Marxist Theories of Imperialism

A Critical Survey

Tony Brewer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134949724
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The last two hundred years have seen a massive increase in the size of the world economy and equally massive inequalities of wealth and power between different parts of the world. They have also witnessed the rise to dominance of the capitalist mode of production. Marxists, from Marx himself through to present day thinkers, have argued that these changes are profoundly interconnected. This book offers a unique account of Marxist theories of Imperialism. It has been fully updated and expanded to cover all the developments since its initial publication and will be essential reading for any student of Marxism.

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Introduction

The last two or three centuries have seen two interconnected developments that have transformed the world. First, production and productivity have increased to levels that would previously have seemed not so much impossible as inconceivable, and the whole nature of industry and of many of the goods produced has altered beyond recognition. How could earlier generations have conceived of live colour television pictures from the moon, broadcast to a mass audience in their own homes, or flocks of aircraft carrying northern Europeans on their annual migration to the resorts of the Mediterranean? Second, inequalities of wealth and power between different parts of the world have grown to an equally unprecedented degree. Americans and Europeans sit in comfortable homes, watching televised reports of famine in Africa. These are facts that everyone knows, but we tend to take them for granted and to ignore the extent to which they determine the whole character of the modern world. They can only be understood and analysed by looking at the historical process by which they have evolved, on a world scale, over a period of centuries.

The same period has been marked by a third development, the rise to dominance of the capitalist mode of production, in which production is carried out by many distinct, privately owned enterprises which sell their products on the market and employ wage workers. Capitalism has almost completely supplanted earlier forms of organization (peasant agriculture, feudal estates, slave plantations) in the advanced countries. In the underdeveloped countries, peasant agriculture still supports a large part of the population, but these areas have been drawn into a world market and a world-wide system of specialization which has completely undermined traditional economic and social structures.

The colonial empires hacked out by European powers, and the whole system of European and American military and political dominance over the world, which reached its peak in the early twentieth century, can only be understood in the context of this process of uneven development. The basis for military supremacy was economic. Superior technology meant superior armaments and a capacity to transport armed men to any part of the world. Superior economic organization made it possible to finance the overhead costs of military forces, and to deploy them to devastating effect. The motives for imperial expansion were also predominantly economic. Some historians now seek to deny it, but the men of the East India Company, the Spanish conquistadors, the investors in South African mines and the slave traders knew very well what they wanted. They wanted to be rich. Colonial empires were exploited ruthlessly as sources of cheap raw materials and cheap labour, and as monopolized markets. The romantic image of empire (flags fluttering over distant outposts, and the like) may be appealing, but a serious study must concentrate on more fundamental economic issues.

I do not claim that every incident in the history of empire can be explained in directly economic terms. Economic interests are filtered through a political process, policies are implemented by a complex state apparatus, and the whole system generates its own momentum. Much of the history of the British empire, for example, pivots on the need to safeguard the route to India; British policy in, say, the Mediterranean should not be explained in terms of the economic gains to be made in that area alone, but in terms of the maintenance of empire as a whole. The drive to imperial expansion must be explained as one element in the whole process of capitalist development.

Equally, the creation of formal empires, under a single flag and a single political authority, is only part of the story, and perhaps not the most important part. Formal political independence, with a flag, an airline and a seat at the UN, does not guarantee real equality, though it may be a necessary condition for real independence and development. Some countries have never been formally annexed, and most Latin American states have been formally independent for a century and a half, but they have been drawn into a system of inequality, exploitation and dominance almost as deeply as if they had been subjected to direct colonial rule. Underdeveloped countries still participate on very unequal terms in a world system of trade and investment.

My purpose in this book is to survey the various accounts of the development of the capitalist world economy that have been put forward in the Marxist tradition. I shall not discuss non-Marxist theories (except where they are relevant to the main theme), pre-capitalist empires or Soviet expansionism. This is not to deny the importance of these topics (especially the last); it is simply a matter of drawing a line around a reasonably coherent subject area. I shall not attempt to define ‘imperialism’ at this stage; indeed, I shall not present a final definition at any stage. Different writers used the word differently, and I shall follow the usage of the writer under discussion. Some of the authors discussed in the book did not use the word ‘imperialism’ at all. The set of topics set out in the preceding pages – the emergence of capitalism, its spread through the world, the unequal development of different areas, the dominance of some countries over others – all hang together, regardless of which elements we choose to label ‘imperialism’.

I have argued that imperialism (in any of several different senses of the word) must be seen in the context of the whole history of capitalism on a world scale. Correspondingly, any theory of imperialism can only make sense when seen as a whole. This dictates the structure of the book. The work of each major writer must be seen as a whole, since a ‘vision’ of the whole system determines the treatment of particular aspects of it. The main body of the book will therefore be devoted to an examination of the work of a succession of major theorists in (approximate) chronological order.

1.1 Historical Outline

As background, I start with a very brief, selective, and inevitably inadequate outline of the historical record. The fifteenth century is as good a starting point as any. At this time, Europe was not particularly rich or technically advanced compared with, say, India or China. The Arabic cities dominated what long-distance trade there was, controlling the trading links between Europe and Asia, and the main Indian ocean routes. Certain parts of Europe had, however, a crucial lead in weaponry and shipbuilding, and the ability and incentive to take advantage of it. This was the basis for the explosive expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese sea-borne empires at the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries.

During the first part of the ‘mercantile’ period (roughly 1500-1800), Spain and Portugal dominated. The Spanish empire was based on precious metals mined in central America and the Andes, funnelled through Panama to Spain, running the gauntlet of piracy in the ‘Spanish Main’ on the way. The mines, and the agricultural estates that fed them, were worked by forced labour. The Portuguese empire was more a string of trading posts controlling the traffic in spices and, later, in African slaves, but leaving social systems and systems of production relatively untouched. At the same time the expanding mercantile cities of western Europe came to depend on grain produced by serf labour on the estates of Prussia and Poland, shipped from Baltic ports.

In the seventeenth century, the emphasis shifted to the production of sugar in slave plantations in the Caribbean and Brazil, while Spain and Portugal progressively lost control of the seas and of key parts of their empires, first to the Dutch and then to the English and French. Labour was scarce in sugar-growing areas, and the ‘Atlantic triangle’ was born; manufactured goods (especially guns) were shipped to Africa, slaves to the Americas, and sugar back to Europe. As the eighteenth century went on, English, French, and Dutch trading posts in Asia expanded into territorial possessions, and there were signs of the more profound changes in Europe that developed in the following century.

In the mercantile period, then, European commerce came to dominate much of the world, though the goods exchanged in intercontinental trade were still mainly luxuries (sugar, spices, tobacco) together with slaves and precious metals. The organization of society and of production in South and Central America was totally and forcibly transformed, with whole populations exterminated and replaced, while in Africa and Asia the impact of Europe was in general either superficial or wholly destructive (the slave trade, the looting of India). How this pattern of trade and production should be described is controversial. Frank and Wallerstein (chapter 8 below) insist that it was a capitalist world system, while others such as Banaji, Brenner and Rey (chapter 10) would describe it as a system of mainly pre-capitalist societies, linked by exchange, with an evolving capitalist centre in Europe. This disagreement is part of a larger debate over the definition of capitalism.

By the eighteenth century, capitalist relations of production, characterized by the employment of free wage-labour in privately owned businesses producing for the market, were well established in England and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere in north-west Europe. Productivity was rising fairly rapidly (though not as rapidly as later), and was already well above levels in the rest of the world. One factor in this general technical advance was the ‘scientific revolution’, which was closely linked to military and mercantile needs. Astronomy and the measurement of time, critical to navigation, were at the heart of Newtonian physics, and thus of a wholly new view of nature.

The decades around 1800 were a critical turning point, separating the mercantile period from the classical epoch of capitalist development. In the political sphere, the American and French revolutions created a new conception of politics. Britain supplanted France as a major colonial power and took effective control of India, which became the linchpin of the British empire. Even more significant, the industrial revolution, centred in Britain, marked the start of a new era. It was a protracted affair, but taken as a whole it was one of the most important events in human history. Its short-run effects on the mass of the people were probably retrograde, but it became possible to conceive of the abolition of poverty and drudgery through mechanized production. Marx’s vision of socialism was based squarely on the potential created by industrialization.

The industrial revolution happened where and when it did because of a conjunction of external and internal factors (whose relative importance is a matter of debate). The organization of production in Britain was by this stage wholly capitalist, based on firms that were relatively large (by previous standards) but numerous, flexible, and driven by fierce internecine competition. They could recruit workers with the necessary skills from a substantial urban proletariat, and lay them off again equally quickly when market conditions changed or when labour-saving innovations made them redundant. Britain controlled the markets of the world, a vital advantage since the most important raw material, cotton, had to be imported, while a large part of the produce was exported. The profits of empire contributed to the ready availability of funds for investment. This was a new kind of society, which the rest of the world regarded with amazement. In a wider sense, the industrial revolution went on for much of the nineteenth century, a period of sustained development in the main centres of capitalism. The new industrial methods were introduced into industry after industry, and spread to other parts of Europe and North America. This was the context in which Marx wrote. By the end of the nineteenth century, Germany and the United States had emerged as major industrial rivals to Britain, and Japan had started on the process of industrialization.

The case of Japan is important, since it is still almost the only example of complete capitalist development outside Europe and areas of European settlement. Those who argue that subjection to Europe caused the failure of development elsewhere can point out that Japan was one of the few areas that remained outside European control, while those who argue that the success or failure of capitalist development depends primarily on internal social structures can point out that Japan started from a social structure that had much in common with European feudalism.

The area effectively integrated into the capitalist world economy expanded throughout the nineteenth century. Most of Latin America achieved formal independence, but came under informal British control. Asia, the largest and most populous continent, was opened up for capitalism. The British established effective control of the whole Indian subcontinent, and forced China, at gunpoint, to permit the import of opium. The French got Indo-China and the Dutch already controlled the East Indies. Russia was steadily pushing back its frontiers in Siberia and central Asia. Parts of Africa were colonized, setting the scene for a scramble for the rest at the end of the century. North America and Australasia were opened up. It was in this period that the world was definitely divided into ‘advanced’ and ‘underdeveloped’ areas, and the basic patterns of the present world economy were established. A new pattern of trade emerged, replacing the trade in luxuries of the mercantile period: advanced capitalist centres exported manufactures and imported food and raw materials. The physical bulk of goods traded expanded colossally, but transport had been transformed along with the rest of industry and was able to cope.

The end of the nineteenth century marks another major turning point, the beginning of what Lenin called the ‘imperialist stage’ of capitalism. Following his lead, many Marxists reserve the term ‘imperialism’ to describe the twentieth century, using other terms for the expansionism of earlier periods. I will follow the usage of whichever writer is under discussion. There was a rapid increase in the size of firms and a spread of monopoly in the form of cartels, trusts and so on. The twentieth century is often said to be the period of ‘monopoly capital’. Exports of capital had increased rather earlier, augmenting rather than replacing trade in goods, at first in the form of loans to governments and public utilities, but increasingly as ‘direct’ investment in productive enterprises. In the early twentieth century investment was mostly in resource-based industries and related infrastructure. The natural resources of the whole planet were opened up for exploitation.

At the same time there was a scramble for control of the few remaining areas not already brought under colonial control, especially in Africa. Latin America passed, more gradually, from the British to the American sphere. Once the division of the world was complete, any further territorial expansion had to be at the expense of rival colonial empires. There was a sharp increase in tension between the main powers, especially between Germany (the rising power) and Britain (with the largest empire), which culminated in two world wars. That the rise of monopoly, the export of capital and the outbreak of inter-imperialist rivalry are connected is generally agreed among Marxists, though the exact nature of the connection is more disputable. This is the subject matter of the theories of imperialism worked out at the time by Hobson, Hilferding, Bukharin and Lenin (chapters 4-6).

The twentieth century has seen a number of developments. First, the area covered by the world capitalist system has contracted, with the subtraction first of Russia, then of China, Cuba, much of south-east Asia and so on. In all cases these areas broke away as a result of war or of violent internal struggles. The nature of the systems installed in these countries will not be discussed here, but the fact of their existence has had important effects on the world balance of power. Second, international trade has grown more rapidly than total production, while international investment by major firms has grown even faster, making them into ‘multinationals’ operating on a world-wide basis. Markets for liquid money capital have also been internationalized. The world capitalist economy is much more tightly integrated than ever before, despite the achievement of formal independence by most underdeveloped countries. The system cannot possibly be understood by looking at particular nation states in isolation. Third, the capitalist world became very clearly divided into advanced and underdeveloped countries, differing not only in income levels, but in almost every other aspect of their economic and social structure. There are, as in all previous periods, a few doubtful cases, but it is notable how small a fraction of the world’s population they contain. In almost all cases there is no difficulty in assigning a country to one group or the other. This cleavage is clearly a major structural feature of the twentiethcentury world system, though it may be breaking down as the end of the century approaches.

The advanced countries (Europe, North America, Japan, Australasia) went through a bad patch in the two world wars and the depression of the 1930s, but then experienced the ‘long boom’ of the 1950s and 1960s. Overall, levels of productivity have increased enormously over the century and the capitalist form of organization has almost completely displaced others. Trade and investment flows within the advanced ‘centre’ have grown especially rapidly, so trade with the underdeveloped ‘periphery’ is now a relatively small part of the total. The economy of a typical advanced country has a relatively large industrial sector, and an even larger service sector organized on modern capitalist lines. Agriculture employs a small fraction of the labour force, using modern capital-intensive techniques. (In some cases, a peasant sector survives with the help of subsidies.) The majority of the population are wage earners, and trades union organizations, if they have not fundamentally altered the nature of capitalism, have at least ensured that the benefits of increased productivity have been shared with the working class. Democratic institutions have become well established, with free elections and guarantees of personal freedom. The advanced countries contain the headquarters of the main multinational companies and are the main centres of technological development. They produce and export a very wide range of manufactured and primary products. They import some primary products and a growing volume of labour-intensive manufactured goods from underdeveloped areas.

Turning to the underdeveloped world, there are important differences between the ‘three continents’ (Latin America, Asia, Africa). In Latin America, indigenous societies were almost wholly destroyed centuries ago, white or creole ruling classes with a European culture were established, and the institutions of the modern state were installed at almost the same time as in Europe. The larger Latin American countries have average income levels well above those of Africa and Asia, though equally far below those of Europe. At the same time, they have all the structural features of underdevelopment. In Asia, major pre-capitalist civilizations were drawn into the capitalist orbit more gradually and at a later date. The larger Asian countries have well-established local ruling classes, a considerable technological capacity, and industrial sectors which are quite large in absolute terms, though small relative to population. Average income levels, however, are very low, with an enormous mass of peasants and workers reduced to near starvation level. Some smaller Asian countries, on the other hand, are relatively industrialized, and have experienced very rapid economic growth, while Japan is, of course, in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Marx
• 3. Luxemburg
• 4. Hobson
• 5. Hilferding
• 6. Bukharin and Lenin
• 7. Baran
• 8. Dependency Theories
• 9. Emmanuel
• 10. Classes and Politics in the Third World
• 11. After Imperialism?
• Bibliography
• Index