by Joseph Green
(from Communist Voice #28, January 2002)
War is once again on the international agenda. Now it's no longer a matter of tragedies in Africa or in East Timor, involving millions of people but treated by the American news as something affecting only faraway peoples. Now the Bush administration has declared that there will be a series of military adventures "against terrorism", of which the Afghan war is only the first. Moreover, the announced US withdrawal from the 1972 ABM arms control treaty raises the possibility of a new arms race centering on ballistic missiles and anti-missile systems. All this sheds a new light on the question of imperialism. Are all these events mere accidents or the consequences of some bad mistakes by a few evil men, or are they the result of an international system which can't live without wars and crises?
The ruling bourgeoisie likes to present imperialism as an unfortunate episode that is long past. Most of the colonies are independent; the cold war that split the world into two hostile blocs is over; so supposedly capitalism has become civilized. They pretend that, aside from a few rogue states, the capitalists are simply reasonable people seeking the best way to increase trade, development, and progress. If some countries are desperately poor or powerless, this is allegedly due merely to some transient historical legacy, but supposedly everyone is united in a common quest for justice and development. The days when the world was run on the basis of the rich raping the poor are supposedly over.
So fashionable books such as Negri and Hardt's Empire deny the Leninist theory of imperialism. Negri and Hardt say that the "combination of national and supranational organisms united under a single rule of logic" is what they call "empire". But, they insist, "By 'Empire,' however, we understand something altogether different from 'imperialism. '"(1) True, America is "privileged" in this empire, and carries out incessant military action, yet supposedly neither the US nor any other country is an imperialist great power like in the old days. Instead Negri and Hardt see a global civil society and constitutionalism, if also corruption, pervading this "Empire".
But the continued domination of weak countries by the strong shows that imperialism still exists. Every meeting of the world economic agencies shows the wealthy industrial countries turning the screws on the poorer countries. Nor is today's imperialism merely economic. The war on Afghanistan is but the latest of a series of military adventures that show that not only does imperialism still exist, but its addiction to war still exists. The international alignments have changed in the more than a century of imperialist rivalry; the products and means of producing them have changed, and so have the weapons of war. But the class basis of imperialism has remained. The division of society between a laboring majority and a privileged elite, under conditions of monopoly capitalism, still results in the division of the world between rich and poor countries as well as between the rich and poor inside each country. It still results in the partitioning of the world by powerful countries and economic monopolies. And the rich and powerful countries, such as the US superpower, still dominate and exploit the poor and weak ones.
- Unending war
- Ever-increasing military spending
- Seeking world domination -- via unilateralism or multilateralism
- The UN -- no alternative to imperialism
- Imperialist power politics
- Blowback
- Fighting over world resources
- The Unocal gas pipeline
- The tendency towards reaction
- Anti-imperialism, real and sham
- Terrorism and imperialism