Imperialism and Global Political Economy

Alex Callinicos

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745640464, 9780745640457
• eBook ISBN: 9780745658230
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In Imperialism and Global Political Economy Alex Callinicos intervenes in one of the main political and intellectual debates of the day. The global policies of the United States in the past decade have encouraged the widespread belief that we live in a new era of imperialism. But is this belief true, and what does 'imperialism' mean?

Callinicos explores these questions in this wide-ranging book. In the first part, he critically assesses the classical theories of imperialism developed in the era of the First World War by Marxists such as Lenin, Luxemburg, and Bukharin and by the Liberal economist J.A. Hobson. He then outlines a theory of the relationship between capitalism as an economic system and the international state system, carving out a distinctive position compared to other contemporary theorists of empire and imperialism such as Antonio Negri, David Harvey, Giovanni Arrighi, and Ellen Wood.

In the second half of Imperialism and Global Political Economy Callinicos traces the history of capitalist imperialism from the Dutch East India Company to the specific patterns of economic and geopolitical competition in the contemporary era of American decline and Chinese expansion. Imperialism, he concludes, is far from dead.

Part I: THEORY

1

THE CLASSICAL LEGACY

1.1 Continuing Marx’s Capital

It seems indisputable that the first third of the twentieth century saw Marxist political economy achieve a standard of intellectual fertility and substantive achievement that has set a benchmark for all subsequent efforts. One of the main themes running through the economic writings of Karl Kautsky, Rudolf Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg, Otto Bauer, V.I. Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Nikolai Bukharin, Henryk Grossman and Evgeny Preobrazhensky was the effort to understand imperialism, which they all acknowledged to be a key feature of their world. Bob Sutcliffe writes: ‘The first generation of imperialism theorists represented one of the high points of the application of historical materialist method to understanding the world of international relations. They wrote in a period of extraordinary fertility. They contributed by not being orthodox and exegetical but by being boldly revisionist and critical.’¹

Three key features of this collective, if highly disputatious enterprise are worth stressing. First, it was radically different from contemporary theorizing about imperialism in that it was based outside the academy. In the preface to his path-breaking work, Finance Capital (1910), Hilferding complains:

Economic theory, by virtue of the infinite complexity of its subject matter, is among the most difficult of scientific enterprises. But the Marxist finds himself in a peculiar situation; excluded from the universities, which afford the time required for scientific research, he is obliged to defer his scientific work to those leisure hours which his political struggles may spare him.²

Perry Anderson, in drawing his famous contrast between pre-war classical Marxism, geographically located in Central and Eastern Europe, excluded from the academy, organically rooted in the mass working-class movements of the Second and Third Internationals, and focused on substantive economic and political analysis, and postwar Western Marxism, centred on Western Europe and North America, based in the universities, and preoccupied with meta-theory and aesthetics, took Hilferding and his peers as the paradigmatic case of the former tendency.³ Their engagement in socialist politics is indicated by the violent fate so many suffered – Kautsky dying after fleeing the Nazi Anschluss of Austria in 1938, Hilferding tortured to death by the Gestapo in occupied Paris, Luxemburg murdered by the proto-fascist Freikorps in revolutionary Berlin, Trotsky, Bukharin and Preobrazhensky all victims of Stalin’s tyranny. What the Communist International dubbed the imperialist epoch of wars and revolutions, along with the paradoxical outcome of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, scarred the lives of all these activist intellectuals.

Secondly, these theorists shared an understanding of imperialism as a problem requiring analysis that could provide the basis for political action. This understanding is admirably summarized by Anthony Brewer:

It is easy to misunderstand the classical Marxist theories of imperialism since the very word has expanded and altered its meaning. Today the word ‘imperialism’ generally refers to the dominance of more developed over less developed countries. For classical Marxists it meant, primarily, rivalry between major capitalist countries, rivalry expressed in conflict over territory, taking political and military as well as economic forms, and leading ultimately to inter-imperialist war. The dominance of stronger countries over weaker is certainly implicit in this conception, but the focus is on the struggle for dominance, a struggle between the strongest in which less developed countries figure primarily as passive battlegrounds, not as active participants.⁴

But there is a third shared characteristic of Sutcliffe’s ‘first generation of imperialism theorists’: they saw their work as continuing Marx’s effort in Capital to uncover the dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. They wrote in an intellectual environment in which the posthumous publication of the second and third volumes of Capital, in 1885 and 1894 respectively, provoked the first debates on Marx’s theory of value, a perennial issue in Marxist political economy.⁵ Much more important than these debates, their effort to develop the conceptual apparatus inherited from Marx aimed to analyse the forms taken by capitalist development in the decades since he wrote Capital in the 1860s. Thus Hilferding describes Finance Capital as ‘an attempt to arrive at a scientific understanding of the economic characteristics of the latest phase of capitalist development. In other words, the object is to bring these characteristics within the theoretical system of classical political economy which begins with William Petty and finds its supreme expression in Marx.’⁶ Even Luxemburg, the most iconoclastic of the classical theorists of imperialism and the least interested in differentiating within Marx’s broad conceptualization of capitalism, calls imperialism ‘the final stage of its [capitalism’s] historical career’.⁷

This movement between continuing Marx’s theoretical enterprise and analytically grasping the specific features of contemporary capitalism requires some consideration of the kind of intellectual project he was undertaking in Capital, though this is easier said than done. The growth of scholarly study of Marx’s economic writings, facilitated by their publication in the Marx-Engels Complete Works (Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe, generally known as MEGA), has revealed the vast and complex nature of his unfinished effort to write Capital, starting with the Grundrisse (1857–8), continuing through the 1861–3 Manuscript (from which Theories of Surplus-Value was eventually extracted) and the 1863–5 Manuscript (the main source used by Friedrich Engels to edit and publish Volumes II and III of Capital) to Capital, Volume I (1867), together with the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), the only portions of this mass of texts to appear during Marx’s lifetime. Nevertheless, some attempt must be made to identify key features of the scientific approach Marx pursues in Capital, since they are of crucial importance to both classical and contemporary theorizations of imperialism.⁸

In the first place, Marx’s aim in Capital is not to provide an empirical account of the capitalism of his day. He writes in the Preface to the first edition of Volume I that the Britain of the Industrial Revolution serves as ‘the main illustration of the theoretical developments that I make’, but his object is ‘the capitalist mode of production, and the relations of production and the forms of intercourse that correspond to it’.⁹ In his late return to the drafts of Volumes II and III, he sought to widen the range of illustration by including empirical material on American and Russian agriculture in his analysis of ground-rent, but did not alter his basic strategy of uncovering the structural logic of the capitalist mode of production. In Marx’s theory of history the mode of production is a basic type of economic system, combining a particular level of development of the productive forces, that is, of the productive powers of human labour, with a specific set of relations of production, and it is the latter, the form of effective control over the productive forces, that defines the character of the mode of production in question. As I noted in the Introduction, capitalist relations of production are constituted by two dimensions, what Robert Brenner has called ‘the “vertical” (market and socio-political) power relations between capitalists and workers’, and ‘the “horizontal” competition among firms that constitutes the capitalist system’s economic mainspring’.¹⁰

But, secondly, Marx does not start Capital with either of these constitutive contradictions, but rather, in the famously difficult (and much revised) first chapter of Volume I, with the commodity. This provides the context for presenting Marx’s version of the labour theory of value first rigorously formulated by David Ricardo, according to which commodities exchange in proportion to the socially necessary labour-time required to produce them. But Marx radically changes the function of this theory of value. No longer does it serve, as it did for Ricardo, to provide a theory of price-determination through which to analyse the distributional struggles among the three main classes of the ‘commercial society’, first conceptualized by Adam Smith as the final and most natural ‘mode of subsistence’ developed by human beings. Now value theory functions in the first instance to identify what is historically specific to capitalism as a transitory and exploitive mode of production. In particular, Marx conceives value as abstract social labour – not a conceptual category invented by the observing analyst to corral the empirical variety of capitalism, but a ‘real abstraction’, imposed on economic actors by the blind process of competition among the autonomous but interdependent units of production into which any system where commodity production prevails (what Marx calls generalized commodity production) is necessarily fragmented. It is the pressure of competition that compels these units to adopt more advanced productive techniques and hence to reduce their costs below those of their rivals, thereby enforcing upon themselves the law of value – that is, the requirement to minimize the socially necessary labour time involved in producing their output. Already in the Grundrisse, at a relatively early stage in the elaboration of Marx’s conceptual system, he had recognized the strategically crucial role of the ‘horizontal’ dimension of competition among the ‘many capitals’ acting as the individual units of the capitalist mode: ‘The influence of individual capitals upon one another has the effect precisely that they must conduct themselves as capital; the seemingly independent influence of the individuals, and their chaotic collisions, are precisely the positing of their general law.’¹¹ One of the most distinctive features of the capitalist mode of production, the accumulation of capital, is ‘the effect of a social mechanism’, the competitive struggle that presses rival firms to plough their profits back into investments in improved and expanded production.¹²

The most important single application of Marx’s value theory is of course his explanation of where these profits come from. He argues in Part 2 of Capital, Volume I, that a key difference between capitalism and other kinds of economic system is that labour-power itself is a commodity. Under the capitalism mode, the direct producers are separated from the means of production. But they differ from the exploited classes in earlier forms of class societies – ancient slaves and mediaeval peasants, for example – in that they own and control their own labour-power. In order to gain access to the means of production and thereby the means of subsistence they must sell this, their sole productive asset, to the capitalists who jointly control these means. But the use to which their labour-power is put – labour itself – is the sole way in which new value can be created. The difference between this new value and the value the capitalist must advance, chiefly in the form of wages, to purchase the workers’ labour-power – what Marx calls surplus-value – is the source of the profits that capitalists seek both to support themselves and to expand their investments. Thus the capitalist mode, despite the legal and political equality among persons that tends to emerge where it prevails, is a form of class society based on the exploitation of wage-labour.

We shall return to some of the implications of Marx’s analysis of this ‘vertical’ contradiction between capital and wage-labour for an understanding of imperialism in chapter 3. Of more immediate concern here is how Marx’s theory of exploitation is related to a third feature of his approach, namely the progressive and non-deductive introduction of ever more concrete determinations. He is highly aware of the complexity of his object. Though he compares his enterprise with that of the founders of classical physics, and stresses the necessity, in constructing any scientific theory, of formulating abstract concepts to identify the fundamental features of its object that may be obscured in or completely absent from what we perceive, Marx believes that the actual operation of the capitalist mode of production presents additional difficulties. These arise from the way in which its real dependence on the circulation of commodities both occults the relations of exploitation and encourages ideologically distorted conceptualizations of economic relations. Already in chapter 1 of Capital, Volume I, he outlines his theory of commodity fetishism, according to which the fact that in a system of generalized commodity production the social connection among autonomous but interdependent units of production takes the form of the exchange of their products on the market means that ‘the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material relations between persons and social relations between things’.¹³

The italicized phrase ‘appear as what they are’ indicates that for Marx this tendency to naturalize and fragment social relations is not simply the product of conscious manipulation, but is a necessary consequence of the functioning of capitalist economic relations. This is a particular problem in Capital, Volume III, presented by Marx as exposing the unity of capitalist production and circulation (the immediate process of production and the process of circulation are the objects, respectively, of Volumes I and II). Fred Moseley has suggested that this book is best understood as being concerned with the distribution of the total surplus-value created in the production process. Thus Marx successively considers in Volume III the redistribution of surplus-value among competing capitals through the equalization of profit rates (Part 2), the division of this profit among industrial, commercial and interest-bearing capital (Part 4), and the transformation of the surplus-profit arising in agriculture thanks to its relatively low productivity into ground-rent appropriated by landowners (Part 5).¹⁴ Marx himself highlights, at the beginning of Volume III, the significance of this differentiation of capital’s forms:

Our concern is … to discover and present the concrete ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• TABLES
• PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: EMPIRE OF THEORY, THEORIES OF EMPIRE
• Part I: THEORY
• Part II: HISTORY
• Index