The Economics of Imperialism

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Thatcher's War for example. A quarter of the whole world's banking business is concentrated in London.

Those facts sketch in some of the reasons why Marxists still speak of 'British imperialism', , even though the Empire is practically vanished.

Every social system based on plunder - and that means practically every social system to date - has generated empires, formal or informal. The bigger powers have conquered subject peoples and made them pay tribute.

Modern imperialism, is however, different in major respects.

Capitalism, unlike previous systems, has generated a world economy. The basic process of capitalism is the conversion of money, via productive capital - means of production and labour power - and then products, into more money. In short, the self expansion of capital. This self-expansion is by its nature relentless and insatiable.

Previous ruling classes sought power, prestige, and luxury. The capitalist class seeks these too - but it is also driven on by an inescapable drive of capital itself towards new markets, new fields of investment, and new sources raW materials.

So capitalism has drawn the world together - closer and closer. Today we can see this strikingly in the fact that the Argentine crisis threatens to join with the Polish crisis to wreak havoc in a world financial system moulded by the Vietnam wat and by the aftermath of the Middle East war of 1973. The most widespread events are connected by a close? : more. mesh of economic relations.

But this close-meshed world ecnomy is not a cooperation of equals. In the world economy - as in each national capitalism - the strongest prey on the weak.

The countries of Western Europe developed first as capitalist powers - and then seized on the rest of the world as an arena for exploitation.

They introduced capitalism into Asia and Africa -but not a relatively balanced capitalist development as in Europe.

Instead there was a partial, hobbled development, geared to the profit of the European ruling classes. Many countries had their economies developed almost exclusively around one or two raw materials industries.

Pockets of modern industrial development were created amid hinterlands of terrible backwardness and poverty.

Each advanced capitalist power sought its own areas of domination. Towards the end of the 19th century this accelerated into a scramble for the division of the world.

Capitalism in Western Europe and the USA was increasingly dominated by big monopolies, closely tied up with the huge banks. For these big monopolies and banks, investment abroad - producing 'super-profits' on the basis of lower wages and higher rates of exploitation in less developed economies and less well organised sections of workers - was increasingly important.

And in the decades since, big multinational monopolies have dominated the cavitalist econom more -Jea drive of the big capitalist monopolies.

That fundamental drive remains, though the form in which it is expressed has been changed a great deal in decades of war and revolution.

In two world wars the big capitalist powers have fought for a redistribution of spoils. In one third of the world capitalism has been overthrown, though Stalinist regimes now rule.

Massive struggles by the former colonial peoples have ended colonial rule in most places, and weakened the direct political control of the big powers.

Since World War 2, the whole of the capitalist world has been massively dominated by the USA. Though inter-imperialist rivalries are now developing more sharply, with the slide into crisis and the relative decline of the US, over the last decades countries like Britain have been very much junior partners of the US in the exploitation of the world. In whole areas - including Argentina - US capital largely pushed out British capital after World War 2.

Yet the relative wealth of a few big capitalist powers - and Britain is still one of them - still depends on, and is inextricably linked with, the desperate poverty of millions in the Third World'.

Britain is no longer very interested in the Falklands as a colony. The profits which the Coalite company draws from the Falkland Islands Company are not very significant for Coalite, let alone sufficient to mould British policy on the Falklands.

But the relative prestige and standing of British imperialism - both in relation to the 'Third World' anu vis-a-vis is dIg capitalist ..in rivals - is a central factor in . the Falklands dispute.