At 11/07/02 14:32 -0400, Nancy Brumback wrote:
Re: the imperialism discussion of a few days ago, i was wondering if the list had any comments about my question about the lenin-luxemburg disagreement about the nature of imperialism. I recently studied up on this disagreement. as far as i could make out, while lenin believes that imperialism is the "highest stage" of capitalism," luxemburg believes that imperialism is innate in capitalism because accumulation of capital is impossible without inputs from non-capitalist sources.
Yes, interesting question. The way the Dictionary of Marxist Thought (ed. Tom Bottomore) puts it:
"Another of her preoccupations was imperialism, with its threat of war, and in 1913 in her major theoretical work, The Accumulation of Capital, she set out to explain its underlying cause. A closed capitalist economy, she argued, without access to non-capitalist social formations, must break down through inability to absorb all the surplus value produced by it. Imperialism was a competitive struggle between capitalist nations for what remained of the non-capitalist environment but, by eroding the latter, it led towards the universal sway of capitalist relations and inevitable coallapes of the system."
The surplus capital argument is also prominent for Hobson and Lenin, non? (In fact, Mill makes this argument way before any of the Marxists, to justify colonization of India.) The big problem with the surplus capital argument is that, for most of the last century, foreign investment has been overwhelmingly /between/ developed capitalist countries.
-----Ben
