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AWL comrades, in contrast, think that it is wrong to argue at
present for the immediate withdrawal of British (and US) troops.
Communists in Britain should campaign only for support to the Iraqi
workers’ and progressive organisations.
The reasons AWL comrades gave for this view were various. Comrade
Clive’s argument was essentially about British politics: campaigning
for ‘troops out now’ would involve at least temporary
tactical common action in Britain with advocates of an islamist
clerical-reactionary regime in Iraq. Other comrades argued that
the immediate withdrawal of British and US troops would result in
the islamists massacring the workers’ movement.
A third and perhaps underlying analytical position for the AWL’s
view was put most clearly by comrades Cathy and Paul. Comrade Cathy
argued that the left had failed to face up to the fact that imperialism
sometimes did things that were progressive. Comrade Paul argued
that the position I had presented rested on the misconception that
capitalism, and especially US imperialism, was in decline. On the
contrary, we now had the apogee of the world market classically
analysed by Marx. This development had been held back by the reactionary
role of Stalinism until the 1990s, and capital was now setting out
to “re-engineer” the Middle East in the interests of global
capital: the results were messy and brutal, as the introduction
of capitalism generally was, but ultimately in the interests of
the working class as a class.
The argument from the point of view of British politics is pretty
clearly sectarian. It simply takes the Socialist Workers Party line
(we should focus only on defeating the occupation, and not raise
awkward questions about the islamist militias, which might be exploited
by pro-occupation forces) and turns it on its head. It prioritises
preserving the ‘purity’ of the socialist alternative above
immediate action for short-term goals. This sectarian character
is consistent with the AWL’s successive arguments in 2002 that
the internationalist wing of the Socialist Alliance should go its
own way over the issue of the (non-existent) referendum on the euro,
and in 2003-04 that the individual, George Galloway, was a fundamental
political dividing line.
The argument concerning the risk of a massacre of the Iraqi workers’
movement is a bit more substantial. My response in the meeting was
that, first, the occupying troops were actually promoting religious
sectarianism and communalism and, second, there was no evidence
that they were actually providing protection to the workers’
movement against the attacks of islamist militias. In fact, the
occupying troops block the reconstruction of Iraqi political order.
Thus, the longer the occupying troops remain, the greater the likelihood
that when they leave the islamists will take over and massacre the
workers’ movement.
A more fundamental point made by John Bridge at our aggregate is
this. The call for the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of
troops is not a question of waving a magic wand and it will happen
tomorrow. It is a proposal for fighting for action by the British
workers’ movement to force withdrawal. And if the British workers’
movement by its action forces a withdrawal of British troops, that
in itself - because of who did it - will alter the political relation
of forces in Iraq in favour of the workers’ movement. Regrettably,
given the present relationship of forces, that is not very likely.
The SWP’s Respect project has seriously weakened the anti-war
movement. But then, in the present political relationship of forces,
few communist political proposals have much chance of being implemented
in the near future. If this was an argument against putting them
forward, we should all be Blairites.
The argument that imperialist interventions sometimes play a progressive
role raises much larger questions of working class political strategy.
They are too large for discussion in a single article, but the issues
are so important that it is worth attempting to outline some of
them. This article will lay out the AWL’s analysis, as explained
by comrade Martin Thomas, and set up the background to the question.
A second part, to follow, will address in this context what exactly
is wrong with the AWL’s analysis and what might be an alternative
approach.
AWL and imperialism
The theoretical positions expressed in the meeting in the arguments
of comrades Cathy and Paul are elaborated more fully by Martin Thomas
in the December 2002 issue of Workers’ Liberty, the AWL’s
occasional theoretical journal. (There is a longer pedigree of discussion
in Workers’ Liberty, but the issue quoted above provides a
relatively recent statement.) The major article by comrade Thomas
is expressed as two critiques - of Antoni Negri’s and Michael
Hardt’s book Empire and the ‘new imperialism’ concepts
of SWP leaders John Rees and Alex Callinicos. The journal also reprints,
with introductions by Thomas, an article by Karl Kautsky on ‘ultra-imperialism’
(famous among communists chiefly for having been the subject of
furious polemics by Lenin) and Kautsky’s 1907 pamphlet Socialism
and colonial policy.
Comrade Thomas’s argument runs roughly as follows. The old
Leninist theory of imperialism addressed the world of competing
colonial empires, which characterised the late 19th century and
the first half of the 20th. This collapsed in the 1950s because:
“Colonialism became, in general, too costly and risky for the
big powers in the decades after World War II, as the colonies became
more urban, educated and industrial. In a world of ‘universalised’
capitalism, they know that trying to impose governor-generals is
an expensive, risky and fragile method of providing assistance to
their corporations in the world market. So long as there are capitalist
states in every country ... then that assistance can be ensured
much more cheaply and reliably by market forces and para-market
forces ...” (pp30-31).
The result is a world of capitalist nation-states, with US “globocop”
military action used merely to secure the existence of such states.
Opposition to US action “is not necessarily a certificate of
positive virtue. The USA’s adversary may well be a ‘sub-imperialist’
or ‘paleo-imperialist’ power, one whose drive is for a
more localised or primitive form of imperialism rather than for
national or human liberation.” By “sub-imperialism”
Thomas means countries which he characterises as regional hegemons,
like India, Brazil, Mexico and Nigeria (all the cases could be seriously
disputed). By “paleo-imperialism” he means “attempts
by smaller powers to offset their weaker position on the larger
canvas of the world economy by small-scale regional conquests -
Iraq in Kuwait, Serbia in Kosova, Argentina (1982) in the Falklands
...” (p31).
The US is the world’s biggest military power, but the world
is not a US empire. To the contrary, “there is a network of
cartels between the big-power governments (G8, WTO, IMF, etc), which
has served, more or less, to regulate the ‘imperialism of free
trade’, and the US has the loudest voice within these cartels”.
But they “do not form a single compact centre, and ... they
are not solely US-run” (p31). The EU and Japan would not have
supported the US in the 1991 Gulf War, 1999 in Yugoslavia, or 2001
in Afghanistan, if these wars were not in the interest of big capital
as a whole.
In this situation the response of the Marxists has two aspects.
“Our underlying goal is workers’ control, the political
economy of the working class, the establishment of worldwide social
standards and rights by international working class action, and
the struggle for worldwide democratic socialist revolution, and
global democracy. Every right of national self-determination, every
other broad democratic right, is an important stepping stone for
that battle” (pp29-30).
On the other hand, “We do not support smaller capital against
big capital in the way that we support the rights of smaller nations
against big powers. We do not support bigger capital either! Even
if we surmise that a particular US ‘globocop’ action may
... bring some improvement on balance, we give no credit in advance
to big-capitalist power. We seek to educate and mobilise the working
class as an independent - which necessarily means, oppositional
- force” (pp31-32).
The relevance of the Kautsky article should now be clear. Comrade
Thomas argues in his introduction that in a sense the structured
form of the ‘western camp’ in the cold war, now extended
to cover the globe, “is a cousin of the ‘ultra-imperialism’
sketched by Kautsky”. Lenin’s criticisms of Kautsky thus
may have been partly right in 1915-17, but Kautsky may be more helpful
in addressing the world as it is.
These views are a pretty clear break with the programmatic positions
of the tradition from which the AWL originally came, the Trotskyist
variant of communism. The Platform of the Communist International,
the Twenty-one conditions for membership of the Comintern, the 1920
Draft theses on the colonial and national question and many other
Comintern documents are built on Lenin’s theory of imperialism
and its strategic consequences. The abortive Trotskyist Fourth International’s
1938 Transitional programme is explicit that “The defeat of
every imperialist government in the struggle with the workers’
state or with a colonial country is the lesser evil.” This
is not to say that the AWL’s approach is wrong. If the world
has changed, the programme must change: after all, the positions
of the Comintern and Fourth International on imperialism were radical
innovations on the positions of the Second International.
It is tempting to argue that the AWL’s positions on imperialism
are simply ideology which ‘reflects the pressure of our own
imperialist state’. This view is widely held on the left. But
this raises the same question: is the AWL’s position right
or wrong? In order to establish that a position is ideology in any
useful sense, it is first necessary to establish that (a) it is
false and (b) it is persistently defended after it has been shown
to be false, so that the only explanation of its persistence is
that it serves some particular interests.
Imperialism and the Marxists
Around 1900 a large part of the globe was parcelled out between
European formal colonial empires - British, French, German, Dutch,
Belgian, Portuguese, Russian ... Beyond this, several formally independent
states were subject to partial state-to-state dependency on various
European powers through treaty arrangements and through financial
and other mechanisms: most clearly the dependency of the Latin American
states on Britain, but also the various concessions and capitulations
affecting late Ch’ing China, the Ottoman empire, and so on.
The USA was ‘imperial’ within its own borders, but had
also begun to acquire protectorates: Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto
Rico ... There were some clear instances of what Lenin called “sub-imperialism”:
thus, for example, Portugal was, and had been since the 17th century,
a British protectorate, but had its own imperial possessions. The
various empires were characterised by abandonment of the old (British)
policy of ‘free trade’: instead various forms of protective
tariffs raised barriers between them. Between the rival empires
there was an arms race going on.
The Marxists were forced to address the division of the world into
competing empires as an economic phenomenon by a debate in 1907
in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Second International,
in which the right wing of the SPD and the international argued
that socialists should support reform of colonialism, rather than
oppose it outright. The arguments of the right derived partly from
the ‘civilising mission’ - ie, progressive role - of capitalism
in displacing pre-capitalist modes of production, and partly from
simple economic arguments: the international division of labour
had now progressed to a point at which the developed capitalist
countries could not, without economic ruin, give up control of the
production of primary raw materials in the colonies.
The left and centre-left in the SPD and International responded
with a succession of pamphlets and books attempting to analyse the
new situation, starting in 1907 with Parvus’s Der Kolonialpolitik
und die Zusammenbruch (Colonial policy and collapse) and Kautsky’s
Socialism and colonial policy. In 1910 came Hilferding’s Finance
capital, in 1913 Luxemburg’s The accumulation of capital, and
in 1914 Kautsky’s Ultra-imperialism. The precise economic mechanisms
proposed by these authors differed, but they shared common underlying
themes. Imperialist expansion was produced by the internal contradictions
of developed capitalism. These resulted, in the developed capitalist
countries, in a tendency towards capital becoming corporate and
monopolistic and the creation of cartels, strengthening of the bureaucratic
state, and increased interpenetration of banking and industrial
capital and of capital and the state.
For Parvus empires resulted initially from the drive of capital
to expand beyond national borders, leading to British exploitation
of the world; then from British response to the growth of competitors
in the form of a protectionist imperial system; then from French,
German, etc reactions to the British imperial system. For Luxemburg
disproportionality problems in the realisation of value - and for
Hilferding the increasing organic composition of capital and the
overproduction of capital in developed countries - drove the major
powers to export capital to less developed countries. The interpenetration
of capital and state is the reason this export of capital assumed
a state-backed form (formal empires and treaty capitulations, etc).
With the exception of Kautsky’s pamphlet, all these authors
drew from the phenomena of imperialism, monopolies, etc the conclusion
that capitalism had exhausted its progressive economic potential
in the developed capitalist countries.
In 1914 the arms race between the competing empires led to the World
War I. The Second International collapsed, as the majority of the
socialist parliamentary parties voted for war credits and the bulk
of the centre-left also collapsed into lines which were pro-war
or conciliated/excused the war policy of their own country. The
economic theory of imperialism, especially in Hilferding’s
version, offered the left both an explanation of the war and an
explanation of the political collapse of the International.
In 1915 Nikolai Bukharin published his Imperialism and world economy
in Kommunist, a theoretical journal issued by a ‘left’
dissident tendency in the Bolsheviks. Imperialism and world economy
is much more focussed on the development of a world economy and
on imperialism as an aspect of this phenomenon than either Hilferding’s
or Luxemburg’s books. After laying out the development of a
world economy, Bukharin argues that it is this development which
drives syndicates and cartels - and, in turn, a process of ‘nationalisation’
and statisation of capital. Imperialism expresses the contradiction
between the growth of a global division of labour and global forces
of production, and the continuation of bourgeois property and hence
the nation-state. But this implies that there will be a drive towards
competition on a world scale taking the form of war. In his final
chapter, Bukharin explains the collapse of the Second International
in face of the war by a solidarity between sections of the workers
and the imperialist state, grounded on the ‘super-profits’
of imperialism. But the war itself proved to (sections of) the working
class that this solidarity was illusory: it thus “severs the
last chain that binds the workers to the masters, their slavish
submission to the imperialist state” (p167 in the 1973 MR edition).
Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism was Lenin’s response
to Bukharin, though by the time it was published in 1917 the debate
between Lenin and the ‘left’ Bolsheviks - and beyond them,
between Lenin on the one hand and Luxemburg and Trotsky on the other,
over the Dublin 1916 Easter Rising - was largely over. For this
reason, and also because it was originally written to be published
legally under the tsarist censorship, the book is severely empirical
in character. Lenin does not share Bukharin’s conclusion that
the age of national economic development, and hence of national
self-determination as a progressive slogan, is over; but he is not
able to refute Bukharin’s theoretical grounds for his view.
Hence his argument focuses on the several symptoms of imperialism
as a system, rather than on the dynamics of their interconnection.
He insists that “in its economic essence imperialism is monopoly
capitalism” (p148 in the Beijing edition); and “Monopolies,
oligarchy, the striving for domination instead of striving for liberty,
the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations
by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations - all these
have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of capitalism
which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism”
(emphasis added, p150). Moral indignation has replaced the analysis
of objective dynamics which grounded the earlier Marxist authors’
claim that imperialism showed capitalism at its limits.
Like Bukharin, Lenin uses the ability of the bourgeoisie to ameliorate
class struggle in the home country through imperialist super-profits
to explain the failure of the Second International. Unlike Bukharin’s
explanation, however, Lenin’s insists that only a section -
the top layers of the working class, and the workers’ leaders
- are “bribed”. In place of a misconception of the class,
we have a moral betrayal by a section of the class, and the role
of the state in mediating the false solidarity between workers and
their masters has disappeared. The replacement of analysis of objective
dynamics with indignation is again apparent.
Anti-imperialism
The difference between Lenin’s and earlier conceptions of imperialism
was converted into concrete politics in the 1919-20 ‘turn to
the peoples of the east’, the Baku Congress of the Peoples
of the East, the Twenty-one conditions, the theses of the Second
Congress of the Comintern in 1920 on the national and colonial questions,
and those of the Fourth Congress (1922) on the ‘eastern question’.
These meetings and texts projected a strategic relationship of alliance
between the class struggle of the proletariat and the struggles
of the colonised peoples against imperialism and for national independence.
The Fourth Congress projected the idea of the ‘anti-imperialist
united front’, including all forces willing actually to fight
the imperialists. Unlike ‘official communist’ interpretations,
and those of today’s SWP, the Comintern insisted that this
was on the basis of strict independence of the Communist Party and
its freedom to criticise its coalition partners. Otherwise, it is
these original texts - not merely Stalinist reinterpretations of
them - which form the basis of the modern anti-imperialist orthodoxy
of the far left.
This is a difference between Lenin’s and earlier theories of
imperialism, in that it is precisely only Lenin’s theory which
makes imperialist capitalism both altogether parasitic and terminal
for capital, because it is parasitic. It hence leads to the conclusion
that the proletarian revolution is immediately on the agenda in
spite of the continued global dominance of peasant and artisan petty
production. Hence, in turn, it leads to the conclusion that the
revolt of the small nations as a whole against imperialism is an
essential component of the proletarian revolution against capital.
This was Lenin’s fundamental conclusion about Easter 1916,
and it can be seen as a generalisation onto the international scale
of his peasant policy for Russia (alliance with the peasantry as
a whole in the democratic revolution, leading to the ‘democratic
dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’). The same results
do not follow from either Bukharin’s, Luxemburg’s or Hilferding’s
accounts.
The failure of prediction
Until around 1950, Lenin’s theory of imperialism as the terminal,
parasitic and regressive phase of capitalism appeared to have considerable
predictive power. The world economy, international affairs and the
politics of the imperialist countries remained highly unstable;
fascism emerged; and by the early 1930s a movement towards a new
world war was apparent. In 1939 it broke out, and turned out to
be both more extensive and more destructive than 1914-18. For the
first few years after the war, the European economies remained ‘flat-lining’,
blocked from recovery by economic bottlenecks. In the colonial countries,
the (apparently) victorious British imperialists, and the French
and Dutch released by US-British victory, fought to re-impose their
rule.
By the early 1950s, however, it was clear that something radically
different was happening. On the one hand, the USSR (contrary to
Stalin’s original intentions) had created new Stalinist regimes
in eastern Europe, while Stalinist parties had done so independently
and against Soviet wishes in Yugoslavia, Albania, China, North Vietnam
and North Korea. The world thus assumed the appearance of a ‘capitalist
camp’ and a ‘socialist camp’.
On the other hand, within the ‘capitalist camp’ inter-imperialist
state-to-state conflicts had been radically suppressed by the total
conquest of Germany and Japan and the clear subordination of Britain
and France (not to mention the smaller imperialist powers) to the
US. US capital had nonetheless made, through the US state, very
major concessions to its capitalist rivals, in the form of Marshall
Aid, exchange controls and the acceptance of large measures of nationalisation
and other forms of protectionism which were against US capital’s
immediate interests. On this basis the European economies had begun
to revive and were to continue growing strongly through the 1950s
and into the 1960s. ‘Decolonisation’ had begun, with Indian
independence. It was to continue, partly through conflicts and partly
by agreed decolonisations, into the 1960s. Through the 50s and 60s
the regime of managed trade, exchange controls and Keynesian demand
management allowed substantial growth in the forces of production
in both the former imperialist and the former colonial countries.
These developments were a radical failure of prediction for the
Leninist theory of imperialism as capitalism in terminal decline,
and for Trotsky’s “death agony of capitalism”.
Responses
For those social democrats who employed Marxist ideas, the failure
of Lenin’s theory of imperialism to predict, even conditionally,
the course of events was no problem: the communists were wrong and
1914-45 merely an aberration.
For ‘official communist’ (Stalinist) theorists, there
was a problem. But it was heavily mitigated by the apparent success
in Yugoslavia, China, etc of the practical policy which flowed from
the Leninist theory, the anti-imperialist united front. (This was
by now more comfortably integrated in Stalinist theory as a variant
of the people’s front.) Soviet theorists developed, to explain
the situation in the imperialist countries, the theory of a new
‘highest stage’: ‘state-monopoly capitalism’,
in which the integration of the state and monopoly capital was deepened
beyond that of classical imperialism.
For the anti-Stalinist Marxist left (Trotskyists and others) the
problem was more severe, and remains a problem to the present date.
It has a practical aspect and a theoretical one. The practical aspect
is that the Trotskyists were completely unable to discover a practical
meaning to the idea of the anti-imperialist united front which was
separable from the anti-imperialist People’s Front in its Yugoslav,
Chinese, etc interpretation. As a result Trotskyism, which had had
a strong presence in Latin America and several other colonial and
semi-colonial countries in the 1930s and 1940s, became marginalised
in the most of the colonial world in the 1950s and 60s.
Theoretical problems
The theoretical aspect is this: are there epochal limits to capitalism,
and if so, what are they? The underlying reason for supposing that
there are is that there have turned out to be epochal limits to
prior (European) modes of production (slavery gives way to feudalism,
feudalism to capitalism). On the other hand, if there are not epochal
limits to capitalism, the claim of Marx and Engels to have discovered
a ‘scientific’ socialism (one which has predictive power)
as opposed to a ‘utopian’ socialism (one which is grounded
merely on a moral critique of capitalism) is false, and the whole
Marxist theoretical apparatus should be discarded.
Marx and Engels suggested two sorts of epochal limits to capitalism.
The first is that the forces of production grow beyond the point
at which the law of value remains a rational economic regulator.
In the result, the forces of production become forces of destruction
and the overthrow of the capitalist order becomes a necessary act
for the self-defence of society.
Hilferding’s, Luxemburg’s, Bukharin’s, and Lenin’s
theories of imperialism all find in imperialism the symptoms that
capital has reached this epochal limit. The growth of cartels, monopolies
and state intervention are all symptoms of the irrationality of
the law of value in a highly developed capitalist society. The imperialist
arms race, and the world wars, are instances of the forces of production
turning into forces of destruction. If these are not symptoms of
the epochal limit to capitalism, what could be is seriously open
to question (it would have to be something more catastrophic than
1914-45), and thus if there are epochal limits at all.
Marx’s and Engels’ second limit to capitalism is that
capital raises up, in the proletariat, its own gravedigger. As society
becomes increasingly divided into capitalist and proletarian, the
proletariat will increasingly assert its own interests against capital,
which will decreasingly have the support of the petty proprietors.
Capital will eventually be unable to stand against the proletariat.
The standard objection to this argument was that the instance of
Britain showed that, as the proletariat grew, it became reconciled
to capitalism: not increasingly inclined to overthrow it. Engels
suggested that this was attributable to the global ascendancy of
British capital. Thus he commented in 1882 that “There is no
workers’ party here; there are only conservatives and liberal-radicals,
and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly
of the world market and the colonies” (www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1882/letters/82_09_12.htm;
quoted in VI Lenin Imperialism chapter 8). Until August 1914 it
was possible to believe that this was a British peculiarity, and
even one that was declining (with the emergence of the Labour Party,
the socialist groups and radical syndicalism). August 1914 made
clear that - whatever the problem was - it went well beyond Britain,
and Bukharin’s and Lenin’s theories of imperialism generalise
Engels’ view to explain the collapse of the Second International.
Theories of imperialism thus play a much larger role in Marxist
theory than simply accounting for the early 20th century colonial
empires. The question posed in relation to alternatives to Lenin’s
theory is thus not just, how well do they account for the factual
course of development? - but also, how far do they offer an alternative
theory which is either (a) consistent with the general claims of
Marxism, or (b) offers a superior alternative to Marxism as a whole?
Mike Macnair
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