4
Fred Halliday
The conjuncture of 2000
The twenty-first century opened amidst a flurry of optimism about the prospects for global capitalism. From the continuing growth of the US economy, through enthusiasm for e-commerce to new perspectives on break-throughs in biology and medicine, the prospects for human fulfilment and emancipation were, it was claimed, unlimited. Yet over this prospect of optimism there hung at least three major shadows, ones that darkened not only the headlines of the press but also the horizons of those who gathered, in Washington, London or Davos, to contemplate, and manage, the new millennium. One was the failure of the WTO conference in Seattle: the sight of a major conference on world trade having been forced to disperse amidst acrimony and chaos underlined the limits of current global management – reflecting the conflicts between representatives of states within the conference, as well as the protests of those on the streets without. A second shadow was the state of the world’s financial system. Outgoing IMF managing director Camdessus warned of complacency in the face of new tensions while pessimism surrounded the world’s newest currency the euro: launched a year before as a rival to the dollar, it had lost a third of its value by the year’s end. Third, and most seriously, there was the shadow of global inequality, a topic conveniently suppressed in the 1990s amidst much market-babble, but now recognised – by the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) among others – as a central, increasingly dangerous, feature of globalisation.
The onset of the new capitalist millennium was, therefore, confronted with a deep challenge: not that, as a century before, of organised movements of the oppressed, on class and national grounds, against a system of global hegemony, nor, for the time being at least, that of imminent inter-state conflict. One contrast in substance and mood between the world at 1900 and that at 2000 was the markedly greater prominence a century earlier of a belief in conscious, collective, human agency and of the possibilities of purposive political action. The optimism of 2000 rested more on assertions about the progress of science or the workings of the market – agency had, conveniently, been dissolved, but not resolved. Yet, from above, in the worryings of Davos man about Seattle people, or in the widespread, and globally diffused, protests at the impact of globalisation, the new age was being placed in question.
The changes brought about by globalisation and the conflicts it evidently generated underline the relevance of placing these processes in their historical and contemporary context, i.e. the expansion of capitalism. By any measure – trade, investment, global reach of companies – capitalism has continued more and more to draw the world into its ambit. 2000 opened with a rush to global mergers. Capitalism has expanded not only through the penetration of markets, but through a range of policies designed to limit the resistance of other societies – trade liberalisation, privatisation, the removal of subsidies, ‘compliance’. Four major historical processes have, in the past two decades, been collapsed into one: first, the completion of that subjugation of the pre-capitalist world which was begun five centuries before and which has now brought the remotest desert, forest and mountain village into the ambit of market relations; second, the destruction of that bloc of states that had, in a world-wide but ultimately failed campaign, sought to extract themselves from the world market; third, the intensification of technological change linked to capitalist expansion, which, by its very self-consuming rapidity, serves to reinforce oligarchic domination; fourth, the transition from a capitalism of rival national economies, a Keynesian-directed capitalism, to one in which states ensure the conditions for a free flow of goods and finance, while preventing the free flow of labour. Never has the link, boldly asserted by Marx and Engels in 1848, between capitalist domination and technological change, and between all of these and state policies, been as evident as is the third industrial revolution and the information revolution of the 1990s and beyond.
Two absent terms: capitalism, imperialism
To state this may be said to state the obvious, but it is not, because of the absence, or suppression, within orthodox discussion of the two analytic terms central to the analysis of this process. The first is capitalism itself: the term ‘capitalism’, the concept (never actually used by Marx) that seeks to denote the character of contemporary socio-economic relations, is one of which orthodox social science, and international relations, avoid speaking. It is as if the central motor of this phenomenon is too complex, or too sacred, for social science to utter its name: this, more than any other discursive denial, constitutes the ideology of social science, globalisation studies included, today. That this process is conducted for profit, with the aim of both subjugating and incorporating, is the central dynamic, and secret, of the modern epoch. The epiphenomenon of capitalist modernity – the introduction of new technologies, mergers, the erosion of ‘outmoded’ working practices, in the UK demutualisation – have here their explanation. International political economy has much to say on the manifestations of this process structures of production and finance, the behaviour of firms: less on the socio-economic system underpinning this, capitalism itself. The study of globalisation, and indeed of contemporary world politics, is, first and foremost, the study of contemporary capitalism. Indeed, paraphrasing Horkheimer,1 one may say: those who do not want to talk about capitalism, should not talk about international relations, or globalisation.
The other term, central but suppressed, is that of imperialism. Imperialism has, at best, had a half-life in the study of international relations. If the subject of the expansion of European, and later US and Japanese, control of subordinated states was accepted as a legitimate object of historical analysis, other branches of the social sciences – economics, sociology, politics and international relations – tended to avoid the topic. IR has recognised the importance of structures of power and inequality, but these have been treated as self-standing entities, separate from, or at best contingently related to, the world market and the global organisation of production. Yet this neglect within orthodox social science was countered by a vigorous, and sustained, debate on imperialism within historical materialism, where imperialism is seen as constituting the exploitative and global character of capitalist expansion, deriving primarily from economic factors, but reinforced by political, legal and cultural forms (Kemp 1967; Owen and Sutcliffe 1972; Brewer 1980). It was, famously, ‘the highest stage of capitalism’ – the Russian novishii etap being equally possible to render as ‘newest’ or ‘most modern’. This has been evident from the early 1900s onwards: indeed no concept originating within historical materialism has had such resonance in the twentieth century, the impact ranging far outside conventional Marxist or socialist circles, to include much of third world nationalism, and indeed Islamic fundamentalism as well.
This impact has, however, seemed to falter in the 1990s, a victim on the one hand of the collapse of the state system that proclaimed itself to be ‘anti-imperialist’, and on the other of the prevalence of ‘globalisation’ as a characterisation for those processes that were previously seen as denoted by imperialism. The term has indeed virtually disappeared from the intellectual map: a brief survey of international relations journals, and of publications of the left, shows a radically reduced interest in the topic. One exception, in a work of sustained historical and theoretical quality, has been Giovanni Arrighi (1991). Significantly, however, many other Marxist writers no longer regard it as a central part of their analysis.2 Denial of the concept has been accompanied by fragmentation of theme: thus one can detect a range of issues that would, historically, have been encompassed within the discussion of imperialism that are now discussed as separate, possibly autonomous, topics: migration, environmental degradation, indigenous peoples, income inequality, gender and development, not to mention globalisation itself.
Current theoretical fashion also militates against recognition of the centrality of imperialism. Thus constructivism, a transposition to international relations of concepts of role and identity long abandoned in sociology, is little concerned with objective structures of power and domination. Contemporary political theory, with its validation of community, identity and nation at the expense of universal and rational criteria, has a moral position on imperialism, and ‘Eurocentrism’: but this is not matched by any substantive analysis of the mechanisms of imperial power. Within post-positivist studies, there is much discussion of ‘post-colonialism’, but this is taken more as a cultural construct, and has displaced the analysis of ‘post-colonial society’ of a materialist kind pioneered in the 1960s (Alavi 1964). Similarly the critique of orientalism, pioneered by Edward Said, has displaced the far more cogent materialist work, of writers such as Anouar Abdel-Malek and Maxime Rodinson, that preceded it. In regard to resistance, contemporary literature is not without its invocations of the alternative, but this is too often either a romantic invocation of marginality – eco-feminism in India, Commandante Marcos in Chiapas, a simplification of Seattle – or a vague and ahistorical claim about growing anti-systemic social movements (Arrighi et al. 1989). Much of the literature on Seattle in particular reinforced this – neglecting the reality that it was as much inter-state conflicts within the conference as movement-state conflict without that determined the outcome.
As for globalisation itself, this too has served to obscure the central concepts and analytic claims of the imperialism literature. This displacement reflects at once a political and a theoretical conjuncture, but, arguably, one that has impoverished contemporary debate, just as it debilitates attempts to confront, resist and, potentially, turn to emancipatory advantage contemporary globalisation. The argument that follows offers, in summary form, some reflections on this intellectual challenge, reformulating some classical tenets of historical materialism on imperialism and examining how far these may be, and may not be, relevant to the contemporary world. The conjuncture of 2000, embodying both the end of the Cold War and its global political significance, and the spread of globalisation, provide occasion for this. They offer at once an opportunity to revisit earlier debates on capitalist expansion, and to identify the weaknesses and historical limitation of the classical arguments.
Imperialism and capitalist expansion: the five classical themes
Imperialism was not, it is often argued, one of the themes with which the founders of historical materialism concerned themselves: Marx and Engels had, famously, an ambivalent and, in retrospect, less than consistent position of opposition to European political and military expansion; at the same time their broad assumption, only partly qualified in later writings on semi-peripheral states such as Ireland and Russia, was that capitalism would create an increasingly unified world (see Shanin 1983). The bases for the supersession of capitalism lay in the diffusion of its social relations and productive forces, and the generation, on a world scale, of the contradictions inherent in that development. It was left to later Marxists, not least Lenin and Trotsky, to formulate what was to become the leitmotif of twentieth-century analysis of imperialism and anti-imperialism alike, the theory of combined and uneven development, one that recognised the explosive character of a growing hierarchy of wealth and power within an increasingly unified capitalist world (Rosenberg 1996).
Yet, in two respects, this reading of the writings of Marx and Engels is misleading. It is this very analysis of the diffusion of the capitalist mode of production that provides, in the 2000s, as in the 1850s, the basis for any discussion of the contemporary world – the use of the term ‘Eurocentric’ confuses an ideological Eurocentrism, ascribing primacy to European culture and values, with a scientific or historical Eurocentrism, which, quite rightly, ascribes the primary dynamic the creation of the capitalist world-system to western Europe and, later, the USA. On the other hand, the very limitation of the concept of ‘imperialism’ to relations between more-and less-developed countries, or what are today called ‘north–south relations’, obscures the other, analytically and historically anterior, dimension of the character and contradictions of developed capitalism itself: for Marx the term ‘imperialism’ meant initially that militarisation and expansionism of developed capitalist states, starting with France in the 1850s. This imperialism led to the later subjugation of Asia, Africa and Latin America in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
Imperialism began within the more developed capitalist states themselves: the study of imperialism involves therefore the location of ‘north–south’ relations within this dual context, the global expansion of capitalism on the one hand, the political and military expansion of developed capitalist states and their interstate rivalry on the other. Freed of the distraction of the Cold War, a strategic conflict in which capitalism confronted its authoritarian socialist other, the conjuncture of 2000 returns the focus to the level of conflict between capitalist states, in economic and military terms: these are the themes to which Marx and Engels directed attention.
Within twentieth-century historical materialism we can identify two broad periods in which the subject of imperialism was addressed: the two decades after 1900, in the writings of Lenin, Luxemburg, Hilferding, Kautsky and other Marxist writers; the two decades from the 1950s, in the work of such authors as Paul Baran, Andre Gunder Frank, Harry Magdoff and Bill Warren. These two high points of discussion on imperialism corresponded to the two central themes in Marx and Engels themselves: the focus of the 1900–20 period was primarily on intra-capitalist relations, and above all the causes of World War I; the focus of the second was primarily on ‘north–south’ relations, variously framed in terms of surplus appropriation, dependency and underdevelopment. Yet in neither case was there an exact, exclusive, focus: the literature of the early twentieth century contained within it, notably in studies of colonial exploitation and the agrarian question, and in the work of Rosa Luxemburg, analysis of transformation within subordinated countries, the second generation of literature related exploitation of the south to the broader dynamic of monopoly capitalism, to the militarisation of Western society in the Cold War epoch, and to the harnessing of third world exploitation and intervention to the conflict with the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Both phases of the analysis of imperialism aspired, therefore, to a global, developed and underdeveloped, combined and uneven, analysis of the dynamics of imperialism.
At the risk of simplification, it is possible to extract from this literature, treated as a whole, five broad themes, which can be regarded as constituting the historical materialist argument on imperialism_
· The inexorable expansion of capitalism as a socio-economic system on a world scale.
· The necessarily competitive, expansionist and warlike character of developed capitalist states.
· The unequal character of capitalist expansion, and the reproduction on a world scale of socio-economic inequalities.
· The creation on a world scale of structures of inequality or power and wealth not only in the economic, but in the social, political, legal and cultural spheres.
· The generation, through the very process of capitalist expansion, of movements of resistance, of anti-imperialism.
Summary as they may be, these constitute a set of basic arguments that run through the historical materialist literature, from the 1840s to the 1970s, and which stand in marked contrast to other more orthodox social science accounts. Above all, they locate the diffusion of imperialism within the context of the global expansion of capitalism.
Taken as a whole, this historical materialist characterisation of the international system was subjected to several, reiterated, critiques (Warren 1981). In the first place, the relationship established between the economic requirements of capitalism and the formal, colonial, subjugation of the non-European world was presented as unfounded. The greatest flow of British capital went not to colonies but to semi-developed states, Argentina and the United States. The economic theory of causation – variously presented as due to surplus capital, the need for raw materials and/or labour power, or the need for markets – was challenged as misrepresenting the pattern of capital export in the high imperial period, or as overstating the contribution of the colonial world to European economic growth.3 This highlighted not so much the weakness of the historical materialist theory as its unduly limited scope: for whatever the combination of reasons that led to the ‘new imperialism’ of 1870–1914, the overall pattern of European expansion, from the 1490s onwards, was intricately related to the economic needs of a developing and expanding Europe. This is the strength of the explanatory claim made by ‘world-systems theory’. The conceptual underpinnings of Wallerstein’s world-systems theory may be subject to critique: the earlier period of expansion, up to the early eighteenth century, was a precursor of capitalism but was in its internal socio-economic and political formation pre-capitalist. Wallerstein’s central insight, on the historical continuity and progressive expansion of the European economic and political system over five centuries, is nonetheless most relevant.
Recent scholarship has indeed established the centrality of capitalism in what had hitherto been regarded as the least capitalist of imperial activities, new world slavery: as Robin Blackburn (1997) has shown, slavery not only served a central role in generating profits in the eighteenth century but in the very formalisation of exploitation and labour management presaged later forms of workplace, and penitentiary, subordination. A second criticism concerned the centrality of colonies, i.e. of formal political control: construed in this sense, domination was not central to the stability of developed capitalism. Yet this too understated the force of the historical materialist argument: for while formal control was never the exclusive form of imperial domination – as evident in regard to such countries as Argentina or Mexico before 1914 – the integration of these states, and of later newly independent countries, was one subordinated to the developed capitalist countries.
More substantial were the critiques of the standard Leninist position articulated from within Marxism itself. In the first period this critique was most associated with Kautsky (1970), who questioned the second of the major theses identified above, namely the necessity of conflict between developed capitalist states. While abruptly contradicted by the outbreak of World War I a few weeks after he had written his analysis, Kautsky nonetheless pointed to an important weakness of the central Leninist argument: the necessary relation between developed capitalism and war. The latter part of the twentieth century was to show that the relation was more flexible and contingent than Lenin, seizing on the opportunity of 1914, had envisaged. The most cogent critique of the later literature was provided by those who argued, against dependency theory, that capitalism was within a hierarchical system capable of development in the third world: cautiously argued by Cardoso (1972) in his theory of ‘dependent development’, and more robustly in Warren (1980) in his ‘imperialism, pioneer of capitalism’, this reasserted the original insight of Marx into the global impact of capitalism, and excoriated the romanticisation of nationalism and pre-capitalist society that had underlain the dependency literature. For Warren, in particular, the analysis of imperialism required a return to the classical Marxist tradition of analysing the expansion of capitalism: hence in addition to the works of Marx and Engels themselves, Warren distinguished between a later, underconsumptionist, Lenin of Imperialism (1916), and the earlier more scientific Development of Capitalism in Russia (1900).
The theory in retrospect
Note has already been taken of the five central theses that constitute the historical materialist argument. It is now possible, in an equally schematic manner, to assess how far, from the vantage point of the analysis of the contemporary world, these theses are valid. If there is much to challenge orthodox and atemporal formulations, it is also possible to see in which respects the classical tradition remains relevant.
1. That the expansion of capitalism has been the defining characteristic of modern history needs little discussion here. Long obscured by the prevalence of inter-state conflict in its colonial, intra-European and Cold War forms, it is now clearer that the process of nineteenth-century capitalist expansion under conditions of broad inter-state collaboration has now been recuperated by the globalisation of the late twentieth century. At the same time, the combination of dynamism and inequality which was marked in the height of the colonial period, up to 1914, has been replicated even more dramatically today. That capitalism unites and simultaneously divides the world is the central truth of our times.
2. The thesis on war between developed capitalist states, and more generally of the warlike character of such states, would appear to have received strong support from the development of the twentieth century. In addition to two world wars, there has been a history of repeated intervention in third world states in the post-1945 epoch. The theory received, it was argued, further support from the conduct of advanced capitalist states during the Cold War: here military expenditure served not only an international function, of pressure on the communist world, one that ultimately contributed to the collapse of the USSR, but also as a means of boosting profits and employment within the developed capitalist states. This was the theory known, variously, as ‘military Keynesianism’ and the ‘permanent arms economy’. In the late twentieth century, Cold War military expenditure served, within an under-consumptionist perspective, the purposes which colonial expansion had served in the latter part of the nineteenth century. While constrained from major inter-state wars, the major capitalist states did engage during the Cold War in a series of wars with radical third world movements. Contemporary reassessment nevertheless suggests a modification of this argument. The pattern of inter-capitalist war that characterised the first part of the twentieth century expressed not a permanent, but a conjunctural, and contingent, tendency within advanced capitalism: the resort to war, and the militarisation of society accompanying it, served the interests of political and economic power in that period. It was not autonomous of the prevailing political and economic formation of capitalism, but was dependent or contingent on it: yet that capitalism itself did not remain permanently in the condition in which World Wars I and II were generated. This is, however, distinct from arguing that it was a necessary, recurrent, feature of capitalism in general. The argument for a contingent relationship of capitalism to war suggests, also however, that arguments on the necessarily pacific nature of capitalism are also unfounded: much as these may have appealed to the earlier sociologists in the 1840s, or to theorists of interdependence and the democratic peace in the 1980s and 1990s, such assertions of a necessary relation between capitalism and peace are as untenable as their counterparts. As with authoritarian political regimes, racial segregation, the gendered division of labour or formal colonial rule, arguments as to the necessary interrelation of capitalism with specific forms of political and social order are shown, in retrospect, to be limited. Capitalism is neither necessarily pacific nor necessarily warlike, any more than it is necessarily authoritarian or democratic.
3. The evidence of the past decades contradicts much of dependency theory but reinforces the argument on the growth of global inequality and the reproduction of an oligarchic economic system. Dependency theory had argued not only that the ‘south’ or the ‘periphery’ was subjected to the ‘north’ but that this subjection involved greater and greater impoverishment. This was the basis of the theory of the ‘development of underdevelopment’ espoused by Gunder Frank. Developments over the past three decades have demonstrated the falsity of this approach and the validity, in this respect, of the criticisms of Warren, Cardoso and others: industrialisation, and economic growth in general, have been possible in a range of peripheral countries and on a scale that dependency theory did not envisage. At the same time the very incorporation of third world economies into global capitalism has led to a massive increase in the flow of capital, through foreign direct investment, into the third world – from $50 billion in 1990, to $150 billion in 1997, this figure being amplified by further flows of private capital, in the form of bank loans and portfolio investment. Capitalism has, in this respect, fulfilled part of its promise, in pursuit of its very global spread. The character of this globalisation has, however, belied any prospect of a universal spread of prosperity. In five central respects this economic change has confirmed the oligarchic character of the globalisation process: first, the increased economic levels of third world countries have not prevented a growing inequality in world income;4 second, the incorporation of peripheral and semi-peripheral societies has come about through the reproduction of capitalist class relations within these countries such that the gap between indigenous rulers and the mass of the population has widened; third, in one group of recently incorporated societies, the former communist countries of eastern Europe and the USSR, capitalist penetration has been accompanied by massive absolute falls in living standards – on average 40 per cent; fourth, to a degree far greater than in the early twentieth-century imperialism, the flow of capital has been under conditions of instability and mobility that have only confirmed the vulnerability of third world states, and, by extension, of the international financial system; fifth, in a dimension earlier writers were only dimly conscious of, and which state socialism in its own manner compounded, capitalism has come to threaten the very environmental balance of the planet, creating in so doing an imbalance of environmental concern and protection between north and south that mirrors the global hierarchy as a whole.
4. The historical materialist focus on the mechanisms and institutions of capitalist domination has received striking confirmation from developments in recent decades: the instruments of global economic management – IMF, World Bank, WTO and Group of 7 – have represented the interests of hegemonic capital, promoting the global spread of free market capitalism even as they seek to manage it and, in the face of instabilities, lessen the tensions. The study of what in orthodox IR is benignly termed ‘international institutions’ analyses the political mechanisms put in place at the international level for the management of this capitalist world. Equally, the processes of economic integration found in Europe and Latin America – EU, Mercosur, NAFTA – correspond to forms of integration of capitalist economies the better to promote shared interests. This process of political and economic integration has been accompanied by the globalisation of a culture that is itself an instrument of subordination: the diffusion of information under the control of an oligopoly of communications firms, and the diffusion of a life style that is associated with the dominant US power, serve to reinforce that cultural domination, and that definition of the expectations of legitimate social and political action, that are central to the maintenance of any hegemonic system. Cultural hegemony allows for diversity, but one construed in corporatist, nativist and essentialist terms: it does not permit the articulation of an alternative hegemonic culture that would threaten to unstick the ideological glue that permeates the system. The site of conflict is, moreover, less that between ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’ values as it is one revolving around different interpretations of what is now a global set of values, originating historically in the West the challenge to hegemony has come in terms of such concepts as equality, independence, revolution, rights. A study of the works of figures generally associated with the ‘revolt against the West’ will show that their core ideological concepts were part of a radical, anti-hegemonic but universal discourse. This is as true of Gandhi, Fanon and Khomeini as it is of Mao Tse-tung, José Marti or Gamal Abd al-Nasir, let alone Che Guevara or Nelson Mandela.
5. The fate of anti-imperialism, and of what are termed ‘anti-systemic’ movements, presents a dual challenge to the historical materialist tradition. On the one hand, the twentieth century witnessed great and persistent struggles against imperialism and capitalism, vindicating the view that the spread of capitalism would generate mass revolt, be this in the semi-peripheral but independent states Russia, China, Cuba, Iran – or in countries formerly controlled by imperialism. For much of the century it appeared as if, in their combined and growing impact, these challenges would weaken the global capitalist system. Even when this challenge had been contained, it appeared that they could in various ways hold out against the world market: such a challenge took both revolutionary – communist – and reformist – NIEO (new international economic order) – forms. Yet neither of these challenges was sustained: reformist programmes of the 1970s, summarised in the NIEO, evaporated after rhetorical resistance, while the bloc of state-controlled economies succumbed in the 1980s and 1990s to reincorporation. The greatest challenge to the modern world capitalist system since around 1500 had failed.
This crisis of anti-imperialism was, however, matched by another development, namely the deformation of anti-imperialism itself. Anti-imperialism had classically involved a coalition of forces, a combination of socialist and Marxist parties on the one hand, with nationalist and national liberation movements on the other: the management of that coalition, and the shifting balance of forces within it, had constituted one of the enduring political tensions of the twentieth century. It had involved both a set of shared, universalist, goals and a belief in a potential historical alternative. Until the 1970s, however, the different components of that movement had espoused certain common goals independence from Western capitalist domination, mass-based revolt, and a programme of secular modernisation: the claim of anti-imperialism was, indeed, not that it rejected the goals of capitalist modernity – democracy, economic development, equality of men and women, secularism – but rather that it was able the better to fulfil the modernist programme that capitalism, for all its claims, could not.5 Increasingly, however, from the 1970s anti-imperialism came to comprise not only groups with such modernist programmes but other, more various, components: that ambivalence towards modernity that was always latent within nationalism came to the fore in movements of religious fundamentalism, a politics of ethnic identity, valorisations of nature and other, irrational, forms. This was true equally in the developed and in the third worlds. At the same time, an increasing part of the remaining traditional anti-imperialist movement came to be dominated by forms of authoritarian politics that represented the worst of the traditional left – Sendero Luminoso in Peru, the PKK in Turkey. At a time when liberal trends in capitalism showed themselves more flexible towards democratisation and human rights, anti-imperialism came to represent a coalition of the romantic and the authoritarian. This was incapable of sustaining a consistent resistance to prevailing forms of capitalism or of offering an alternative that was visibly superior to the programme inherent in the more democratic capitalist states.
The challenge which this posed was, therefore, the reconceptualisation of resistance to, and supercession of, imperialism itself: as within societies, so on a world scale, there developed a tension long present in the conflicts of modernity between a reformist approach, that sought to realise the democratic and economic potential of capitalist modernity, by bringing it under greater democratic control, and one that sought to reject it entirely. The very opening up of capitalist politics to discourses of rights and of democratisation in the 1980s and 1990s, coupled to the removal of Cold War justifications for authoritarian rule, provided a new political space in which to oppose prevailing forms of political and economic power.6 The failure of revolutionary anti-imperialism in its classic form was tied to its espousal of a teleological history, of the possibility of struggle in the name of a transition to post-capitalism, both desirable and sustainable, that proved to be invalid. Equally, it was associated with political dictatorships that proved incapable of democratic, popular, evolution. In its more recent form, latent as it was with promises of deliverance through authoritarian rule, and associated increasingly with anti-modernist confusion, such anti-imperialism itself inhibited the emergence of an alternative, emancipatory and realistic, contestation: facilely aligning with a range of regimes whose practice was even more remote from the emancipatory agenda than their opponents, many anti-imperialists found themselves acting, in the spirit of a long discredited stagist view of history, as apologists for semi-peripheral dictatorship.
One of the most telling challenges for any theory of imperialism, both in regard to the analysis of contemporary global structures and of alternatives to them, is to offer an understanding of the place and character of alternative forces. This is as necessary to rebut the hegemonic triumphalism of the epoch as it is to learn from the catastrophic simplifications of the century past: between mawkish indulgence of globalisation, and a vapid idealisation of alternative forces, there needs to be a space which identifies those, within movements, civil contexts, the media, the intelligentsia, and, in their individual and combined form, states that can form the basis for such a challenge. Any such conception that abandons the principles of democracy, and the more advanced conceptions of rights which contemporary liberalism has espoused, or which seeks to displace rather than transform states, is misdirected. A radical alternative to globalisation can only transcend the structures of inequality in the world today if it builds, in material and ideological form, on the best that its opponent has created.
Contemporary challenges
The critique which has already been levelled at the classical Leninist theory of imperialism, by historical event and intellectual reassessment alike, should underline the dangers of any fìdeist reassertion of orthodox verities. Imperialism, in the sense that Lenin understood it, was not the highest stage of capitalism, nor was developed capitalism necessarily tied to war. The forces of resistance generated by imperialism were not fated, by some immanent logic, to overwhelm the capitalist states. Nor have all those who have opposed imperialism represented an alternative that is, on political or ethical grounds, preferable to imperialism itself. The intellectual challenge facing critical analysis of international relations now is not to revive a ‘correct’ theory: it is of a rather different kind, and may be divided into four broad themes.
In the first place, there is a need to grasp the historicity of the contemporary phase of world capitalism, its relation to earlier phases in this century, and before, and the limits which may be inherent in its current phase. Contemporary world capitalism is evidently able to avoid war between developed capitalist states and rests increasingly on mechanisms of financial globalisation. The analytic challenge is to identify what it is that is specific to this phase, without lapsing into eternal and themselves ahistorical projections, about post-modernity, globalisation, or the end of inter-state conflict. Equally it involves assessing the dynamic of the contemporary world, and the potential for alternatives that it is creating, without reinventing those teleologies on which much earlier materialist and anti-imperialist writing implicitly relied.
Second, we need not just an analysis of the international state system but of that which underlies, and has long underlain, it, namely the international social system, a global sociology not of overventilated generalisations about globalisation, but of the contemporary reproduction of class, wealth and power on a world scale. To do this involves both a locating of different social forces on the world map, but equally their relation to particular structures of economic and political power, be they in terms of production circuits, financial structures or mechanisms of distribution. Several candidates for such a global sociology already exist: dependency theory, world-systems theory, various elaborations of ‘hegemony’ (Rupert 1995; Bromley 1993; Cox and Sinclair 1996) and ‘postimperialism’, the last a theory about the creation of a new transnational capitalist elite that incorporates third world economies into those of the developed world (Becker et al. 1987). Any such sociology needs to combine awareness of the increasingly integrated character of capitalist elites, and, at the same time, the reproduction and intensification of overall income disparities, and of new interbloc conflict.
Third, we need to assess and rethink something that was central to the classical analysis of domestic and international society, namely mechanisms of domination. At the moment we have vague intimations of military, political, economic and cultural power, as well as of the role of law – international, but also citizenship law – as an instrument for global control. We have very little sense of how ideologies – of nationalism, identity, religious affiliation – and means of communication fit into the global system of domination. How central, for example, is the US domination of global culture and news diffusion to the reproduction of its system of political control? How far since 1989 are systems of military domination linked to those of economic control?
Finally, we need to assess, in the light of materialist and rational criteria, the potential for alternatives in the contemporary world. A mere rallying of disparate self-proclaimed anti-imperialist forces is hardly sufficient, leaving aside the fact that these have no directing centre. The breaking down of the barrier between Marxist and ‘reformist’ critics of capitalism evident since the 1970s in the domestic field needs to be replicated on the international plane. Any policy of critique has to be linked both to the potential for improving on what already exists and on the identification of social forces capable of realising such a critique. Central to any such project is the need for democratic control of the forces that are, ideologically, presented as objective and beyond social control – markets, technological change, scientific advance. There is room here for some neo-Warrenite scepticism about what passes as credible anti-imperialism today. One shudders, for example, to think what the more hard-headed of the socialist tradition of the twentieth century would have thought if they had seen that the last great global mass event of the twentieth century would be the motley agglomeration on the streets of Seattle.
Conclusion: the pertinence of imperialism
If understood in terms of the five themes identified above, imperialism is not just a possible, but a necessary, part of any comprehension of the contemporary world. Shorn of teleology and of dehistoricised extrapolation, the classical literature can contribute to a framework for understanding the dynamics of contemporary capitalism, in rebutting both the vapidities of neoliberal orthodoxy and disembodied globalisation alike. Equally, imperialism, along with other Marxist concepts, can challenge prevailing ‘alternative’ approaches within the study of society and international relations, be they ‘post-colonialism’ or idealisms of constructivism and its ilk. Above all, it can provide the basis of what any theory of imperialism entails, which is that of a critique of political realities: the task, common to both developed and developing countries, is that of bringing the processes of contemporary capitalism under democratic control, and of realising the emancipatory potential within advanced and subordinated capitalism alike. There are many things in the contemporary world that would have surprised, and challenged, Marx and his immediate associates: the reproduction of capitalist inequality on a world scale, and the masking of this process by appeals to science, inevitability or even culture, would not.
Notes
1. ‘Those who do not want to talk about capitalism should not talk about fascism.’
2. For example, in Marxism and Social Science, edited by Andrew Gamble, David Marsh and Tony Tant (1999), there is no entry on imperialism.
3. Patrick O’Brien (1990) has argued that imperial investment, by lowering investment rates at home, weakened Britain vis-à-vis its competitors.
4. UNCTAD (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development) figures indicate that in the quarter century from 1965 to 1990 the share of world income owned by the richest 20 per cent of the world’s population rose from 69 per cent to 83 per cent. Average per capita income in the richest 20 per cent was thirty-one times higher than in the poorest 20 per cent in 1965, sixty times higher in 1990 (The Economist, 20 September 1997).
5. A classic version of this was the Trotskyist theory of permanent revolution: in essence, this stated that capitalism could not, under contemporary conditions, fulfil the ‘tasks’ of modernity and that these could only be realised under socialism. These ‘tasks’ included national independence, industrialisation, land reform, democracy, cultural development (see Löwy 1981).
6. For a powerful critique of militarism in the Latin American left, see Castañeda (1994).
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