Liberation, November 2000 Published by CPI(ML) Reading Lenin’s Imperialism in Y2K -Dipankar Bhattacharya Next only to The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism has proved to be the second most insightful tract of the modern times. Written in the midst of the First World War, Imperialism had the privilege of being overwhelmingly vindicated within a few months. To bypass the tsarist censor, Lenin was constrained to adopt an uncharacteristically oblique style in writing this classic, which he later described as ‘that accursed Aesopian language’. “It is painful, in these days of liberty, to re-read the passages of the pamphlet which have been distorted, cramped, compressed in an iron vice on account of the censor”, remarked Lenin in his April 1917 preface to the text which was written between January and June 1916. Yet this pain was amply rewarded as those cramped and compressed passages went on to spring the historic surprise of the world’s first victorious socialist revolution in November 1917. Lenin had succeeded in not only helping his readers ‘to understand ... the economic essence of imperialism ... and appraise modern war and modern politics’, he had also shown the revolutionary way of outsmarting imperialism by breaching the imperialist chain at its weakest link. The history of the first half of the twentieth century was the history of the incredible transformation of tsarist Russia into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. An epochal product of the First World War, the Soviet Union went on to overpower the fascist onslaught of the Second World War, before being done in eventually by the insidious logic of the Cold War. Meanwhile, the continuing scientific and technological revolution has given imperialism a new lease of life; it has acquired a new look, and even a new name - ‘globalisation’! The air is thick with talks of a dramatic transition from the monotonous ‘old economy’ to a mesmerising ‘new economy’. And, to be sure, a re-reading of Lenin’s Imperialism at this juncture can once again offer a whole range of most illuminating clues to the economic and political dynamics of the new era. The recent reprint of Imperialism by LeftWord Books is therefore a most timely move. The thought-provoking introduction by Prabhat Patnaik is an added bonus. In Imperialism, Lenin’s objectives were twofold. First, he had to identify the economic essence of imperialism, to show that imperialism did neither reflect the bad habits of certain nations nor was it a matter of ‘preferred policy’ of capitalism under certain circumstances, rather it constituted a special stage of capitalism itself. In the process, he also exposed what he called the ‘ultra-nonsense’ of Kautsky’s thesis of ultra-imperialism or super-imperialism, and revealed the depth of imperialism’s crisis and the severity of inter-imperialist rivalries. Second, he had to show the organic link between imperialism and the rise of opportunism in the working class movement or between imperialist superprofit and the bribing of not just a thin stratum of labour aristocracy but a considerable minority of workers of imperialist nations. In pursuing both these objectives Lenin drew enormously on the whole range of available literature on imperialism and on the Marxist analysis of capital and colonialism, British colonialism in particular. If Marx had laid bare the material basis of what he called commodity fetishism by focussing particularly on the role of one key commodity - labour-power - in the genesis of surplus value, the key categories for Lenin in Imperialism were monopoly and finance capital. Indeed, the journey from Capital to Imperialism is a journey towards ever-greater concentration of production and centralisation of capital; it is an analytical transition from competition to monopoly, from the export of goods to the export of capital, from ‘normal’ profit (surplus value) to superprofit, from the domination of capital in general to the domination of finance capital. But this transition did not mean any fading of the essential Marxist focus on the underlying crisis of capitalist anarchy stemming from the insoluble contradiction between the social nature of production and private character of appropriation. Interestingly, Lenin designated imperialism as the highest, and not just the latest, stage of capitalism. He called it moribund, parasitic and decaying, yet he made it abundantly clear that “it would be a mistake to believe that this tendency to decay precludes the rapid growth of capitalism,” and that indeed “on the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before.” In other words, moribund capitalism is perfectly capable of experiencing bouts of rapid growth now and then, and here and there, but this growth would not add up to a qualitatively new or post-imperialist stage of capitalism. It is this predictive value or definitiveness of Lenin’s analysis, which is nowadays questioned by many theorists of globalisation who would like us to believe that globalisation has ushered the world into a new post-imperialist phase of democratic capitalism where we have all the brilliance of the capitalist motion described by Marx and Engels in The Manifesto of the Communist Party, but none of the horror of Lenin’s Imperialism. The same bourgeois writers who would dare to repackage and celebrate Marx as the original guru of globalisation are bent upon banishing Lenin and his analysis of imperialism as an ancient aberration! They conveniently forget that if the Manifesto talks of ‘constant revolutionising of production’, ‘everlasting uncertainty’ and ‘cosmopolitan character of production and consumption’, it also emphatically points to the other side of the capitalist coin where we have ‘epidemic of over-production’, ‘enforced destruction of productive forces’ and ‘universal war of devastation’, propelling capitalism inexorably to its eventual collapse. And the edifice of Lenin’s analysis of imperialism was erected on this Marxist logic of capitalist wealth progressively stretching and outgrowing the narrow limits of bourgeois society. How well do the key features of Lenin’s analysis of imperialism correspond to the emerging contours and dimensions of globalisation? Let us begin with Lenin’s assertion concerning monopolies permeating and dominating every field of the economy and society. The monopolies have attained greater heights with the rise of MNCs/TNCs and their routine practice of mega-mergers and acquisitions. With the spectacular growth of communication technology and especially the mind-boggling rise of the Internet, we were of course told that monopoly would fast become technologically obsolete or redundant. But with the biggest billionaire of the world having just been legally indicted as the latest computer-aided and Net-borne monopolist of our times, the non-monopoly illusions can surely be given a decent burial! Lenin had written Imperialism decades before the appearance of the Bretton Woods twins, the World Bank and the IMF, not to mention the subsequent debt crisis and the devastating domination of the Fund-Bank establishment. Yet in Imperialism, Lenin already traces the growth of capitalism into a world system of not just colonial oppression but also ‘the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of he population of the world by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries’ (preface to the French and German editions); he talks of the usurer state and usury imperialism (a term he used for French imperialism), of the division of the world between a handful of usurer states and creditor countries and ‘the rest of the world (which) is more or less the debtor to and tributary of these international banker countries’. From ‘these international banker countries’ to the rise of multilateral lending institutions, the world capitalist economy has surely covered a considerable distance, but the dynamics of usury imperialism were anticipated quite accurately way back in 1916. Let us also look at the contemporary discourse on the relative loss of sovereignty or autonomy of nation-states. This loss is certainly relative, neither absolute nor universal. In other words, the loss of autonomy on the part of the overwhelming majority of states is of course a reflection of the accumulation of ‘excessive autonomy’ or interventionist powers around the remaining tiny minority of states, as demonstrated so arrogantly by the phenomenon of global policing by the US whether in the institutional guise of the UN or alliances like the NATO. While focussing on the politics and economics of ‘redivision’ of colonial possessions, Lenin’s Imperialism also notes the growing trend of finance capital subjecting to itself ‘even states enjoying the fullest political independence’ thereby giving rise to middle categories like semi-colonies and other forms of combination of political independence and financial and diplomatic dependence. The buzzword of the global economy today is finance and it is often argued that by its sheer volume and velocity, and the resultant speculative thrust, today’s finance has moved worlds away from the finance capital of Lenin and Bukharin. Even Prabhat Patnaik describes finance today as “an altogether different totality, ... an altogether different entity.” He cites three basic differences - (i) finance has decisively outgrown its national moorings, (ii) it has moved away from production to speculation, and (iii) it operates in the context of pan-imperialist collusion rather than inter-imperialist rivalry. Before we examine Patnaik’s points (i) and (iii), let us consider his second point dealing with the growing speculative forays of finance capital. It is wrong to suggest that Lenin saw finance capital as a predominantly productive coalescence of bank capital and industrial capital. There are several passages in Imperialism where Lenin locates finance capital in a non-industrial or speculative setting. Take, for example, this extraordinary reference to speculation in land - “Speculation in land situated in the suburbs of rapidly growing big towns is a particularly profitable operation for finance capital. The monopoly of the bank merges here with the monopoly of ground-rent and with monopoly of the means of communication ...” While endorsing Bukharin’s phrase of coalescence of bank capital and industrial capital, Lenin also approvingly cited the German bourgeois economist Kestner who had observed ‘a certain change ... from commercial activity in the old sense of the word towards organisational-speculative activity’. “Translated into ordinary human language this means”, Lenin added, “that the development of capitalism has arrived at a stage when, although commodity production still ‘reigns’ and continues to be regarded as the basis of economic life, it has in reality been undermined and the bulk of the profits go to the ‘geniuses’ of financial manipulation. At the basis of these manipulations and swindles lies socialised production; but the immense progress of mankind, which achieved this socialisation, goes to benefit ... the speculators.” He also quoted this admission by Liefman, ‘an unblushing apologist of capitalism’: ‘In all probability mankind will see further important technical revolutions in the near future which will also affect the organisation of the economic system’ ... electricity and aviation ... ‘As a general rule, in such periods of radical economic change, speculation develops on a large scale.’ The most recent Nasdaq nosedive following the dotcom frenzy of venture capital has once again amply borne out Liefman and Lenin. There are also categorical references in Imperialism to the organic overlapping of productive investment and speculative investment and the increasingly complete isolation of the rentiers from production. Referring to the distinction made by E. Aghad, author of Big Banks and the World Market (1914), between ‘productively’ invested capital (industrial and commercial undertakings) and ‘speculatively’ invested capital (in Stock exchange and financial operations), Lenin attributed this dichotomy to the author’s petty-bourgeois reformist point of view which made him think “that it is possible, under capitalism, to separate the first form of investment from the second and to abolish the second form.” Pointing to the immense accumulation of money capital in a few countries, Lenin explained the “extraordinary growth of a class, or rather, of a stratum of rentiers, i.e., people who live by ‘clipping coupons’, ... whose profession is idleness” and showed how “the export of capital, one of most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labour of several overseas countries and colonies.” Another analytical cornerstone of Imperialism is the completion of the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers, which continually necessitates war for achieving redivision of the world’s resources. Indeed, Lenin wrote this pamphlet in the midst of the First World War, which was followed within two decades by an even more devastating Second World War. Since then we have not however seen a third world war in that old form and the air is thick with illusions of a war-free, carefree capitalism finally entering a phase of permanent peace and durable democracy. Here it is important to grasp the economic context of war - in the memorable phrase of the Manifesto it is ‘universal war of devastation’, war as a means of achieving forced periodic destruction of productive forces to be followed by hectic economic reconstruction and reorganisation. It is also imperative to understand the dialectical inter-relation between war and peace, war growing within and out of peace. From the point of view of the political economy of war, the war industry/economy or what has come to be known as the military-industrial-scientific complex is no less important than the actual execution of war. If between them, the two actual world wars had led to a substantial redivision of the world and a significant redrawing of the world map alongside massive doses of destruction and reconstruction, the net outcome of the Cold War and the periodically erupting local wars has been no less spectacular. Like the epidemic of over-production mentioned in the Manifesto, the epidemic of over-speculation we see nowadays also has the demonstrated potential of engineering enormous landslides of capital. Huge chunks of finance worth billions of dollars can be, and have indeed been, wiped out overnight paving the way for large-scale actual realignments of industrial capital. From the trauma of capitalist restoration in Russia to the tremors in the East and South-East Asian ‘tiger’ economies following the recent bouts of currency turmoil to the ongoing spectacle of ‘public sector disinvestment’ in our own country, the essential rules of the game of capitalist restructuring were brilliantly summed up by Lenin in Imperialism: “During periods of industrial boom, the profits of finance capital are immense, but during periods of depression, small and unsound businesses go out of existence, and the big banks acquire ‘holdings’ in them by buying them up for a mere song, or participate in profitable schemes for their ‘reconstruction’ and ‘reorganisation’.” Now, to return to Patnaik’s points (i) and (iii), he argues that even though finance is drawn from particular nations, “(it) is neither amenable to the control or discipline of any nation-state, nor engaged in promoting any definable ‘national interest’.” The difficulties being faced by the weak third world nation-states and even by some developed countries of Europe in tackling the volatility of finance capital are indeed well-known, but does Patnaik really mean to say that global finance has started playing truant with the control or discipline mechanism of the world’s most powerful nation-states, the US in particular, or that finance has acquired a truly supra-national interest overriding the supreme national interest of the US? Such a proposition would indeed be too sweeping to be treated as tenable by any serious student of conttmporary world economics and politics unless one is prepared to be taken in by the statastical deception of facts like the us figuring as the world’s biggest debtor country. Similarly, his assertion regarding finance operating in the context of a very noticeable unity among the leading capitalist players would also seem to fly in the face of the widely admitted breakdown of the notorious Washington Consensus. The technological environment, and particularly the technological milieu of finance capital has indeed undergone a sea change. But the growing autonomy of finance from production and its sweeping mobility across national frontiers have by no means insulated it from the underlying crisis of capitalism. If anything, globalisation of finance has only led to a heightened and globalised crisis, sharply exposing the inherent mismatch between the narrow conditions of bourgeois society and the enormity of wealth and want. After all, finance cannot be infinitely self-generating or self-sustaining; it is parasitic capital, and at the end of the day, it has to have some corespondence, however intricately mediated, with the real economy of production. It takes one realty check, one major hike of oil prices by the OPEC countries to reassert the primacy of the ‘real’ over the ‘virtual’. After asserting that finance today is ‘an altogether different totality, ... an altogether new entity’ from Lenin’s time, Patnaik of course tries to distance himself from any possible ultra-imperialist misreading of contemporary reality on the lines of Kautsky’s thesis of super-imperialism based on internationally united finance capital. Lenin’s basic argument against Kautsky’s lifeless abstractions of ultra-imperialism was that the latter would “serve exclusively a most reactionary aim: that of diverting attention from the depth of existing antagonisms” and encourage “that profoundly mistaken idea which only brings grist to the mill of the apologists of imperialism, i.e., that the rule of finance capital lessens the unevenness and contradictions inherent in the world economy, whereas in reality it increases them.” Under globalisation, the fundamental processes and trends of capitalism described and analysed in the whole range of Marxist classics from the Manifesto to Imperialism have become much more acute and intense. The spectacular growth of information and communication technology has facilitated the new flexi-time, flexi-place approach to work which in turn has paved the way for a major intensification of the process of generation and appropriation of surplus by breaking the limits of a fixed working day and working place and blurring the hitherto established distinctions between home and place of work or between leisure and work. Finance capital has acquired unprecedented volume and mobility, but only to lead to financial meltdowns and currency turmoils. Computers have rewritten the ways people communicate, but only to lend new cyber-expressions to the inherent anarchy and everlasting uncertainly of the capitalist economy. The world today has to live with sudden attacks of one lethal computer virus after another and only the other day that gnawing global doubt about Y2K compatibility overshadowed a lot of euphoria and hype of the new millennium. Many tested and trusted tools of world capitalism have also started yielding diminishing returns if not turning into their opposites. In Imperialism, Lenin, for example, quoted the financial magnate Cecil Rhodes who had candidly confessed way back in 1895 that “The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.” Lenin subverted this lethal logic of war by actually turning an imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war and now a Vietnam war is opposed right inside the US more out of bread and butter nationalist concerns rather than noble feelings of internationalist solidarity. The MNCs shifting their bases to low-wage Third World countries are no longer celebrated as the benign procurer of lucrative superprofits, but are increasingly being resented as savage destroyers of jobs and high wages in their own homelands. Loud cries demanding the dismantling of IMF, World Bank and WTO are rending the air not in Bombay, Calcutta and Delhi, but in Seattle, Washington and Melbourne. Of course, it is futile to expect capitalism to resolve its own contradictions through a global levelling of the economic and living conditions. As Lenin repeatedly pointed out in Imperialism, capitalist imperialism continues to be enmeshed in close networks of pre-capitalist relations here and there, and more importanly, the pressures of levelling are being systematically counteracted by capitalism’s inherent tendency to promote parasitism and unevenness. The result is a deepening capitalist crisis and accentuation of the contradiction between the growing technological foundation for bringing about real all-round prosperity and the narrow bourgeois fetters which cannot be blurred by the blinding speed or daunting volume of speculative finance or all that ‘virtual’ razzmatazz of the cyberworld. The result is a continuing and growing possibility of delivering more revolutionary blows to the imperialist wall in individual countries backed perhaps by a stronger wave of global solidarity. Faced with this task of comprehending the crisis and nurturing the revolutionary possibility, Lenin’s Imperialism remains not just a valid historical reference of a previous comparable conjuncture, but a live guide to applied history as it is being made and unmade today under conditions of a globalisation that is thoroughly imperialist. A review of Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism by V.I. Lenin, introduction by Prabhat Patnaik, pp vi+164, LeftWord Books, New Delhi, Rs. 85 (paperback) _______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
