Ana Cristina Carvalhaes is a founding member of Brazil’s Socialism and Liberty Party. In this interview with Green Left’s Federico Fuentes, Carvalhaes argues for a non-dogmatic theory of imperialism that incorporates ecology.
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Is imperialism still valid?
Imperialism is a Marxist concept, though the word is commonly used in the media and by non-Marxist scholars.
The answer to your questions depends on the Marxist perspective you analyse it from, as there are various forms of Marxism. I subscribe to one that rejects immutable dogmas, untouchable classics and sanctified gurus.
Such ahistorical views contradict the essence of Marxist historical materialism.
Imperialism remains extremely valid and useful today, even if it has been enriched by reality and new phenomena in the 110 years since Lenin’s seminal pamphlet on the topic.
I am among those who defend and draw upon the concept of imperialism, formulated and debated by a great generation of Marxists at the turn of the 20th century.
But I also think we must draw on the history of these past 100-plus years, and on important contributions regarding new phenomena in the global economy and geopolitics, especially by activists and theorists from the so-called Global South.
What elements of Lenin’s pamphlet have been superseded by subsequent developments?
The merit of Lenin’s synthesis lies, above all, in that it revealed an extraordinary long-term strategic vision.
As a revolutionary, Lenin was concerned about the war, which had already claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in Europe when the pamphlet was written in 1916, and how socialists on both sides of the trenches should respond.
Most of what he described as imperialism remains relevant today:
• the systemic predominance of an alliance between banking capital and industrial capital — finance capital;
• the growing tendency towards capital’s concentration through the formation of monopolies or oligopolies — the end of free competition;
• the ever-widening development gap between core and non-core countries;
• the tendency of industrialised nations, driven by capital’s needs, to expand their political, military and economic power over others; and
• rivalry among imperialist powers and the tendency toward war.
Each characteristic aptly describes today’s crises — with the notable exception of the ecological and climate crisis.
Broadly speaking, the Marxist theory of imperialism has proven correct in the long run, though, of course, not without shortcomings.
The Marxist theory of imperialism, further developed by Latin American dependency theorists and anti-colonial thinkers from Africa and Asia, rightly emphasises the core-periphery contradiction.
But it took a long time to recognise the emergence of intermediate state-economies. These state-economies are dependent on core imperialist powers, but oppress neighbours and partners at the regional level.
They do not quite qualify as part of the core, but are no longer simply periphery. Brazil is one case. This group is highly heterogeneous due to historic, social and demographic differences, among others.
Second, but no less important, is that no attention was paid to industrial capitalism’s predatory impacts on nature. In fact, nature did not appear in the writings of these thinkers.
They failed, for example, to elaborate on the link between imperialism and inequalities in terms of the far greater environmental destruction inflicted on the colonised.
How important is the integration of the environmental crisis into our understanding of imperialism?
This belated incorporation is, in my view, the most important contribution to Marxist theory since the 1970s.
There is an expanding body of work on the subject, one that has grown in line with the rising number of ecological disasters, increasing awareness among broad sections of society, and mounting evidence of the climate and biodiversity crises we face.
The main Marxist and Marxist-influenced theorists contributing to this ongoing discussion include Michael Löwy, Ian Angus, James O’Connor, Daniel Bensaïd, John Bellamy Foster, Jason Moore, Ariel Salleh, Andreas Malm, Maristella Svampa and Kohei Saito.
Anti-capitalists, such as Naomi Klein, have been crucial to popularising the issue.
The incorporation of ecology by Marxist theorists and social movements was — and remains — essential, as combating capitalism is a matter of human survival.
This system destroys nature. If the capitalist system — which gave rise to colonialism and imperialism — is the heart of the problem, then its mechanisms of domination serve to worsen the current crises and threaten planetary collapse.
Fortunately, movements and the left are taking up this issue, though not at the pace needed to halt imperialist capitalism amid the climate emergency.
Do the original imperialist powers continue to be the only imperialist powers?
This is another shortcoming of the Leninist approach.
In defence of Lenin and his contemporaries, they did not set out to predict the future. The possibility that some imperialist powers might lose influence while new imperialisms might assert themselves at the regional level was not foreseen.
But that is exactly what we are seeing.
Today, European countries have lost their leading role, though they remain imperialist.
The US remains hegemonic within the “core” group, but is in economic decline and losing political influence.
Russia exhibits the geopolitical characteristics of a regional imperialist power.
And China seeks to join the “club” of the most powerful. It not only wants its share within the redivision of spheres of influence, but directly competes with the hegemon for economic, technological, and geopolitical supremacy.
The global capitalist-imperialist system is not static, but dynamic; it is in a state of constant transformation. China’s rise and Putin’s assertion of Great Russian imperialism — together with the existence of sub-imperialist countries — are the result of global and national conditions.
What relative weight do mechanisms of imperialist exploitation carry today compared to the past?
If by the “past” you mean the period prior to World War II, China’s revolution (1949), India’s independence and partition (1947) and the decolonisation movements across Africa and Southeast Asia in the 1950s and ’60s, then clearly the mechanisms of exploitation and political oppression have changed or been refined considerably.
But, as with Lampedusa’s The Leopard, they only changed to ensure “everything remains the same”.
The core countries still appropriate a significant portion of value generated by non-core countries.
But there are few direct colonies left: Puerto Rico is a US colony; France, England and the Netherlands maintain some overseas colonies, including in Oceania. Direct colonisation is no longer the main mechanism for appropriating value.
Instead, the main mechanisms are:
• the international division of labour, which condemns dependent countries to the “perpetual” role of exporter of raw materials (primarily agriculture and minerals) for industrialised core countries;
• the super-exploitation of labour in dependent or semi-colonial countries, which only benefits the buyers;
• the flow of profits to industrial, service and technological oligopolies or monopolies headquartered in imperialist countries, even though they operate in periphery countries, where they destroy small businesses and hinder the development of domestic enterprises; and
• periphery countries’ debt to imperialist governments and international lending institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, as well as development banks run by the European Union, Japan, etc.
The main difference, however, between imperialism in the neoliberal era and that of the preceding period lies in the balance of power.
In the neoliberal era, imperialist exploitation expanded and became more sophisticated as imperialism resumed the offensive it lost in the previous period of great revolutions and colonial liberation.
Today, US President Donald Trump’s extremist imperialism, which supports a 21st century genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, seeks to reestablish the old colonialist mechanism of appropriating wealth through plunder, invasions, looting and direct control over countries (as with Venezuela since January 3).
Blatant political interference by Trump and his henchmen in elections in Honduras, Argentina and Colombia, and now in Brazil, embodies the stance “theorised” in the White House’ National Security Strategy, which sets the US as the master of the “Western Hemisphere” (the Americas plus Greenland).
[Abridged and slightly edited from a much longer interview published at links.org.au.]