellogg, Paul, “Canada as a Principal Economy: A Comparative Critique of the ‘Counter-discourse’ of Political Economy,” paper presented to the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, McMaster University, Hamilton, 1987.Google Scholar
49 Resnick, “The Maturing of Canadian Capitalism,” 15.
50 This framework is extensively developed in Carroll, William, Corporate Power and Canadian Capitalism (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986).Google Scholar
51 Carroll, “Dependency, Imperialism and the Capitalist Class in Canada,” 31.
52 Ibid., 42–43.
53 Ibid., 25.
54 Ibid., 27, 28.
55 Ibid., 32.
56 Ibid., 35. This conclusion is directly opposite to the one drawn by Panitch (“Class and Power in Canada”). See footnote 40. Has finance capital developed in a more or less “classical” form in Canada, with the oddity of a high degree of head offices being located in the United States (as Carroll argues) or did Canadian banking interests fuse their interests with those of American industrial capital, leading to a “Canadian-exceptionalist” view (as Panitch argues) where indigenous Canadian industrial capital was left out in the cold? As the Marxist critique of Canadian political economy develops, this should prove to be one of the key areas of controversy.
57 Ibid., 35.
58 Friedman, Jonathan, “Crisis in Theory and Transformations of the World Economy,” Review 2 (1978), 143.Google Scholar
59 Warren, Bill, Imperialism, Pioneer of Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1980), 176.Google Scholar
60 Carroll, “Dependency, Imperialism, and the Capitalist Class in Canada,” 37.
61 Bukharin, Nikolai, Imperialism and World Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 157.Google Scholar
62 Some recent scholarship has begun to reverse this trend. See, for example: Haynes, Mike, Nikolai Bukharin and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism (Kent, UK: Croom Helm, 1985)Google Scholar; Coates, K., The Case of Nikolai Bukharin (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1978)Google Scholar; Cohen, Stephen F., Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1975)Google Scholar; and Lewin, M., Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates (London: Pluto Press, 1974).Google Scholar
63 Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, 12.
64 Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, 17.
65 Cited in Trotsky, Leon, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), 291.Google Scholar
66 Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, 24–26.
67 Ibid., 126, 127.
68 See especially Cliff, Tony, State Capitalism in Russia (London: Pluto Press, 1974).Google Scholar Cliff argues on this basis that the Soviet Union is best understood as bureaucratic state capitalist. For a recent and iconoclastic examination of perestroika from this perspective see Harman, Chris and Zebrowski, Andy, “Glasnost—Before the Storm,” International Socialism 2 (1988), 3–54.Google Scholar International arms competition has another related impact on national economies which we will be unable to develop here. Briefly, three related concepts must be linked very closely—state-capitalism, world economy and the permanent arms economy. One of the principal thrusts behind the expansion of the state sector has been the competition between national-capitals which at a certain point becomes military competition. This military/state sector in turn becomes an economic factor in its own right, accelerating the very forces that brought it to birth—the concentration and centralization of capital. This argument is developed in the international context by Harman, Chris in Explaining the Crisis (London: Bookmarks, 1984).Google ScholarMcNally, David has developed its implications in the Canadian context in a provocative paper, “The Permanent Arms Economy and the Crisis of Canadian Capitalism,” paper prepared for the 1976 convention of the International Socialists, Toronto, 1976.Google Scholar
69 Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, 26.
70 Ibid., 61–62.
71 Ibid., 73.
72 This line of argument has been superbly developed by Harris, Nigel in Of Bread and Guns: The World Economy in Crisis (Markham: Penguin, 1973)Google Scholar which develops the general argument that the great levelling effect of the world market has overrun the ability of nation-states—communist or non-communist—to counter the pressures towards homogenization and, therefore, crisis; and The End of the Third World (Markham: Penguin, 1987) which develops the implications of this approach for dependency theories of the Third World and its development prospects.
* Ken McRoberts and Leo Panitch of the Department of Political Science, York University, and George Perlin and Grant Amyot of the Department of Political Studies, Queen's University, may not agree with everything in this article; but they were all invaluable over the years in helping these ideas come to fruition. The comments of the three anonymous reviewers for this Journal were extremely useful. The completion of this article was made possible by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
Paul Kellogg
Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique
Volume 22, Issue 2
June 1989 , pp. 337-362
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008423900001335
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
Abstract
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, “left-nationalist” dependency theories dominated Canadian political economy. However, Canada defied the predictions of dependency theory and developed all the class relations appropriate to advanced capitalist societies. The origins of Canadian industrial capitalism were not such that the country was locked into a staple-trap, notwithstanding the very real reliance of the economy on staple-export. In recent years, a number of political economists have offered an “orthodox” Marxist critique of dependency to account for these and other weaknesses in its overall framework. This article first summarizes the dependency arguments, then the arguments of its Marxist critics, and finally introduces a summary look at the ideas of Nikolai Bukharin, a little-examined but nonetheless important theorist whose insights on the relationship between the state as a capitalist and the growing internationalization of economic life are key to a Marxist re-theorization of Canadian political economy.
Vers la fin des années soixante et le début des années soixante-dix, les théories de la dépendance « nationalistes de gauche » dominaient l'économie politique du Canada. Le Canada a pourtant défié les prévisions de ces théories et développé tous les rapports entre les classes qui caractérisent les sociétés capitalistes avancées. Les débuts du capitalisme industriel au Canada n'étaient pas au point de nous rendre totalement dépendants des produits de base, même s'il ne faut pas ignorer l'importance de l'exportation de ces produits. Dans les dernières annees, un certain nombre de spécialistes en économie politique ont présenté une critique marxiste de type orthodoxes des théories de la dépendance afin d'expliquer certaines faiblesses de son cadre générale d'analyse. Cet article résume d'abord les arguments portant sur les théories de la dépendance, puis ceux des critiques marxistes et présente enfin un bref aperçu des idées de Nikolai Bukharin, un théoricien important mais relativement peu connu. Ses théories du rapport entre l'État vu comme capitaliste et l'internationalisation croissante de la vie économique sont présentées comme étant la clé d'une re-théorisation marxiste de l'économie politique du Canada.
Export citation Request permission
Copyright
COPYRIGHT: © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1989
References Hide All
1 Cited in Clement, Wallace and Drache, Daniel, A Practical Guide to Canadian Political Economy (Toronto: Lorimer, 1978), 43.Google Scholar
2 Carroll, William, “Dependency, Imperialism and the Capitalist Class in Canada,” in Brym, Robert J. (ed.), The Structure of the Canadian Capitalist Class (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1985), 42.Google Scholar
3 Porter, John, The Vertical Mosaic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), 273.CrossRef | Google Scholar
4 See Lumsden, Ian (ed.), Close the 49th Parallel Etc. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Teeple, Gary (ed.), Capitalism and the National Question in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973)Google Scholar; and Laxer, Robert (ed.), (Canada) Ltd. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1973).Google Scholar
5 Resnick, Philip, “The Maturing of Canadian Capitalism,” Our Generation 15, (1982), 11–24.Google Scholar
6 Carroll, “Dependency, Imperialism and the Capitalist Class in Canada.”
7 Moore, Steve and Wells, Debi, Imperialism and the National Question in Canada (Toronto: S. Moore, 1975), 113.Google Scholar
8 Panitch, Leo, “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy,” Studies in Political Economy: A Socialist Review 6 (autumn 1981), 7–33CrossRef | Google Scholar; David McNally, “Staple Theory as Commodity Fetishism,” Ibid., 35–63; and Ray Schmidt, “Canadian Political Economy: A Critique,” Ibid., 65–92.
9 This will not involve a complete survey of all Marxist political economy. In particular, I shall not refer to the numerous and important contributions of Niosi, Jorge including The Economy of Canada: A Study of Ownership and Control (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1979)Google Scholar; Canadian Capitalism (Toronto: Lorimer, 1981); and Canadian Multinationals (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1985). While it does not deal directly with Canada, Niosi's work co-authored with Bellon, Bertram, The Decline of the American Economy (Montreal: Black Rose, 1988)Google Scholar, is also relevant. I have restricted my horizons to those Marxists who have directly taken up the dialogue with the dependency theorists.
10 Marx, Karl, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970), 20.Google Scholar
11 Levitt, Kari, Silent Surrender (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1970).Google Scholar
12 In saying this, I do not wish to imply that the dependency theorists were by and large elite theorists. However, in developing a society-centred framework to understand the Canadian economy, many dependency theorists did use elite theory (whose classic Canadian formulation is found in John Porter's The Vertical Mosaic) as a starting point and developed their analysis through a critique of this approach. The attitude of the dependency theorists to elite theory was fraternal (agreeing that society was in fact based on manifest inequalities) but critical. Dependency theorists disagreed with the purely descriptive bias of this type of sociology and with its acceptance of the inevitability of inequality. They posited an explanation of the inequalities inside Canadian society that implicitly or explicitly contained a prescription—independence and socialism.
13 Porter, The Vertical Mosaic, 557, 54 and 166.
14 John Hutcheson, “Class and Income Distribution in Canada,” in Laxer, (Canada) Ltd., 59.
15 Panitch, “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy,” 7.
16 Drache, Daniel, “The Crisis of Canadian Political Economy,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory 7 (1983), 25, 34–36.Google Scholar
17 See Baran, Paul, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957)Google Scholar; Emmanuel, Arghiri, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Free Trade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972)Google Scholar; and Frank, André Gunder, Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979).Google Scholar
18 Carroll, “Dependency, Imperialism and the Capitalist Class in Canada,” 21.
19 Ibid., 22–23.
20 See Moore and Wells, Imperialism and the National Question in Canada, 115.
21 Cited in Penner, Norman, The Canadian Left (Toronto: Prentice-Hall, 1977), 86–87.Google Scholar
22 Ibid., 91, 100.
23 Ibid., 103.
24 Cited in Ibid., 104.
25 Resnick, Philip, The Land of Cain (Vancouver: New Star Books, 1977), 202–03, 70.Google Scholar
26 Ibid., 203.
27 Moore and Wells, Imperialism and the National Question in Canada, 112. Moore and Wells here do not mean to argue that this unity is a “good” thing. While there might be one central Canadian state, there is very definitely more than one nation. According to their analysis, the historic oppression of the Quebec nation is intensified precisely because the central state is independent and unified.
28 Panitch, “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy,” 8.
29 Ibid., 9, 13.
30 Ibid., 14.
31 Levitt, Silent Surrender, 24.
32 McCallum, John, Unequal Beginnings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980).CrossRef | Google Scholar
33 Panitch, “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy,” 15.
34 Ibid., 10. For a more extensive discussion of this approach to the early years of Canadian industrialization, see Paul Kellogg, “The Early Years of Capitalism in Canada: A Defence of the Home-market Approach,” unpublished paper, York University, 1987.
35 Panitch, “Dependency and Class in Canadian Political Economy,” 16.
36 Ibid., 17, 19.
37 Drache, “The Crisis of Canadian Political Economy,” 28.
38 McNally, “Staple Theory as Commodity Fetishism,” 44.
39 Drache, “The Crisis of Canadian Political Economy,” 25–43.
40 To be fair, Panitch has recently developed his analysis in a somewhat different direction, one which is more complex than simply a “branch-plant” approach that makes much of the location of head office. See Panitch, Leo, “Class and Power in Canada,” Monthly Review 36, 11 (1985), 1–13Google Scholar, which makes a coherent case for his rich dependency approach, developing an argument that incorporates dependency from an angle that does not rely on the “Frank school.” In “terms of the extent of foreign ownership and control over the economy and of Canada's international trade pattern… Canada looks more like belonging in the company of Venezuela or Nigeria” (Ibid., 1). He argues that “the material foundations for a centralized Canadian state simply do not exist.” In Canada, industrial and financial capital have not merged into a unified and concentrated national bourgeoisie to form “finance capital”; rather, “Canada's commercially oriented bourgeoisie… entered into a partnership with American industrial capital in Canada.” This has resulted in the “implantation within the social formation of a powerful fraction of foreign industrial capital on a scale unmatched anywhere in the developed capitalist world” (Ibid., 4–5). Canada has a “neo-colonial relationship” with the United States and “nothing approaching a national bourgeoisie with its own political, ideological and economic unity vis-à-vis other national capitals has emerged” (Ibid., 10–11). This allows Panitch to theorize a dependent relationship with the United States that does not rest on the assumptions of the underdevelopment school. The crux of the case is the weakness in Canada of a national bourgeosie. While this phenomenon has not led to the underdevelopment predicted by the Frank school, it has held important implications for the ability of the state to direct the economy. This is an interesting approach, one that merits detailed examination in a separate paper. It does not, however, detract from the thrust of the argument presented here. Dependency in the sense of the Frank school was intimately bound up with a notion of underdevelopment. This underdevelopment was rooted in several structures of the relationship between the centre and the periphery, all of which have been shown by Marxist critics of dependency to be empirically and theoretically weak.
41 Porter, The Vertical Mosaic, 266.
42 Ibid., 269.
43 Ibid., 269–70.
44 Ibid., 271–72.
45 Ibid., 273.
46 Resnick, “The Maturing of Canadian Capitalism,” 12.
47 Ibid., 17, 22.
48 For a compilation of the various official statistics which attempts to prove just that, see Kellogg, Paul, “Canada as a Principal Economy: A Comparative Critique of the ‘Counter-discourse’ of Political Economy,” paper presented to the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association, McMaster University, Hamilton, 1987.Google Scholar
49 Resnick, “The Maturing of Canadian Capitalism,” 15.
50 This framework is extensively developed in Carroll, William, Corporate Power and Canadian Capitalism (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986).Google Scholar
51 Carroll, “Dependency, Imperialism and the Capitalist Class in Canada,” 31.
52 Ibid., 42–43.
53 Ibid., 25.
54 Ibid., 27, 28.
55 Ibid., 32.
56 Ibid., 35. This conclusion is directly opposite to the one drawn by Panitch (“Class and Power in Canada”). See footnote 40. Has finance capital developed in a more or less “classical” form in Canada, with the oddity of a high degree of head offices being located in the United States (as Carroll argues) or did Canadian banking interests fuse their interests with those of American industrial capital, leading to a “Canadian-exceptionalist” view (as Panitch argues) where indigenous Canadian industrial capital was left out in the cold? As the Marxist critique of Canadian political economy develops, this should prove to be one of the key areas of controversy.
57 Ibid., 35.
58 Friedman, Jonathan, “Crisis in Theory and Transformations of the World Economy,” Review 2 (1978), 143.Google Scholar
59 Warren, Bill, Imperialism, Pioneer of Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1980), 176.Google Scholar
60 Carroll, “Dependency, Imperialism, and the Capitalist Class in Canada,” 37.
61 Bukharin, Nikolai, Imperialism and World Economy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1973), 157.Google Scholar
62 Some recent scholarship has begun to reverse this trend. See, for example: Haynes, Mike, Nikolai Bukharin and the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism (Kent, UK: Croom Helm, 1985)Google Scholar; Coates, K., The Case of Nikolai Bukharin (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1978)Google Scholar; Cohen, Stephen F., Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1975)Google Scholar; and Lewin, M., Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debates (London: Pluto Press, 1974).Google Scholar
63 Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, 12.
64 Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, 17.
65 Cited in Trotsky, Leon, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), 291.Google Scholar
66 Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, 24–26.
67 Ibid., 126, 127.
68 See especially Cliff, Tony, State Capitalism in Russia (London: Pluto Press, 1974).Google Scholar Cliff argues on this basis that the Soviet Union is best understood as bureaucratic state capitalist. For a recent and iconoclastic examination of perestroika from this perspective see Harman, Chris and Zebrowski, Andy, “Glasnost—Before the Storm,” International Socialism 2 (1988), 3–54.Google Scholar International arms competition has another related impact on national economies which we will be unable to develop here. Briefly, three related concepts must be linked very closely—state-capitalism, world economy and the permanent arms economy. One of the principal thrusts behind the expansion of the state sector has been the competition between national-capitals which at a certain point becomes military competition. This military/state sector in turn becomes an economic factor in its own right, accelerating the very forces that brought it to birth—the concentration and centralization of capital. This argument is developed in the international context by Harman, Chris in Explaining the Crisis (London: Bookmarks, 1984).Google ScholarMcNally, David has developed its implications in the Canadian context in a provocative paper, “The Permanent Arms Economy and the Crisis of Canadian Capitalism,” paper prepared for the 1976 convention of the International Socialists, Toronto, 1976.Google Scholar
69 Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, 26.
70 Ibid., 61–62.
71 Ibid., 73.
72 This line of argument has been superbly developed by Harris, Nigel in Of Bread and Guns: The World Economy in Crisis (Markham: Penguin, 1973)Google Scholar which develops the general argument that the great levelling effect of the world market has overrun the ability of nation-states—communist or non-communist—to counter the pressures towards homogenization and, therefore, crisis; and The End of the Third World (Markham: Penguin, 1987) which develops the implications of this approach for dependency theories of the Third World and its development prospects.
* Ken McRoberts and Leo Panitch of the Department of Political Science, York University, and George Perlin and Grant Amyot of the Department of Political Studies, Queen's University, may not agree with everything in this article; but they were all invaluable over the years in helping these ideas come to fruition. The comments of the three anonymous reviewers for this Journal were extremely useful. The completion of this article was made possible by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
The enduring relevance of Rosa Luxemburg’s
The Accumulation of Capital
https://cbtansel.net/publication/2016-jird/2016-jird.pdf
Andreas Bieler, Sümercan Bozkurt, Max Crook, Peter S. Cruttenden,
Ertan Erol, Adam David Morton, Cemal Burak Tansel and
Elif Uzgören
School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham
NG7 2RD, UK.
First published in 1913, The Accumulation of Capital represents Rosa Luxemburg’s
quintessential contribution to Marxism and an exceptional, yet equally controversial, ‘modification’ of Marx’s original scheme of accumulation. Built on a cordial critique of Marx’s
model of expanded reproduction, Luxemburg’s intervention offers not only a new framework to study capitalist economic development, but also a historical and political compass
with which the expansion of capitalist social relations through colonialism and imperialism
can be expounded. To celebrate the centenary anniversary of the book in 2013, we assess the enduring relevance of key themes developed by Luxemburg in their conceptual implications, but also in their relevance to understanding dynamics within contemporary capitalism.
The first part of the article engages with Luxemburg’s theoretical contribution to the analysis of capitalist expansion with reference to the transformation of peripheral spaces. The second part briefly discusses how the book can be utilised as a starting point to examine the characteristics of today’s crisis-ridden global capitalism. We conclude by highlighting a number of contentious points that challenge Luxemburg’s account, but ultimately claim that
The Accumulation of Capital is still an invaluable resource for those who are interested in
critically examining international political economy and geopolitics.
Journal of International Relations and Development (2016) 19, 420–447.
doi:10.1057/jird.2014.18; published online 19 September 2014
Keywords: capital accumulation; capitalism; geography; peripheral space; Rosa
Luxemburg; uneven developmen
The Accumulation of Capital
https://cbtansel.net/publication/2016-jird/2016-jird.pdf
Andreas Bieler, Sümercan Bozkurt, Max Crook, Peter S. Cruttenden,
Ertan Erol, Adam David Morton, Cemal Burak Tansel and
Elif Uzgören
School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham
NG7 2RD, UK.
First published in 1913, The Accumulation of Capital represents Rosa Luxemburg’s
quintessential contribution to Marxism and an exceptional, yet equally controversial, ‘modification’ of Marx’s original scheme of accumulation. Built on a cordial critique of Marx’s
model of expanded reproduction, Luxemburg’s intervention offers not only a new framework to study capitalist economic development, but also a historical and political compass
with which the expansion of capitalist social relations through colonialism and imperialism
can be expounded. To celebrate the centenary anniversary of the book in 2013, we assess the enduring relevance of key themes developed by Luxemburg in their conceptual implications, but also in their relevance to understanding dynamics within contemporary capitalism.
The first part of the article engages with Luxemburg’s theoretical contribution to the analysis of capitalist expansion with reference to the transformation of peripheral spaces. The second part briefly discusses how the book can be utilised as a starting point to examine the characteristics of today’s crisis-ridden global capitalism. We conclude by highlighting a number of contentious points that challenge Luxemburg’s account, but ultimately claim that
The Accumulation of Capital is still an invaluable resource for those who are interested in
critically examining international political economy and geopolitics.
Journal of International Relations and Development (2016) 19, 420–447.
doi:10.1057/jird.2014.18; published online 19 September 2014
Keywords: capital accumulation; capitalism; geography; peripheral space; Rosa
Luxemburg; uneven developmen
Lenin and Bukharin on imperialism
Imperialism since Lenin and Bukharin
But does Lenin and Bukharin’s approach help us to understand the modern world? After World War II, the structure of global politics changed dramatically. Before the war, the world was economically and politically multipolar. After the war it remained economically multipolar but became politically bipolar, with the formation of two rival global military alliances, one dominated by the United States, the other by the Soviet Union. While nominally socialist, the USSR was by this time ruled by a bureaucratic elite that exploited the majority of the population in order to compete with the West for power and influence. The stage was set for the Cold War. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union took over most of Eastern Europe (initially with the agreement of their wartime Western allies) and installed regimes modeled on its own, with one-party states that controlled in each case most of the economy. While state and capital never fully merged in most of the capitalist world, they did so in the Soviet bloc for several decades.11
But does Lenin and Bukharin’s approach help us to understand the modern world? After World War II, the structure of global politics changed dramatically. Before the war, the world was economically and politically multipolar. After the war it remained economically multipolar but became politically bipolar, with the formation of two rival global military alliances, one dominated by the United States, the other by the Soviet Union. While nominally socialist, the USSR was by this time ruled by a bureaucratic elite that exploited the majority of the population in order to compete with the West for power and influence. The stage was set for the Cold War. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union took over most of Eastern Europe (initially with the agreement of their wartime Western allies) and installed regimes modeled on its own, with one-party states that controlled in each case most of the economy. While state and capital never fully merged in most of the capitalist world, they did so in the Soviet bloc for several decades.11
It would be hard to deny that this was a period of intense interimperialist rivalry. Wars continued on the periphery resulting in millions of deaths, and the two superpowers engaged in a massive arms race, but there was no war between the USA and the USSR, although they came extremely close at the time of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and on several other occasions.12 But with the Eastern European revolutions of 1989 and the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union itself, the structure of the global system changed again.
The end of the Cold War took place at the same time as the decisive US victory in the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq, and was supposed to usher in a “new world order” of international stability, in which military conflict would decline, and we would all receive the benefits of a massive “peace dividend.” But despite a mood of triumphalism among US imperial strategists and propagandists in the early 1990s, the peace dividend never materialized because the US ruling class found itself almost immediately faced with new challenges.
For the United States, one positive consequence of the Cold War was that it gave Washington political dominance over the major capitalist countries in Europe and Asia, since they depended on the US military for their security. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Western Europe’s military dependency on the US decreased at the same time as its economic and political integration accelerated. US planners viewed this as a potential medium-term threat to continued American global dominance. In the mid-1990s, some European countries began floating the idea of a European Defense Force that could act independently of the US-dominated North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which had been formed to oppose the USSR and now seemed to have little reason for its existence. US policy makers were also concerned about the possibility of a German-Russian strategic alliance, as well as the emergence of China as a major economic and military power that might begin to replace the US as the dominant power in Asia.
The Clinton administration responded to these challenges both economically and militarily. It pushed through policies of economic globalization designed to bind the other major powers into relations of dependency on the US in the World Trade Organization. Simultaneously it followed a policy of strengthening and expanding NATO in order to maintain the US presence in Europe and weaken Russia. This culminated with military interventions in the former Yugoslavia, intended to maintain European dependence on US armed power.
In the 1990s, US strategists from both sides of the political aisle began to look for ways in which Washington could use its enormous military power to keep its main rivals in check. On the right, the most influential group was a neoconservative think-tank named the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), several of whose members became prominent figures in the George W. Bush administration. In a report issued in September 2000, PNAC outlines the key strategic goal of “maintaining global US pre-eminence . . . and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests.” Key to achieving this goal, according to the report, was seizing control of the Persian Gulf region. “While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”13 Regime change in Iraq would, it was assumed, not only give the United States control over the second largest oil reserves in the world but also significant leverage over its main rivals, particularly Europe and China, both highly dependent on Middle Eastern oil.
This was not just the fantasy of neoconservative extremists. By the end of the 1990s, there was bipartisan consensus that Saddam’s government needed to be removed, and it had become official US policy. Shortly after the PNAC report of September 2000, the bipartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies issued a report on the geopolitics of energy that pointed to a “fundamental contradiction” between the need to modernize Iraq’s oil infrastructure in order to increase production to meet growing world energy demand and continued sanctions.14 But if the sanctions were lifted while the Iraqi regime remained in power, then the chief beneficiaries would be France and Russia, which had negotiated major oil concessions with Saddam.
Underlying this immediate concern were continuing imperial rivalries with other major powers, driven by the same intersecting logics of economic and military competition analyzed by Lenin and Bukharin in different geopolitical circumstances ninety years earlier. None of the other powers could threaten Washington’s hegemony on a global level, but they could erode US dominance in specific areas. The long-term goal of US imperialism was to maintain its control of Middle East oil—first established after World War II—by shoring up friendly governments in the area no matter what their records might be on human rights, and by containing and when possible replacing unfriendly ones. It was in fact the Democrat Jimmy Carter who articulated this most clearly in his January 1980 State of the Union address: “An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”15 The so-called “Carter Doctrine” is a reminder that control over what a 1945 State Department memorandum to President Harry Truman had described as “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest material prizes in world history,”16 was always a bipartisan project.
When the Bush administration came to office in 2001, however, the goal of regime change in Iraq was not immediately achievable, since there was insufficient domestic support for an outright invasion. The PNAC report had bluntly noted in the previous year that what was needed to implement such a policy was “some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”17 The attacks of 9/11 thus provided the Bush administration with exactly the opportunity it needed to pursue an agenda that it had already decided on. As Gilbert Achcar puts it: “September 11, 2001 came as a terrific windfall for the Bush administration. . . . The spectacular blow struck by Islamic fundamentalists, former US allies who had become its sworn enemies, created such a huge political trauma in the United States that the Bush administration thought it was possible at last, for the first time, to break once and for all with the ‘Vietnam syndrome’ and return to the unbridled military interventionism of the first Cold War decades.”18
The important point to note is that while there were tactical differences between the administration and some other sections of the political establishment about how best to pursue the agenda, there was near unanimity on the goal itself. The shift to a much more aggressive and unilateralist foreign policy was not the result of a neoconservative coup but a consequence of radically new circumstances providing US imperialism with the opportunity to solve its problems in a new way.
Some in the Bush administration wanted to attack Iraq immediately, but for political reasons it was decided that an invasion of Afghanistan was politically more feasible and could be a stepping stone towards the goal of removing Saddam Hussein. It had the additional benefit of allowing Washington to set up a string of military bases in Central Asia, thus increasing its control over Caspian oil and gas, and giving it greater leverage against both Russia and China.
Once the operation in Afghanistan seemed to have been completed, the Bush administration turned its attention to Iraq, with support from nearly all the leading figures in the Democratic Party. The conflicts with France, Germany, Russia, and China in the buildup to the invasion revealed the key rivalries between the major powers that were at the root of US policy. The war on Iraq was supposed to assert US dominance not just over the Middle East but over these economic and military rivals too. The goal was to remove a regime hostile to US interests, to gain control over Iraqi oil, thereby increasing US leverage over Europe and China, and to use Iraq as a base to reshape the entire Middle East along lines congenial to Washington.
In an interview on BBC television, General Jay Garner, former head of the Iraq occupation authority, described Washington’s long-term vision of Iraq as a political and military base, modeled on America’s control of the Pacific in the early twentieth century.
We used the Philippines. And the Philippines, for the lack of a better term, it was in essence a coaling station for the navy. And it allowed the US navy to maintain presence in the Pacific. They maintained great presence in the Pacific.I think . . . we should look right now at Iraq as our coaling station in the Middle East, where we have some presence there and it gives a settling effect there, and it also gives us a strategic advantage there, and I think we ought to just accept that and take that for a period of time, as long as the Iraqi people are willing to allow us to be guests in their country.19
This interview reveals some of the continuities of current policy with the long history of US imperialism. But the world that US policy has brought about over the past few decades has created new problems for US imperialism. The occupation of Iraq first bogged down the US militarily while at the same time removing Iran’s biggest rival in the region, leading in turn to an intensification of Washington’s confrontation with Tehran.
Even more importantly, while Washington has been largely successful in reintegrating the countries of Western Europe into a US-dominated international framework since the end of the Cold War, the same is not true for Russia (which is still a major military power, with thousands of nuclear missiles) or China (which is a rising economic and military power). Indeed US policy makers are obsessed by the rise of China and how they can prevent it from becoming a major challenger to US power on a regional or even a global level. The US used 9/11 to set up military bases in central Asia. In response, Russia and China formed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in an effort to maneuver the United States out of the region. They were successful in pushing it out of Uzbekistan, with Russia and China supporting the Uzbek regime. That is an illustration of a process unfolding on a much larger scale in which the major centers of economic and military power in the world continue to maneuver against each other for advantage. None of them are prepared to stand out against the United States directly because the costs are too high, but the process illustrates the fragmentation and instability of the global system.
The shift to a much more aggressive and unilateralist foreign policy by the Bush administration following 9/11 was not the result of neoconservatives hijacking the government,20 but a consequence of radically new circumstances providing US imperialism with the opportunity to solve its problems in a new way. For that reason, little changed when Barack Obama replaced Bush as president, as the conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat pointed out in 2011:
For those with eyes to see, the daylight between the foreign policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama has been shrinking ever since the current president took the oath of office. But last week made it official: When the story of America’s post-9/11 wars is written, historians will be obliged to assess the two administrations together, and pass judgment on the Bush-Obama era.21
This is not exactly what most of Obama’s supporters had in mind when they voted for him in 2008, but two-and-a-half years later, the record speaks for itself. Troops were eventually withdrawn from Iraq in accordance with a plan begun under Bush, but the war in Afghanistan was expanded, with regular attacks across the border into neighboring Pakistan and high numbers of civilian deaths, a secret bombing campaign in Yemen exposed by Wikileaks, an open bombing campaign against Libya, and saber rattling against Iran. Obama also announced a “pivot to Asia” to challenge China’s growing power and greatly increased the US military presence in Africa. US imperialism did not end when George Bush left office.
These developments confirmed Lenin’s observation that imperialism is not simply a policy, but something built into the fabric of developed capitalism, as economic competition gives rise to geopolitical competition and military intervention. The form of that competition can change over time, but so long as capitalism exists, so will imperialism. That is why—apart from minor differences—both major political parties in the United States pursue the same foreign policy agenda.
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