Iniciativa Comunista (Spain)
Good afternoon to all of you.
My intervention—which I will try to make brief—has a fundamentally critical sense. Critical with the positions of a substantial part of the communist movement of the Spanish State in matters of international conflicts, but critical also, above all, with the theoretical foundations of these positions.
Because, if so many communist, workers and anti-imperialist organizations have been unable to adopt a correct position, for example, before the imperialist aggressions against Libya, Syria or Venezuela, before the war in Ukraine or before the Palestinian genocide, this is due, among other things, to a theoretical misunderstanding of the nature of current imperialism. Hence the need to identify these confusions in order to be able to refute them with arguments, and thus also to generate the necessary framework to continue elaborating one’s own analysis.
For my part, I will limit myself to pointing out four major mistaken lines of thought on imperialism, each of which leads, in turn, to a series of serious political errors.
The first line consists, in fact, in an open denial of imperialism as a distinctive phenomenon. Communists who hold this position juggle conceptually in order to reject out of hand the existence of imperialism as an international system of domination and exploitation, and reason, above all, in two ways: either by rejecting the Leninist theory of the monopolistic character of modern capitalism, on the grounds that this thesis denies Marx’s law of value; or by rejecting the validity of the concept of “nation” as a framework of analysis, on the grounds that every nation is split into antagonistic classes.
The first argument is spurious, because the monopolistic development of capitalism does not annul competition but arises from it and reproduces it under a new form, as Lenin himself pointed out a century ago. The second argument is also sterile. Undoubtedly, every country is divided into antagonistic classes. But if a country constantly appropriates an unpaid surplus produced in another country, and these surplus benefits the process of capitalist accumulation within the first country, while, on the contrary, it harms it in the second, then we can speak of imperialist exploitation.
In general, these communists do not understand that what Lenin contributes is precisely an analysis of the national question and of the tendency to monopoly, not as negation or overcoming, but as historical concretion of the laws of the capitalist mode of production. This does not mean that nations have priority over classes, nor that the tendency to monopoly annuls competition and, therefore, the law of value. It is only a question of incorporating theoretical elements that Marx and Engels did not manage to elaborate so deeply, or that, simply, had not yet manifested themselves in their fullness during the epoch of classical industrial capitalism.
The second line, which has been gaining strength in recent times and which finds its most finished expression in the “theory of the imperialist pyramid” of the Communist Party of Greece, is born of a biased reading of Lenin’s work.
There are two different ways of formulating this thesis, but, as we shall see, both lead to the same conclusions. The first consists in analyzing imperialism as a simple stage of development of world capitalism, ignoring the particularities of its internal structure; the second consists, on the other hand, in analyzing imperialism as a simple stage of the internal development of each capitalist country, ignoring its essentially international nature.
The theoretical limitations of this position are evident. Some adopt the first point of view, according to which imperialism constitutes only a stage of development of world capitalism, to conclude that all countries participating in the world market are imperialist. This reasoning is not only as absurd as affirming that, since the working class participates in the process of capitalist accumulation, the working class is capitalist, but it also splits, as Kautsky already did, the economic content and the political form of imperialism.
This position reduces imperialism to its economic dimension that is, to its condition of monopoly capitalism—, but ignores how the very expansion of monopoly capitalism necessarily leads to the domination of the weaker countries by the great capitalist powers. In this way, the pyramid theory loses sight of the qualitative distinction between the oppressed countries and the oppressor countries, leaving only a supposed difference of degree between them, which, however, does not serve to clarify the concrete forms adopted by the class struggle in both types of countries, the possible class alliances that open up in each of them, etc.
Others adopt, on the other hand, the second point of view, according to which imperialism constitutes only a simple stage of the internal development of each country, to affirm that any country which satisfies certain requirements (such as the existence of domestic monopolies, of a local financial oligarchy or of geopolitical interests outside its own borders) must be considered imperialist. Under this very generic perspective, only the world’s poorest countries would remain outside the club of imperialist nations, while countries such as Brazil, Indonesia or South Africa would be, it would seem, indisputably imperialist. Here, in addition to continuing to ignore the weight of the division between the oppressed and oppressor countries, the essentially international character of capitalist accumulation is also lost sight of, theoretically regressing to an outdated Marxism, more typical of the 19th century than of the imperialist epoch.
However, in either case, the political sterility of the pyramid theory is obvious: if all—or practically all—the countries of the world are imperialist, then none is imperialist. The concept becomes useless because it adds nothing substantial to the analysis Marx made 150 years ago; because it does not serve to distinguish between capitalism “in general” and its concrete expression as imperialism; in short, because it does not define the features proper to the present moment of capitalist development.
The third line I want to mention, although it is more common among the ranks of social democracy, anarchism and other currents that advocate an abstract pacifism, also has a certain weight within the communist movement.
This position, born more of moral prejudice than of rigorous theoretical analysis, affirms that imperialism consists simply in the aggression or political and military domination of one country over another. Starting from a generic rejection of all wars and all violence, these communists denounce any kind of international conflict as a simple struggle between two equally detestable factions.
The limits of this analysis are, once again, obvious. On the one hand, the idea that we communists must oppose, on principle, any war, denies all our historical experience, denies the need to lead a war against the bourgeoisie and denies, finally, our responsibility to support struggles that weaken imperialism. But, besides disarming us politically, this thesis loses sight of the fundamental aspect of imperialism, namely: the economic exploitation of the oppressed countries by the oppressor countries.
If we want, thinking in this way, to reduce imperialism to direct political-military domination over other countries, then we should affirm, against all logic, that imperialism ends with colonialism; that, once the colonies conquered their independence, they ceased to be subject to imperialism. However, the plunder and exploitation of Africa, Asia and Latin America have continued to this day. Therefore, this position only blurs and hides the perpetuation of the relations of dependence between the former colonies and the imperialist countries.
To give an example: if only those countries that intervene militarily in others are imperialist, then Switzerland, despite profiting massively from the exploitation of Africa, would not be an imperialist country, while Ethiopia, despite being a country exploited by the European powers, would be imperialist for having intervened in Somalia. In this way the essence of imperialism is distorted, giving rise to absurd reasoning that denies the imperialist character of oppressive powers simply because they are more or less coupled to the hegemony of the United States—as in the case of Germany, France or the Spanish State itself, for example—, while, on the contrary, affirming the imperialist character of countries like Russia or Iran simply because they defend themselves against the threat of the United States, NATO and its various appendages.
Finally, the fourth line that I would like to present constitutes, more than a definite position, a sort of general orientation which, in a certain sense, also operates as a foundation for the two previous lines. I refer here to the biased and dogmatic readings of Lenin. We have seen, for example, that the theory of the pyramid retains only the economic part of Lenin’s analysis—that is, the idea of imperialism as a monopolistic phase of capitalism—, while the theory of imperialism as direct domination retains only the political part of Lenin’s analysis—that is, the idea of imperialism as a system of international domination of some countries by others.
In both cases we find a partial and limited reading of Lenin, which splinters the economic content and the political form of imperialism. More generally, I would dare to say that many communists, in the face of the retreat of the revolutionary movement during the last decades, have preferred to take refuge in formulas and prejudices rather than continue to apply the fundamental tool of our doctrine: that is, the concrete analysis of the concrete situation. Between the time Marx published Capital and Lenin published Imperialism barely 50 years passed, but those 50 years were enough for the transformations undergone by capitalism to force communists to apply and elaborate Marx’s theory in order to understand the particularities of their own historical moment. Today, however, more than a century after Lenin wrote about imperialism, it seems that almost nobody is interested in studying the transformations that imperialism has undergone from 1916 to the present.
Some communists arrive at erroneous political conclusions and others arrive at correct political conclusions, but almost all do so based on a mere application of preconceived recipes and formulas, such as, for example, the famous five features of imperialism enumerated by Lenin. During the last few years, certain organizations have taken this recipe book to conclude that Russia, since it more or less satisfies these five traits, is an imperialist power. Others, with greater political intuition, but the same theoretical narrowness, have taken this same recipe book to conclude that Russia, since it does not completely satisfy these five features, is not an imperialist power.
What practically no one has asked is whether this formula does not require updating; whether 100 years of capitalist development do not oblige us to elaborate, as Lenin himself did then, a more concrete and exhaustive study of the fundamental features of present-day imperialism, of the conditions of our own historical moment.
Today, for example, there is no longer a territorial distribution of the world as in Lenin’s time, because the great colonial empires have been dissolved and the exploitation of the dependent countries is carried out by other means. Today, for example, the export of capital, although important, is no longer a necessary condition for the Western monopolies to exploit the labor force of the dependent countries, because the world value chains allow them to obtain the same profits without the need to commit their capital in those countries.
In short—and I am finishing—: the importance of updating our concrete analysis to understand the essential features of contemporary imperialism lies precisely in the need to identify what are the dominant forms it adopts today, and, from there, to define an adequate political orientation, capable of taking advantage of the contradictions of current capitalism to advance the revolutionary socialist project.
