by Joseph Green (Communist Voice #38, July 2006)
A century ago, in the years leading up to World War I, the struggle by the Great Powers to enlarge their vast colonial holdings led to wide talk about a period of imperialism. This was a period of renewed international tensions, as each Great Power sought to encroach on the empires of its rivals. The ensuing disaster of World War I led to the development and spread of the Leninist theory of imperialism. It emphasized that the cause of colonial wars and other rivalries of the major powers was the development of monopoly capitalism; that monopoly capitalism was paving the way economically towards a new system that would supplant capitalism; and that working class revolution would be the midwife of this new system.
There have been great changes in the world situation since then. The major world colonial empires have collapsed. International governmental organizations such as the UN, the WTO, and the IMF, regulating, to some extent, some aspects of international economics and politics, have taken on an unprecedented prominence.
Some say that this makes the Leninist theory outdated, or even means that imperialism no longer exists, although there's much less of that talk since the Afghan and Iraqi wars. But a closer look shows that, on the contrary, the present world tensions verify precisely the Leninist theory of imperialism, which pointed to monopoly capitalism as the economic base for the massive bloodshed and militarism and other features of imperialism. The old empires are gone, but monopoly capitalism remains, and sure enough, so are wars, relations of domination and subordination among countries, and bitter exploitation of weak countries by strong. The old empires are gone, but empire-building of a new sort remains; today even many bourgeois ideologues talk about the present imperial system.
- The colonial and semicolonial empires
- The collapse of the colonial empires
- The national question
- The continuation of imperialism
- Spheres of influence
- Wars and militarism
- The world governmental organizations
- The rape of the world by finance capital and the giant corporations
- The tendency to reaction
- Imperialism as a transition to a new system
- The role of the working class