Imperialism

For the computer game, see Imperialism (computer game).

Cecil Rhodes: Cape-Cairo railway project. Founder of the De Beers Mining Company, one of the first diamond companies, Rhodes was also the owner of the British South Africa Company, which carved out Rhodesia for itself. He wanted to "paint the map British red", and once declared: "all of these stars... these vast worlds that remain out of reach. If I could, I would annex other planets".

Imperialism is the forceful extension of a nation's authority by territorial gain or by the establishment of economic and/or political dominance over other nations.

It developed in the early 19th century after the Industrial Revolution when the western nations began to take control of other non-industrialized nations and colonies. The "Age of Imperialism" usually refers to the Old Imperialism period starting from 1860, when major European states started colonizing the other continents. The term 'Imperialism' was initially coined in the mid to late 1500s to reflect the policies of countries such as Britain and France's expansion into Africa, and the Americas.

In nineteenth century Britain the word "imperialism" came to be used in a polemical fashion to deride the foreign and domestic policies of the French emperor Napoleon III. Britons, in a longstanding tradition to distinguish themselves from the European mainland, did not consider their own policies to be "imperialist". They did speak of "colonization", the migration of people from British descent to other continents, giving rise to a “greater Britain” of English speaking peoples. Colonization was not yet associated with the rule of non-western peoples. India, which Britain acquired from the East India Trading Company, was widely regarded as an exception.

It was a very important exception, which nonetheless gave Britain cause for embarrassment. Benjamin Disraeli's move to make Queen Victoria "Empress of India" was even criticized as a dangerous act of (continental) “imperialism”. Critics feared this would have negative repercussions on British freedom and the rule of Parliament. When the subordination of non-Western peoples by European powers resumed with greater vigor in the late 19th century, the term became commonplace among liberal and Marxist critics alike.

Europeans also took control of regions of China. Each region that was seized was known as a sphere of influence, an area where Europeans from a certain country had economic privileges. Europeans controlled the government in their spheres of influences and Europeans forced the Chinese government to give them favorable treatment.

In the twentieth century the term "imperialism" also grew to apply to any historical or contemporary instance of a greater power acting, or being perceived to be acting, at the expense of a lesser power. Imperialism is therefore not only used to describe frank empire-building policies, such as those of the Romans, the Spanish or the British, but is also used controversially and/or disparagingly, for example by both sides in communist and anti-communist propaganda, or to describe actions of the United States since the American Presidency's acquisition of overseas territory during the Spanish-American War, or in relation to the United States' present-day position as the world's only superpower.

Lenin's theory of Imperialism

Lenin, in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), argued that capitalism necessarily induced monopoly capitalism - which he also called "imperialism" - in order to find new markets and resources, representing the last and highest stage of capitalism. This theory of necessary expansion of capitalism outside the boundaries of nation-states - one of the foundations of Leninism as a whole - was also shared by Rosa Luxemburg and then by liberal philosopher Hannah Arendt. Since then, however, Lenin's theory has been extended by Marxist scholars to be a synonym of capitalistic international trade and banking.

While Karl Marx never published a theory of imperialism, he referred to colonialism in Das Kapital as an aspect of the prehistory of the capitalist mode of production. In various articles he also analyzed British colonial rule in Ireland and India. Moreover, using the Hegelian dialectic, he predicted the phenomenon of monopoly capitalism in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) (hence the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!"). Lenin defined imperialism as "the highest stage of capitalism" (the subtitle of his outline), the era in which monopoly finance capital becomes dominant, forcing nations and corporations to compete themselves increasingly for control over resources and markets all over the world.

Marxist theories of imperialism, or related theories such as dependency theory, focus on the economic relations between countries (and within countries, as outlined below), rather than the more formal political and/or military relationships. Imperialism thus consists not necessarily in the direct control of one country by another, but in the economic exploitation of one region by another, or of a group by another. This Marxist usage contrasts with a popular conception of 'imperialism', as directly controlled vast colonial or neocolonial empires.

Lenin held that imperialism was a stage of capitalist development with five simultaneous features as outlined below:

1) Concentration of production and capital has led to the creation of national and multinational monopolies - not as understood in liberal economics, but in terms of de facto power over their enormous markets - while the "free competition" remains the domain of increasingly localized and/or niche markets:

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. (Ch. VII)

[Following Marx's value theory, Lenin saw monopoly capital as plagued by the law of the tendency of profit to fall, as the ratio of constant capital to variable capital increases. In Marx's theory only living labor or variable capital creates profit in the form of surplus-value. As the ratio of surplus value to the sum of constant and variable capital falls, so does the rate of profit on invested capital.]

2) Industrial capital as the dominant form of capital has been replaced by finance capital (repeating the main points of Rudolf Hilferding's magnum opus, Finance Capital), with the industrial capitalists being ever more reliant on finance capital (provided by financial institutions).

3) The export of the aforementioned finance capital is emphasized over the export of goods (even though the latter would continue to exist);

4) The economic division of the world by multinational enterprises, and the formation of international cartels; and

5) The political division of the world by the great powers, in which the export of finance capital by the advanced capitalist industrial nations to their colonial possessions enables them to exploit those colonies for their resources and investment opportunities. This superexploitation of poorer countries allows the advanced capitalist industrial nations to keep at least some of their own workers content, by providing them with slightly higher living standards. (See labor aristocracy; globalization.)

The Soviet Union, which claimed to follow Leninism, proclaimed itself the foremost enemy of imperialism and supported many independence movements throughout the Third World. However, at the same time, it asserted its dominance over the countries of Eastern Europe. Some Marxists, including Maoists and those to the left of the Trotskyist tradition, such as Tony Cliff, claim that the Soviet Union was imperialist. The Maoists claim that this happened after Khrushchev's seizure of power in 1956, while Cliff claims it happened in the 1940s with Stalin's policies. Harry Magdoff's Age of Imperialism is a 1954 discussion of Marxism and imperialism. Globalization is generally viewed as the latest incarnation of imperialism among Marxists.

See also

• New Imperialism
• Theories of New Imperialism
• Ultra-imperialism
• Colonialism
• Neocolonialism

Further reading

• Empire, by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, Harvard University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-674-00671-2

External links

• The Paradox of Imperialism by Hans-Hermann Hoppe. November 2006.
• Imperialism: In Tribute to Harry Magdoff by William K. Tabb