Chicxulub Note: This article by Anthony Boynton is a slightly edited and expanded version of one of his posts on the Marxmail list (https://groups.io/g/marxmail) in a conversation that began when one regular contributor, Marv Gandal, posted 'The Nation: Was the Collapse of US-Russia Relations Inevitable?' Marv started out by writing, 'Those who continue to insist that Russia is an imperialist power will have to contend with an article in the current Nation by Thomas Graham.' The conversation included a debate about Russian imperialism, but also back and forth about Lenin’s pamphlet on imperialism. Here Anthony defends Lenin’s basic insight on imperialism in the epoch of developed capitalism, while noting its limitations.
21st Century Imperialism
Lenin’s well-known pamphlet, “Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism” (written in 1916, published in 1917) has some serious weaknesses, most of which have to do with the fact that is written with the aim of publishing it in Czarist Russia during World War I which meant passing through the very heavy handed censorship of the reactionary Russian imperialist state. Consequently, Lenin said nothing that would directly criticize the Russian empire or its war aims in that pamphlet.
This was not its only limitation. “Imperialism” was limited also by its reliance both on the theoretical framework and empirical findings of the anti-imperialist “social-liberal” J. A. Hobson in his “Imperialism, A Study” (1902), and on the theory of finance capital put forward by the Austrian Social Democrat Rudolf Hilferding in a work of the same name (1910), and finally because Lenin intended the pamphlet as a polemic against the German Social-Democrat Karl Kautsky's theory of an “ultra-imperalism” that could peacefully resolve inter-imperialist conflict. Finally, though drafted in 1916, any further elaboration may have been prevented by the practical exigencies of the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917.
The result was a work that can be seen in three parts. The first part is a fairly well-developed section on the economics of imperialism based on the then indirect dominance of the capitalist mode of production on the world scale in the form of the export of capital, this however seen mainly in its financial form, and therefore as “parasitic”. The second part in contrast portrays a world geopolitically divided into states, Lenin however noting that vast colonial territories were also concentrated in the hands of a few Western European metropolitan capitalist powers, so the world appeared much less “divided” that it does today. This colonial political concentration in turn was the real basis for the indirect world domination of the capitalist mode of production over a century ago, but Lenin never explicitly notes this.
The third part falls well short of a theoretical explanation for the growing parasitism of capitalism, that would relate this growing parasitism to a concept of an era of capitalist decay. It leaves off instead with an intriguing passage stating that it is a mistake to conclude that “decay” means that capitalism ceases to grow, in fact “capitalism grows more than ever” in this era.
Lenin’s pamphlet is often misunderstood, partly as the result of those weaknesses, and partly as the result of the deification of Lenin by the Third International and the tendencies that derive themselves from it. Marv alluded to this when he wrote that Lenin’s pamphlet is “the standard text for all tendencies claiming descent from the Third International.”
Lenin avoided writing about the military and political aspects of imperialism in that pamphlet, and he especially avoided any discussion of pre-capitalist forms of imperialism because either topic would have drawn the wrath of the Russian Imperialist censors, but not because Lenin was unaware of them or did not include them in his political thinking and program.
Let’s start with pre-capitalist forms of imperialism. The two basic pre-capitalist forms of imperialism were generally characterized by territorial conquest. In the first form, the aim of conquest was to acquire a continuing flow of tribute from the conquered territory. Tribute could take the form of enslaved people, products produced by the people who lived in the territory (irrespective of the mode of production), or later, money. In the second form, merchant capitalists allied with absolutist monarchies in conquering territories to gain monopoly commercial arbitrage privileges for imports from and exports to the conquered territory.
Neither of these forms have ever disappeared, instead they have been subsumed within the new capitalist form of imperialism which is characterized by direct non-financial and financial investments in countries outside the boundaries of the imperialist power.
The two pre-capitalist forms of imperialism depended directly on the military power of a state. No Roman legions, no Roman empire. No British fleet, no British empire. No Russian army, no Russian Empire. No Tennessee militia, no USA west of the Appalachians.
The new form of imperialism contains within it both older forms of imperialism although they have withered in importance. Tribute has now been divided into two streams, taxes, and land rent. When the United States conquered Puerto Rico and the Philippines, the state gained a stream of taxes, and American “investors” gained rents.
Clearly, the new form also depends as well directly upon the military power of states, even if it is disguised or hiding behind a few fig leafs like international laws and treaties.
The new form of imperialism’s emergence can be dated from three key events in the 19th century: the Napoleonic Wars, their direct offspring the Latin American Wars of Independence, and the failure of European and US imperialism to conquer Japan and China.
Following its humiliation at the hands of the British colonists in North America and their French allies, the British Parliamentary monarchy became pragmatic. It advocated a return to Bourbon monarchy in revolutionary France, but independence for the colonies of the Spanish Bourbons in the Americas. Britain materially aided the independence struggle from Colombia to Argentina.
Of course in China, the British fought three wars to force the Chinese to at least buy something from England. Since the English had nothing worth buying, they forced the Chinese to buy opium.
The inability to politically or militarily to conquer these two vast areas of the planet did not stop British mercantile capital from trying to dominate them in other ways. Trade was followed by loans, both were followed by direct investments, and all were protected by treaties. The rising capitalists of other countries soon joined the fray.
The combination of the three forms of imperialism continued throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century. Japan’s conquest of Korea is a perfect example, and the temporary conquests of Japan, Italy and Germany leading up to and continuing into the second world war offer many more. And of course, the old conquistador empires of Britain and France continued until well after the Second World War.
The Russian empire, rather than being transformed into a federation of independent and equal socialist Republics, was instead transformed into Stalin’s grotesque parody of Czarism. And when it collapsed, the KGB (now reborn with new initials) came along to try to revive the old Czarist form of empire under the leadership of Vladimir the Mad and Would-Be-Czar of all the Russias.
Lenin wrote many, many polemics against Russian imperialism, mostly in his writing against Great Russian chauvinism and for the rights of Poland and Ukraine to secede from the empire. Many of those polemics were directed against members of his own party who erroneously or opportunistically sided with Czarism against the national self-determination of the peoples imprisoned within the Russian empire.
Here are two good examples, both are well worth reading:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/dec/12a.htm
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/jul/x01.htm
Finally, it is worth noting that Lenin’s famous pamphlet is still basically true but incomplete. Capitalism does spawn concentration of capital and monopolies, it does lead to a falling rate of profit, those tendencies do lead to the export of capital, and those tendencies do lead to competition among capitalist states. The main theoretical omissions involve the persistence of land and tax tribute, and monopolization of commercial (“mercantile”) arbitrage, the two respective bases of the two pre-capitalist forms of imperialism already indicated above. Both are non-productive social relations in themselves. These, far from disappearing with their “real subsumption” to capitalist production in the 19th century, now “grow more than ever”, precisely describing the silhouette of capitalist decay today. The omission from Lenin's pamphlet of tribute and commercial arbitrage are artifacts inherited from Marx who was intent upon countering “Smithian” commercial notions of capitalist production.
Here is a paragraph from that pamphlet’s conclusion:
“Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations—all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism. More and more prominently there emerges, as one of the tendencies of imperialism, the creation of the “rentier state”, the usurer state, in which the bourgeoisie to an ever-increasing degree lives on the proceeds of capital exports and by “clipping coupons”. It would be a mistake to believe that this tendency to decay precludes the rapid growth of capitalism. It does not. In the epoch of imperialism, certain branches of industry, certain strata of the bourgeoisie and certain countries betray, to a greater or lesser degree, now one and now another of these tendencies. On the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before; but this growth is not only becoming more and more uneven in general, its unevenness also manifests itself, in particular, in the decay of the countries which are richest in capital (Britain).”
It could have been written yesterday. I recommend that comrades reread the whole pamphlet and pay special attention to the conclusion.