BRICS and the New American Imperialism

Global rivalry and resistance

Vishwas Satgar, Ferrial Adam, Samir Amin, Patrick Bond, William K Carroll, Christopher Chase-Dunn, Alexander Gallas, Ana Garcia, Karina Kato, Nivedita Majumdar, Keamogetswe Seipato, Vishwas Satgar

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781776145645
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

BRICS is a grouping of the five major emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Volume five in the Democratic Marxism series, BRICS and the New American Imperialism challenges the mainstream understanding of BRICS and US dominance to situate the new global rivalries engulfing capitalism. It offers novel analyses of BRICS in the context of increasing US induced imperial chaos, deepening environmental crisis tendencies (such as climate change and water scarcity), contradictory dynamics inside BRICS countries and growing subaltern resistance. The authors revisit contemporary thinking on imperialism and anti-imperialism, drawing on the work of Rosa Luxemburg, one of the leading theorists after Marx, who attempted to understand the expansionary nature of capitalism from the heartlands to the peripheries. The richness of Luxemburg's pioneering work inspires most of the volume's contributors in their analyses of the dangerous contradictions of the contemporary world as well as forms of democratic agency advancing resistance.While various forms of resistance are highlighted, among them water protests, mass worker strikes, anti-corporate campaigning and forms of cultural critique, this volume grapples with the challenge of renewing anti-imperialism beyond the NGO-driven World Social Forum and considers the prospects of a new horizontal political vessel to build global convergence. It also explores the prospects of a Fifth International of Peoples and Workers.

CHAPTER

1

OLD AND NEW IMPERIALISM: THE END OF US DOMINATION?

Vishwas Satgar

For over three decades the main buzzword of development, international relations and policy making has been ‘globalisation’. It is a descriptive concept used to characterise processes underway in the global political economy related to production, trade, finance, technology and labour. It has been an overworked term, sometimes evoking the metaphor of a happy ‘global village’ in which all countries are equal and in which there is smooth mobility not just of finance and goods, but also of labour and technology. The embrace of globalisation has also promised that all ships will rise as the tides of competition and winds of integration buttress the engines of national economies. Inequality and poverty will all be history in this global market utopia according to the promises and rhetoric of globalisation discourse. Or more poignantly, we would all be Americans and would all have been conscripted to the ‘end of history’ in which the US standard of liberal democracy was also our common standard. However, the realities of today’s global political economy are much more complex. This fifth volume in the Democratic Marxism series seeks to explore the remaking of the global political economy over the past few decades in a world of deepening systemic crises (such as climate change and water crises), redistributions of economic power (with China today the largest economy), the rise of the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) bloc and sharpening global rivalries. In this volume we unpack the new patterns of global power within the context of conjunctural and longer spans of history, the remaking of capitalism and the forms of resistance that are emerging. In short, this volume seeks to clarify the meanings of imperialism/anti-imperialism in the context of a crisis-ridden globalisation and the various social forces shaping our world, from above and below.

The concept of imperialism was central to Marxist theorising and political economy analysis in the twentieth century. It has important analytical strengths to uncover hierarchies of power and relations of oppression as part of the expansionary dynamics of capitalism. However, the mechanisms and material foundations of imperialism in the twentieth century are very different from those of imperialism in the twenty-first century. More sharply, twenty-first century imperialism is not the same as twentieth-century imperialism and merely reading the current historical period through a lens of the past (through Lenin’s conception of imperialism, for instance) is not useful and will certainly miss nuance and historical specificity. To enable a twenty-first century perspective on the new imperialism, this volume brings together Marxists and critical thinkers from within some of the BRICS countries, in dialogue with scholars from the global north. The volume also builds on themes related to the emergence of a new imperialism that has featured in previous volumes, such as marketisation, passive revolution, capitalism’s crises, the climate crisis and ongoing racism in the world order.

This chapter situates the origins of the term imperialism and highlights its place within Marxist theory. Instead of merely focusing on the contributions of Rudolf Hilferding, Vladimir Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin as the progenitors of the first Marxist theories of imperialism, this chapter looks more deeply into the history of Marxism to understand the debates after Karl Marx that gave rise to Marxist approaches to imperialism. More specifically, the chapter focuses on the contribution of Rosa Luxemburg, who provided an extremely original theory of imperialism, which was largely ignored after her murder in 1919 and after her thought was banned in the Soviet Union in 1925. The chapter highlights key aspects of Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism and its contribution to our understanding of classical imperialism, but also traces the lineage of thought she inaugurated, which has drawn on her work to theorise and analyse the new imperialism of our times. Through a Luxemburg-inspired understanding of imperialism, this chapter locates the cycles of US hegemonic imperialism in the twentieth century and the challenges it faces in the twenty-first century. The Trump moment and the possible trajectories of US imperialism in relation to contemporary crisis dynamics are explored. The chapter concludes by reviewing the main contributions of the chapters in this volume, which together highlight the conditions informing contemporary global rivalries, the role of BRICS countries and the challenges for anti-imperial resistance.

Origins of the Term ‘Imperialism’ and the Development of Marxist Theories

It is patently clear in modern international relations thought that Marxists have played a pivotal role in providing an intellectual, theoretical and historical basis to imperialism as a conceptual category. However, the origins of the term are less well known. The original use of the term ‘imperialism’ cannot be ascribed to Marxism although Marxist-Leninists tend to believe that Lenin invented the term. For them, imperialism as a conceptual category derives from a post-competitive phase of capitalism and emerged with the rise of monopolies, the dominance of finance capital and recurrent crises at the end of the nineteenth century. Actually, the origins of the term imperialism, in the English language, goes back to the mid-nineteenth century (Day and Gaido 2011: 5). It was initially used to describe Louis Napoleon’s Second French Empire (1852–1870) and was later used more widely in Britain with the passage of the Royal Titles Act of April 1876, which officially conferred the title ‘Empress of India’ on Queen Victoria. Only much later in the nineteenth century, and particularly after the publication of John Hobson’s book on imperialism, which was inspired by the Boer War (1898–1902), did the English socialist press associate imperialism with the emerging imperatives of capitalist competition (Day and Gaido 2011: 7). In the US context, the term imperialism was initially used to describe, in positive ways, the expansionist turn in US foreign policy initiated by the 1898 Spanish-American War and the US annexation of the Philippines, which was then rejected by the American Anti-Imperialist League and the Democratic Party (Day and Gaido 2011: 7–8).

Most renderings of the historiography of Marxist theory related to imperialism focus merely on Hilferding, Bukharin and Lenin. Hobson, the liberal thinker, is also mentioned as being a forerunner. Rosa Luxemburg is treated as having serious flaws in her understanding of Marx and is generally dismissed (Brewer 1990). Lenin, on the other hand, is given undue importance due to his canonical place in sovietised Marxism–Leninism. Lenin’s pamphlet (1917) Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism builds on the work of Hilferding and Bukharin. While recognising the uneven development of capitalism, the role of finance capital (combined banking and industrial capital) and colonial rivalries underpinned by monopoly capital and war, Lenin made several mistakes in how he situated imperialism. Moreover, the dogmatic reading of Lenin is given a trans-historical salience which inhibits how contemporary imperialism is understood. These problems have been specified by various Marxists in the course of the twentieth century.¹ First, imperialism has been central to the early expansion of proto-capitalism, mercantile capitalism, since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Second, it was integral to the development of competitive capitalism (which preceded monopoly capitalism) in the nineteenth century, and British imperialism. Third, imperialism in the twenty-first century has been shaped by new dynamics such as the hegemonic role of the US, the global monopoly phase of techno-financial capitalism and the development of weapons of mass destruction. Fourth, Lenin did not fully appreciate the racist logics and practice of imperialism, both historically and in his own time. However, the dogmatic canonisation of Lenin’s thought has presented it to the world as original and unsurpassed.

The unearthing of the actual history of Marxism reveals several important developments that unsettle the origins of Marxist thinking on imperialism. Marxist theorising about imperialism was contingent on and shaped by developments in the late nineteenth century related to colonialism – including the Boer wars, genocidal violence against the Herero peoples in what is known today as Namibia and the brutal US colonial conquest of the Philippines – but also related to rising nationalism and militarism among dominant European powers. A valuable archive of primary documents and original contributions capturing these debates, which exploded during the Second International, is contained in the 951-page Discovering Imperialism: Social Democracy to World War 1 (Day and Gaido 2011). What follows draws on this material to highlight central contributions that shaped debates about imperialism within Marxism. Various themes run through these engagements, including the causes of imperialism, colonialism, imperialism and capitalist crisis, disarmament, and war and tactics. What follows focuses merely on the formative contributions to debates about the causes of imperialism and the relationship between imperialism and colonialism.

Marx did not have a developed theory of imperialism, nor did he write his planned volumes on the world market and the state. Although he recognised the tendency for capitalist accumulation to expand beyond nationally bounded spaces, the challenge of elaborating a causal theory of imperialism was left to subsequent generations. The pioneering analysis of imperialism, unknown to most historians, was by Max Beer (1864–1943), an Austrian émigré in London, and Paul Louis, a Frenchman whose real name was Paul Levi (1872–1955) (Day and Gaido 2011: 16). Both these socialists were thinking in a context characterised by the complexity of British imperialism, European colonialism and the role of the United States. They both attempted to elaborate an understanding of the economic foundations of imperialism and they certainly initiated the debate on imperialism that gave rise to more systematic theoretical analysis. Beer’s analysis starts with Modern English Imperialism (November 1897) and proceeds to The United States in 1898 (31 December 1898), The United States in 1899 (19 November 1899) and then turns to Reflections on England’s Decline (March 1901), Social Imperialism (8 November 1901), Party Projects in England (January 1902), Imperialist Policy (December 1902) and Imperialist Literature (December 1906).

In characterising the rise of British imperialism, Beer had this to say:

Two factors were at work in Great Britain that made possible the erection and consolidation of the worldwide ‘Second Empire’: the powerful Industrial Revolution, which led to the development of gigantic productive forces, and the relatively free constitution, which enabled the Englishmen to take up the colonial policy again and continue it in the spirit of the new economic doctrines. The strong influence of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations … Those factors enabled England to overcome the serious crisis and put together the elements of modern English imperialism. ([1897] 2011: 98–99)

Paul Louis’s work covers Anglo-Saxon Imperialism (March 1899) and An Essay on Imperialism (April 1904). For Louis imperialism marked the epoch and shaped the life worlds of the majority, tied to chauvinistic nationalisms, militarism and economic expansion. He says:

Imperialism appears as the result of an economic revolution, as the product of capitalism, industrialism, free competition and the universal struggle for markets. One can say that, like proletarian socialism, it had to result inevitably from all the phenomena caused by the growth of production and exchange in the last century, and that is why it is so engaging, general and appealing. If a people lapses into the imperialist conception, or, rather, if its leaders try to inculcate the imperialist spirit, that is a certain sign that the ruling class, which exploits and oppresses that people, feels threatened in its fortunes and hurt in its interests. Now, in which country are the bourgeoisie, the oligarchy of landowners and industrialists sure of their future and income? ([1904] 2011: 294)

The relationship between imperialism and colonialism was a serious and engaged debate in the Second International. It had many twists, turns and setbacks. To simplify, it was culturally inflected and racist in some instances on the one hand and, on the other, anti-imperialist. One of the main protagonists in this debate was the reformist theoretician Eduard Bernstein. Bernstein drew on the economistic and epistemological Eurocentricism in the early Marx and justified colonialism as based on the racial and civilisational superiority of Europeans (Day and Gaido 2011: 11). He argued his position from 1896 till 1907, continuing to argue his support for the civilising role of colonialism and pointing out that colonies would be inherited by socialism (Day and Gaido 2011: 41). On the other side of this debate stood many principled leftists, including Rosa Luxemburg. Luxemburg rebuffed the chauvinistic positions of Bernstein and his supporters. In the 1900 International Socialist Congress in Paris, Luxemburg sponsored a resolution, which was acclaimed. In this was framed a crucial rejection of imperialism as a necessary consequence of capitalism’s contradictions: it led to colonial expansion; it excited chauvinism; it led to brutalisation and cruelties against natives of the colonies conquered by armed forces and it required united, anti-imperial resistance everywhere (Day and Gaido 2011: 20–21). These debates continued up to the eve of World War 1. It is in this context that we turn to Luxemburg’s contribution to analysing the imperialism of her time.

Rosa Luxemburg and Classical Imperialism

Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) was an extremely prominent Marxist at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. She held her own in a very male-dominated Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Germany. At the same time, she was also not a Leninist and forged a more humanist and radical democratic approach to revolutionary struggle. Her work The Accumulation of Capital (1913) shook up the SPD, increasingly degenerate as it became trapped in electoralism, nationalism and even, in the end, defending militarism. It is a sophisticated attempt to think through and ground a Marxist understanding of imperialism. Luxemburg’s critics have foregrounded only certain aspects of her argument, distorted most of it or have merely rejected it as flawed. Many caricatures were invited by this ambitious work as it also took on Marx, while it also challenged the growing Eurocentric and nationalist chauvinism within the SPD.

There are three parts to The Accumulation of Capital. Part 1 deals with the problems of reproduction in Marx’s work regarding the realisation of a part of the surplus product. Part 2 focuses on how bourgeois economic theory (from Sismondi to the Russian ‘legal’ Marxists) grappled with the problem, and Part 3 deals with the historical conditions of accumulation as it relates to enabling imperial expansion. From her 453-page text, four crucial aspects of her theory of imperialism are highlighted here. First, a literal reading of Luxemburg’s critique of Marx’s reproduction schemas in Volume 2 of Capital suggests that she argued underconsumption was the basis of the crisis in expanded reproduction and ultimately therefore also the basis for expansion to non-capitalist spaces. Put differently, the part of the surplus product which capital could not consume could only be realised by expansion to non-capitalist parts of the world. Many of her critics ascribe this argument to her and suggest that she had a simplistic argument contra Marx. For Riccardo Bellofiore (2004), Luxemburg had to also be read through her notes on the Introduction to Political Economy (published posthumously) which she used at the SPD school. This reading yields a much richer interpretation of Luxemburg’s understanding of crisis in expanded reproduction. This includes (i) the internal link between value, abstract labour and money; (ii) the connection between dynamic competition, relative surplus value extraction and the ‘law’ of the falling tendency of the ‘relative wage’ and (iii) the realisation that her theory of the crisis is not underconsumptionist. Effective demand is reduced due to a fall in autonomous investment related to inter-sectoral disequilibria, which are related to innovation in methods of production, and the consequent relative reduction of workers’ consumption. Ultimately, Bellofiore (2004: 289) suggests that Luxemburg recognised the importance of money in the reproduction process, more so than most Marxists, and posed the right questions. As a result, Bellofiore (2004: 290) concludes that ‘what Kautsky or Lenin, Bauer or Bukharin dubbed as her “errors” now appear as what make Luxemburg a forerunner of a macro-monetary theory of exploitation, accumulation and crisis’.

Second, for Luxemburg the pre- or non-capitalist modes of production were what surrounded the heartland of capitalism. To her, this meant that primitive accumulation did not end with the development of capitalism in the European centre, it continued as part of colonial policy (Luxemburg [1913] 2003: 350). This, she argued, is about the conquest of natural economy (an economy in which there is production for personal need). An imperialist cap...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• TABLES AND FIGURES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS
• CHAPTER 1: Old and New Imperialism: The End of US Domination?
• PART ONE: GLOBAL CRISIS, BRICS AND RIVALRY
• PART TWO: GLOBAL RESISTANCE
• CONCLUSION: Vishwas Satgar
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX