http://www.webcom.com/wildcat/NWORhetoricReality.html New World Order: The Rhetoric and the Reality Radical Chains
... The differences between the powers are trivial compared with the rivalries which led to the first and second world wars and the cold war. At the time of writing, the policy differences between the EC countries on Yugoslavia usually exceed the differences between any one of them and the USA. Every year, Japan and the USA reach the brink of a "trade war"; every year, they call it off. Their imperialist rivalries amount to disagreements about how many third world proletarians they should collectively slaughter. They all agree on the need for simmering ethnic conflicts to divide the proletariat and create millions of desperate dispossessed, willing to work for peanuts. The proletariat is currently so supine it doesn't take the kind of inter-bloc conflict which characterised international relations for the two hundred years up till 1989 to keep it down. As we gradually became aware during the late eighties (see Wildcat 12), capitalism had replaced its supposedly inexorable war drive with a remarkable ability to broker a period of relative world peace.
Marx and Engels had little to say on the subject of Imperialism. Their remarks on colonialism and foreign trade, particularly the section on counter-tendencies to the tendency of the Falling Rate of Profit, have been used by their epigones to give authority to their own investigations, and blown up out of proportion (Capital Volume 3 (1) pp 344-347). These three pages were used to justify anti-Imperialism, but all they basically say is that a national capital tries to avoid the crisis caused by the Falling Rate of Profit, which in turn is caused by the increase in the ratio of constant to variable capital, of machinery to workers, by investing in foreign countries. The Falling Rate of Profit is fully explained in (1), 13, p318. Briefly, capitalists are forced by competition to produce cheaper goods by increasing the ratio of machinery to workers. Because labour is the only source of value, the rate of profit is given by dividing the proportion of living labour in the product by the proportion of dead labour, or machinery. This rate must fall as the proportion of machinery rises.
Capital invested "at home", in production for foreign trade, can also yield a higher rate of profit
"because it competes with commodities produced by other countries with less developed production facilities, so that the more advanced country sells its goods above their value".
This enables the more advanced country to dominate the less advanced, by making more profit. Capital invested directly in production in the colonies also produces more profit:
"the reason why this can yield higher rates of profit is that the profit rate is generally higher there on account of the lower degree of development, and so too is the exploitation of labour, through the use of slaves and coolies, etc."
What this hastily-written passage means is that a higher rate of profit is obtainable in countries where exploitation is less developed, where more variable capital (labour) is required to turn out a given quantum of value from a given unit of constant capital (machinery).
Marx doesn't make too much of this counter-tendency to the Falling Rate of Profit. He adds that though the more advanced country "receives more labour in exchange for less", it is all "pocketed by a particular class, just as in the exchange between labour and capital in general".
Both foreign trade and capital export are just particular examples of capitalism in general. They are not qualitatively different from what capital does within its "home" country. The "super-profits" of anti-Imperialist theory are, in other words, simply larger quantities of ordinary profits. Taking over competitors with less developed production facilities by destroying them by selling cheaper goods, and taking advantage of these less developed facilities to make more profit, is part of capital's daily life. Moralistic whining about the unfairness of Imperialism, as opposed to ordinary capitalism, is an attempt to confuse us about the nature of the beast. This is not to deny the far worse conditions imposed on the colonies compared to the metropoles. The enslavement of Africans was qualitatively worse than the forced deportations of the English, Scots and Irish poor, but if a capitalist power is more savage and parasitic abroad than it is at home, that is only because the class struggle at home has restrained it. If metropolitan workers have been "bribed", that is because they have forced the bosses to bribe them.
Theorists of Imperialism may have misunderstood Marxist economics, but they genuinely tried to base their positions on his methodology. In The German Ideology (1846), Marx outlined the materialist conception of history, the premises of which are:
"the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way." (2)
But Marx was no head-banging empiricist. He was also a poet:
"At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or - what is but a legal expression for the same thing - with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters ... new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself" (3).
The more radical elements within the Second International had good organisational and political reasons to see themselves as the successors of Marx and Engels. Around the turn of the century, various debates took place among these radical social democrats about Imperialism and Nationalism. The most famous of these is V. I. Lenin.
Lenin argued that Imperialism was in part a conscious strategy to buy off the working classes in the Imperialist countries. His evidence consists of one quote from arch-imperialist Cecil Rhodes, (4) p93, and one from Engels to the effect that the workers of England "merrily share the feast" of its colonies. What would these severe Victorians say if they could see the workers of England today in its Indian restaurants? From Rhodes' opinion that Imperialism would help avoid revolution in Britain, Lenin derived his theory of the Labour Aristocracy, which shows his moralism at its crudest. His condemnation of the "economic parasitism" by means of which the English ruling class "bribe the lower classes into acquiescence" is completely antithetical to materialism, as are his complaints that the "Imperialist" countries oppress the weaker ones.
The ruling class in all countries pay workers as much as they think they have to, calculated from:
a) the need for workers to stay alive and, to a greater or lesser degree, healthy,
b) the shortage or otherwise of workers capable of doing the job, and
c) the class struggle.
Where does a wage rise gained by struggle end and a bribe begin? Lenin's position implies that British workers should deduce what proportion of their pay checks are the proceeds of the exploitation of the colonies, and hand that proportion back to their employers, declaring their refusal to be bribed.
Lenin shored up his views with off-hand remarks by Marx and Engels, ignoring the better worked-out passages which can be used to develop an analysis of the world economy without the concept of Imperialism, as Geoff Kay does in Development and Underdevelopment (5).
Lenin's position was not a mistake. The Labour Aristocracy theory had the political purpose of enabling the Bolsheviks to argue for the workers in the colonies to form united fronts with their local ruling classes against Imperialism. This in turn had the aim of dividing the working class internationally, and turning it into cannon fodder for capitalist war.
It would be simplistic to write off the Bolsheviks as nothing but defenders of capitalism. Another member of the Bolshevik party, Nikolai Bukharin, presented a theory of Imperialism which paid lip-service to the Labour Aristocracy position, but placed more emphasis on the necessity for revolution. The reasoning behind Bukharin's theory was simple. If it could be shown that capitalism was inevitably divided into warmongering states, that hence the horrors of the first world war were going to be repeated until capitalism was overthrown, this would constitute a convincing case for revolution.
In Imperialism and World Economy (6), following the dialectical method outlined in Marx's Preface(3), Bukharin tried to show a contradiction between nation states and international capitalism. Capitalism has created the world economy, the material basis of communism, but "national economies" and "state capitalist trusts" contradict this, leading to Imperialism and war. Nation states were the "forms" which helped develop the "forces of production", but now they are "fetters" on their further development. Imperialism and World Economy was intended to show that Imperialism is an inevitable stage of capitalism, in order to refute the possibility of a peaceful solution to the first world war. This was in turn necessary in order to oppose the "centrists" among social democracy, who were trying to sit on the fence on the question of the necessity of a proletarian revolution to end the war. The more radical socialists needed a dialectical contradiction between nations and the world economy to reject the theory of ultra-Imperialism, put forward by the leading centrist, Karl Kautsky. Like Lenin, Bukharin distorted Kautsky's theory. They both claimed that Kautsky had completely abandoned Marxism, and now believed that capitalism could reform itself, eliminating its nasty bits, and evolve into a peaceful new world order. Kautsky actually said:
"From the purely economic standpoint, therefore, it is not excluded that capitalism may live through another new phase, the transference of the policy of cartels to foreign policy, a phase of ultra-Imperialism, which of course we must fight against just as energetically as we fought Imperialism. Its dangers would lie in a different direction, not in that of the armaments race and the threat to world peace" (7), p88.
We need hardly add which of the two theories, Imperialism and ultra-Imperialism, has best stood the test of time.
Bukharin attempted to deal with ultra-Imperialism:
"The development of world capitalism leads, on the one hand, to an internationalisation of economic life, and, on the other, to the levelling of economic differences, - and, to an infinitely greater degree, the same process of economic development intensifies the tendency to 'nationalise' capitalist interests, to form narrow 'national' groups armed to the teeth and ready to hurl themselves at one another at any moment" (6), pp 106-107.
This is because, he said, state capitalism is the capitalism of existing, national states. Though the economy is increasingly international, "Acquisition, however, assumes the character of 'national' (state) acquisition where the beneficiaries are huge state companies of the bourgeoisie of finance capital" (6), p106.
Considering how central it is to his theory, he is obliged to explain what he means by "national", which he put in inverted commas throughout the book. The reason he did so is clear from the footnote on p80 which is the only place he tried to explain this crucial concept.
"When we speak of 'national' capital, 'national' economy, we have in mind here as elsewhere, not the element of nationality in the strict sense of the word, but the territorial state conception of economic life."
What is clear is that he cannot define what nations are. This weakens his whole thesis, which depends on the contradiction between nations and world economy. Bukharin assumed that capital is divided into particular "narrow 'national' groups" when this is what he had to prove in order to hold the line against ultra-Imperialism. Capitalism has proved itself more flexible than many of its critics realised. In Bukharin's time, it was obligatory to try to show capitalism is an inherently irrational system, that the bourgeoisie are driven, against their will, to do all sorts of wicked things by the genie they have unleashed but cannot control. In contrast, socialism will be a planned social system. Today, it is almost axiomatic that "planned socialism" was just another form of capitalism. We could add that capitalism is not unplanned, and that the capitalist class is not driven to make war; on the contrary, war is part of the plan.
Is there any reason why single capitalist firms should be tied to one state? It is possible for capitalism to dissolve particular national states and replace them with larger entities, such as the European Community. Is there any limit to the size of such entities, and does there have to be more than one? Bukharin answered yes, but didn't successfully explain why.
Rosa Luxemburg's most important contribution to the debate on Imperialism was her opposition to the idea that Imperialism could be opposed by supporting national liberation struggles. Whereas Lenin's guilt-trip about how "we Russians" (and by implication, we British, we French, etc.) have no choice but to support national struggles against "our" Imperialist ruling class (9) has justified support for numerous anti-imperialist wars, Luxemburg's arguments, based on the experience of the Polish working class in its struggle against "its" poor oppressed national bourgeoisie, have been largely forgotten.
In Foreword to the Anthology (1905)(8), for example, she tried to show where Marx's support for some national struggles was wrong by looking at the facts of Poland's integration into the Russian Empire (p95). As Russia, "the prison-house of nations", incorporated Poland, it tended to unite the working class of Russia and Poland. On the other hand, Polish nationalism acted against that unity during the Russian revolution of 1905. Luxemburg rejected "eternal truths" like support for national liberation in favour of an empirical, case-by-case approach.
Her arguments were seriously debated at the time, and many social democrats, including a significant section of the Bolsheviks, supported her views against Lenin's "right of nations to self-determination". Eventually Lenin's views won the day, and the Communist International supported national liberation movements and thus the defeat of the working class in China, Germany, etc., etc.. The Russian Revolution did not help end the first world war. By taking out one of the powers on the side that was just beginning to gain the upper hand, it prolonged the war. Equalising the two sides enabled Germany and Austria/Hungary to concentrate on the Western Front. Similarly, anti-Imperialism supports the "oppressed", i.e. weaker, side, prolonging the war.
The most obvious reason for the success of Lenin's views was the power of the Bolshevik state. It had both the means and very good reasons for supporting national liberation struggles. Another reason for the weakness of opposition to Lenin's liberal moralism was that his opponents were themselves not unafflicted by the same mental paralysis.
For example, Luxemburg defended the proletariat as the true defender of democracy against Absolutism, and even as the bearer of Western Civilisation against Tsarist barbarism, a position which, if defended consistently, might have had serious consequences. Her commitment to democracy seriously weakened Luxemburg's opposition to the idea of national self-determination. Rather than simply showing that nationalism is the enemy of the working class, she claimed that the bourgeoisie distorts or makes meaningless the idea of nationalism. This was part of the weakest but most famous argument against Lenin: national liberation is impossible because of the domination of the planet by Imperialism. (See The National Question and Autonomy in (8), pp 130-131). Until this happened, she maintained, there was a case for supporting certain national movements in the 19th century. We reject nationalism as anti-working class not because it's impossible, not because the bourgeoisie distorts or betrays it, but because it has always tied the proletariat to its class enemy and divided it amongst itself: the workers have no country.
These confusions were not the result of revisionism corroding the legacy of Marx and Engels. The heroic legends of the revolutionary bourgeoisie fearlessly slaying the dragons of feudalism and developing the productive forces were told better by Marx than anyone else. With such a starting point, Marx's followers were bound to end up bickering about which faction of capitalism was more progressive, at what date capitalism had achieved its historic mission, and so on.
What is Imperialism?
In this section, we briefly consider some of the most important definitions of Imperialism to see whether it has ever been a useful concept.
"The policy of finance capital pursues a threefold aim: first, the creation of the largest possible economic territory which, secondly, must be protected against foreign competition by tariff walls, and thus, thirdly, must become an area of exploitation for the national monopoly companies"
Hilferding, Finance Capital, cited in (6) p107.
Hilferding's definition, on which most of his socialist contemporaries depend, depends in turn on the concept of nation states. To see that invisible but concrete Thing, Capital, moving around the world in search of profits, using nation states to divide the exploited, would require a level of abstraction similar to that achieved by Marx in Capital. Instead, he defines Imperialism in terms of national monopolies exporting Capital and commodities. In other words, nations are more basic than capitalism, and Imperialism is their policy. However, Imperialism was not always carried out by nations. India and Indonesia were founded by companies.
As we saw with Bukharin, nations are hard to define. Hilferding's definition can only be understood as the policy of nation states, which are particular coalitions of capitalist groups with sovereignty (the monopoly of violence) over a particular acreage of the earth's surface. We do not deny that these coalitions exist. But we need to address the question of how fundamental these particular formations are, compared to others. Is the bourgeoisie really split into national groups above all others? Unless it is, Hilferding's definition of Imperialism falls to the ground.
Almost every country is more powerful than others, and tries to dominate its neighbours, apparently ignorant of Marx's advice that a nation which oppresses another can never itself be free. Even the smallest countries harbour designs on bits of their neighbours' territory. "Imperialism means the tendency of nations to dominate others" leads to the view that they are all Imperialist, which would render the term meaningless.
Communists sometimes define Imperialism as the current "stage" which International Capitalism is passing through. Imperialism is synonymous with Decadence. This is the phase of capitalism when it is no longer progressive, when it has completed its historic mission of developing the productive forces to the point when they are high enough to give rise to Communism, the next stage in the forward march of Humanity, when the relations of production are now fetters on the further expansion of those forces, which have now ripened on the tree, and are ready for picking. They have matured in the womb, baked in the oven, and fermented in the brewery.
The most coherent version of Decadence is the view that capitalism created the world economy and thus created the possibility of a world community, something which was never possible before. Having achieved its historic mission, capitalism is now in decline. But this is difficult to put a date on. Capitalism is still developing its domination of the world, and still creating a more and more international proletariat.
During the twenties and thirties, capitalism appeared to be on its last legs. Theorists of Decadence literally thought that capitalism was in an epoch of decay because the forces of production had stopped growing. But after another world war, capitalism gained a new lease of life. It was able after 1945 to develop the productive forces more than ever before. The bombing of Hiroshima was therefore progressive, because they helped develop the forces of production. A really consistent follower of the method of the left communists of the twenties would argue that they had made a mistake, that capitalism turned out still to be progressive after all.
Earlier, in the discussion on Lenin's theory, we alluded to the use of Imperialism as an ideology. At the end of the last century, some of the rulers of the most powerful capitalist states consciously decided to try to tie their working classes to the state by persuading them they had material interests in the conquest of Africa and Asia by the mother country, promoting pride in the imperial power of their homelands, and faith in the superiority of the white man.
Though Kipling soon gave way to the war poets, this strategy had some success. British and French workers, for example, have been fairly saturated in Imperialism for a century or so. This has helped the bourgeoisie to suppress the possibility of revolution by getting them to die by the million for "their" respective nation states. The 1982 Falklands War showed that old-fashioned jingoism is far from dead among Britain's lower orders.
But pernicious and effective though it may be, it has been no more so than any other form of nationalism. Anti-Imperialism, the ideology which tells workers to suppress their class interests in order to help "their" national bourgeoisie win its struggle against Imperialism, has also been highly effective in keeping millions of workers under control in the interests of international capitalism. The defeat of the Vietnamese working class by anti-Imperialism enabled Vietnam to invade Cambodia, whereas the American working class, whose resistance helped end the war in Vietnam, continued to paralyse the warmongering aims of the US ruling class. Although the USA has now overcome its "post-Vietnam syndrome", Vietnam never had one.
It is questionable what role ideology plays in making workers fight for the interests of their masters. Most are less than enthusiastic, and are simply conscripted. But whatever importance we attribute to ideas, Imperialist ideology is no worse than anti-Imperialism. Successful anti-Imperialism becomes Imperialism. This is well illustrated by the example of Germany. The Communist International supported the Nazis in the early twenties on the grounds that they were a national liberation struggle. Germany was an oppressed nation, occupied and looted by French and British Imperialism. The Nazis fought the occupying troops, so the Comintern supported the former, militarily and politically. A decade later, this anti-Imperialist movement had become German Imperialism. Israel was founded in a national struggle against the British Empire. Although Imperialism as an ideology has been useful to the bourgeoisie of certain countries, it has been no more useful than any other form of national chauvinism. Racism is not unique to Europeans, as liberals would have us believe. Outright racial hatred of the "interfering foreign devils" has been central to the attempt to maintain the integrity of the Chinese nation for centuries.
Capitalist organisation is assumed to be based on the nation state. This is why the working class of each country must "first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie", why "the main enemy is at home".
But capitalism preceded nations. The feudal world had no conception of nations because it was ruled by a global religious hierarchy which had no intrinsic territorial limitations. Neither Columbus nor the ruling classes of the ancien regimes had nationalities, nor the Pope, nor the Bourbons, nor the Hapsburgs. These interrelated divinely appointed rulers did not belong to particular bits of the world.
The emergence of nations is explained by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities (10) as the result of three main factors. One is the collapse of religion. According to Anderson, the existential angst caused by the decline of religion partly explains the rise of nationalism as a substitute community. The destruction of communities in general by capitalism partly explains nationalism. Capital has tried to replace the various historic communities it has destroyed with an imagined community, the nation.
Another major factor is the print industry. The Latin market became saturated, and it was economical for printers to create large reading groups based on fusing numerous dialects together into languages. At one time, there was no point at which you could say Dutch ended and German began. Today, there are two distinct languages with a border between them.
But the most interesting factor noted by Anderson is the conscious creation of nationalisms by the ruling class. Old dynasties did not need to be overthrown by Marx's mythical "revolutionary" bourgeoisie in order to develop the forces of production. They just became bourgeois themselves. Japan is a shining example. Pre-national dynasts deliberately promoted nationalism. Anderson gives bucket loads of empirical examples to support his argument - the Romanovs, the Hapsburgs, Chulalongkorn - all promoted "official nationalism" to preserve their power over labour.
Nineteenth century nationalisms became models. Since 1918, these models have been adapted by bourgeois students from around the world at European Universities, and taken "home" to create nations. Some of these creations are more obviously arbitrary than others. Anderson points out that Indonesia "does not remotely correspond to any precolonial domain", and goes on to describe its enormous variety of peoples, cultures, languages and religions, how the people at one end have far more in common with their neighbours across the national frontier than with their fellow "Indonesians", and how its shape is determined by the last Dutch conquests (10), p110.
The bourgeoisie is a global class. Nations mostly emerged after capitalism. Consciously or not, and there are numerous examples of conscious strategy, capitalism created nations. It should therefore not be assumed that the nation state is essential to capitalism. Uniquely among the commentators discussed in this article, Anderson asks the right question: what are nations, and where do they come from? Partly a spontaneous false community caused by the decline of other communities, partly the result of the linguistic centralisation's brought about by the emergence of the mass production of vernacular (non-Latin) books in the 16th and 17th centuries, and partly as the result of conscious decisions by a) the old non-national dynasties, and b) the modern international bourgeois intelligentsia, "Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist" - E. Gellner, cited in (10), p15.
Anderson starts by showing that nations are imagined communities - we tend to think we have something in common with our fellow-nationals, most of whom we will never meet - and then tries to work out how they were created and by whom. The consequences can be summarised in the phrase "The Bosses Have No Country".
The truth of this slogan is becoming increasingly clear. It was particularly confirmed by the Gulf war, its overture and follow-up, which saw Imperialists and anti-Imperialist forces united against the proletariat, pushed to the front lines by Iraq's Republican Guard, then bombed by the UN. As we showed in our leaflet Ten Days That Shook Iraq, the USA backed Saddam Hussein just enough to enable him to crush the proletarian uprising against his rule, working with Kurdish nationalists and bombing mutineers to save his regime. There were two sides in the Gulf: the international bourgeoisie and the international proletariat. Though increasingly united, the bosses need to keep us divided. Politicians promote petty nationalism around the world, Eastern Europe and the fragments of the Soviet Union bearing the brunt of this strategy. The United Nations' prolongation of the war in Yugoslavia by giving the weaker side just enough encouragement to allow it to fight on is a particularly obvious example of a deliberate policy of international capitalism to crush the class struggle.