Modern theories of imperialism

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By Martin Thomas 'Historical Capitalism', by Verso £3.95. 'The Geome: Giovanni Arrighi. Revised er word (the first edition was in BOTH GIOVANNI Arrighi and Immanuel Wallerstein are well-known Marxist or neoMarxist writers on imperialism and underdevelopment.

Arrighi has written most notably on class structures in Africa; Wallerstein is the author of a large-scale historical work on 'The Modern World System'.

The two books reviewed here are both short summaries of conceptual debates.

A large part of Arrighi's book is, in my view, wrong-headed. Much of it is certainly difficult to understand.

Some of the most essential points are made as passing comments, while relatively minor issues are discussed at length.

Wallerstein's book is lucid and well-constructed, but very abstract and probably difficult to understand without prior knowledge of the debates it comes out of.

Bodies Both books, however, contribute a lot to clarifying the terms in which 'imperialism' is discussed among the Left.

"By the early 1970s", Arrighi points out, "two main bodies of analysis had developed, which were quite distinct in their premises but confusingly lumped together under the label, 'theories of imperialism' "The first body of theories, produced from the beginning of the century up through the First World War, had a common object of analysis. the growing competition between capitalist states over territory...

«There was a second body of theories...

Political and intellectual opposition to past and continuing relations between the evidently developed and the evidently much less developed countries, grew. And so did theories expressing this opposition and explaining historically and analytically why such relations... enriched the rich and exploited the poor among the countries of the world..."

One body of theory - Hilferding, Bukharin, Lenin - focused on the export of capital from advanced capitalist countries and its consequences in terms of inter-imperialist rivalry, militarism, and war. It recognised the plunder of poor countries by rich (which had been going on for Immanuel V Vallerstein, ry of Imperi alism', by 'ition with a new after1978): Verso £3.95 centuries) but focused on what was new in the 'Third World' For Lenin, for example, What lay behind the 1911 Revolution in China was that the country was 'on the eve of a gigantic capitalist development' which would produce many cities 'teeming with capitalist riches and proletarian need and poverty'.

Revolutionary conclusions followed from the contradictions within capitalist development, and the contradictions between capitalist development and pre-capitalist or colonial institutions.

Another school of thought -represented by more recent writers like Wallerstein and also Baran, Frank, Amin, Emmanuel -focuses on the export of revenue from underdeveloped capitalist countries. It draws its socialist conclusions not from capitalist development in the Third World •view of two new books the discussion in Socialist C ism and how to 1 ight it rtin but from the alleged impossibility of such development on any serious scale.

Class relations, for this school of thought, are subordinate to or subsumed in the web of economic flows from Third World "periphery' to US/West European "core' These flows are the essence of world capitalism. Apparently 'precapitalist' forms are in fact only part of the capitalist world system.

Distinct

The two bodies of theory are quite distinct in the questions they ask, the answers they give, and the concepts they use. Both could agree broadly that 'imperialism is the world system of monopoly capitalism': yet they would give very different meanings to these words.

"As a result" , as Arrighi puts it, "much of the debate on imperialism that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s was vitiated by basic misunderstandings over the very object of the debate".

Today, too, many comrades will present a picture of the world with a fixed division between a unified imperialist 'core' and a 'semi-colonial' periphery, the essence of the system being the exploitation of the periphery by the core. And they hotly insist that this is Leninist orthodoxy, to be defended against revisionism'.

In truth their picture is derived from those elements of the Wallerstein-type analysis Which have become 'accepted wisdom' on the Left, and is quite different from Lenin's, in which inter-imperialist rivalry and the fluidity of relations between different countries were central.

"Capitalism is growing with the greatest rapidity in the colonies and the overseas countries. Among the latter, new imperialist powers are emerging (e.g. Japan). The struggle among the world imperialisms is becoming more acute" (Lenin).

To defend Lenin is one thing. lo propose a rival theory is another. But dogmatically to defend the rival theory in the name of Leninist orthodoxy is something else again!

Further confusion has been added by the ideologists of the 'end of imperialism' - whose arguments, as Arrighi notes, *stood in evident contrast to the "imperial' role assumed by the United States on a world scale after the Second World War"

These ideologists attacked Lenin's theory: and on the other side of the argument, many who wrote to prove the continued existence of imperialism assumed that what they meant by 'imperialism' was the same as what Lenin had meant, when it fact it was not.

The confusion was accompanied, and facilitated, by a persistent blurring of concepts.

Immanuel Wallerstein's book unravels the confusion one way: