Rasti Delizo is a global affairs analyst, veteran Filipino socialist activist and former vice-president of Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP, Solidarity of Filipino Workers).
In the first part of this interview with Green Left’s Federico Fuentes, Delizo discusses the ongoing relevance of Vladimir Lenin’s concept of imperialism.
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How do you define imperialism?
My standpoint aligns with Lenin’s theoretical concept of imperialism, as it was originally outlined in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
In essence, Lenin stated: “If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism, we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.”
He further wrote: “(W)e must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features:
- The concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life;
- The merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation on the basis of this ‘finance capital’ of a financial oligarchy;
- The export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance;
- The formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves; and
- The territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.”
We can extend his logic on imperialism to further analyse the current general world situation.
Imperialism concretely operates and grows across a planetary landscape that manifests an objective range of uneven and combined developments and circumstances. Its ever-expanding scope of capital aggregation subsequently leads to perpetual cycles of generalised crisis conditions.
Being the direct product of the capitalist system’s forever crisis of overaccumulation (of capital) — which subsequently results in a fall in the rate of profit — imperialism induces a subsequent crisis of overproduction (of commodities). Such a general crisis of capital leads to grave global economic downturns on a cyclical basis.
This universal plight generates the capitalist world system’s perennial contradictions, tensions, confrontations and conflicts.
In turn, this ominous international environment further creates a permanently systemic poly-crisis — a simultaneous concatenation of economic, social, political, diplomatic, security, technological and ecological predicaments that essentially roils and imperils the world system.
Reacting to the major fallouts that constantly destabilise the global economy, the great imperialist powers are routinely compelled to regain their respective state’s internal economic balance.
In pursuing this agenda, imperialist powers are obliged to directly and forcefully compete with each other. They mainly carry this out by reshaping and realigning their respective strategic spheres of interest and dominance across the world’s key areas and countries.
As an offshoot to the ceaseless re-divisioning of the international division of labour by competing imperialist powers, a fresh era of inter-imperialist war is triggered.
However, such an international conflict does not automatically have to take the form of the last two inter-imperialist world wars. This is principally due to the deliberate avoidance of the use of nuclear weapons since 1945 (but not absolutely).
Modern wars of a global magnitude can come in the form of intensified retaliatory trade measures, sweeping economic sanctions, coercive regime changes, asymmetric warfare, covert operations, limited regional hostilities, imperialist wars of aggression, etc.
These forms of conflict remain below the threshold of all-out nuclear war. This is chiefly due to imperialist powers maintaining “no first-strike” defence policies concerning the employment of nuclear weapons versus rival nuclear-armed imperialist states.
In spite of this, the reality and phenomenon of capitalist imperialism endures as an epoch of wars and revolutions.
What elements of Lenin’s book have been superseded by subsequent developments?
The general content of Lenin’s popular outline on the theory of imperialism endures as a principled framework to understand the class dynamics of the global capitalist system. In fact, his work on imperialism is proving to remain applicable amid a severely altered world order.
But since it was first published, the data and statistics on world trade and the financial sector, including on colonial possessions, have obviously become outdated. While Lenin’s fundamental approach still applies, it must, nonetheless, expressly draw upon the latest possible national and international data.
Furthermore, Lenin’s Imperialism was rather prescient concerning global capitalism’s overarching trajectory. It forecasted monopoly capitalism’s steady universal trend toward a greater concentration and centralisation of finance capital on a global scale by taking advantage of the combination of uneven economic growth and related political developments throughout the world.
Lenin, however, was obviously unable to envision a more detailed future of the imperialist world system’s crucial moments. Nevertheless, many of these particular outgrowths of capitalism’s “highest stage” can be theoretically traced to Lenin’s thinking in Imperialism.
For example, the following concrete conditions were put into motion by monopoly-finance capitalism’s incessantly intensifying logic of capital accretion post-Lenin:
- the 1945-91 Cold War global order;
- the US imperialist-led Bretton Woods international monetary regime in 1944;
- US imperialism’s sustained monopolisation of the globalised financial system since 1971, via the dollarisation of the capitalist world economy;
- the permanent bolstering of the imperialist world system’s core/semi-periphery/periphery architecture through a series of repartitioning of the global division of labour via decolonisation, beginning in the late 1940s;
- the conversion of former imperialist colonies into peripheral semi-colonial states still largely characterised by conditions of dependency, maldevelopment and non-monopoly capitalist growth;
- the structural adjusting of global capital’s hegemonic “economic reforms” through neoliberal policies to preserve and maintain its systemic extraction of super-profits; and
- the invention of nuclear weapons, impelling core powers to uphold the imperialist world system on the basis of the “nuclear balance of terror”.
These imperialist effects were a material outcome of monopoly capitalism’s naturally endless progression and expansion across the world’s economic sphere.
Even if the original scope of Imperialism is enhanced by incorporating new points of analyses and up-to-date trends reflecting the current(ly rupturing) period in world affairs, Lenin’s theory of imperialism endures.
What relative weight do mechanisms of imperialist exploitation have today, as compared to the past?
The central mechanisms of imperialist exploitation and oppression have continued to influence the precarious growth of monopoly-finance capitalism.
Yet, particularly since the late 1970s and early ’80s, these devices of monopoly-finance capitalism’s exploitative dominance have become even more catastrophic for the world’s working-class masses.
This is principally due to the emergence of international capital’s highly globalised chains of production (and reproduction), circulation, distribution, exchange and consumption being fashioned around a neoliberal capitalist project that chiefly prioritises an unfettered free market regime on a global scale.
These negative repercussions were unleashed by the economic policies of neoliberal globalisation: austerity, deregulation, free trade, labour flexibilisation, liberalisation, privatisation, reduced state subsidies, etc.
They have managed to destroy numerous social welfare programs and attendant democratic rights, most of which were won by the international working-class movement in the past century.
Consequently, intensifying social conflicts and exacerbating class divisions are the standard in nearly all countries right now.
An integral set of economic mechanisms underpin extensive forms of exploitation running through the foundations of the global capitalist economy.
Accordingly, this oppressive arrangement, through which monopoly-finance capital exploits, is based upon an international division of labour that is framed by a core-periphery paradigm.
The core is basically defined by monopoly-controlled production processes taking advantage of forms of global labour arbitrage (offshoring) to extract immense volumes of surplus value from the dominated peripheral countries.
The periphery is largely represented by dependent semi-colonial states, whose economies are substantially more competitive (free market and non-monopoly capitalist) than those in the core, but very much backward, weaker and maldeveloped.
In this economic setup, the core is able to steadily extract a net flow of super-profits from the labour power of the periphery to the monopolies of the advanced capitalist states.
As this imposed method of super-exploitation greatly favours the monopoly-based core, the primary international process of unequal exchange is firmly upheld and preserved by the imperialists at all costs.
Moreover, the present phase of the imperialist epoch undoubtedly displays a major shift toward the globalisation of finance capital in relation to its consequential role in the processes of capitalist production and distribution.
This is demonstrated by the much higher level of concentration of production methods, an enhanced centralisation and interconnectedness of finance capital via banks, and a greater consolidation of key economic sectors and major branches of industry.
[Abridged from a much longer interview published at links.org.au.]