Lenin’s theory of imperialism, the modern capitalist world system and revolutionary communist struggle today: An interview with Rasti Delizo (Part I)
Rasti Delizo is a global affairs analyst, veteran Filipino socialist activist and former vice-president of the Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP, Solidarity of Filipino Workers). In the first part of this extensive interview with Federico Fuentes for LINKS International Journal of Socialist Renewal, Delizo discusses the ongoing relevancy of Vladimir Lenin’s theory of imperialism while outlining subsequent developments that need to be factored in, particularly with regards to mechanisms of core-periphery exploitation.
In Part II of this interview, Delizo accounts for the rise of new imperialist powers, outlines the faulty logic behind the idea and promotion of multipolarity, and argues for a 21st century anti-imperialism rooted in working-class solidarity.
Over the past century, the term imperialism has been used to define different situations and, at times, been replaced by concepts such as globalisation and hegemony. Does the concept of imperialism remain valid?
Yes, and definitely so. Even in this early phase of the 21st century, imperialism remains valid as a theoretical framework to critically analyse the prevailing global system of perpetual capital accumulation and its exploitative and oppressive means — a complex setup dominated and driven by the imperialist great powers, largely via their destructive competition with each other on a global scale. Imperialism endures as a key Marxist theory to guide the international communist movement, as it provides us with a principled understanding of how this class-based world system and its international order works.
As such, a precise grasp of imperialism per se can assist the international working-class movement to develop much needed and effective revolutionary strategies, with their corresponding tactics, for worldwide change. Implementing such measures is the only way it will be able to ultimately replace the centuries-old rule of global capital, as only a comprehensive socio-economic shift from the lingering imperialist-led capitalist world system to world socialism can bring forth genuine systemic change.
Regarding the concepts of globalisation and hegemony, both of these can be relatively connected to the theory of imperialism. Nevertheless, I would not readily apply them as substitute concepts to accurately and fundamentally explain the still predominant imperialist world system.
Globalisation, as a singular term, predates the end of the Cold War in December 1991. However, as a popular synonym denoting the post-Cold War international economic and political environment, globalisation remains a bourgeois-ideological construct to triumphantly assert the logic of capitalism over socialism. In the context of today’s fluid world order, it is often used to broadly describe the worldwide economic-trade-financial architecture that upholds the preponderant structures of global capital along neoliberal lines. In this way, globalisation, as a descriptor, merely outlines the reigning bourgeois global economic arrangements and processes imposed by the world’s leading imperialist states.
But “globalisers” can only describe the capitalist world system in an elementary sense; they cannot provide any consequential critique of it. The concept of globalisation lacks a necessary focus on crucial revolutionary strategies, tactics and methods. This is globalisation’s primary weakness in explaining world capitalism’s systemic designs and agenda under the preponderance of contending imperialist blocs.
This is because globalisation does not exactly characterise and define the capitalist world system’s general class character and its main class interests. Globalisation also does not clearly identify the bourgeois ruling classes’ overall class aims and conscious plans to control the material and financial aspects of global capitalism’s production and distribution dynamics — together with its attendant social relations — and how they centrally underpin and impact global affairs. As such, the concept of globalisation strongly tends to be fixated on the form and procedures of international capitalism.
In contrast, the concept of imperialism focuses not only on the global capitalist system’s infrastructure and mechanisms, but more so on the content and direction of world capitalism. Therefore, imperialism’s central Marxist framework is obligatory for analysing the capitalist world system from a longue durée perspective, and its concomitant bourgeois-dominated global order in a provisional manner. This Marxist approach employs the dialectical method to crucially study the imperialist world system’s material foundations and practices, especially its historical development, emergent trends and potential future outcomes. By drawing out relevant lessons from contemporary imperialism, revolutionary socialists can develop strategic countermeasures to negate imperialism’s vulnerable points and hasten the downfall of this decaying and moribund economic system.
As for the term hegemony — emanating from the Greek word “leader” — this particular theoretical conception is essentially linked to two revolutionary Marxist thinkers and leaders of the international Communist movement in the early 20th century: Vladimir Lenin and Antonio Gramsci. While contemporary bourgeois reformists have widely coopted the latter’s conceptual framework on hegemony for analysing international affairs, their principal understanding of it is a distortion of Gramsci’s well-developed thoughts on the concept.
The reformists selectively deploy an explanatory narrative that simply highlights hegemony in terms of how bourgeois society’s social majority (the proletarian masses) consents to be ruled by an elite minority. As such, the dialectical conflict between the hegemonic forces of bourgeois society (the capitalist ruling classes) and subordinated and subaltern social groups (the working-class masses) — that is, the revolutionary class struggle — is greatly downplayed, if not ignored altogether. The reformists, interpreting hegemony in a subjective way, do not ground their analysis on the material conditions that bring forth class conflict. They tend to devalue the indispensable role of counter-hegemonic forces in transforming their capitalist societies through working class-directed revolutionary mass struggles.
In contrast to this reformist approach, Lenin’s writings on hegemony are grounded in objective conditions and realities. By historically and materially premising his ideas concerning the proletariat’s battle for hegemony through the lens and struggles of the bourgeois-democratic revolution (as it advances toward socialist revolution), and by locating it organically within the epoch of imperialism (as a transitional phase in the development of capitalism), Lenin’s views on hegemony are inevitably and rationally associated with the proletarian struggle for state power.
Accordingly, Lenin’s line of thinking reaches a logically conclusive set of key views on this profound subject matter. Certain upshots of his thinking on proletarian hegemony — including his ideas on democratic centralism, the revolutionary vanguard party, the need for an independent working-class movement, the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc — are in synergy with his theoretical contributions on imperialism. Applying Lenin’s hegemony/imperialism dialectic implies a necessity by the working class to view hegemony as a revolutionary strategy to win over democratic forces within class society, and lead them toward a seizure of revolutionary state power and replacement of the capitalist system.
The concept of hegemony can be adopted to characterise cause-and-effect relations and spatial-temporal dynamics in the realm of world affairs. However, its notions on leadership must always be complementary and integral to a critical understanding of imperialism’s extensive underpinning of the capitalist world system. This is because the concept of hegemony tends to connote a momentary state of being, or an unfolding condition of the international order (for example, a transitory world situation revealing certain states and regions are under the predominance of certain powerful states), arising from a set of combined causes (economic, political, security, etc) that are produced by universally powerful states (the imperialist great powers).
By itself, hegemony, as it is often used, presents a limited framework for explaining the comprehensive and extensive features of actually existing imperialism. This is the case even if the concept of hegemony is widely applied by many revolutionary communists, especially in the fields of international relations, foreign policy and world affairs. Yet, in substance, hegemony on its own does not conceptually expound on the inherently systemic contradictions of the imperialist world system’s class-driven facets and operative elements. So, unless one utilises Lenin’s theory of imperialism as a conceptual basis for understanding and studying the bourgeois international order, she or he may fall into mistaken views with declassed (chiefly state-centric), non-revolutionary and un-Marxist conclusions.
How do you define imperialism?
When it comes to defining imperialism, my standpoint fully aligns with Lenin’s theoretical concept of imperialism, as it was originally outlined in his pivotal magnum opus written in 1916, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. In essence, Lenin stated:
If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.
He further expounded on this point, writing:
[W]e must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features:
The concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life;
The merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation on the basis of this ‘finance capital’ of a financial oligarchy;
The export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance;
The formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves; and
The territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.
Flowing from Lenin’s non-static principles of imperialism, as both a special and highest stage in the general advancement of capitalism on a global scale, we can sketch out some additional relevant points on this subject matter, extending his logic on imperialism to further analyse the current general world situation.
Imperialism, as a historically advanced phase of evolution of the capitalist economic setup, concretely operates and grows across a planetary landscape that manifests an objective range of uneven and combined developments and circumstances. Its ever-expanding scope of capital aggregation subsequently leads to perpetual cycles of generalised crisis conditions. Being the direct product of the capitalist system’s forever crisis of overaccumulation (of capital) — which subsequently results in a fall in the rate of profit — imperialism induces a subsequent crisis of overproduction (of commodities). Such a general crisis of capital leads to grave global economic downturns on a cyclical basis.
This universal plight chiefly generates the capitalist world system’s perennial contradictions, tensions, confrontations and conflicts. In turn, this ominous international environment further creates a permanently systemic polycrisis — a simultaneous concatenation of economic, social, political, diplomatic, security, technological and ecological predicaments that essentially roils and imperils the world system.
Reacting to the major fallouts that constantly destabilise the global economy, the imperialist great powers are routinely compelled to regain their respective state’s internal economic balance. In this scenario, the dominant oligarchic stratum within imperialist states instigate forceful measures toward a continued repartitioning of the global division of labour to rebalance their own monopoly-finance interests. In pursuing this external agenda, imperialist powers are obliged to directly and forcefully compete with each other. They mainly carry this out by reshaping and realigning their respective strategic spheres of interest and dominance across the world’s key areas and countries.
Soon after formulating their new geopolitical designs and schemes to attain even greater dominance throughout the vital hemispheres and regions of the world, opposing imperialist blocs aggressively assert their parallel geostrategies — with matching belligerent foreign policy narratives and militarist maneuvers — to secure for their own ruling financial oligarchies expansively wider transregional hegemonic capacities. Along this escalatory thrust, the imperialist-led world system ultimately unleashes yet another momentous but chaotic shift, negating a ruptured antiquated international order and moulding a newly renovated one. And thus, the global strategic setting is once more qualitatively transformed into a more volatile world environment.
In the meantime, these new periods of worldwide disruption and upheaval understandably bring about universal moods of uncertainty and tensions within society. At the level of bourgeois states, capitalist ruling classes automatically react to protect their narrow class interests via state apparatuses they essentially control. In doing so, capitalists tend to incite the political atmospheres of their national societies around varied forms of reactionary nationalism, including jingoistic attitudes and behaviour, as a ploy to win over their already agitated and steadily radicalising working-class masses and dissipate their seething class struggles. As the dire impacts from these dangerously unfolding global situations are directly and intrinsically linked to emergent material threats arising from the international system’s economic sphere, their spillover effects onto the world’s nation-state arenas only further stir up latent social conflicts.
Amid the unraveling and tension-prone global situation, the world order rapidly deteriorates and acutely bifurcates into at least two battling imperialist blocs. As an offshoot to the ceaseless redivisioning of the international division of labour by competing imperialist powers, purposefully to recast and boost their respective spheres of hegemonic influence, a fresh era of inter-imperialist war is triggered. However, such an international conflict does not automatically have to take the form of the last two inter-imperialist world wars. This is principally due to the deliberate avoidance of the use of nuclear weapons since 1945 (but not absolutely).
Nonetheless, modern wars of a global magnitude can come in the form of intensified retaliatory trade measures, sweeping economic sanctions, coercive regime changes, asymmetric warfare, covert operations, limited regional hostilities, imperialist wars of aggression, etc. These forms of externally-directed conflict, which are always real options held out by the imperialist powers, still remain below the threshold of all-out nuclear war. This is chiefly due to the contemporary international context, characterised by imperialist powers maintaining “No first-strike” defense policies concerning the employment of nuclear weapons versus rival nuclear-armed imperialist states. In spite of this latter condition, the reality and phenomenon of capitalist imperialism endures as an epoch of wars and revolutions
As long as the globalised economic mode of production and distribution is primarily based on an always increasing extraction of super-profits, the blowbacks and repercussions emanating from the prevalent structures and mechanisms of the imperialist world system — predicated upon international trade dynamics of unequal exchange via systematic net transfers of surplus value from semi-colonial periphery countries to the core of competing imperialist blocs — must seriously and constantly be monitored, analysed, studied and comprehended to successfully resist all imperialist assaults. With a sharper understanding of imperialism, the militant revolutionary forces of the global proletariat can resolutely advance a universally collective project for genuine systemic change to build world socialism.
Lenin’s theory of imperialism continues to stand as the cardinal concept to be applied in any analysis of the lingering world system. Sustained serious studies of its ever-evolving capitalist global order of exploitation, oppression and repression is a primary duty of all revolutionary communists. One principled task to help advance the aspiration of proletarian internationalism is to seek effective ways to undermine, weaken and defeat the fetters of all brands of imperialism, especially within their national arenas of revolutionary struggle.
Discussions regarding imperialism often refer to Lenin’s book, which you have already touched upon. But how much of his book remains relevant, and what elements have been superseded by subsequent developments?
Lenin’s pamphlet on imperialism continues to be highly relevant. Even if he originally wrote it in the first half of 1916 — while he was in exile in Switzerland during the first inter-imperialist world war — the general content of Lenin’s popular outline on the theory of imperialism strongly endures as a principled framework to understand the class dynamics of the global capitalist system. In fact, his theoretical work on imperialism is proving to remain applicable amid a severely altered world order.
In a very coherent manner, Lenin’s principles, precepts and methods of analysis in Imperialism were a fundamental way for him to illustrate how his contemporaneous world situation had radically changed from the last quarter of the 19th century to the post-1914 era. His theoretical framework and its operating fundamentals, explaining the qualitative development and impacts of finance-driven monopoly capital throughout the world’s prevailing economic regime, endures as a leading tool to advance the contemporary global left movement’s revolutionary struggles for socialism.
But since it was first published, the data and statistics on world trade and the financial sector, including on colonial possessions, have obviously become passé. These statistical figures were used by Lenin to show how his theory can be applied to analyse the economic essence of the global capitalist system in the epoch of imperialism. These older datasets inescapably demonstrated the fused historical and material development of international capitalism in Lenin’s time. They displayed how the latter system of global capital accumulation transformed from one of free competition (ending in the early 1870s) to that of the monopoly stage of capitalism (beginning no earlier than 1898-1900). Dialectically synergising these metrics with his analytical approach, Lenin’s classic work on imperialism concretely exposed the exploitatively oppressive structures and processes underpinning the existing world market. More critically, he sharply centred the world’s proletarian movement upon the revolutionary socialist direction as the pathway for any authentic post-capitalist transformation.
Accordingly, there is a desideratum for any modern-day analysis or study on imperialism. While Lenin’s fundamental approach, in terms of methodology of investigation and evaluation still applies, it must, nonetheless, expressly draw upon the latest possible national and international data. This is a principal requisite to extrapolate certain general conclusions from particular statistics relating to key economic, social, political, security and ecological matters (and other such concerns) underlying the current global interstate system.
By synthesising these elemental and integral aspects affecting global affairs (basic facts, quantitative information, qualitative developments, pressing international issues, etc), comrades can arrive at remarkably eminent assessments and perspectives on the world situation at any given time. And, by doing so, they can forge appropriate sets of revolutionary methods, strategies and tactics — embracing both domestic and foreign dimensions — to determinedly accomplish universally identified socialist goals and objectives.
Furthermore, Lenin’s Imperialism was rather prescient concerning global capitalism’s overarching trajectory. Applying Marx’s precepts on capitalism’s endless contradictions, Lenin asserted that such paradoxes derive from an undying expansion of the productive forces, the incessant production of commodities and goods, and the ceaseless accumulation of capital, especially from the world market. Accordingly, Lenin stated in his book that imperialism only increases “the differences in the rate of growth of the various parts of the world economy” and that, as a direct consequence, “once the relation of forces is changed, what other solution of the contradictions can be found under capitalism than that of force?”
Guided by this dialectical materialist outlook, Lenin correctly foresaw the rise of the second inter-imperialist world war; his views on the emergence of the latter global conflict anticipated crisis conditions that materially and historically arose from the first inter-imperialist world war’s terminal features. Equally so, Lenin’s theoretical work in Imperialism forecasted monopoly capitalism’s steady universal trend toward a greater concentration and centralisation of finance capital on a global scale by taking advantage of the combination of uneven economic growth and its related political developments throughout the world.
However, Lenin was obviously unable to envision a more detailed future of the imperialist world system’s crucial moments. Certainly, Imperialism drew upon factual details and accounts to outline a general theory of “a definite and very high stage” in the continuing evolution and development of “capitalist imperialism”. But Lenin could not have predicted the most elaborate byproducts of imperialism’s constantly evolving dynamics and changes through the 20th century — and the imperialist world system undoubtedly generated various pivotal upshots after Lenin’s death in 1924.
These subsequently momentous developments must be viewed and contextualised within the capitalist system’s universal process of decay. Nonetheless, many of these particular outgrowths of capitalism’s “highest stage” can also be theoretically traced, and integrally linked, to Lenin’s thinking in Imperialism. The following concrete conditions were put into motion by monopoly-finance capitalism’s incessantly intensifying logic of capital accretion post-Lenin:
the 1945-91 Cold War global order, which was bifurcated by the imperialist and Communist camps;
the US imperialist-led Bretton Woods international monetary regime, which was established in 1944 to essentially prevail over the majority of the member-states of the newly created United Nations (UN) system;
US imperialism’s sustained monopolisation of the globalised financial system since 1971 via the dollarisation of the capitalist world economy;
the permanent bolstering of the imperialist world system’s core/semi-periphery/periphery architecture through a series of repartitioning of the global division of labour via the decolonisation track, beginning in the late 1940s;
the conversion of former imperialist colonies into peripheral semi-colonial states whose collective ecosystem is still largely characterised by conditions of dependency, maldevelopment and non-monopoly capitalist growth;
imperialism’s increasing need to expand and consolidate its spheres of influence compelling global capital to structurally adjust its hegemonic “economic reforms” through neoliberal policies (free trade in goods and services, free flow of capital, freedom of investments, etc) to preserve and maintain its systemic extraction of super-profits; and
the invention of nuclear weapons, just three decades after Imperialism’s publication, with its attendant nuclear arms race, impelling core imperialist powers to uphold the imperialist world system in their favour and on the basis of the “nuclear balance of terror”.
All of these imperialist effects were a material outcome of monopoly capitalism’s naturally endless progression and expansion across the world’s economic sphere.
Hence, the theoretical framework for analysing the monopoly stage of capitalism, as laid out by Lenin in Imperialism, remains pertinent if one wishes to better understand the contemporary phase of a financially-propelled imperialism and its complex international environment. His pamphlet’s key conceptual elements are still appropriate for any primary and critical comprehension of the present-day capitalist global system, especially amid its continually shifting world order.
And even if the original scope of Imperialism is enhanced by incorporating new points of analyses and up-to-date trends reflecting the current(ly rupturing) period in world affairs, Lenin’s principal theory of imperialism endures as a guiding instrument for the revolutionary communist movement.
In light of these changes that have taken place, what relative weight do mechanisms of imperialist exploitation have today, as compared to the past?
The imperialist world system has certainly been shaped by the impacts of new phenomena since Lenin’s time. There have been major changes, both quantitative and qualitative, to monopoly capitalism’s materialist course of development throughout the 20th century.
The central mechanisms of imperialist exploitation and oppression have continued to influence the precarious growth of monopoly-finance capitalism. Yet, the latest phase in the epoch of imperialism, particularly since the late 1970s and early ’80s, has seen these devices of monopoly-finance capitalism’s exploitative dominance become even more catastrophic for the world’s working-class masses.
This is principally due to the emergence of international capital’s highly globalised chains of production (and reproduction), circulation, distribution, exchange and consumption being fashioned around a neoliberal capitalist project that chiefly prioritises an unfettered free market regime on a global scale. As a result, its mode of social relations have only induced panoramic scales of societal inequality in practically all states.
These negative repercussions were unleashed by the economic policies of neoliberal globalisation: austerity, deregulation, free trade, labour flexibilisation, liberalisation, privatisation, reduced state subsidies, etc. They have managed to destroy numerous social welfare programs and attendant democratic rights, most of which were won by the international working-class movement in the past century. As a consequence, intensifying social conflicts and exacerbating class divisions are the standard in nearly all countries right now.
Within global capitalism’s strategic environment, the key attributes of imperialism have only become more blatant. These greatly destructive factors are now powerfully roiling and aggravating this currently momentous period in world affairs. For sure, we are constantly and grimly witnessing a sharper rise in inter-imperialist rivalry, tensions and wars among states; national turmoil with open revolts, social inequality and other injustices; and even revolutionary mass uprisings throughout capitalism’s present-day international order. These convulsions are a result of the materialist processes and dynamics induced by capitalism’s fundamental logic of permanent capital accumulation.
All of this only confirms the lingering contradictions intrinsic to the parasitic, decaying and moribund stage of monopoly capitalism. More than a century after Lenin’s publication of Imperialism, the steadily rupturing imperialist world system continues to discharge a deepening range of crisis conditions that worsen the daily and future lives of global humanity.
This objective universal condition characterises the modern-day bourgeois world order, which is structured by an integral set of economic mechanisms that underpin extensive forms of exploitation running through the foundations of the global capitalist economy. Accordingly, this oppressive arrangement, through which monopoly-finance capital exploits, is based upon an international division of labour that is framed by a core-periphery paradigm.
As a materially grounded relational concept, the core is basically defined by monopoly-controlled production processes taking advantage of forms of global labour arbitrage (offshoring) to extract immense volumes of surplus value from the dominated peripheral countries. On the other end of this axial economic relationship is the periphery. This peripheral zone is largely represented by dependent semi-colonial states whose economies are substantially more competitive (free market and non-monopoly capitalist) than those in the core, but very much backward, weaker and maldeveloped.
In this economic setup, the core is able to steadily extract a net flow of superprofits from the labour power of the periphery to the monopolies of the advanced capitalist states. As this imposed method of super-exploitation greatly favors the monopoly-based core, the primary international process of unequal exchange is firmly upheld and preserved by the imperialists at all cost.
Moreover, the present phase of the imperialist epoch undoubtedly displays a major shift toward the globalisation of finance capital in relation to its consequential role in the processes of capitalist production and distribution. This is demonstrated by the much higher level of concentration of production methods, an enhanced centralisation and interconnectedness of finance capital via banks, and a greater consolidation of key economic sectors and major branches of industry.
Linked to these conjunctural developments, the following are additional contemporary devices and elements of monopoly capitalist exploitation and oppression, which collectively play a vital function in imperialism’s ceaseless dominance over the world economy:
the increasing importance of finance capital sees big banks lending more money to businesses, the expansion of direct investments throughout the economy, and the widening ownership of controlling shares in many major corporations;
the intensifying domination of finance capital (“dictatorship of the banks”), through stock markets and credit systems, allows it to accumulate ever more capital;
the constant initiation of trade and tariff wars to counteract the recurring tendency toward an overproduction of commodities (which push prices down);
the globalised system of production and circulation, fused with greatly concentrated capital, leads to the creation of mighty multinational corporations (MNCs) that economically dominate the periphery;
imperialist globalisation’s extremely unequal international division of labour ensures the net transfer of wealth value from poor dependent-countries to advanced capitalist states (chiefly due to wage differentials between the dominated semi-colonial periphery and the imperialist core);
pegging the US dollar as the world’s foremost reserve currency has guaranteed US imperialism’s half-century-long hegemony over the global capitalist economy; and
the perennial pursuit of geostrategic struggles by the great powers for access to sweeping markets (for both capital and commodity exports) and to secure vast amounts of strategic resources for their own imperialist states and spheres of influence, inevitably leads them to varied forms and levels of international conflict with each other (this includes the deployment of regional alliances of puppet-states under the respective leaderships of the rival imperialist blocs).
Taken as a whole, these mechanisms of economic exploitation exemplify the relative weight of oppression of the imperialist world system today.
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