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﻿<title﻿>﻿New Socialist Magazine, Imperialism and Capitalism At the End Of the 20th Century - Article﻿</title>﻿

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﻿<b﻿>﻿Imperialism and Capitalism At the End Of the 20th Century 

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by Greg Swartz﻿<br﻿>﻿

﻿<i﻿>﻿New Socialist Magazine, July - August 1999﻿</i>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿<br﻿>﻿

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What significance does the seemingly outdated term, imperialism, have at the end of the 20th century? Is it not difficult to speak today of the conquest and colonization of foreign peoples as described in the history of Rome or the Americas? Is it not proper to view wars waged by the so-called "democracies" of the West as legitimate affairs, carried out for the liberation of foreign people from anti-liberal regimes? 

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Often the term "imperialism" arises today only at the sight of deadly military conflicts. Yet, I shall argue that imperialism is, in principle, not about violence, or colonization of foreign lands, or even about spreading "Western values," all such matters being a digression from what makes imperialism a specific stage of capitalist development. Rather, rivalry between states is generally a symptom of the global capitalist order which, otherwise, seeks to achieve perpetual peace for its exploits. However, the main obstacle to any such peace lies in the contradictions thrown up by capitalism itself, as competition between capitals (corporations, banks, etc.) leads to military rivalry between states that represent their interests. 

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To get a sense of what is meant by imperialism, it is useful to begin with some ideas about capitalism. Capitalism, from its inception, has been a global system. It owes its rise to the existence of global commerce and the subordination of people's ability to labour to the rule of money gained from exchange. Capital becomes fully crystalized when human efforts and the earth's natural wealth become private property commanded by those who own the means of production. Capitalist production forces rapid industrialisation as a means of constantly keeping ahead of potential competition. 

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The capitalist, however, does not compete for the purpose of greater wealth, but simply on pain of extinction, as each capitalist threatens to put the other out of business and turn him into a wage labourer. Thus, what Marx called the "anarchy of the market," which functions on the principles of unplanned production of commodities with a view by every capitalist to outproduce his opponent at a lower cost, causes periods of immense economic boom closely followed by mass unemployment and periods of slump. Also known as "crises,"these periods bring to the surface the main contradictions of capitalism: human impoverishment and misery seen in times of immense social wealth. They also put in question the adequacy of capitalism as a system of production.

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Historically, capitalist crises were largely responsible for two main trends in modern capitalist societies. On the one hand, while each individual capitalist saw his opponent as a prospective business enemy and a barrier to his own power, he could not do so for long, as the "war of all against all" would produce the collapse of the very system that allows each capitalist to accumulate wealth and ensure the safety of his property in the first place. 

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This kind of contradictory dynamic, which pitted individual capitalists against each other, but at the same time made them interdependent for their very existence, transformed states in Europe and elsewhere into fundamentally capitalist states, with the laws coming to reflect the principles of private property. At the same time, the threat of system overthrow was impressed on the ruling class, to the extent that capitalist laws came to address the question of "public peace" which, by increasing the police force, sought to guarantee that labour remained subordinate to capital and the system remained impervious to revolutionary opposition of the growing proletariat.

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On the other hand, large-scale bankruptcies and what many today call "corporate buy-outs" were a sign that small-scale producers were being replaced by large, mechanised and more vertically integrated industries, giving rise to large firms and financial institutions. This expressed the greater centralisation of capital within a number of European administrative states and the concentration of capital in fewer hands. The centralisation of capital within states also gave great impulse to the rise of national states across Europe and elsewhere. Nationalism provided the political justification needed to expand, conquer peoples and territories in order to better weather the crises brought on by competition and overproduction. 

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The discourse of nationalism used by the ruling classes from the late-1800's onward soften erved to subvert the growing fraternity of the working people. What's more, nationalism succeeded in restricting the movement of labour at the time when capital was becoming increasingly mobile, thus ensuring the accessibility and political subordination of labour to every whim of capital.

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Having achieved unity among themselves and subordinated worker's solidarity to nationalist chauvinism, domestic capitalists were able to reach unprecedented economic growth in each of their nation states. However, at the turn of the 20th century this dynamic was reaching its limits, as overproduction and immense wealth was causing depressed wages and increasing unemployment. 

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Thus began an era of immense exports of capital and of imperialist expansion -- which was how classical Marxists like Rosa Lusemburg, V. I. Lenin, and Nikolai Bukharin referred to this stage of capitalism. Just as individual capitalists competed with one another, capitalist states began competing with their counterparts for markets and cheap natural resources in the lesser developed territories of the East and South. Just as it was with individual capitals, the overabundance of wealth and the scarcity of markets pitted one capitalist nation state against another. And just as it was during the early years of capitalist development, this stage of capitalist development erupted in war.

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It would take imperialism two World Wars and the loss of dozens of millions of innocent lives to partially settle their differences through a formal, state-like structure: the United Nations. The establishment of this supra-state in practice meant the same as the establishment of national states in the mid-1800's: the centralisation of financial and industrial power and the concentration of wealth in a few hands. Accordingly, it meant the subordination of the world to the rule of the US dollar, enforced by global police in the guise of UN and NATO forces.

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However, the establishment of the United Nations did not mean capitalism overcame its contradictions. Thus, starting from the mid 1970's, the fragile post-war consensus reached among capitalist states when their economies were growing, has been increasingly deteriorating under the pressure of overaccumulation of capital on a global scale. As individual capitalists attempted to overcome the mounting crisis, they tended to follow the age-old path of making the bitter, albeit necessary, alliances with their rivals in order to maintain the basis of their power by subordinating the masses to the rule of money.

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Such alliances or trade blocs as the European Economic Union, and ﻿the North American Free Trade Agreement represent the regroupment strategies of the capitalist classes, as they try to enlist the support of legal and financial institutions to exert the power of one or another currency over various people. These new alliances are now showing increasing signs of disquiet. What is more, the legal basis on which they have been established and the military power they are able to exert make the United Nations less and less relevant.

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As the current conflict in Yugoslavia shows, the rivalry between the power of the US dollar and the recently launched Euro over the yet-to-be defined territory of East Central Europe, is an expression of a more entrenched struggle between two capitalist trade blocks over the definition of the legal and military principles regulating the imperialist world order. While the US continues to have the upper hand, insisting on redefining NATO and using its instruments of control as a principle of imperialist order, the European Union hopes to define the nature of the same order and make its currency, the Euro the increasingly dominant world currency. 

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As these cursory notes hopefully show, imperialism is not in the first instance about about war, nor is it simply about colonisation or the spread of Western values -- as important as these phenomena remain. It is about establishing global order along the lines of capitalist accumulation. However, the competition between individual capitals and the capitalist states, alliances, or trade blocs that represent their interests, inevitably leads to the overaccumulation of capital, resulting in increased rivalry (and attacks on the working class). To put an end to unjust wars of domination, then, requires ending the capitalist system that produces imperialist rivalry in the first case.

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