A Tale Of Contradictions - Part 3

Yet, stuck with that old vision of Imperialism, taken from Lenin, most of the Marxist Left in the post-war period found itself disoriented when it came to analyse US imperialism. The Stalinists, of course, had good reason to point to US involvement in any overseas territory as imperialist aggression, and necessarily reactionary. Their function, after all, was to act as cheerleaders and propagandists for the ruling elite in the USSR, not to engage in any kind of objective analysis. But, the Trotskyist Left were little better. In part, that was because they too saw some duty to “defend” the USSR by placing a plus in its column, wherever the US placed a minus. But, they were in reality also disoriented by one of the central planks of Trotskyism – the Theory of Permanent Revolution.

The starting point of Permanent Revolution, as with Lenin's theory of Imperialism was the existence of that old Colonialist form of Imperialism. The basic idea of the need for a bourgeois revolution – either against a domestic Landlord Class or against a Colonial Power – is that identified by Marx and Engels, in the Revolutions of 1848, which is that although, the middle class cannot carry through such a revolution without the aid of the workers, they will, as soon as they fear that the workers will assert their own interests, desert them, and side with the landlords or Colonialists. But, the experience of Germany and Japan had shown that a different variant was possible. Just as Marx and Engels had outlined in the Communist Manifesto, the existence and dominance of the Capitalist Mode of Production in England was forcing every other country to assume the bourgeois form too, on pain of extinction. In Germany and Japan, and in Russia, Capitalist industrialisation was proceeding under the dominance of a Capitalist State, but where feudal regimes still ruled politically. It would only be a matter of time before these old classes, increasingly basing themselves on the ownership of Capital, and certainly dependent upon it, recognised what the Big industrial bourgeois recognised, that the best conditions for Capital accumulation existed within the context of a liberal bourgeois democracy.

Big Capital had cast aside bourgeois democracy only where it was no longer fulfilling the function assigned to it – maintaining social peace, and absorbing working-class pressure. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, and other revolutions across Europe, first the Italian bourgeoisie looked on at the spreading wave of Workers Councils, and establishing of Workers Control in its factories, and decided enough was enough, throwing its financial support behind Mussolini. Even in Germany at this time, conditions were not sufficient to persuade the Big German bourgeois to follow suit. Only with the developing global economic crisis of Capitalism, the growing economic strength of the USSR, and the increasing votes being won by the German Socialists and Communists, did they also throw their financial support behind the Nazis. Even then they probably did not realise what they were unleashing, and expected it to be little different to Mussolini's Italy. But, here too is an important lesson. The capitalist class is very small. The Big Capitalists, the ones whose ownership of the major means of production sets them aside even from the rest of their class, is even smaller, perhaps less than one thousandth of the population – for example, in the US, Bill Gates alone has wealth equal to the bottom 40% of the population. They can rule, therefore, only with the acquiescence of the rest of society. That acquiescence arises on the back of the overwhelming dominance of the ideas of that ruling group, and the hold they have over those that hold the levers of power in the State, in the echelons of Higher education, in the media etc. That ideological dominance is such as to ensure that via bourgeois democracy, the range of ideas presented by the contending parties is tightly restricted. The big bourgeoisie can make its influence felt on these parties when they are in Government via its representatives in the State, and via its contacts with the leading figures within the contending parties, by its use of finance to support one or another. But, its influence is restricted to such indirect pressures, because the drawback for it, of bourgeois democracy, is that the Government is ultimately elected by the vast mass of the people. Still, its ability to exert such control over Government's, which are generally weak, to achieve much against the wishes of the State, is significantly greater than it is over a fascist regime or military junta.

But, rather than recognising this fact, the Marxist Left assumed that the normal political regime that would be favoured by Imperialism would be similar to those old Colonial regimes, or an alliance with a local dictator. In fact, the only places where this was likely to be the case was in those areas where the old economic base of Colonialism remained dominant, and where it feared the strength of the working-class, or radical petit-bourgeois forces. In the aftermath of WWII, of course, no shortage, of undeveloped areas existed. The problem was that the Marxist Left tied this state of lack of economic development, to its theory of Imperialism, and came up with the idea that this Imperialism had an incentive in perpetuating such underdevelopment – what became known as the development of underdevelopment – in order to keep these economies subordinate, and to ensure that they remained sources of cheap raw materials, and markets for manufactured goods from the centre. In fact, the lack of development was partly due to Colonialism, but was more significantly just an indication of the well-known phenomena of combined and uneven development.

In reality, the period after WWII, the period in which big, industrial, multinational Capital has been dominant, has not only seen an increasing level of economic development around the globe – what today is termed globalisation – but, has seen alongside that, the greatest extension of bourgeois democracy around the globe. That, is one reason why Imperialism has, objectively, been the most progressive force on the planet in the last 60 years.

But, I hasten to emphasise the repeated use of the adjective “objectively” here, for there will no doubt be no shortage of opponents who will want to pick up on such an apparently heretical statement. It is no more heretical than Marx's own use of the term to describe the role of Capital in general. Simply describing, the consequences of the role of Imperialism as “progressive” in no way is intended to ascribe any “progressive” intent to the actions of the dominant imperialist agents. On the contrary, it is just a consequence of their aim to maximise profit, an aim, which, has also led them where the situation required it, to adopt quite other measures, the opposite of anything that could be described as progressive. The question is not to become blinded by the individual instances, but to analyse the broad picture, and to ascertain the general trend. The refusal to do that, to pick on any instance to re-affirm the old view of Imperialism as a wholly reactionary force, is what has led some Marxists to deny what is apparent. There is no shortage of Marxists who view the idea that Imperialism – or simply Capitalism – is still capable of revolutionising production as heretical, who view the world economy through a lens in which Capitalism is in permanent crisis, or about to experience some catastrophe, and so who have to deny that any progress is real. In the case of the developing economies, that has gone through stages of denying that they had actually become politically independent, describing them as neo-colonies or semi-colonies, to then arguing that they were not really independent because they were economically subordinate, to now denying that some of these economies, which have themselves become developed economies, are really developed, that their economies only have the level they have because of the role of foreign rather than domestic Capital! It is one of the weirdest examples of self-delusion you could encounter.

If Imperialism is viewed as such a social relation, then it can be seen that, however, imperfectly, some of the developments it was led towards within the context of the nation state, it has also attempted to extend on a global scale. And within that those same basic elements of Social Democratic ideology are also replicated. When I speak of Social Democratic ideology here, I am not meaning in the restricted sense of that pertaining to the various “Social Democratic” parties, but to that general trend, which developed even from the beginning of the twentieth century around the notions of social justice and security, of social harmony and so on, which has been taken on by Christian Democratic and even Conservative parties as much as by parties of the Centre-Left. The strategy of Imperialism has been to try to create global institutions, through which these ideas could be implemented, and to proceed by negotiation where possible. The strategy has been to create a Global economy in its own image, and the military interventions in Iraq, in Yugoslavia and elsewhere have to be viewed in that context, rather than in any kind of narrow immediate economic determinist manner, in the way that the invasion of Iraq, for oil, for instance was presented.

But, the global economy is not the nation state, and the kinds of complications that it experiences in translating its interests into policies and actions in the latter, are multiplied many fold in the former. By this roundabout discussion we come to the current situation in regard to the world economy, and the multiple contradictions apparent within it.

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