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I'm just starting to work it out, but I think the basis for "anti-imperialism" as an ideology is the notion that somehow capitalism changed its own spots, its mode of accumulation, its source of value, from the organization of labor as wage-labor to some sort of "advanced" "mechanized" mode of plunder and looting, i.e the mis-applied and abused concept of primitive accumulation.
[Side note, I think it's kind of ironic, that, IMO, for all their differences, Lenin and Luxemburg both seem to turn to "external sources" or "primitive accumulation" "looting" or rents to explain their puzzlement at the vitality of capitalism. I think they are both wrong. Wrong as you can get.].
Anyway, capitalism is not, was not, during the period known as the "long deflation" 1873-1898 morphing into a rentier system, simultaneously discounting and bribing the working class in the advanced countries through "sharing the plunder" of the less advanced countries. This doesn't mean that the barbarism and brutality of capitalism weren't greater, harsher etc; it just means that this amounted to no structural, "logical" change in the mode of accumulation.
Anyway, again, I think what gave Lenin's Imperialism, written in the moments of an apparent retreat of the working class, republished during another apparent retreat, its "icon status" during and after the great defeats suffered by the workers, was this "substitute accumulation" in which value, the existence of capital in the appropriation of a specific social organization of labor, recedes and ultimately disappears; such that what we are left with is.... well --is everything and anything from Proudhonist "all property is theft," to the "developmentalism" of so-called national revolutions, to baloney evaluations of China and India and wherever as "semi-feudal, semi-colonial etc etc" countries where all that counts is opposing "imperialism"-- the "foreign" capitalists.
Well, the demands of accumulation have put an end to that, even as many try furiously to restore these notions by "doubling down" so to speak in their support of a Qaddafi, or Assad, or Kirchner, Morales, Chavez etc.
The historical truth is that the "national" "anti-imperialist" governments, and their supporters served quite handily the overall interests of capitalism as an international system. And no, the hostility of this or that or all the advanced countries to Iran, or Qaddafi, doesn't change that; no more than it changes the bagman's work that OPEC, and all its members have performed on behalf the bourgeoisie, because the US would like to see Chavez and Ahmedinejad gone. What all-- the Kirchners, the Chavezs, the Ahmedinejads must do is suppress the independent effort of the working class to take control of the means of production NOT to simply accumulate more means of production, but rather subjugate production to the fulfillment of the potential of the labor process.
Whether its austerity one year, and or expansion the next, it's still capitalism; it's still all about preserving the means of production as property commanding labor, rather than labor consciously directing the means of production.
So the problems of accumulation that were suppressed after 2003 through war in Iraq, dollar devaluation, the price rise in oil, restrictions on capital investment.... all of that has come up a few billion dollars short, and days late. Once again the working class is compelled to take action as a class in the advanced countries. And in the less advanced, the failure of anti-imperialism, of "nationalism" to do anything more than "mimic" capitalism, has illuminated the inadequacy of anti-imperialism as an ideology, and the reality of it as a means for suppressing independent revolutionary action.
Please excuse the sketchy nature of the above...like I said I'm just trying to put it together... while I'm still finishing the 2nd part of the article on rent.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Ralph Johansen" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]> Sent: Saturday, May 07, 2011 1:44 PM Subject: Re: [Marxism] Should we treat Perez Bocerra as though he were already dead
This is a timely assertion and further discussion of implications and specifics would be useful.
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