The imperialist stage of capitalism is signified by this development of monopoly capitalism, and its association with the state. The state, increasingly plans and regulates, introducing standards and so on. It creates a welfare state, which takes on the job of producing the publicly educated and skilled labour-power required by capital, including the provision of the middle-class managers etc. But, this imperialist capital has already outgrown the limits of the nation state, and national market. As a national bourgeoisie, it, inevitably, seeks to resolve that constraint by exerting itself against other national bourgeoisies. The fact that it developed, via social democracy, meant that the workers, in each imperialist country, also, saw themselves as a national, rather than international class, a fact exemplified in the actual constitution and operation of the Second International.
Colonialism arose, in the period before the development of imperialism, or even the dominance of industrial capital. Its basis was mercantilism, the symbiotic relationship between commercial and money-lending capital with the old nobility and landlord class. Its source of revenues was unequal exchange, and protected markets, which is why it developed via the opening up of new geographical territories, and the subordination of more primitive modes of production. But, imperialism rests on the domination of large-scale, industrial capital, and its need for an ever larger, single domestic market, not, now, as a source of materials, and destination for its output, but as the location for its investment of capital, and exploitation of labour.
The US Civil War was a front-runner of the process, as the industrial capital of The North subordinated the South, and established the predominant role of the federal State over the individual states. The reactionary, petty-bourgeoisie, has been resisting that ever since in insisting on states rights, much as internationally, they insist on the right of national self-determination. Yet, in each case, they end up depending upon the capitalist state itself to achieve that for them, whether its Trump using his power as President, or else, the repeated demands for “liberal intervention”, by imperialist states on an international scale. Just before that, the US had, also, expanded its territory by annexing Mexican territory in Texas, California and Oregon. The US, also, expanded the size of its territory, via the Louisiana Purchase, and the purchase of Alaska from Russia.
In the Spanish-American War, the US sought to expand its own borders into the surrounding Spanish colonies. The Franco-Prussian War, and, then, WWI in Europe, saw German imperialism fight it out with French imperialism over dominance in the creation of a single European state, able to compete with British imperialism, and the rapidly developing US imperialism. As Trotsky set out, in The Program of Peace, this simply reflected the historically progressive, and inevitable process of dismantling the outgrown nation states that, now, were a reactionary fetter on the development of capital, let alone socialism.
“If the bourgeoisie now appeals to force in order to save the collapsing “economic situation” from collapse, it is only showing that it is labouring under the same delusion as Herr Dühring: the delusion that “political conditions are the decisive cause of the economic situation”; that just like Herr Dühring it imagines that by it it can regenerate those “second order facts”, the economic situation and its inevitable development; by means of “the primary factor”, of “direct political force”, and that it can shoot and kill with Krupp guns and Mauser rifles the economic consequences of the steam-engine and the modern machinery driven by it, and of world trade and the present day development of banking and credit.” (p 211)
That process continued in WWII, and, only on the basis of the subsequent hegemony of US imperialism, able to subordinate European and Asian imperialism to it, in a common front against the USSR and China, was it able to come together as an uneasy, voluntary association of nation states (EU, and similar blocs), as well as a certain degree of global regulation via international, para-state bodies such as GATT/WTO, World Bank, IMF and so on. The fall of the USSR, but rise of China, as a global economic powerhouse, has fractured that previous uneasy coalition, which always involved the subordination of other imperialist blocs to the US, and that fracturing is now manifest via the role of Trump.
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