John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

In Imperialism and World Economy (published a few months before Lenin’s work and from which Lenin lifted much of his own analysis), Bukharin openly addressed the uncomfortable fact that, as his biographer Stephen F. Cohen put it, “latter day capitalism was distressingly unlike the classical free enterprise system analysed in Capital ”. 2Bukharin agreed that the finance capital described by Hilferding would develop into imperialism, but he rejected Hilferding’s suggestion that capitalism might thereby avoid catastrophic implosion. Instead he called imperialism an “historic category” of modern capitalism bound to appear in its terminal stages. In much the same way, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, in their highly influential Empire (2001), advanced a theory of imperialism for the postmodern era.

Hardt and Negri argue that while the imperialism analysed by Lenin was driven forward by nation-states–whose interests could collide, thus producing war–modern imperialism is a supra-national process which they call “Empire”. Empire is no longer competing for the world. It already owns it, presided over by the United States and the other G8 countries, who use their policemen, the IMF and World Trade Organisation to enforce their will on nation-states that are out of step. Occasionally, Empire convenes at Davos or elsewhere to coordinate its policies. The legal norms thus produced, such as the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) which gives transnational corporations more legal rights than national governments in the running of public services, are, in Hardt and Negri’s terminology, “the material constitution of the new planetary order, the consolidation of its administrative machine, and the production of new hierarchies of command over global space”. 3

The Hardt-Negri thesis is a neo-Marxist vision of capitalism that sees it as quite literally a global entity requiring a similarly “total” response, an amorphous political resistance which they call the “Multitude”. Their analysis moves beyond the categories of classical Marxism and suggests that anti-capitalist resistance now resides in a diverse range of campaigns, groups, alliances and peoples. Where Marxism-Leninism privileges the role of the working class in such resistance, Hardt and Negri assert that other forms of anti-Empire activity–environmental and student activism, direct action campaigns, the Comunalidad , etc.–are just as valid and important as working-class labour struggle, perhaps more so.

In their view, the Multitude “are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organisation of global flows and exchanges”. 4The protests at Seattle and Genoa, the World Social Forum movement, the Indignados occupations, the Arab Spring and the global alliance against TTIP have all, to an extent, validated this theory, as has–in a negative sense–the Euro-Empire’s crushing of Syriza’s attempt to free Greece from its economic torture chamber. If that defeat proved anything it was that no matter how radical and populist it may be, a strictly national challenge based on a local democratic election is, to the forces of Empire, insignificant.

In 1914, Empire was still squabbling amongst itself. Following in Hilferding’s and Bukharin’s footsteps, Lenin analysed the political implications of this stage of capitalism. He repeated the argument that big business merged with financial institutions and together exported excess capital to colonial territories to reap “super-profits” through the use of cheap labour and raw materials, and that their need to do so was the primary reason for the acquisition of those territories. But his argument lacked nuance. For example, although German banks and big business worked together to advance a common agenda, in the largest Empire builder of all, Great Britain, the City tended to stay aloof from industry. It was mainly financial adventurers, not established plutocrats and banking houses, which led imperialist exploitation of colonial possessions.

Despite its methodological failings, the core argument caught a fundamental truth, i.e. that the social and cultural cloak of contemporary imperialism, “the white man’s burden” and the romantic mythology associated with it, was hypocritical cover for economic self-interest and exploitation of new markets. That exploitation may not have been the most rational way for Western capital to seek returns, but that it did so, aided by a massive state-military apparatus of which it was an inextricable component, was one of the key and undeniable elements of early-20th-century capitalism. In Lenin’s terms, it “emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general”. 5Although Lenin admitted his debt to the liberal economist Hobson (and grudgingly nodded to Hilferding), he did not concede that Karl Kautsky had preceded all of them and more accurately foreseen the broad trend of capitalist economic development.

A decade before Hilferding, Kautsky wrote that in advanced capitalism high finance “held government in a position of dependence, by virtue of public debt. But the modern kings of finance dominate nations directly through cartels and trusts and subject all production to their power”. 6Kautsky later considered that while imperialism was a definite stage in the development of capitalism, it was not the final stage, and that instead of heralding the terminal collapse of capitalism it might (in the summary of Massimo Salvadori) “consecrate the end of the primacy of Europe and the advent of the young and powerful United States as the dominant power on the world scene”. 7In an article written in 1914 entitled “Ultra-Imperialism”, he predicted one vast global market designed by and for transnational corporations. Where Lenin saw only catastrophism, Kautsky saw globalism.

The global imperialism that emerged was less hypocritical than today’s version, but in essentials it did not differ much from the neoliberal writer Thomas Freidman’s 1999 hymn to market-based globalisation, in which he advised America “to act like the almighty superpower that it is”. He openly admitted that

the hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist–McDonalds cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F15. And the hidden fist which keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps. 8

Aside from its crucial support to the US economy through defence contracts and R&D (most famously, the US Army’s Arpanet communications network was the genesis of the Internet) the core mission of the US military machine is to protect and project US “Full Spectrum Dominance”. In similar fashion in the pre-WWI period the US, British, French and German military carried out the larger geo-strategic policies of their civilian governments across “unclaimed” areas of the globe.

Eric Hobsbawm’s synoptic history of the period from 1875 to 1914 examines the creation of a single global economy with a high level of technological development. This created a pressing need for new markets, as well as access to raw materials that were scarce or not available in America and Europe such as oil, rubber and copper. The US economy, in particular, urgently needed outlets for its massive agricultural and industrial surplus. This in turn meant interventions in the economies of the Middle East, Latin America and Africa, with ferocious exploitation of labour in the Congo and the Amazon (for rubber), in Latin America (for sugar and tobacco) and in South Africa (for gold).

In response a strain of moralistic anti-imperialism–seen in Britain during the Boer War and in the international outcry against Belgium’s genocidal treatment of native labour in the Congo–became a part of Western liberal politics. For Lenin, imperialism produced far more important results than racist exploitation. In his view the level of super-profits reaped by monopoly capitalism “makes it economically possible to bribe certain sections of the workers, and for a time a fairly considerable minority of them, and win them to the side of the bourgeoisie of a given industry or a given nation against all others”. 9