The New-Old Imperialism

_By Savas Michael-Matsas

1. During the '90s, Globalization dominated as a theme the mainstream bourgeois and the radical left discourse; after September 11, 2001, the launching of a "global war on terror" by the neoconservative Bush Administration, the disastrous campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, the focus of debates has changed centered now on imperialism and "neo-imperialism".

Nevertheless, the '90s, the "fabulous decade" for finance capital, were far from being a period of peace and prosperity; the collapse of the USSR and of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern-Central Europe was followed by the brutal dismemberment of Yugoslavia, the NATO war in Kosovo, the massacres in Caucasus, and bloody upheavals elsewhere, including chaotic conflicts in the Horn of Africa and genocides as in Rwanda.

There is continuity between the 1991 and 2003 Gulf Wars, marked above all by the direct effects of the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. But there is also an obvious discontinuity: the scope of the confrontations broadens beyond the initial limits and becomes global, the initiative taken for war is moved, from 1999 onwards, from Europe to America and U.S. foreign policy itself shifts from Clintonian multilateralism to neo-conservative unilateralism of the Cheney-Rumsfeld aggressive type.

What, then, is the nature of the change in the early years of the 21st century that refocused the debate on imperial, imperialist or neo-imperialist politics? What are the material bases of the change in terms of political economy? Is there any epochal character? Is it the ushering of a totally new historical epoch or the latest violent explosion of all the contradictions of an epoch already characterized by Lenin as "imperialism, the highest and last stage of Capitalism" and by Trotsky as "the epoch of imperialist decay"?

2. This "classical" characterization of imperialism as the historical epoch of capitalist decline is apparently dismissed or revised both in the radical discourse on Globalization as well as in the theories on the "new imperialism".

Negri's and Hardt's "Empire" represents a post-imperialist stage of transnational, de-centered world rule of capital, while the post 9/11 imperialist wars are considered as a kind of retrograde coup d' état by elites looking back to reproduce the pre-Empire conditions. The artificial, arbitrary nature of this intellectual construction can easily be demonstrated as it lacks a real foundation on an appropriate political economy analysis; despite its attractive, exotic language and some interesting, sometimes even brilliant insights, it exhausts itself into abstract generalities and platitudes.

In an earlier discussion on "Imperialism today" (Actuel Marx No 18, 1995) Michel Husson, Pierre Salama and Gilbert Achcar, while trying to re-connect with the "classical" legacy of Marxist theoretical debates on imperialism by Lenin, Luxemburg and Bukharin to analyze the features of what Husson calls "neo-imperialism", they do not hide that they found obsolete Lenin's concept of an imperialist stage of capitalism as the epoch of its historical decline. Achcar recognizes as still relevant the systematic 5 points definition of imperialism given as a summary of an entire analysis by Lenin but he finds antiquated the concept of the "highest stage" of a declining, agonizing, parasitic, "moribund" capitalism (op. cit. p. 103).

But as a matter of fact, it is impossible to separate Lenin's grasping of the nature of the epoch from the five essential aspects of its manifestation at the particular moment that he abstracts them (concentration of capitals into dominating monopolies, merging of banking and industrial capital and creation of finance capital, primary importance of export of capital in relation to export of commodities, beginning of the division of the world by international capitalist monopolies, completed territorial division of the whole world among the greatest capitalist powers).

Achcar's argument to demonstrate the "outdated" character of the Leninist concept of capitalist decline is the "long wave" of capitalist expansion after the Second World War. It is no coincidence that the same post war protracted boom is taken as landmark by David Harvey to distinguish between the "classical" imperialism of the 1885-1945 period and the post 1945 "new" imperialism under US world hegemony.

Harvey's theoretical contribution is rich, quite insightful and contradictory; it cannot be dealt in a few lines (See the discussion in Historical Materialism volume 14, issue 4, 2006 and the review by Peter Kennedy in Critique vol. 34, No 3, December 2006 pp.347-353 whose main points we share). The central point focusing here is Harvey's view that behind the imperialist endeavor of the United States, including the current war in Iraq, there is an attempt by the American political elite to counteract by political-military means the threat for the US to lose territorial and political dominance in the context of a developing US economic decline and to re-impose its world supremacy against potential rivals as hegemonic powers, like the European Union but above all China.

P. Kennedy rightly points out that Harvey's analysis of the "new" imperialism omits completely the class struggle and the major capital /labor contradiction. He replaces it with two intertwined but distinct logics of power (logic of territorial power and logic of capital accumulation) within the one pole of the main contradiction, capital itself. Following the same reasoning as Arrighi, Harvey sees decline in a limited way, Kennedy argues, as "a possible decline of one imperialist hegemony (the USA) and a transition (open-ended) towards the possibility of another hegemony(China) [.]Harvey's ideas about capitalist development are ultimately ideas about cycles and waves of the same unending capital relation" ( op. cit. p. 351).

The myth of the Eternal Return of the Same is not solely central in early pre-capitalist formations; it re-appears again, as Walter Benjamin sharply showed in his Passagenwerk -The Arcades Project, with the historical exhaustion of the bourgeoisie, the ruling class of "the last form of an antagonistic class society". From the world perspective of a dying ruling class, different forms are rising and declining, but never breaking the continuity of a cyclical time where the same fundamental social relation eternally re-establishes itself. Eternal Return is the myth shadowing a capitalist world in decline, from Nietzsche's time to today.

3. The myth was challenged and shaken in the aftermath of the first world war by the 1917 October socialist Revolution as the powerful initial act of a transitional epoch towards the abolition of Capitalism and class society on a world scale and the emergence of an emancipated classless, Stateless communist society. The subsequent upheavals, a wave of revolutions in Europe and Asia, historic defeats of the working class, the rise of Stalinism and of fascism, the Great Depression and the slide towards a new even more devastating world war made quite convincing the view of a decaying, agonizing capitalism.

But the post World War II "Thirty Glorious Golden Years" of capitalist expansion on the Keynesian bases of the Bretton Woods Settlement had changed the entire picture of the world and nurtured the illusions of an eternally returning new youth of the capitalist system in new forms. This mythical-false consciousness was compounded by the fetishism of the "ultimate fetish" (Marx, Capital vol. III), fictitious capital, with its globalization for a quarter of a century long period, in the last part of the 20th century up to now.

It was only in a relatively short period that the "eternity" of capitalism was again challenged: in the explosive decade between the end of the Bretton Woods system and before the domination of finance capital globalization, when the past forms of social control had collapsed and new ones did not yet had firmly established, i.e. during the revolutionary tide in the '60s and '70s( civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements in US, May 68 in France, Cordobazo in Argentina and revolutionary upsurge all over Latin America, the Prague Spring, the Italian "hot autumn", the Portuguese Revolution and the fall of the dictatorships in Greece and Spain, the historic defeat of US imperialism in Vietnam, the revolutionary overthrow of the Shah regime in Iran etc.)

4. But even in those years, despite the fact that capitalism, imperialism as well as Stalinism were challenged an the revolutionary perspective became again a credible emancipatory alternative, a real, cohesive theorizing of these struggles was lacking, despite a stream of new ideas reflecting the revolutionary needs in advanced capitalist countries and some important, although inconclusive, creative contributions. In general these events, when they were not just dismissed by a Stalinist controlled political-academic milieu, they were either impressionistically treated or transcribed into a dogmatically rigid "Marxist" codification by the anti-Stalinist Left. They were never adequately theorized. These strategic experiences represent a crucial moment in the transition to the current stage of class struggle, our 1905, a "dress rehearsal" for a coming wave of social revolution. They cannot be dismissed but theorized in the broader context of a dialectical-historical materialist theory of revolution whose core should be a Marxist theory of the epoch of capitalist decline, its self reflection.

A theoretical consciousness of the epoch based on an ongoing Marxist critique of the political economy and a non linear conception of history, has necessarily to include the theorization of the ruptures of the historical continuum, the major experiences in the struggle for emancipation, the entire "Tradition of the Oppressed"(Benjamin). Pivotal events, like revolutions and counter-revolutions, starting with the October Revolution or the subsequent rise and fall of Stalinism, are not solely epiphenomena but integral, interactive components of the epoch itself.

The concept of decline has to be concretized: it is the decline of the fundamental law of motion of capital, the value relation which manifests a growing inability to function as the regulative principle of social economic life. It reaches its historical limits, from the last part of the 19th century onwards, when the tendency to universality generated by the capital relation in modernity clashes not solely with external, territorial limits, but with its own internal limits, the limits of capital accumulation, the historical limits in the capital/labor relation. The development of new forms of social control over a rebellious working class, over all aspects of the life of the working population, the repulsion of the threat of social revolution at home and of the revolts of the oppressed peoples abroad, becomes, particularly after October 1917, the principal concern of imperialism, capitalism in decline and of its decadent ruling class.

The conceptualization of imperialism not as an expansionist policy but as a specific epoch in capitalist development, introduced first by Lenin, is timely today as never before, and vital as a historical perspective. Only with such a unified theory is possible to avoid seeing the second part of the 20th century as a formal negation of its first part and, rather, to grasp it as a dialectical negation, a moment of connection, of transition to the current world situation emerging in early 21st century. It is the only way to comprehend the logic in the madness of imperialism today and to take action to escape from the vicious circle of the dominant myth of its Eternal Return.

5. Globalization is not a new stage at the end of the 20th century. It is a process in different phases throughout the imperialist epoch in which a world division of labor, a world market and the world character of the modern productive forces, of class struggle and politics have being established.

The transition form one phase into another is determined by the need of capital to re-establish its control over labor in a new form, after the contradiction between capital and labor has taken an explosive, revolutionary character.

In a previous occasion, a periodization of the different phases of the imperialist epoch was presented (Savas Michael-Matsas, La mundialización como fantasma del comunismo, Marx Ahora, No.6-7/ 1998-9, La Habana, Cuba).

The first phase goes from the late 19th century to the First World War and the October Revolution (debated by Hilferding, Lenin, Luxemburg, Bukharin etc.)

The attempt to re-establish control with the old means of the period of Gold Standard and of the protection of the Nation-State led to a catastrophe, the Great Depression and the Second World War.

The shift to Keynesianism, already proposed by Keynes in the Versailles Conference as the reply to the challenge represented by the October Socialist Revolution, was introduced first in the States with the New Deal and then after the Second World War, in 1945 on an international scale by the settlement in Bretton Woods. The unquestioned supremacy of America in relation to a devastated Europe and Japan was also reflected that it was possible (as the two thirds of the world gold reserves were accumulated at Fort Knox) to establish a fixed convertibility between the US dollar and gold at $35/ounce of gold. The inability to return to the Gold Standard- the international currency system used throughout the ascending epoch of world capitalism- and the shift to a US dollar based Gold Exchange Standard was by itself a clear symptom of the historic decline of the system itself.

The Bretton Woods Agreement together with the Yalta-Potsdam Accords for the division of Europe in zones of influence between Stalin's Kremlin bureaucracy and its imperialist war Allies became the basis to check a post-war revolutionary explosion in a devastated Europe, where the communist partisans emerged as the dominant Resistance force in France, Italy, Greece and South Eastern Europe. Behind the framework established for a 30 years of Keynesian concessions to the working class, there was the change in the relationship of class forces, the renewed strength of the working class, the threat of a new October, of a repetition of the revolutionary events that followed World War I. The revolution was repelled not solely with economic means but above all by the political conditions produced by Stalinism's collaboration in Yalta and afterwards, during the Cold War.

Harvey's post-1945 "new imperialism" gives the main emphasis to the rise of US at world dominance at the expense of the former dominant European powers now in decline, without taking into consideration these political parameters and the class struggle and without seeing behind the surface of the post war boom the working of the laws of motion of a declining world capitalist system. US imperialism knew very well that without re-stabilization of Capitalism in Europe and Japan, without policing the world against the "communist threat" and the rebellions of the former colonial and semi colonial countries, without the survival of capitalism as a world system, its own survival in the American heartland was in jeopardy. In the post war period, it was not only the decline of Britain and France, with the dismantlement of their colonial empires that became obvious. The dependence of America from the world economy, world politics and world class struggle, from the existence of a world capitalist equilibrium reveal, despite all its resources, the historic limits of American capitalism tied with a world system in historic decline.

These epochal limits became visible again as the unprecedented post war capitalist expansion led to an unprecedented crisis of over-accumulation of capital in the late '60s-early'70s destabilizing the entire social political situation internationally and triggering the revolutionary tide following May '68. A crisis of political power was manifest both in the center and the periphery of world capitalism, while it became obvious that the Stalinist State-Party apparatuses could no more control as in the past the radicalized mass movements.

It is the specter of a rising revolution that led to the shift to finance capital expansion, finance globalization and the political strategy that took the often misleading name of "neo-liberalism". The liberalization and globalization of the financial markets gave a way out to the surplus capital, speculation helped to the formation of a nouveaux riches middle class base to the right wing regimes and their neo-liberal offensive against the Welfare Sate and the trade unions, while the role of the bureaucracies and the political limitations of the radical movements themselves had as a result demoralization and a protracted retreat. The culmination of this process of an advancing Capitalist Globalization was the collapse of Stalinism in Eastern -Central Europe, the implosion of the Soviet Union, the open turn to capitalist restoration in the former Soviet space, Russia and China.

But euphoria in the imperialist West and illusions for a "final and complete victory of liberal Capitalism" proved to be short lived. The third phase of capitalist globalization did not solved but globalized the capitalist contradictions that started to explode again, particularly in the last part of the '90s.

6. Finance globalization did not resolved the crisis of capital over-accumulation but exacerbated by adding gigantic sums of fictitious capital having a claim on a shrinking mass of available surplus value. A series of financial shocks revealed this fact. In the '80s the costs of the destruction of surplus capital was paid by the so-called LDCs, the overindebted countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. In the late '90s, the costs of the crash centered in Asia-Pacific was paid principally and initially by the so-called NICs, "the "newly industrialized countries" of East Asia; but as this international crash was spiraling all over the world, with Russia's default in August 1998 and the collapse of the biggest hedge fund the U.S. based Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) in September-October of the same year, the prospect a world meltdown became visible. The burst of the bubble of the "dot.com" economy in U.S. in 2000, the recession that followed, the bankruptcy of gigantic corporations such as Enron and of entire States considered as " the success story of neo-liberalism" such as Argentina in 2001, made this prospect palpable.

From the mid 2002 to 2006, there was a relative, uneven upturn in the world economy; its axis is the rapid growth of the peculiar social economic formation of China, financing, with its huge surplus reserves in dollars from its massive exports (now about 1 trillion US dollars), the gigantic deficits of US economy, by vastly investing in US Treasury bills.

The historical features of a systemic decline are already visible in these enormous and precarious unbalances around which world economy evolves; the unprecedented parasitism of America, the strongest capitalist economy in the world, on the world economy; its dependence, and the dependence of the world upturn from China, a hybrid economy with a non capitalist sector sustaining a capitalist-oriented economic over-growth.

But the cycle of 2002-2006 sustained by the China-Wall Street axis, has ended. The international financial meltdown triggered by the crash in the Shanghai stock market on February 27, 2007 joined by Alan Greenspan's remarks about the prospect of a downturn in US economy later in 2007 shows the cracks in the axis.

In the 1997 Asian crash, China could escape its consequences thanks to the peculiarities of its social economic formation, which in its crystallization contains a non capitalist sector with origins in the Chinese revolution. A decade latter, the same peculiarities make China the trigger of an international financial maelstrom. The capitalist restoration process "with Chinese characteristics" has undermined the State banking and State enterprises sector, it has produced an enormous crisis of over-investment, financial- investment bubbles and, at the same time, monstrous social inequalities, digging an abysmal gap between the social devastation in the countryside and the accumulation of wealth by local mandarins, the corrupt State-Party bureaucracies and the super-rich entrepreneurs. Integration of China into world capitalism did not created a new imperialist superpower to replace US as the world hegemonic power (according to a much publicized scenario, theorized also by Arrighi, Harvey et al.) but it becomes a destabilizing factor both for China and the world capitalist economy. If the crash in summer 1997 has destroyed the myth of the NIRCs, of the "Asian Tigers" as the new superpowers of the 21st century, the shock of February 2007 is a powerful blow to the "Chinese Dragon" myth.

The writing on the wall is clear: neither capitalist restoration in China nor in Russia, 16 years after the collapse of the USSR could rejuvenate world capitalism, or saving it from its inexorable decline.

Finance globalization failed to solve the crisis of capital over-accumulation that emerged after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system. It has exacerbated it. The neo-liberal strategy that was insolubly connected with it failed as well. It does not work anymore not solely as an effective economic policy but above all as a mode of social control and class rule. The crisis of political governance that finance capital and neo-liberalism tried to defuse at the last decades of the 20th century re-appears more forcefully in the early 21st century.

Without a Marxist theory of capitalist decline all these failures remain an irresoluble riddle. The same applies to the new imperialist war drive in the Middle East, Central Asia and internationally.

7. The last decade of the 20th century has demonstrated again not solely the political-military weakness of capitalist Europe but its historic decline. The response of the French-German axis of European capitalist integration to the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European bloc was to take the challenge by unifying the entire Continent into a Great Superpower with a hegemonic claim in the post Cold War world versus America.

This is the strategic line from the Maastricht Treaty to the Lisbon Plan, from the disastrous role played in the dismemberment of Yugoslavia up to the integration of Central-Eastern Europe countries as members of the European Union.

The strategic line has miserably failed. European intervention in Yugoslavia finished in a bloody impasse allowing the United States to take the driver's seat from Bosnia and Kosovo onwards, while the grandiose expansion of the EU to the East ended with the economically and politically problematic integration of a number of American-client States, sites of the new US military and ballistic missiles bases, including CIA prisons and interrogation centers, for use in the US "global war on terror" and as a menace against a resurgent Russia.

The weakness of Europe in relation to America has been re-asserted. But this weakness manifests definitely the decline of European capitalism but it does not preclude that a similar historical process, on a different rhythm and form, involves America too. It is Capitalism as a world system, not just one or the other metropolitan center, which is in decline.

Europe's failures in the '90s encouraged the shift in US foreign policy from multilateralism to unilateralism, expressed by Donald Rumsfeld's arrogant and stupid remarks about "old Europe" on the eve of the war against Iraq. But its relative advantage to Europe does not save America from the forces of systemic decline. Both Europe and America are plunging with different tempos in the same pitfall.

Economic parasitism on the world economy, exhaustion of finance globalization as a temporary way out from crisis, fear from a renewed social radicalization and activism exacerbate America's urgent need to re-shape a new world order under US hegemony in the post Cold War chaotic world. Systemic decline pushes American capitalism on the path of a new militarism and new imperialist war aggressions.

War becomes the means for social control both abroad and at home. The "global war on terror" is intrinsically combined with the declaration of a "State of Emergency" at home, strangulating civil liberties in the name of a decaying bourgeois democracy. The Patriot Act is the other side of Guantanamo.

But this extreme mode of class rule failed as well. Stalemate in occupied, resisting Iraq became a nightmare to US imperialism and his "Coalition of the Willing", raising a specter more scaring than that of the defeat in Vietnam. Afghanistan is totally uncontrollable destabilizing also central Asia, Pakistan and the entire Indian subcontinent. US-supported Zionist Israeli war against Lebanon in summer 2006 met for the first time with a military defeat and a political disaster.

There is no doubt that U.S. imperialism and its allies are losing their "global war" with devastating global political consequences (See Savas Matsas, La "guerra contra el terrorismo" cinco años después, En Defensa del Marxismo No 34, Buenos Aires 2006). The defeats in the imperialist wars backfire producing a regime crisis as it was seen in the "CIA-gate" and the midterm November 2006 elections in US, the crisis of Blair's "new Labor", the fall of Aznar in Spain, the fall of the first Prodi's Centre Left government in Italy etc.

The defeats do not lead directly to peace, on the contrary. When in Vietnam defeat became visible in the horizon, the US extended the war in Cambodia and Laos. Today, the Bush administration disregarded the Baker Report and escalated the war preparations against Iran and Syria, while fueling the civil strife inside Iraq, Lebanon ands Palestine. The task of the anti-war movement, arising from this analysis, is to transform by class action the political regime crisis in the belligerent capitalist countries into a revolutionary political crisis to defeat the imperialists at home and overthrow the system that generates, in its decay, wars, social catastrophes and barbarism.

The possibilities are enormous as people is severely and deeply affected by the continuing war and anti-war feelings are growing in conditions where the capitalist crisis already pushes in the arena of mass class struggle in the metropolitan countries millions of workers and youth. Social conflicts sharpen both in Europe( in France in the anti-CPE struggle of February -March 2006, in Greece in the fight against the privatization of education with the mass demonstrations , strikes and occupations from May 2006 to March 2007) as well as in America ( for ex. the 2006 "Si Se puede" movement of millions of immigrant workers).

The ruling classes, conscious for the threat, try to neutralize it both by State repression as well as by co-opting the Left in all kinds of class-collaboration fronts and center left governing bodies. Alliance with bourgeois forces, such as in the British Respect, in the name of the struggle against the war can only help the warmongers by politically disarming the only social force able to defeat them, the working class.

The period in front of us will prove beyond any doubt that new-old imperialism is not only an epoch of wars but above all an epoch of revolutions!

_Athens, 10-15 March 2007

Paper presented in the Critique Conference 2007, on Theories of Imperialism, on March 17, 2007, in the London School of Economics