This is Part-1 of the article.
Part-2 is titled – Western Marxism, Neo-liberal Capitalism and the Imperialist State
This article was originally published in International Critical Thought journal, and you can access it here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21598282.2024.2431960. We are reproducing the article with the permission of the author.
ABSTRACT
Many Western Marxists have jettisoned the concepts of imperialism while retaining opposition to actually existing socialist projects of the Global South. This paper asserts that the failure to critique imperialism and to support socialist projects in the Global South is grounded in a rejection of classical Marxist human relations to nature and a failure to contemplate the continuance of state-socialist projects in the Global South. Since the 1990s, Western Marxists have replaced imperialism with global capitalism that is untethered to Western imperialism. Western Marxists have also deemed socialist projects as a betrayal of their utopian views rooted in the Hegelian “purity fetish.”
Instead, some Western Marxists have aligned with imperialist states in support of political and economic intervention against countries they view as failed projects, often leading to the reassertion of imperialist domination. Consequently, Western Marxists blindly support Western policies which undermine socialist state projects and wittingly or unwittingly, the reassertion of economic, political, cultural and military dependency on imperialist capitalism.
Academic interest in over 500 years of European imperialism has significantly declined since the end of formal colonization in the 1970s and 1980s and especially since the fall of the Soviet Union and Eastern bloc communist governments in the early 1990s. Notably, waning concern about anti-imperialism has been evident among a segment of Western Marxists who have abandoned dialectical materialism and the Global South to focus on advancing the conditions of people in the imperialist core.
When we speak of Western Marxism in this article, we refer not just to Marxists in the West as a geographic space; rather, we mean a type of Marxism that is (1) uncritically anti-state or a form of anarchic Marxism, (2) denies the contributions of the socialist projects in the Third World and (3) believes that imperialism is passé. A definition of Western Marxism is not all-encompassing and recognizes that even non-Western Marxists may come from the West. Indeed, even Samir Amin and Arghiri Emmanuel spent much of their lives in France. Thus, what makes a “Western” Marxist has more to do with position than geography.
Over more than a century, most Western Marxists have retreated from endorsing actually existing socialist projects and retheorized their significance in relation to capitalism. Such retheorization downplays the historical significance of actually existing socialism (AES) in the Global South, often by reframing them as part of global capitalism or global modernity. Western Marxists’ understanding of capitalism is overly broad and consequently it becomes impossible for them to actually conceive of or envision a world beyond it. Because their ideals are completely divorced from existing institutions and movements, socialism for them is precisely what Hegel called “the setting up of a world beyond that exists God knows where” (1991, 20). In effect, for many Western Marxists, capitalism becomes so expansive, and socialism becomes so pure, that it is not clear how it can exist.
The post-1990 tendency for Western Marxists to further downplay imperialism and privilege a nebulous global capitalism originates in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union as an extension of a wide-ranging intellectual and political tradition among Western Marxists and post-Marxists.
This article explores and analyzes how a section of Western Marxists have come to reject primary Marxist and Leninist concepts on imperialism, socialism and actually existing socialisms and to center further debate. From about the 1980s to the present, Western Marxists have replaced the abiding significance of imperialism with globalized capitalism, empire and undifferentiated “inter-imperialist rivalry.”
This article is not an exegesis of the entire Marxist canon on imperialism but is intended to interrogate a dominant group of contemporary theories for further research into and examination of a festering controversy that parts with fundamental concepts of class struggle and ignores the abiding exploitation by Western Europe and North America of 85 percent of the world’s population in the Global South.
Emergence of Western Marxism and Imperialism
Following the Russian Revolution, some Western Marxists began to replace support for revolution and fledgling socialist, instead promoting liberal-democracy and social reform in Europe and North America, restoring a position taken by the Second International before the Second World War. In the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution, Georg Lukács, a supporter of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet Union, published History and Class Consciousness (HCC) in German in1923, which paradoxically supplied the oxygen for Western Marxism over the next century by channeling class into a relationship between subject and object, appropriating the abstract Hegelian notion of class consciousness over a grounded historical materialism advanced by Karl Marx in Capital (1867) and Friedrich Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1907). For Marx and Engels, class consciousness is a direct extension of the material being of the worker, but in HCC Lukács pursues the notion of working-class subjectivity as expressed in the communist party, a view which modifies class struggle from material dialectics into a philosophical abstraction. Lukács’s HCC distinguishes the individual as the historical subject in place of privileging the working class and nature, instead asserting that individual subjectivity is the primary force which is driven by ideas and not the material world. In spite of Lukács’s intention to philosophically situate the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet Union as the objective organ reflecting the working class, HCC becomes the driving force of Western Marxism in Europe and North America, re-centering the proletariat as a metaphysical and abstract subject and object of an undefined history.1
Unwittingly, in the ensuing century, HCC has ushered in and propelled Western Marxism, the Frankfurt School, anarchism, as well as other deviations from Marxism focusing on ahistorical philosophy. While linking working-class subjectivity with the party and organization is a compelling concept, as expressed in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Adventures of the Dialectic (1973) where he coins the term “Western Marxism,” HCC shifts the working class from the dominant historical force to the dominant theoretical concept in Marxism. By doing away with actuality and replacing it with ideation without conception, class struggle and revolution, and by extension, socialist anti-imperialism, become utopian unobtainable objectives. And, by doing so, the primary force of history is rendered into a silent deradicalized utopia, as Friedrich Engels warns in Socialism: Scientific and Utopian (1907). The advent of Western Marxism deflects attention from the socialist revolutionary struggles to the abstractions of the reification of the singular lone worker. Thus, Western Marxism focuses on idealistic, abstract, cultural and philosophical questions and detaches itself from nature, political economy and the scientific Marxist currents of Engels, Lenin, Mao and, by extension, the Soviet Union and AES in the Third World.
Through rejecting dialectical materialism and scientific socialism, leading currents of the Western Left minimize imperialism and the working class under primitive accumulation. To be sure, from the 1950s to the 1970s, the Algerian and Indochina wars of independence against France and the United States stimulated anti-imperialist sentiment in the Western Left; for example, Jean Paul Sartre’s hiatus from existentialism and support for Third World liberation, in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth ([1961] 2021). However, Marxist concern with imperialism waned and quickly shifted back to improving economic conditions in the core through social democracy and Eurocommunism from the 1980s to the present.
Ten years later, Prabhat Patnaik found the disappearance of imperialism from the lexicon of Western scholars and students even before the Soviet Union disbanded and the U.S. emerged as the imperial hegemon:
The point is the paradox that while the system of relations covered under the rubric of imperialism has not changed an iota over the last decade and a half, fundamental questions today are discussed, unlike earlier, even among Marxists without any reference to it. (1990, 4)
This swing is evident in the aftermath of the Vietnam War when the British Marxist journal New Left Review(NLR) and Verso Books published Bill Warren’s Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism (1980), falsely claiming European colonialism and imperialism as a progressive force for Third World development and a source of prosperity and global equality. Warren’s heretical position gained purchase among Western leftists who disregarded economic plunder and focused on developing social democratic welfare states at the expense of further impoverishing Africa, Asia and Latin America. NLR could then turn inwardly to improving conditions for the labor aristocracy in the West.
As Western Marxists were focusing on metaphysical dialectics and the deleterious impact of capitalism on abstract workers, non-Western Marxists centered attention on dialectical materialism and endeavored to apply dialectics to the transformation of the world: notably, the material contradiction between the rich and poor regions of the world, and as a means to study the capitalist world for praxis and transformation to socialism. In The Principal Contradiction, Torkil Lauesen applies Mao Zedong’s “On Contradiction” to strategy and praxis, without which Marxism is reduced to a set of philosophical ideas which have no material reality. Lauesen asserts, “The concept of contradiction builds a bridge between theory and practice. It is not just a valuable tool for the analysis of complex relationships; it also tells us how to intervene” (Lauesen 2020, 8). In this return to reality, Mao’s notion of contradiction is applied not just to understand the world but to change it: “Contradiction is present in the process of development of all things; it permeates the process of development of each thing from beginning to end. This is the universality and absoluteness of contradiction” (Mao 1937). At its core, Mao’s dialectical project places imperialism as the principal contradiction in the 1930s as it is today for the subordinated states:
When imperialism launches a war of aggression against such a country, all its various classes, except for some traitors, can temporarily unite in a national war against imperialism. At such a time, the contradiction between imperialism and the country concerned becomes the principal contradiction, while all the contradictions among the various classes within the country (including what was the principal contradiction, between the feudal system and the great masses of the people) are temporarily relegated to a secondary and subordinate position. So it was in China in the Opium War of 1840, the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and the Yi Ho Tuan War of 1900, and so it is now in the present Sino-Japanese War. But in another situation, the contradictions change position. When imperialism carries on its oppression not by war, but by milder means—political, economic and cultural—the ruling classes in semi-colonial countries capitulate to imperialism, and the two form an alliance for the joint oppression of the masses of the people. (Mao 1937)
An imperilist counter distinction emerges between North and South in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and Chinese Revolution, restoring a position taken by the Second International before the Second World War. In effect, despite the various contradictions in capitalist society and increasing poverty in the colonized countries, the standard of living in the West increased through the spoils of imperialism and unequal exchange of trade with the periphery. Only upon achieving national sovereignty could the Communist Party of China launch a socialist revolutionary struggle, which became the principal contradiction. Mao writes in “On Contradiction”:
When imperialism launches a war of aggression against such a country, all its various classes, except for some traitors, can temporarily unite in a national war against imperialism. At such a time, the contradiction between imperialism and the country concerned becomes the principal contradiction, while all the contradictions among the various classes within the country (including what was the principal contradiction, between the feudal system and the great masses of the people) are temporarily relegated to a secondary and subordinate position. (Mao 1937)
As Lauesen notes, class contradictions
have impacted both capitalists, who want to see continued accumulation of capital, and other classes, which are dependent on capitalist production to maintain their living conditions. . . . This is the importance of class struggle: it can steer contradictions in one direction or another. (Lauesen 2020, 123)
As historical materialism was unfolding through NDR and socialist revolutions, Western Marxists focused attention on theoretical debates about the nature of class in post-industrial society. In Farewell to the Working Class, French socialist André Gorz went as far as to assert that the working class had disappeared as new technology had abolished class and its aspirations, which were “as obsolete as the proletariat itself” (Gorz 1982, 67 —68), wholly overlooking the expansion of the industrial working class in the periphery. In the absence of a historical materialist analysis, Western Marxists negated the major contradiction: the emergence of a far larger industrial working class in the Global South from the 1980s to the 2020s, and the extraction of surplus value for the benefit of capitalists and the aristocracy of labor in the rich countries of the North.
Imperialism, Neo-Liberal Capitalism and Western Marxists
A new shift occurred from the 1980s to the present as Western Marxists and leftists fragmented even further into multiple perspectives: post-Marxism, postmodernism, and First Worldism. Marxist political economists began to focus on globalization and neo-liberal capitalism, privileging globalized capital in the absence of the imperialist state, the primary force behind global production chains and the deepening exploitation of the Third World. In this context, scholars focused on imperialism even less. Many Western Marxists focused on the wrongdoings of Third World comprador elites who assumed power and were unable to transform their countries. Apart from anti-imperialists, dependency theorists or most world-system theorists, Samir Amin (1976), Arghiri Emmanuel (1972), Immanuel Wallerstein (1979), Walter Rodney ([1972] 1981), Ruy Mauro Marini (2022), Donald A. Clelland (2012) and John Smith (2016), few scholars alluded to the dominant capitalist imperialist system that was reinforced in the post-independence era. Only a small proportion of workers are actually true proletarians (i.e., live exclusively from their wage) while 75 percent are categorized as semi-proletarians who live on subsistence farming outside of the capitalist system and occasionally work for below-minimum income, which allows super-exploitation in a multitude of ways. According to Clelland (2012), labor exploitation constitutes a “dark value” of unpaid inputs to global capitalism, constituting a surplus drain on workers of the Global South.
In this article, we contend that imperialism is necessary for capitalism to extract higher surplus value through the exploitation of the Global South. Western Marxists overlook the importance of the imperialist state as the primary force behind capitalist accumulation.
Decolonization ended the imperial project and replaced it with an amorphous empire (Hardt and Negri 2000). We align with Samir Amin in seeing the global spread of capitalism as dependent on imperialism and the extraction of surplus labor from the Third World. Capitalism could not produce and reproduce itself without imperialism. We question the respective positions of Marxists and post-Marxists like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2020), David Harvey (2007), Gilbert Achcar (2013), William I. Robinson (2014) and Kim Moody (2017). They form one representative group of scholars who have more or less dispensed with Western imperialism, international value exchange that benefits rich countries and depends on the super-exploitation of the Third World as essential international contradictions. For them, imperialism, both on Leninist and non-Leninist interpretations, either does not exist or is insignificant and is replaced by global capitalism, where relations of subordination are secondary. Ellen E. Wood (2005) and Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin (2013) suggest a middle position which recognizes imperialism but accords less significance to surplus extraction from the Global South.
Western Marxism, the First World and the Aristocracy of Labor
The development of a privileged working class was advanced by Friedrich Engels as early as 1887 with the publication of the English edition of the Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels writes:
That their condition has remarkably improved since 1848 there can be no doubt, and the best proof of this is in the fact that for more than fifteen years not only have their employers been with them, but they with their employers, upon exceedingly good terms. They form an aristocracy among the working-class; they have succeeded in enforcing for themselves a relatively comfortable position, and they accept it as final. (Engels [1887] 2010, 13—14)
Lenin’s critique of the labor aristocracy extends the work of Engels from the nation state to the global system through identifying a crucial convergence between the bourgeoisie and the labor aristocracy in imperialist countries in exploiting the masses of humanity on the periphery. Lenin viewed the Left and social democratic parties as collaborators in the imperialist wars against the rest of the world to ensure the continued extraction of profits. Yet for Lenin, this political convergence of the bourgeoisie and trade union leaders in imperialist core countries did not extend to the larger working-class masses. Like Engels, he predicted that the lower echelons of the working class would eventually rise up to oppose the corrupted, bureaucratic and wayward leadership of trade unions and establish a class-conscious working-class opposition (Lenin 1916).
However, for more than a century, the Western labor aristocracy has become widespread and further entrenched as the privileged segment of the working class recognizes that it benefits economically from imperialism. Labor support for war and imperialism extended to socialists, social democrats and the political Left in the West, who also recognized their trade union and political parties benefit from imperialism. This, then, has affected parts of the Western Left. For example, the British Labour Party has been deeply engaged in imperialism, appalling those socialists who wish to identify with it as a so-called working-class party (Gupta 1975).
Eric Hobsbawm asserts that the farther removed the proletariat in the imperial core is from economic activity, the more it has a material and economic basis in maintaining the system and a susceptibility for social chauvinism toward oppressed peoples in the colonial world. In the absence of a principled trade union leadership, the working class resorts to self-interested organizational economism which has perilous consequences for global working-class unity (Hobsbawm 1970).
Western working-class support for war is self-serving as imperialism has been a driving force in the establishment of the European social welfare states.
Decisively, Lukács’s regression toward abstraction and the phenomenology of consciousness views the political economy of the extraction of surplus value through trade from the periphery as a natural occurrence rather than a conscious form of Western parasitism which facilitates the imperialist mode of living in the imperialist core. If surplus extraction is a phantom of nature, Western Marxists can focus on perfecting conditions in the West through social democracy, a form of removing the alienation in the West through universal basic income, expansive healthcare and pensions, thereby removing the degradation of work and replacing it with carnal and recreational activities geared to perfecting the human experience. To this end, imperialism transfers resources to a parasitic aristocracy of labor in the West, which benefits from exploitation of the periphery. In turn, the central Marxist principal of labor as a revolutionary and transformative force was also dismissed. French philosopher André Gorz’s Farewell to the Working Class (1982) scorned the industrial working class as a reactionary and exhausted social force as if socialism would be achieved through the absence of work rather than through class struggle. Following this line, most but not all Western Marxists entirely ignored imperialist exploitation of labor in the Global South.
Certainly, in the West there is labor exploitation of Black and Latino people, migrant workers, low-waged women and other oppressed peoples. The aristocracy of labor thesis indicts the majority of the West as willing or unconscious conspirators and beneficiaries in the pillage of the Third World.
Neo-colonialism, Imperialism, Hegemony and Multipolarity
In the post-Second World War era, enthusiasm and optimism prevailed in states of the Global South that political independence from the Western imperialists would straightaway translate into economic prosperity through advancing economic programs in the interest of the masses. Ever since the victory of the Russian Revolution and especially in its aftermath, fervor around the potential socio-economic gains which would result from decolonization have drawn leading anti-imperialists in the Third World to Moscow and then Beijing. Communist parties militarily challenged Western-backed bourgeois nationalist parties for power and control of their emerging states, promising to form and institute egalitarian societies on the basis of the successful Soviet model.
Independent parties gained power in the Global South following the end of the Second World War, in most cases peacefully but often through armed conflict with colonial and imperialist powers. But the expectation that political sovereignty would bring about economic sovereignty was not realized in the newly independent countries as the United States, the global hegemon, and Europe’s former colonial countries maintained economic domination over the Global South through extending colonial policies and new forms of economic imperialism (Prashad 2019; Stavrianos 1981).
This perspective was stated vehemently by Kwame Nkrumah in Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1966). As Westerners viewed political independence as the end of imperialism, Nkrumah found that it not only failed to end political, economic, cultural and other forms of dependency on Western Europe and North America but represented the most “dangerous stage.” As it was impossible for colonial powers to rescind independence, they would compete among each another to plunder territories that had “become nominally independent.” He asserted that existing colonies may linger on, but no new colonies would be created. In place of colonialism as the main instrument of imperialism, we have today neo-colonialism. The essence of neo-colonialism is that the state which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality, though, its economic system and thus its political policy are directed from outside (Nkrumah 1966, ix).
Nkrumah recognized that the post-colonial era would acquire diverse forms, from the equivalent of states controlled by military garrisons of the former colonial power to economic suzerainty over former colonies through imposing the former colonial power’s currency and monetary control of foreign exchange, as in Francophone West Africa. When newly independent states gained independence relatively peacefully, the inheritance of former colonial powers was evident within legal, bureaucratic, economic and political continuities. In almost all cases, colonial political systems were incongruent with the authentic material conditions of nascent independent countries. The constant was that developed countries retained economic and financial power “to impoverish the less developed.” But Nkrumah presciently recognized and documented that neo-colonialism extended beyond the colonial power and extended to economic dominance, shifting imperial control from a single developed state to imperialist and hegemonic capitalist countries capable of exploiting and plundering neo-colonies in ways which they could not deploy when maintaining colonial domination (Nkrumah 1966, x—xiii).
From the end of the Second World War the Soviet Union and then China provided essential support to sometimes diverging anti-colonial, anti-imperialist forces in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and beyond, leading to the formation of Marxist-Leninist post-colonial states. But in many instances, socialist movements gaining independence and political power in the post-war era encountered immediate opposition from right-wing insurgencies and death squads funded and supported by the United States and Western European and settler colonial states. Following the end of the Second World War, the West turned its attention to suppressing rising movements for political and economic independence in the Global South, opposing Marxist and socialist states which met in Bandung, Indonesia in April 1955 to promote economic development, self-determination and advance global peace at the height of the Cold War.2 In 1961, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was formed in Belgrade, Yugoslavia with the same guiding principles. Western powers, seeking to retain or impose their dominance in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, fomented imperialist opposition to new socialist states while preserving economic dominance through foreign mining and agricultural firms, using unequal forms of exchange which depleted the Global South’s natural resources.
Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, deposed in a British-supported coup d’état in 1966, recognized an inherent dilemma: decolonization established the basis for the persistence of imperialism through fragmenting the new states which had achieved ostensible independence. Nkrumah, who was a pan-Africanist but not a Marxist, was well aware that states of the Global South which had been granted independence by their colonial rulers were fragmented by boundaries which prevented them from becoming durable and resilient like their former colonial masters. He asserted that the endurance of imperialist capitalist rule is instituted through dividing and fragmenting territories (Nkrumah 1966, xiii).
But it is significant that Walter Rodney’s Marxist-Leninist critique claimed that Kwame Nkrumah “denied the existence of classes . . . until the petty bourgeoisie as a class overthrew him,” at which point he was forced to recognize that classes do indeed exist (Rodney 2022, 48, see also 68—69). According to Temin, Rodney exposed the historical significance of European economic development as an extension of capitalist imperialism:
“Self-reliance,” the core of the policy and philosophy first articulated in Tanzania’s 1967 “Arusha Declaration,” encapsulated the idea of building a non-aligned socialist society whose external independence did not hinge on Western (or Soviet) aid or investment. While maintaining socialist emphases on national ownership of the means of production, the politics of self-reliance rejected earlier state-led developmentalist emphases on industrialization such as Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah. (Temin 2023, 243)
Nkrumah, foreshadowing contemporary demands outside the West for multipolarity, points to the significance of achieving a world which is not controlled exclusively by the West but has several geo-political forces in which Global South countries can develop and thrive through pursuing their own independent policies. The unipolar rules-based world system which gained dominance after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 has been dominated by the United States and its Western allies, which are also the major beneficiaries of a system perpetuating the most extreme form of free market. In this context, it has not been possible to challenge an economic, political and juridical order with alternative forms of organization, notably socialism. After 1991, those countries seeking to challenge the dominant neo-liberal model have been at risk of economic isolation and exclusion from the world economy. Consequently, with several exceptions, few countries have resisted the neo-liberal model. For this reason, Nkrumah challenges neo-colonialism and contemplates a world with several constellations of power, or what Third Wordlists call polycentrism. The call for African unity is an appeal for multiple powers which can attend to unique socio-economic crises without dependency on the imperial system. Expanding the magnitude of detached states in the Global South would expand their power to form socialist systems outside the Western-dominated unipolar system (Nkrumah 1963). Socialism requires scale to thrive without sanctions, military threat and other forms of coercion from dominant states.
Following countries’ formal achievement of independence since 1945 and through into the 1980s, most Western Marxist scholars have not considered the resilience of imperialism outside the colonial state. The majority saw it as a remote and obscure subject which ended with the independence of most regions of the Global South after the Portuguese colonies fell in the 1970s. Certainly, they did not neglect research on the Global South but, in place of imperialism, they implanted class as the major form of conflict there. This view was shared by almost all Western Marxists, who, as a whole, failed to account for the past and enduring malevolence of economic imperialism directed at the Global South.
In sharp contrast to Western Marxist globalists who privilege an immaterial form of capitalism without capitalist state actors as the leading force in the political economy, other scholars demonstrate that the globalization of poverty is a hegemonic project of imperialist states and their multinational organizations, like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank (WB) and World Trade Organization (WTO) (Chossudovsky 2003). Vijay Prashad (2007) diagnosed the dilemma as the rise of imperialist neo-liberalism, disintegration of the Third World and the domination of the United States and its Western allies, which imposed market policies on the Third World by force and represented a profound shift away from AES and Marxism as practice. From 1980 to 2000, the Third World as a force against Western imperialism began to cave in as states rapidly abandoned responsibility for social welfare and state elites succumbed to the supremacy of the neo-liberal market. For Prashad, the rise of neo-liberalism and demise of socialism and disintegration of the Third World are inextricably intertwined.
During the course of the Cold War (1945—1990), the U.S. government designed a calculated policy with its Western allies to coerce the Soviet Union and the Third World socialist states. With the demise of both the Soviet Union and Cold War and with the preservation of U.S. military power intact, U.S. foreign policymakers were drawn into the mistaken belief that they should no longer withdraw but rather accelerate and advance a policy of reshaping a neoliberal rules-based world using U.S. military power in the interests of a an imperialist transnational capitalist class. The U.S. defense and treasury assiduously endeavored to ensure that resources continued to flow toward Western transnational corporations, and that the dollar carried on as the principal hard currency (Prashad 2007, 278).Those intellectuals continuing to assert that imperialism remained the most significant factor of capitalism in the world economy —Samir Amin (1976), Arghiri Emmanuel (1972), Walter Rodney ([1972] 1981) and Prabhat Patnaik (2001) —were commonly excluded from debates dominated by Western Marxists intent on preserving and expanding the bourgeois-democratic and social-welfare gains in the Global North during neoliberal globalization while disparaging the flaws of past and present socialist projects in the Global South.
The Reassertion of Imperialism in Political Debate
From the mid-2000s to the present, the concept of imperialism was resuscitated by scholars centering attention on the growing economic power of rich countries in the Global North over poor countries in the Global South. Above all, imperialism re-emerged as an economic dynamic as manufacturing shifted from North to South, where commodities could be produced at far lower cost and much more surplus value could be extracted through inequality of trade from workers (Amin 1976; Cope and Ness 2022; Emmanuel 1972; King 2021; Patnaik and Patnaik 2016; Patnaik and Patnaik 2021; Smith 2016).
The revival of imperialism research exposed the privileges First World workers enjoy thanks to five centuries of pillage in the Third World. In contrast to Western Marxists’ position that global financialized capitalism does not require a nation state, Patnaik and Patnaik maintain that “[t]he colonial state worked directly and exclusively in the interests of metropolitan capital, while the liberal state works directly and exclusively in the interests of international finance capital, which is the lead actor in the current epoch” (2016, 33). In this way, Patnaik and Patnaik share Lenin’s assertion that imperialism requires a state to expand and exploit the world for the benefit of workers and capitalists in the major powers (Lenin [1917] 1948).
For Western Marxist intellectuals, the “aristocracy of labor” theory and the division of wealth between core and periphery (which might very well have been a key feature if Marx had written a Capital, volume 4) is a hard lesson which denies their self-proclaimed active role in the revolutionary transformation to socialism and ascribes it instead to Marxist anti-imperialist revolutionaries in the Global South. In the early 20th century, Marxists were already well aware of the benefits amassed by the Global North’s working classes from the continued exploitation of the Global South, representing the imperialist dialectic of outsourcing and global production. In 1907, Lenin asserted that European workers were beneficiaries of colonial labor:
Only the proletarian class, which maintains the whole of society, can bring about the social revolution. However, as a result of the extensive colonial policy, the European proletarian partly finds himself in a position when it is not his labour, but the labour of the practically enslaved natives in the colonies, that maintains the whole of society. (Lenin 1907; italics in the original)
Nkrumah also recognized that imperialist states used the extraction of profits to placate and buy off their own working classes. He asserted that colonialism created North American and Western European welfare states based on high working-class living standards and on state-regulated capitalism at home. In so doing, “the developed countries succeeded in exporting their internal problem and transferring the conflict between rich and poor from the national to the international stage” (Nkrumah 1966, 239).
If Global South countries were to achieve unconditional independence, end unequal exchange and foster development, neo-colonialism would have to end, which in turn would activate acute class conflict in the advanced countries:
When Africa becomes economically free and politically united, the monopolists will come face to face with their own working class in their own countries, and a new struggle will arise within which the liquidation and collapse of imperialism will be complete. (Nkrumah 1966, 239)
While much of the literature on imperialism focuses on the contemporary transformation of economies in the Global South through integration into global supply chains for commodity production, Patnaik and Patnaik demonstrate the decisive extraction of surplus value from primitive accumulation in the South, where limited subsumption of capital forces labor into super-exploitation. They show that, whereas agriculture and natural resources are also produced in the Global North and throughout the world using technological advances, Global South workers are exploited directly through primitive accumulation, which is decisive for the global economy, most notably the use of cheap labor for the extraction of cash crops and minerals. Indeed, in the periphery it is because the labor there is so cheap that investing in technology is not profitable for multinational corporations of Western agribusiness (Patnaik and Moyo 2011).
These essentials for global production are made possible by inadequate subsumption of capital (capital investment) and the super-exploitation of low-wage labor. In this way, mineral extraction is more profitable without the injection of new technology, as seen in the reliance on low-wage labor for production of copper, platinum and rare earth minerals (Patnaik and Patnaik 2021). Moreover, production in the Global South was typically restricted to growing and harvesting agricultural commodities (e.g., cocoa, coffee, etc.) and extracting minerals with a low organic composition of capital as opposed to the imperialist North, with high subsumption of capitalism which facilitated mechanized production and refining of agricultural commodities, minerals and petroleum, depriving poor countries in the South of essential technology and profit.
Fordist industrial production was confined to the North from the 1940s to the 1970s but industrial production substantially shifted to the South through the imposition of neoliberal capitalism, requiring the strengthening intergovernmental bodies dominatd by the West, viz., World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the formation of the World Trade Organization in 1995 to regulate production or the benefit multinational corportions in the core. Under neoliberalism, raw-material exploitation extended to industrialization, both Fordist and production with low subsumption of capital, dependent on a vast informal reserve army of labor. Hence, global inequality expanded as profits generated by foreign investments on the periphery was captured by multinational capital in the core.
Mainstream political economists contend that the center of the world economy has moved from an advanced developed core in Europe and North America to an undeveloped periphery in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where remarkable economic gains have occurred, integrating the global economy, notwithstanding the Global South’s subordination. The global economy has produced a periphery of manufacturing industries which advanced capitalist nations rely on for the production of commodities (Dicken 2015). However, while a noteworthy “global shift” has occurred under neo-liberal capitalism, Dicken acknowledges the economically subordinate position of countries in the Global South. Even so, this account seeks to propose that the contemporary world economy is multifarious and variegated, discounting the dominance of rich countries of the Global North over most of the Global South, where poverty and inequality persist. Ironically, Dicken proposes that the global capitalist economy is complex and depends on capital flows to those regions where higher levels of surplus value can be extracted. This perspective parts from the position that the primary forms of class conflict are within nation states; rather, as Branko Milanović (2018), former chief economist at the IMF, argues, the most significant form of class conflict is between rich and poor countries. The “non-capitalist mode of production” and primitive accumulation are ubiquitous throughout most of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. However, the real shift is the imposition of neo-liberal capitalism, which has contributed to the withdrawal of the state and the requirement that workers be self-reliant actors. Therefore, the expansion of neo-liberal capitalist imperialism has undermined the negligible benefits provided by developmental states and replaced them with a far more pernicious system which renders formal political independence irrelevant to most in the Global South. Economic imperialism has reinforced dependency on the capitalist core (Cope and Ness 2022). Western Marxists who reject imperialism typically point to the rise of authoritarianism and despotism among Southern leaders who support an emergent upper class of multimillionaires and billionaires who rival those in the West. They contend that rising powers in the South are challenging Western imperialists through plundering natural resources and polluting the environment in the Global South (Bond and Garcia 2015). Accordingly, this plays into the claim that the adversary is not Western imperialism but capitalism, neo-liberalism and financialization. Yet they do not see a subservient comprador class whose members are agents of Western capitalism and facilitate the plundering of most states of the Global South by rich countries of the North.
State Power, Defense of Socialism and the Rise of Neo-liberalism
Western Marxism comprises a range of ideologies which are informative in political philosophy but, as a whole, lack credibility and concrete authenticity as a practical means to seize state power. Ultimately, Western Marxism stands in opposition to socialist endeavors to overturn the capitalist state and replace it with a socialist one. It is not possible to establish enduring socialism without grasping state power and instituting a socialist program opposing the bourgeoisie. Philosopher Domenico Losurdo (2024) suggests that Judeo-Christian faith is the foundation of Western socialism, which is ingrained in an end-time, upheld by self-proclaimed communists.
This unmistakable defect of Western Marxism is clear in Losurdo’s critique (2024). He challenges the intellectual basis of communist utopianism as rooted in the opposition to science, which Frederick Engels had underscored in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific in 1907. For Losurdo, Western Marxists reject the integral significance of anti-imperialism within the struggle for socialist state power and oppose the struggle for national self-determination in the Global South (Broder 2017).
Since the 1990s, the construct of imperialism has been further diminished and disregarded by Western Marxists, who have viewed globalized capitalism as superseding the state and the hegemony of the First World (Harvey 2007; Robinson 2014; Slobodan 2018 among many others). In contrast to Western Marxists who have dispensed with the concept and reality of imperialism, Monthly Review School, notably political economists Paul A. Baran and Paul Sweezy (1966), have asserted that the enlargement of private capital is dependent on imperialist state-accumulated profits. F ellow Monthly Review historian Harry Magdoff has examined the contours of U.S. imperialism and its dependence on monopoly control over resources and markets. In the case of Western Europe, economic advantage “is obtained through exploitation of colonial and neo-colonial countries” while the U.S. has advanced through imperial control over resources and markets (Magdoff 1969, 16).
Patrick Bond and Ana Garcia (2015) mistakenly focus attention on emergent states in the South as forming part of an inter-imperialist rivalry, naturalize the ideology and experience of neo-liberalism and stress the imperative of a global capitalist market that did not require an imperialist state to expand but thrived on the withdrawal of the state from capital controls, paving the way for dismissing the significance of the working class, the Third World and the idea of socialism.
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Part 2
Western Marxism, Neo-liberal Capitalism and the Imperialist State
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Immanuel Ness is a professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York and visiting professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesurg. His recent publications include Migration as Economic Imperialism (2023). He is writing a book on the unique efficacy and potency of the Chinese labor movement.
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Notes:
- Two years later, holding to the fundamental concepts of reification and class consciousness, Lukács’s unpublished monograph, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic (2020), preserves the significant concept of reification and the consciousness of the proletariat, rejects philosophical revisionism, and foregrounds social existence as determining class consciousness and class struggle rather than individual subjectivity driving existence. Moreover, in the preface to the 1967 edition of HCC, Lukács succinctly asserted that his views were framed “through spectacles tinged by Simmel and Max Weber” (1971, ix)].”
- The Bandung Conference, held in Bandung, Indonesia from 18 to 24 April, was attended by 29 Asian and African countries besides the five countries mentioned above; namely, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Gold Coast (now Ghana), Iran, Iraq, Japan, Jordan, Laos, Lebanon, Liberia, Libya, Nepal, the Philippines, China, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, the Vietnam Democratic Republic, South Vietnam (reunified as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1976) and Yemen. See Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (2014).
- Charter of the United Nations. https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/CTC/uncharter.pdf.
Originally published: Anti-Imperialist Network on December 24, 2024 by Immanuel Ness (more by Anti-Imperialist Network) (Posted Dec 28, 2024)
