From Territorial to Nonterritorial Capitalist Imperialism: Lenin and the Possibility of a Marxist Theory of Imperialism

Abstract

The concept of imperialism has returned to political and theoretical debates. But there are open theoretical questions. In opposition to treating imperialism in terms of a territorial logic, we insist on the nonterritorial character of capitalist imperialism. We go back to Lenin's theoretical contribution to a possible Marxist theory of imperialism in order to distance it from theories of empire building and territorial expansion. We attempt to combine such a reading of Lenin's writings on imperialism with a conception of political power and hegemony on the international plane, stressing the relative autonomy of the state and political power. We highlight Lenin's discussion of imperialism's class character, in terms of condensed class strategies. Consequently, the aim of this paper is to offer elements of a theory of the specifically capitalist form of nonterritorial imperialism, stressing the importance of articulating Lenin's concept of the imperialist chain with Gramsci's concept of hegemony.

Key Words:

• Antonio Gramsci
• Imperialism
• VI Lenin
• Marxism
• Mode of Production

Notes

1. On realism (and neorealism) as a theoretical tradition in international relations, see Carr (1939), Wight (1994), Waltz (1979), and Frankel (1996). For a criticism of traditional international relations theory see Rosenberg (1994).

2. “The rise in importance of accumulation by dispossession as an answer symbolized by the rise of an internationalist politics of neoliberalism and privatization correlates with the visitation of periodic bouts of predatory devaluation of assets in one part of the world or another. And this seems to be the heart of what contemporary imperialist practice is about. The American bourgeoisie has, in short, discovered what the British bourgeoisie discovered in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, that, as Arendt has it, ‘the original sin of simple robbery’ which made possible the original accumulation of capital ‘had eventually to be repeated lest the motor of accumulation suddenly die down.’ If this is so, then the ‘new imperialism’ appears as nothing more than the revisiting of the old, though in a different place and time” (Harvey 2003, 182).

3. Despite this criticism, we have to stress that Panitch and Gindin's (2012) recent Making of Global Capitalism is one of the most detailed and wide-ranging accounts of American imperialism.

4. In this sense, we disagree with Alex Callinicos's (2009, 41) reference to a “Lenin-Bukharin synthesis.”

5. On classical theories of imperialism see Milios (1988, 11–46).

6. “A Marxian theory of uneven development will pay special attention to the uneven and combined development of modes of production, to the uneven ebb and flow of the various fundamental class processes and their conditions of existence that characterize any and every social formation” (McIntyre 1992, 91).

7. The difference between Kautsky's (2004) vision of ultraimperialism and Lenin's emphasis on interimperialist antagonism is analytical and concerns Lenin's insistence that uneven development and antagonism are essential characteristics of the imperialist chain, whereas forms of interimperialist cooperation are contingent outcomes of particular conjunctures.

8. “Imperialism, in turn, is the set of conditions that shape and are shaped by the existence of this exploitation. Yes capitalist imperialism—not because capitalists always get what they want, nor because forms of colonial expansion and domination did not predate the emergence and development of capitalism, nor finally because imperialism can be reduced to or explained entirely in terms of the economy (capitalist or otherwise)—but because the particular forms of imperialism I am referring to, from the British annexation of India to the U.S. military barrage on Iraqi forces and the new ‘war on terrorism,’ cannot be divorced from those (complex, changing) conditions and effects of capitalism to which I just referred” (Ruccio 2003, 87).

9. On the importance of the concept of the imperialist chain see Poulantzas (1974, 20–3) and Althusser (1965, 92–6).

10. On the relation between early capitalist development and slavery see Blackburn (1998). On classical liberalism's acceptance of slavery see Losurdo (2011). On contemporary forms of forced labor, see the ILO (2009).

11. “The different moments of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and organized force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode” (Marx 1887, 477).

12. At the same time, a great part of British investment was directed toward its dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa) and toward the United States, Argentina, and Uruguay (Hobsbawm 1989, 66).

13. The notion of the encounter—although associated with Althusser's (2006) post-1980 texts, which were published posthumously—was in fact a central tenet of his theoretical endeavor from 1966 onward. The following passage from a 1967 text exemplifies this nonteleological reading of the emergence of capitalism: “But capitalism is the result of a process that does not take the form of a genesis. The result of what? Marx tells us several times: of the process of an encounter of several distinct, definitive, indispensable elements, engendered in the previous historical process by different genealogies that are independent of each other and can, moreover, be traced back to several possible ‘origins’: accumulation of money capital, ‘free’ labour-power, technical inventions and so forth. To put it plainly, capitalism is not the result of a genesis that can be traced back to the feudal mode of production as if to its origin, its ‘in-itself,’ its ‘embryonic form,’ and so on; it is the result of a complex process that produces, at a given moment, the encounter of a number of elements susceptible of constituting it in their very encounter. Evolutionist, Hegelian or geneticist illusions notwithstanding, mode of production does not contain ‘potentially,’ ‘in embryo,’ or ‘in itself,’ the mode of production that is to ‘succeed’ it” (Althusser 2003, 296).

14. See, for examples of this reading, the work of Andrew Bacevich (2002, 2005).

15. Lenin (1970a, 109) uses the notion of hegemony but in a more “geopolitical” sense: “An essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between several Great Powers in the striving for hegemony, i.e., for the conquest of territory, not so much directly for themselves as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony.”