Güney Işıkara and Patrick Mokre are authors of Marx’s Theory of Value at the Frontiers: Classical Political Economics, Imperialism and Ecological Breakdown.
Green Left’s Federico Fuentes spoke to Işıkara and Mokre about how Karl Marx’s value theory helps explain imperialism’s economic core and ecological breakdown.
How do you define imperialism?
Imperialism shapes the global economy today like no other factor, and that is perfectly clear to most working people around the world.
Outsourcing of production, volatile prices of imported goods, exchange rate-induced inflation, foreign investors pushing down wages or domestic capitalists invoking international competition to do the same, debt service on (private and sovereign) foreign debt, and so forth — for most of the global population, imperialism’s effects are felt in everyday life.
That does not make its dynamics any less complicated, however.
We see imperialism as the mode of operation of international capital accumulation, rooted in the same dynamics that define capitalism: surplus value production through labour exploitation, which is then reinvested to accumulate and outgrow competitors.
Imperialism is a complex, multidimensional phenomenon inherent in the concept of capital as self-expanding value. It appears as a system of asymmetric economic, political and military power relations that are difficult to distinguish descriptively and separate analytically. It is a mistake therefore to treat these dimensions independently of each other.
From its start, the capitalist mode of production has been international. Its expansion across borders adopted and transformed pre-existing patterns of trade, colonisation and exploitation.
When capitalism became the dominant mode of production — first in certain regions and eventually globally — it became clear that internationalisation was an innate feature of capital accumulation, generating specific forms of domination.
Historically, the internationalisation of capital took place in all three functional forms of capital: commodity capital, money capital and production capital. Each phase, however, gave rise to distinct empirical patterns of power relations, along with corresponding waves of imperialism theories.
Vladimir Lenin’s intervention came at a crucial moment amid World War I — an unprecedented event driven by capital’s expansionist dynamics. The emphasis on capital exports was a timely intervention as the internationalisation of productive capital was starting to appear on an unprecedented scale.
Capital exports remain a central channel of economic imperialism today. Just consider cross-border ownership structures and so-called foreign direct investment in productive capital, which formed Lenin’s point of departure, or the dominance of a few financial centres over credit and debt worldwide.
We also value that Lenin grounded his explanation of the drive toward capital exports in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, rather than in problems of realisation or theories of underconsumption.
On the other hand, what was largely missing from the first wave of imperialism theories (roughly the first two-to-three decades of the 20th century) was a sustained attempt to link the study of imperialism — or the internationalisation of capital — to the law of value.
Your latest book explains how Karl Marx’s value theory can help us better understand the economics of imperialism. Can you outline why?
As we see it, imperialism is the way capitalism functions on the international stage. It is essentially what happens when capital accumulation crosses borders and encounters historically structured unequal development, patterns of domination, and asymmetric power relations.
Therefore the economic core of imperialism follows the broader logic of capital accumulation and reproduction, which is precisely what value theory helps explain.
In the book, we explore one specific dimension of the economics of imperialism by expanding the concept of international value transfers, since these transfers express and reinforce the inequalities structured and reproduced through capitalist competition.
Although the book focuses on the quantitative dimensions of Marx’s value theory — also known as the labour theory of value — we emphasise that this is much more than a quantitative tool. It investigates the law of value, which captures the processes that make the reproduction of capitalist society possible.
Capitalist society is fragmented into private, autonomous units making decisions under competitive pressures, with only partial information and without any mechanism of prior coordination. Marx’s value theory therefore lets us analyse a wide range of phenomena, including capitalist alienation and commodity fetishism, among others.
The labour theory of value examines how production and the social division of labour are regulated by value, particularly from a quantitative perspective. It starts with the creation of value through socially necessary labour time (direct prices), to surplus value’s redistribution in conditions of capitalist competition (prices of production reflecting a general rate of profit), and finally to market prices as indicators of day-to-day shifts in market conditions.
A central thread in the economics of imperialism is the redistribution of surplus value across industries and borders, as well as the appropriation of surplus value produced by workers in one country by capitalists in another.
Productive forces in the neo-colonial periphery — outside the traditional colonial and imperial centres — remain underdeveloped and capitals in the centre are powerful enough to mobilise entire states in their interests. Therefore huge redistributions of value occur.
These occur through several channels: the mobility of productive capital (including profit repatriation) and portfolio investment; the capture of value generated in productive industries in one country by non-productive sectors (finance, real estate and so on) in others; and transfers of value across industries and countries through the equalisation of profit rates, that is through the formation of international prices of production.
We examine the last mechanism in detail, focusing on cross-nation and cross-industry differences in the value composition of capital and in rates of surplus value. This line of research had largely faded from Marxist debates after the 1910s, until revived by Arghiri Emmanuel in his seminal book, Unequal Exchange.
We develop a coherent value-theoretical framework for analysing international transfers of value and, for the first time, present empirical estimates covering a large number of countries over a significant time period.
One of our key findings is that aggregate value transfers — representing only one mechanism of economic imperialism — were more than 70 trillion euros between 1995–2020, with gains concentrated in a small group of countries while the majority experienced losses.
This approach’s central strength lies in treating imperialism as an integral part of capitalist competition at the international level, rather than attributing global inequalities to imperfections in an otherwise smoothly functioning capitalism or relying on theoretically eclectic foundations.
How can Marx’s ideas help us integrate ecology into the concept of imperialism?
The idea of unequal ecological exchange (also called ecologically unequal exchange) emerged from a particular critique of Marx’s value theory. The argument is that Marxist analyses of international trade focus primarily on transfers — and unequal exchanges — of labour values, which are seen as only one form of energy, while overlooking the asymmetric flows of raw materials, land and other forms of energy.
From a broader perspective, it is certainly true that global capitalism’s functioning favours the imperial core in terms of the redistribution of surplus value, as well as the appropriation and use of various forms of use value.
To describe such processes, Marx used the notion of a “system of robbery” to explain how soil degradation in the countryside accompanied the rise of industrial capitalism in the cities. He also referred to colonial relations in discussing how the dynamics of capital accumulation in England exhausted Irish soil for more than a century.
In recent decades, many studies have analysed international trade through environmental indicators such as ecological footprint (the amount of ecologically productive land area per capita), land or space embodied in commodities, physical trade balances and material flows. These are important contributions because they document the material enrichment of the imperial core at the expense of workers and peasants in the periphery — a key dimension of imperialism.
It is a mistake, however, to think that such material flow patterns have self-constituted dynamics.
A defining feature of capitalism is that social and environmental concerns are subordinated to capital accumulation. Social structures and use values — whether from non-capitalist production or non-human nature — are reduced to their usefulness for accumulation and often degraded or destroyed in the process.
Think of a river that offers many use values: it provides enjoyment for swimmers, an ecosystem for fish and algae, and a vital function in the water–groundwater–precipitation cycle, while also serving as a cooling source for data centres.
Once its cooling function is fully exploited, the discharged water returns hot and polluted, riverbeds and currents shift, fish and plant life die off, and the water becomes unsafe for recreation.
The contradiction between use and exchange value thus lies at the heart of ecological breakdown.
We cannot explain the global distribution of materials, land, energy, space and waste without a coherent theory of accumulation and its relationship to use values.
This is precisely what Marx’s value theory provides through the duality of use value and exchange value — a contradiction embedded in every commodity.
[Abridged from LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal. This interview is the latest in LINKS’ ongoing series on imperialism today.]