Dhalgren
10-31-2013, 02:54 PM
The nature of American imperialism is not only confused in so many persons’ minds, but is, in itself, confusing, because of how imperialism is conceptualized in modern thought. American and European concepts of what constitute imperialism are muddled and various. Here is some of what passes for Marxist analysis of current imperialism; from the preface to Empire by Hardt and Negri (http://www.angelfire.com/cantina/negri/HAREMI_unprintable.pdf ):
The passage to Empire emerges from the twilight of modern sovereignty. In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow. The transformation of the modern imperialist geography of the globe and the realization of the world market signal a passage within the capitalist mode of production. Most significant, the spatial divisions of the three Worlds (First, Second, and Third) have been scrambled so that we continually find the First World in the Third, the Third in the First, and the Second almost nowhere at all. Capital seems to be faced with a smooth world—or really, a world defined by new and complex regimes of differentiation and homogenization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The construction of the paths and limits of these new global flows has been accompanied by a transformation of the dominant productive processes themselves, with the result that the role of industrial factory labor has been reduced and priority given instead to communicative, cooperative, and affective labor. In the postmodernization of the global economy, the creation of wealth tends ever more toward what we will call biopolitical production, the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another.
This line, “The transformation of the modern imperialist geography of the globe and the realization of the world market signal a passage within the capitalist mode of production.” strikes me as the closest thing to a coherent sentence in the whole batch and echoes (at least in some sense) what Lenin wrote a hundred years ago.
This attempt to divide the definitions of imperialism and empire seem confused and actually backward. The authors want to say that “imperialism” was modern and “empire” is post-modern…whatever that means. Yet in reality, empire is the actual edifice of imperialism, while imperialism is the underpinning conceptual notion of empire. The very idea that imperialism relates to centralized, nation-state, differentiation and empire is the manifestation of some kind of immaterial, worldwide state of mind (or something) is past odd and without any foundation (that I can find). These two authors are touted as Marxists…hmm…
Why the need of all the mumbo-jumbo? If it is a Marxist “take’ on imperialism that is desired, well, here’s Lenin:
Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general. But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, when certain of its fundamental characteristics began to change into their opposites, when the features of the epoch of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic system had taken shape and revealed themselves in all spheres. Economically, the main thing in this process is the displacement of capitalist free competition by capitalist monopoly. Free competition is the basic feature of capitalism, and of commodity production generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale industry and forcing out small industry, replacing large-scale by still larger-scale industry, and carrying concentration of production and capital to the point where out of it has grown and is growing monopoly: cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks, which manipulate thousands of millions. At the same time the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system.
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. Such a definition would include what is most important, for, on the one hand, finance capital is the bank capital of a few very big monopolist banks, merged with the capital of the monopolist associations of industrialists; and, on the other hand, the division of the world is the transition from a colonial policy which has extended without hindrance to territories unseized by any capitalist power, to a colonial policy of monopolist possession of the territory of the world, which has been completely divided up.
But very brief definitions, although convenient, for they sum up the main points, are nevertheless inadequate, since we have to deduce from them some especially important features of the phenomenon that has to be defined. And so, without forgetting the conditional and relative value of all definitions in general, which can never embrace all the concatenations of a phenomenon in its full development, we must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features:
(1) 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; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital”, of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
We shall see later that imperialism can and must be defined differently if we bear in mind not only the basic, purely economic concepts—to which the above definition is limited—but also the historical place of this stage of capitalism in relation to capitalism in general, or the relation between imperialism and the two main trends in the working-class movement. The thing to be noted at this point is that imperialism, as interpreted above, undoubtedly represents a special stage in the development of capitalism. To enable the reader to obtain the most well grounded idea of imperialism, I deliberately tried to quote as extensively as possible bourgeois economists who have to admit the particularly incontrovertible facts concerning the latest stage of capitalist economy.
No mention here of any “state”, “nation”, or “government”. It can be argued that these terms are implied, but that argument doesn’t stand very well, because Lenin always explains clearly and is not opposed to speaking bluntly and directly. If governments or nations had been important in his description of imperialism, he would have used them. And, as a matter of fact, he goes on to outline Kautsky’s erroneous description of imperialism in which the term nation is very pronounced:
In the matter of defining imperialism, however, we have to enter into controversy, primarily, with Karl Kautsky, the principal Marxist theoretician of the epoch of the so-called Second International—that is, of the twenty-five years between 1889 and 1914.
…
The best way to present Kautsky’s idea is to quote his own definition of imperialism, which is diametrically opposed to the substance of the ideas which I have set forth (for the objections coming from the camp of the German Marxists, who have been advocating similar ideas for many years already, have been long known to Kautsky as the objections of a definite trend in Marxism).
Kautsky’s definition is as follows:
“Imperialism is a product of highly developed industrial capitalism. It consists in the striving of every industrial capitalist nation to bring under its control or to annex all large areas of agrarian [Kautsky’s italics] territory, irrespective of what nations inhabit it.” [1]
This definition is of no use at all because it one-sidedly, i.e., arbitrarily, singles out only the national question (although the latter is extremely important in itself as well as in its relation to imperialism), it arbitrarily and inaccurately connects this question only with industrial capital in the countries which annex other nations, and in an equally arbitrary and inaccurate manner pushes into the forefront the annexation of agrarian regions.
Imperialism is a striving for annexations—this is what the political part of Kautsky’s definition amounts to. It is correct, but very incomplete, for politically, imperialism is, in general, a striving towards violence and reaction. For the moment, however, we are interested in the economic aspect of the question, which Kautsky himself introduced into his definition. The inaccuracies in Kautsky’s definition are glaring. The characteristic feature of imperialism is not industrial but finance capital. It is not an accident that in France it was precisely the extraordinarily rapid development of finance capital, and the weakening of industrial capital, that from the eighties onwards gave rise to the extreme intensification of annexationist (colonial) policy. The characteristic feature of imperialism is precisely that it strives to annex not only agrarian territories, but even most highly industrialised regions (German appetite for Belgium; French appetite for Lorraine), because (1) the fact that the world is already partitioned obliges those contemplating a redivision to reach out for every kind of territory, and (2) an essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between several great powers in the striving for hegemony, i.e., for the conquest of territory, not so much directly for themselves as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony. (Belgium is particularly important for Germany as a base for operations against Britain; Britain needs Baghdad as a base for operations against Germany, etc.)
From: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,
Chapter VII. Imperialism as a Special Stage of Capitalism
(http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch07.htm)
The bolding in the above passage was mine.
There are discussions all the time about the current US Empire and it is very common for the definition of empire to come into dispute. “Well, it isn’t like the Roman Empire” or “there’s no comparison with the British Empire” and on and on. The problem seems to always revolve around form, politics, and ethnicity. However, in Lenin’s description it is purely economic (given that the social and political are inextricably bound into the economic). This doesn’t mean that nation states, nationalities, more-developed vs. less-developed aspects of current conditions are not present or not important, it means that these ancillary aspects are just that – ancillary. It may, in reality, come down to a confusion of subject and object.
In a discussion I was involved in the other day, a person was trying to explain current conditions in the US (and around the world) in terms of language or communication. He started quoting a professor of communication philosophy (yeah, they have those) and if I can recreate this correctly, he said:
The subjective elements become the objective elements once a large enough portion of a society holds the same subjective elements as true.
I disagreed with him. I said that the subjective affects the objective, but does not become objective, itself. He tried to explain it to me (in terms I might understand).
If enough people in a society believe in Jesus and the Bible, etc., then that faith becomes an object element of that society.
Again, I disagreed. The subjective faith of the citizens affects the objective conditions of their society in numerous ways – by how they spend their time, how they view work and leisure, how they manage crime and distribute wealth, etc. These things can certainly be affected by the ardently held faith of a population, but that faith, itself, does not become objective.
My debate partner then said that there was a third category in this mix which was a category between objective and subjective (I cannot now recall what he named this betwixt and between thing), and that it essentially was the objective nature of subjectivity (or something close to that). As a struggling materialist, I simply said, “Bullshit!”
This may be (at least a part) of the problem so many have in dealing effectively with current imperialism. We want it to look like something that occurred under different circumstances, during different times, which, yet, was called by the same name. And in a real sense it was the same thing – it is just that the thing has almost always been poorly or erroneously described.
Imperialism within a capitalist society will manifest itself in different ways from imperialism in non-capitalist societies in the same way other social activities will. The 3rd century Roman work force was quite different from the 19th century US workforce, even though both are work forces. The idea that empire must always be identical regardless of epoch, era, or social conditions is absurd. But, the phenomenon of imperialism can be described and analyzed based upon current historical, social conditions – and that is what Lenin did.
But if that is what our Marxists, Hardt and Negri, are trying to do it strikes me as a pretty poor showing.
Perhaps this can be explained in some way, by someone with a better grasp of…something:
We should emphasize that we use ‘‘Empire’’ here not as a metaphor, which would require demonstration of the resemblances between today’s world order and the Empires of Rome, China, the Americas, and so forth, but rather as a concept, which calls primarily for a theoretical approach.2 The concept of Empire is characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire’s rule has no limits. First and foremost, then, the concept of Empire posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or really that rules over the entire ‘‘civilized’’ world. No territorial boundaries limit its reign. Second, the concept of Empire presents itself not as a historical regime originating in conquest, but rather as an order that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity.
I haven’t finished this book, yet, but I have found no instances of any undergirding for these “empirical” statements. These things are, apparently, self evident.
More as I can do it.
The passage to Empire emerges from the twilight of modern sovereignty. In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow. The transformation of the modern imperialist geography of the globe and the realization of the world market signal a passage within the capitalist mode of production. Most significant, the spatial divisions of the three Worlds (First, Second, and Third) have been scrambled so that we continually find the First World in the Third, the Third in the First, and the Second almost nowhere at all. Capital seems to be faced with a smooth world—or really, a world defined by new and complex regimes of differentiation and homogenization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. The construction of the paths and limits of these new global flows has been accompanied by a transformation of the dominant productive processes themselves, with the result that the role of industrial factory labor has been reduced and priority given instead to communicative, cooperative, and affective labor. In the postmodernization of the global economy, the creation of wealth tends ever more toward what we will call biopolitical production, the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another.
This line, “The transformation of the modern imperialist geography of the globe and the realization of the world market signal a passage within the capitalist mode of production.” strikes me as the closest thing to a coherent sentence in the whole batch and echoes (at least in some sense) what Lenin wrote a hundred years ago.
This attempt to divide the definitions of imperialism and empire seem confused and actually backward. The authors want to say that “imperialism” was modern and “empire” is post-modern…whatever that means. Yet in reality, empire is the actual edifice of imperialism, while imperialism is the underpinning conceptual notion of empire. The very idea that imperialism relates to centralized, nation-state, differentiation and empire is the manifestation of some kind of immaterial, worldwide state of mind (or something) is past odd and without any foundation (that I can find). These two authors are touted as Marxists…hmm…
Why the need of all the mumbo-jumbo? If it is a Marxist “take’ on imperialism that is desired, well, here’s Lenin:
Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general. But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, when certain of its fundamental characteristics began to change into their opposites, when the features of the epoch of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic system had taken shape and revealed themselves in all spheres. Economically, the main thing in this process is the displacement of capitalist free competition by capitalist monopoly. Free competition is the basic feature of capitalism, and of commodity production generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale industry and forcing out small industry, replacing large-scale by still larger-scale industry, and carrying concentration of production and capital to the point where out of it has grown and is growing monopoly: cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks, which manipulate thousands of millions. At the same time the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system.
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. Such a definition would include what is most important, for, on the one hand, finance capital is the bank capital of a few very big monopolist banks, merged with the capital of the monopolist associations of industrialists; and, on the other hand, the division of the world is the transition from a colonial policy which has extended without hindrance to territories unseized by any capitalist power, to a colonial policy of monopolist possession of the territory of the world, which has been completely divided up.
But very brief definitions, although convenient, for they sum up the main points, are nevertheless inadequate, since we have to deduce from them some especially important features of the phenomenon that has to be defined. And so, without forgetting the conditional and relative value of all definitions in general, which can never embrace all the concatenations of a phenomenon in its full development, we must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features:
(1) 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; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital”, of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.
We shall see later that imperialism can and must be defined differently if we bear in mind not only the basic, purely economic concepts—to which the above definition is limited—but also the historical place of this stage of capitalism in relation to capitalism in general, or the relation between imperialism and the two main trends in the working-class movement. The thing to be noted at this point is that imperialism, as interpreted above, undoubtedly represents a special stage in the development of capitalism. To enable the reader to obtain the most well grounded idea of imperialism, I deliberately tried to quote as extensively as possible bourgeois economists who have to admit the particularly incontrovertible facts concerning the latest stage of capitalist economy.
No mention here of any “state”, “nation”, or “government”. It can be argued that these terms are implied, but that argument doesn’t stand very well, because Lenin always explains clearly and is not opposed to speaking bluntly and directly. If governments or nations had been important in his description of imperialism, he would have used them. And, as a matter of fact, he goes on to outline Kautsky’s erroneous description of imperialism in which the term nation is very pronounced:
In the matter of defining imperialism, however, we have to enter into controversy, primarily, with Karl Kautsky, the principal Marxist theoretician of the epoch of the so-called Second International—that is, of the twenty-five years between 1889 and 1914.
…
The best way to present Kautsky’s idea is to quote his own definition of imperialism, which is diametrically opposed to the substance of the ideas which I have set forth (for the objections coming from the camp of the German Marxists, who have been advocating similar ideas for many years already, have been long known to Kautsky as the objections of a definite trend in Marxism).
Kautsky’s definition is as follows:
“Imperialism is a product of highly developed industrial capitalism. It consists in the striving of every industrial capitalist nation to bring under its control or to annex all large areas of agrarian [Kautsky’s italics] territory, irrespective of what nations inhabit it.” [1]
This definition is of no use at all because it one-sidedly, i.e., arbitrarily, singles out only the national question (although the latter is extremely important in itself as well as in its relation to imperialism), it arbitrarily and inaccurately connects this question only with industrial capital in the countries which annex other nations, and in an equally arbitrary and inaccurate manner pushes into the forefront the annexation of agrarian regions.
Imperialism is a striving for annexations—this is what the political part of Kautsky’s definition amounts to. It is correct, but very incomplete, for politically, imperialism is, in general, a striving towards violence and reaction. For the moment, however, we are interested in the economic aspect of the question, which Kautsky himself introduced into his definition. The inaccuracies in Kautsky’s definition are glaring. The characteristic feature of imperialism is not industrial but finance capital. It is not an accident that in France it was precisely the extraordinarily rapid development of finance capital, and the weakening of industrial capital, that from the eighties onwards gave rise to the extreme intensification of annexationist (colonial) policy. The characteristic feature of imperialism is precisely that it strives to annex not only agrarian territories, but even most highly industrialised regions (German appetite for Belgium; French appetite for Lorraine), because (1) the fact that the world is already partitioned obliges those contemplating a redivision to reach out for every kind of territory, and (2) an essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between several great powers in the striving for hegemony, i.e., for the conquest of territory, not so much directly for themselves as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony. (Belgium is particularly important for Germany as a base for operations against Britain; Britain needs Baghdad as a base for operations against Germany, etc.)
From: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,
Chapter VII. Imperialism as a Special Stage of Capitalism
(http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch07.htm)
The bolding in the above passage was mine.
There are discussions all the time about the current US Empire and it is very common for the definition of empire to come into dispute. “Well, it isn’t like the Roman Empire” or “there’s no comparison with the British Empire” and on and on. The problem seems to always revolve around form, politics, and ethnicity. However, in Lenin’s description it is purely economic (given that the social and political are inextricably bound into the economic). This doesn’t mean that nation states, nationalities, more-developed vs. less-developed aspects of current conditions are not present or not important, it means that these ancillary aspects are just that – ancillary. It may, in reality, come down to a confusion of subject and object.
In a discussion I was involved in the other day, a person was trying to explain current conditions in the US (and around the world) in terms of language or communication. He started quoting a professor of communication philosophy (yeah, they have those) and if I can recreate this correctly, he said:
The subjective elements become the objective elements once a large enough portion of a society holds the same subjective elements as true.
I disagreed with him. I said that the subjective affects the objective, but does not become objective, itself. He tried to explain it to me (in terms I might understand).
If enough people in a society believe in Jesus and the Bible, etc., then that faith becomes an object element of that society.
Again, I disagreed. The subjective faith of the citizens affects the objective conditions of their society in numerous ways – by how they spend their time, how they view work and leisure, how they manage crime and distribute wealth, etc. These things can certainly be affected by the ardently held faith of a population, but that faith, itself, does not become objective.
My debate partner then said that there was a third category in this mix which was a category between objective and subjective (I cannot now recall what he named this betwixt and between thing), and that it essentially was the objective nature of subjectivity (or something close to that). As a struggling materialist, I simply said, “Bullshit!”
This may be (at least a part) of the problem so many have in dealing effectively with current imperialism. We want it to look like something that occurred under different circumstances, during different times, which, yet, was called by the same name. And in a real sense it was the same thing – it is just that the thing has almost always been poorly or erroneously described.
Imperialism within a capitalist society will manifest itself in different ways from imperialism in non-capitalist societies in the same way other social activities will. The 3rd century Roman work force was quite different from the 19th century US workforce, even though both are work forces. The idea that empire must always be identical regardless of epoch, era, or social conditions is absurd. But, the phenomenon of imperialism can be described and analyzed based upon current historical, social conditions – and that is what Lenin did.
But if that is what our Marxists, Hardt and Negri, are trying to do it strikes me as a pretty poor showing.
Perhaps this can be explained in some way, by someone with a better grasp of…something:
We should emphasize that we use ‘‘Empire’’ here not as a metaphor, which would require demonstration of the resemblances between today’s world order and the Empires of Rome, China, the Americas, and so forth, but rather as a concept, which calls primarily for a theoretical approach.2 The concept of Empire is characterized fundamentally by a lack of boundaries: Empire’s rule has no limits. First and foremost, then, the concept of Empire posits a regime that effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or really that rules over the entire ‘‘civilized’’ world. No territorial boundaries limit its reign. Second, the concept of Empire presents itself not as a historical regime originating in conquest, but rather as an order that effectively suspends history and thereby fixes the existing state of affairs for eternity.
I haven’t finished this book, yet, but I have found no instances of any undergirding for these “empirical” statements. These things are, apparently, self evident.
More as I can do it.