Kevin B Anderson is a Marxist humanist and Professor of Sociology, Political Science and Feminist studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. Green Left’s Federico Fuentes spoke with Anderson about Karl Marx’s ideas on colonialism and imperialism. Read part two here.
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Does the concept of imperialism remain valid and, if so, how do you define it?
Imperialism, which involves economic, political and/or cultural domination of one nation by another for profit and political advantage, remains a valid concept. But imperialism has changed a lot since the early 1900s, when the term first started to be used widely on the left to refer to an outgrowth of colonialism.
For example, there are very few direct colonies today: France has New Caledonia and some colonies in the Caribbean; Israel basically treats the Palestinian territories as a colony; and Russia has invaded and occupies parts of Ukraine. But it is quite rare today.
Most of Latin America became politically independent in the early 19th century, while in the period of decolonisation after World War II imperialist rule in Africa and Asia also became largely indirect.
The normal way imperialism operates today is by supporting people such as General [Abdel Fattah al-]Sisi in Egypt, the various military regimes that existed in Latin America in the 1970–80s, the former South African apartheid regime, etc.
A second difference is that in [Vladimir] Lenin’s and Rosa Luxemburg’s time, there were four or five imperialist powers, each roughly equal in power and all competing against each other.
By the end of World War II, however, the world was divided into two large blocs: one led by the Soviet Union; the other by the United States. Then, with the Soviet Union’s collapse [in 1991], US hegemony seemed relatively uncontested.
But now with China’s rise and Russia recovering its power (to a certain extent), we seem once again to be heading towards two blocs: one composed of the US, the European Union, Britain and Japan; the other of China, Russia and, to some extent, Iran.
So, there have definitely been shifts and changes since Lenin and Luxemburg’s time.
Despite this, discussions regarding imperialism often still refer back to Lenin. Which parts of his writings on the subject remain useful or relevant today?
One of the great things about Lenin’s book is his idea of stages of capitalism. For Lenin, this involved not just a gradual evolution from one stage to another but a transformation into opposites.
We saw this with the rise of monopoly capital and the transformation of competition into monopoly (the negation of competition).
We also saw this after the Great Depression, when capitalism entered the stage of state capitalism. This, among other things, saw the transformation of the Russian Revolution into its opposite.
During this stage we also had Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and US president Franklin D Roosevelt initiating a more benign form of state capitalism.
Lenin’s notion that capitalism — as a whole, and not just in one country — goes through stages is a very useful way of thinking.
So too is his idea that imperialism is tied to capitalism. This is not to deny the various ideological factors at play, such as national pride, but the underlying motivations of markets, cheap labour and natural resources help explain imperialism.
Often both factors — economic and ideological — can be true at the same time. World War I technically started over a nationalist grievance in the Balkans.
But, as Lenin explained, an underlying motive was the quest to divide up what remained of the Ottoman Empire and other areas of the world.
Luxemburg wrote that once Europeans had occupied most of the Global South by the 1880s and ’90s, there was nowhere left to expand. This meant the only way capital could expand was by going after each other, leading Luxembourg to predict the war earlier than almost anybody.
So, the theory of imperialism is also useful for explaining wars.
Though he was writing before the concept became common on the left, is there anything useful in Marx’s writing for understanding imperialism and anti-imperialism today?
When Marx was writing, it was still called colonialism. At the time, much of the world was not yet dominated by colonialism, though the French were in North Africa, the British were in India, etc.
Edward Said has noted, in a rather polemical way, that Marx initially held certain sympathies for colonialism and what he saw as technological progress being brought to the colonies.
This problematic view was clearly expressed in the Communist Manifesto, where he and Friedrich Engels talk about how colonialism “batters down all Chinese walls” and “draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation”.
It is worth noting that while Lenin wrote about imperialism at a high level of abstraction — focusing on finance capital, monopoly capitalism, global markets — Marx focused his intensive studies on the internal structures and dynamics of colonialism.
Two areas of particular interest were: the potentially revolutionary consequences of agrarian societies transitioning towards capitalism (most of the world at that time was composed of agrarian societies with rural peasant and agricultural labouring majorities); and whether any kind of alliance could be struck between movements in those societies and the workers’ movement in the West.
These studies led Marx to gradually shift away from his quite ethnocentric and eurocentric views, so that by the 1860s and ’70s he became a strong supporter of anti-colonial movements in general.
Marx started writing about India early on in his career, a topic he kept returning to throughout his life. But he also wrote a lot about Poland and Ireland, which were two different types of colonies.
In the case of Poland, nobody could claim Russia was bringing progress: it was not building railroads or modernising the economy — it was outright reactionary colonialism. As for Ireland, it was a rehearsal for what the British did later in many other parts of the world.
Marx dedicated part of a chapter in Capital to colonialism in Ireland as a uniquely capitalist form of colonialism, one that does not simply extract but also uproots the social conditions of the population.
In contrast to India, where he early on expressed ambivalence toward colonialism, Marx gave strong support to the anti-colonialist movement in Poland and Ireland from pretty early on.
The difference was that there were many socialists and left-wingers in the Polish and Irish nationalist movements, which had links to the First International through their respective branches in those countries.
In India, however, the movement’s goals in the 1850s were centred on restoring the old Mughal Empire and lacked any modern political perspective. The same was true in China.
Despite this, Marx and Engels supported the gigantic 1857 uprising in India and a year later Marx would write to Engels that “India is now our best ally”. By “our” he meant him, Engels and the small number of people who remained dedicated to socialist revolution amid the era of conservative reaction after the defeat of the 1848 revolution.
Marx could see that, while there was not much doing in Europe, India was exploding in resistance to the British Empire, which was a big part of the global capitalist system back then.
[Abridged from links.org.au.]