even warrant inclusion amongst his
list of capitalism’s double-digit
contradictions. His chapter on “Un
even Geographical Developments
and the Production of Space” does
not once mention imperialism, nor
center and periphery. The only
direct reference to Lenin’s
Imperialism is aimed at down-
playing the structural role of
monopoly capital, which Lenin had
associated with imperialism.30
Late Imperialism
There is no question that
world capitalism has changed in the
century since the First World War,
when Lenin developed his critique
of the imperialist stage. Yet, this
has to be seen in the context of a
historical dialectic that embraces
continuity as well as change.
Imperialism is a historical as much
as a theoretical category. If half a
century ago it was still possible to
refer, as Magdoff did, to “the age
of imperialism,” even to the point
of seeing this as imperialism’s
“golden age,” today we are clearly
in an era of late imperialism
associated with: generalized
monopoly-finance capital; the
globalization of production; new
forms of surplus extraction from the
periphery to center; and epochal
economic,
military,
and
environmental challenges. The
crises facing the system and
human society as a whole are now
so severe that they are creating
new fissures in the state in both the
advanced capitalist and emerging
economies, with a rapid growth of
protofascist and neofascist
tendencies, on the one hand, and
a revival of socialism, on the other.
Recognizing the continuity
with earlier phases of imperialism
is as crucial to our understanding
of the present as our awareness
of the distinguishing characteristics
of the current phase. Each
historical phase of imperialism
relies on different means of
exploitation and expropriation to
June,July - 2019
feed accumulation on a world
scale. Imperialist countries at the
core of the system invariably
attempt to restructure labor in the
capitalist periphery (or in the
precapitalist external areas) to
reinforce power and accumulation
at the center of the system. At the
same time, the core imperial
nations are often in competition
with each other for global spheres
of influence. The early colonial era
in the mercantilist stage of
capitalism during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries centered
not on free exchange but on “profit
upon expropriation,” along with the
“extirpation, enslavement and
entombment in mines of the
indigenous population” of the
Americas and much of Africa and
Asia.31
In the later, mid–nineteenth-
century colonial era or stage of
free competition under British
hegemony, free trade operated in
the core of the world economy, but
this went hand in hand with
colonialism in much of the world,
where unequal exchange and
outright robbery and plunder
predominated. In 1875, Robert
Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, the
3rd Marquess of Salisbury, then
secretary of state for British India,
declared: “As India must be bled,
the bleeding should be done
judiciously.”32 Bled it was, but not
“judiciously.” As Utsa Patnaik has
demonstrated in detail, the present
value of the “drain” of surplus from
India to Britain from 1765 to 1938
amounts “on a highly underesti-
mated basis” to £9.2 trillion,
compared to a £2.1 trillion gross
domestic product (GDP) for the
United Kingdom in 2018.33
Nineteenth-century colonial
capitalism evolved by the end of
the century into what Lenin called
the imperialist stage, characterized
by the rise of monopoly capital in
all the great powers, the decline of
British hegemony, and rising
tension over the division of the
entire world among the core
capitalist powers. These conditions
led to two world wars among the
rival claimants to hegemony over
economic territory. Following the
Second World War, the United
States emerged as the world
hegemon within the capitalist world,
in a context that also included a
Cold War with the rival socialist-
oriented world. While promoting an
ideology of free trade and
development, the U.S. hegemon
nonetheless put in place a system
of neocolonialism enforced by
multinational corporations, dollar
hegemony, and a globe-spanning
string of military bases—from which
numerous military interventions
and regional wars were to be
launched. This was accompanied
by the siphoning off of much of the
economic surplus of the global
South.
W ith the rise of monopoly-
finance capital, the world has
entered a new phase of
imperialism, late imperialism,
rather than a superseding of
imperial relations. Late imperialism,
as we have seen, represents an
epoch in which the global
contradictions of the system are
revealed in ever starker forms and
in which the entire planet as a
place of human habitation is now
at risk—with the catastrophic
effects falling disproportionately on
the most vulnerable of the world
population. All of this is bound to
generate greater geopolitical
conflict as capitalism’s failure as a
society becomes evident.
None of this was a complete
surprise for the more astute
analysts of globalization. In 1992,
Magdoff wrote that, “contrary to
widespread expectations, sources
of tension among the leading
capitalist powers have increased
side by side with their growing
interdependence. Nor has the
geographic spread of capital
contd. on page 12
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