Blanca Missé is an associate professor at San Francisco State University and a Workers’ Voice member, who is active with the Ukraine Solidarity Network and the Labor for Palestine National Network.
In part one of this interview, Green Left’s Federico Fuentes spoke to Missé about the need to reclaim Vladimir Lenin’s method for analysing imperialism.
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How do you define imperialism? Do you see Lenin’s concept of imperialism as still valid?
The core of Lenin’s concept of imperialism remains valid. Still, his work on imperialism cannot be boiled down to a simple formula or treated as dogma.
In simple terms, imperialism says that the rise of monopoly production and finance capital gave rise to multinational corporations needing to expand beyond national borders. This accelerated imperialist rivalry, national oppression, chauvinism, militarism and war.
Looking at today’s world, this phase of capitalism has not disappeared or weakened — quite the opposite.
The value of the Marxist theory of imperialism, which has been much enriched throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, lies in documenting the specific mechanisms leading capitalist states to intervene economically abroad to extract value and profits, eventually resorting to military intervention to protect their investments.
Its goal is to connect what mainstream liberal thinkers keep separate: the inner trends of world capitalism and the political manifestations of national oppression (such as wars, plundering, coercion, targeted repression of movements and the overthrow of governments) in colonial and semi-colonial countries.
But while the essence of imperialism — “the dominance of monopolies and finance capital” as Lenin put it — and the relentless effort to divide and redivide the world remains unchanged, the form of imperialist domination has evolved.
The fact that today we might see a different configuration of imperialist powers, with new imperialisms rising such as China and Russia, does not negate the ongoing trend of the monopolisation, concentration and centralisation of capital in the hands of imperialist bourgeoisie, or their ruthless competition.
A 2011 study by Swiss researchers presented a startling scenario. Their analysis of 43,000 transnational corporations revealed that 147 of them — less than 1% of the total surveyed — control 40% of global wealth through ownership connections. More importantly, the study showed that 75% of those leading companies are financial corporations.
Economic capital, the defining feature of imperialism, continues to shape today’s world economy, which is controlled by giant banks and financiers.
Today’s transnational corporations also remain concentrated in key countries and are not evenly spread around the globe. Of the top 200 corporations identified in the study, 122 are located in five Western imperialist countries.
What parts of Lenin’s understanding of imperialism do you think have been superseded by subsequent developments or require updating?
As for the most critical contemporary updates, I list four.
The first involves updating our understanding of the various mechanisms of economic and financial domination.
It is true that Lenin highlighted in Imperialism the export of capital (or foreign direct investment), as the primary form of value extraction at the time, but he never claimed it would always be that way or that it was the definitive criterion.
In the postwar period, Marxist economists, such as Ernest Mandel, Samir Amin and Arghiri Emmanuel, identified other forms of imperialist domination, such as unequal exchange arising from a structurally fraught global division of labour between commodity producers and industrialised countries.
More recently, Marxist scholars such as Andy Higginbottom and Intan Suwandi have examined how this hierarchy is embedded in today’s global value chains.
Another crucial form of domination is debt. The use of debt service payments became the main form of US imperialist domination after WWII, especially following the oil crisis of the mid-’70s.
Also, so-called “multilateral” organisations (World Trade Organization, World Bank, International Monetary Fund) emerged as significant mechanisms of imperialist domination.
National and foreign debt have been a double form of imperialist oppression: extortion through extracting direct surplus value via interest payments; and coercion by forcing national governments to implement economic policies that open markets, assets and natural resources to predation by foreign capital.
The second update concerns establishing distinct labour markets and imperialist powers relying on both steady flows of immigration to imperialist centres and enforcing a capitalist border regime to enable the overexploitation of the semi-colonial world, or the “Global South”.
John Smith has explained this in his analysis of the global hierarchy of labour, where he documents how surplus value is extracted in the Global South and realised in the Global North. The “global labour arbitrage” developed in the neoliberal period may not be the “central” mechanism of modern imperialism, but it is a fundamental one.
On the other hand, and to complete Smith’s picture, we need to look at the role of migrant labour in imperialist centres. Justin Akers Chacon has developed a sharp Marxist analysis of the role of immigration in the post-WWII imperialist world. He says that the pro-capitalist border regime is designed to favour capital, which has the complete right of mobility.
This allows profits to be repatriated on a large scale with little or no actual taxation, while ensuring needed labour is offshored to peripheral countries with significantly lower wages and migrant labour at home is criminalised to make it more exploitable.
The third major change concerns the looming ecological disaster and the need to embed the concept of a metabolic rift with nature within any analysis of imperialist domination.
The foundational work of John Bellamy Foster, Paul Burkett and the early publications of Kohei Saito are essential to reestablish the true scope of Marxist analysis of capitalism.
Nature has always been, like human activity, one of the vital forces of production exploited by capitalism, which now drastically disrupts the possibility of sustainable renewal.
Monopoly production is fuelled by the abstract logic of capital accumulation, which constantly expands the number of commodities and depletes natural resources. As it assumes resources are unlimited, it poses the greatest threat to the environment and humanity.
Also, some scholars examine what they call “climate” or “ecological imperialism”, which focuses on the environmental aspect of profit extraction and value transfer. They describe the shift toward “offshore” or externalising environmental costs onto poorer countries, and the monopolisation of green transition profits within rival imperialist centres, while maintaining control over global environmental governance.
Today, it is impossible to seriously oppose world imperialism without fully adopting a socialist ecological perspective.
Finally, and this is still developing, we see in the early 21st century another historical trajectory, unforeseen by early 20th century Marxists, for the rise of new imperialist powers: the transformation of powerful productive forces — initially developed by a workers’ state — into private monopoly capital as they became intertwined with the capitalist mode of production and accumulation through a top-down process of capitalist restoration.
Should socialists seek to reclaim Lenin’s method to analyse today’s crisis of world imperialism?
We need to update it to account for significant global evolutions in capitalism since WWII, but yes, of course.
It was not so much the method of a great individual, but rather the result of a collective elaboration by revolutionary Marxists deeply embedded in the struggles of the working class.
They made a deliberate attempt to develop an internationalist perspective by engaging with revolutionaries in other countries, rather than being satisfied with a narrow national viewpoint.
Because they had to constantly account for uneven and contradictory trends in the world-class battle, they did not see imperialist rivalry as a confrontation between fixed blocs — a sort of trench war — but as a totality of contradictory relations in constant movement.
In fact, in his preparatory Notebooks for Imperialism, Lenin insisted on analysing the different imperialist states as embedded in a totality — a dynamic world order with living inter-relations among states, consisting of complex relations of subordination, domination or co-dependency.
Each imperialist state has its own strengths and weaknesses, due to a varying combination of economic and political transformations. Imperialist powers should never be considered in isolation from their historical background or by abstract standards or norms.
Lenin analysed imperialist states based on their capacity to enforce their rule abroad without outside support. While Britain, Germany and the US had risen to be “fully independent” powers, Lenin viewed Russia and Japan as “not fully independent” imperialisms.
The contradictions inherent to dependent and uneven imperialisms are not an exception to the Marxist theory of imperialism. The anomaly, instead, has been the US’s uncontested world domination for several decades.
If we recover Lenin’s method, we can understand why, for example, Russia can be an imperialist state today, oppressing its near neighbours abroad while depending economically on China, or how Spain still enforces its imperialist domination in Latin America while being subordinated to German capital inside the European Union.
Today, like in the early decades of the 20th century, we are again experiencing an imperialist world order in deep crisis and constant change. To understand its main trends and contradictions, we must revisit this analytical method.
[Read the full interview at links.org.au.]