A reply to Leo Panitch on the relevancy of the term imperialism

posted to www.marxmail.org on June 1, 2003

I want to urge comrades, even those without high-speed Internet access, to listen to the debate between Leo Panitch and John Bellamy Foster that was originally aired on Living Room Radio, a Pacifica station in California and that is archived at: http://www.livingroomradio.org/. It raises some very interesting questions that I want to take up, especially Leo Panitch's problem with the usefulness of the traditional Marxist understanding of imperialism. But first a word or two about the principals.

Panitch edits "Socialist Register", a yearly journal that was launched by the late Ralph Miliband and John Saville in 1964. Panitch's co-editor is Colin Leys, a fellow professor at York University in Canada, where the journal is published, and with whom I have had a series of exchanges about dependency theory and other issues alluded to in the Panitch-Foster debate. Leys, who is a specialist in African development, started out as a dependency theorist but became convinced somewhere along the line that independent capitalist development was possible in Africa. This led him to make some rather startlingly optimistic projections about the Kenyan bourgeoisie that John Enyang, a Marxmail subscriber who grew up in Kenya, dismissed with references to the discouraging economic data of his homeland and to the writings of Franz Fanon.

Although Panitch appears to come from a more classical Marxist outlook than many other figures on the academic left, he shares with Immanuel Wallerstein and Hardt-Negri the belief that proletarian revolution is an outmoded concept. Since he is also in favor of socialism, this has lent his writings a certain disjointed quality. It is almost like reading a manual about how to raise a family without finding a word about sexual intercourse.

Foster is the editor of Monthly Review, a journal that has tried to maintain the viability of the theory of imperialism and which recently convened a conference in Vermont titled Imperialism Today (http://www.monthlyreview.org/tribute.htm). It was timed to coincide with the publication of Harry Magdoff's "Imperialism Without Colonies", a collection of articles that have appeared in the journal over the years. Foster's reply to Panitch incorporated a lot of the observations that were made a recent MR article titled "Imperial America and War" and that is online. As will be obvious from my following remarks, I am in agreement with Foster but have some additional comments that might help to clarify the issues.

To begin with, Panitch says that the term imperialsim is inadequately theorized today. It is analogized with ancient Rome, but presented without any grounding in historical determinacy or political economy. According to Panitch, the term began to fall out of favor with Marxists around 1970 for these reasons. Of course, this would have been news to people like myself back then who had about as much familiarity with Socialist Register or Science and Society as they had with the man in the moon. Whenever I got into a extended conversation with some undergraduate about the causes of the Vietnam war, I always brought up the subject of imperialism. Little did I suspect that there were well-intentioned left intellectuals out there questioning the usefulness of the term.

One of them was John Willoughby, who wrote an article in the 1995 Science and Society special issue on Lenin titled "Evaluating the Leninist Theory of Imperialism". To put it bluntly, there is nothing that Panitch said in his debate with Foster that wasn't already said by Willoughby. The main problem with the Marxist understanding of imperialism, according to Panitch, is that it is prone to economic reductionism. Although Willoughby's remarks are focused on Lenin, they jibe with Panitch's complaint. Willoughby writes:

"We cannot deduce imperial domination from capital export or capitalist rivalry from the logic of uneven development without additional arguments connecting the evolution of national social formations to the world accumulation process. And this, in turn, means that the roots of metropolitan territorial domination are still obscure. We have neither a general explanation of capitalist imperialism, nor an accounting of its heterogeneous character. This is a fundamental failing. No theory of imperialism can be complete without a compelling explanation of the varying forms of metropolitan capitalist state domination. And this requires that attention be paid to the formation of varying political structures throughout the world economy, an attention that is diverted by the reductionist theories of capitalist imperialism and, in Lenin's case, the actual definition of imperialism itself."

Most importantly, for both Panitch and Willoughby, this reductionism could not explain why most capital flows remain with the advanced capitalist world today. If imperialism is characterized by the export of capital, then one might conclude that Great Britain is more of a victim of imperialism than Tanzania since there is more direct American investment in the former than the latter. Panitch says that imperialism might have been a useful concept in the Victorian era when North-South ties were decisive but not when you find a preponderance of commercial and military interpenetration in the G8 nations through various trade agreements, bilateral investments and partnerships in NATO. Prior to 1945, it made sense to speak of inter-imperialist rivalries but it does not today. What you have instead is a US hegemony that has effectively turned other major capitalist powers into something resembling Canada. This is not exactly what Lenin was facing at the outbreak of WWI.

What is entirely missing from Panitch's analysis is the role of the USSR and the colonial revolution in effecting this rapprochement between the USA and other imperialist powers. It was necessary for their joint survival to create a united front that would stave off socialist revolution both in Europe and in the South. In hypothetical but not far-fetched terms, try to imagine what the world would have looked like in 1955 if Hitler had successfully overthrown Bolshevism and created a client state in Russia--ie., eventually what the west achieved. Next, a German nationalist party that was more "reasonable" and willing to co-exist with the allies overthrows Hitler. It easily could have brought the war to an end and left in its place a status quo not too much different than that which followed the end of the First World War, maybe this time one that put its former enemies in a weakened state. Under these circumstances, would inter-imperialist rivalries eventually have manifested themselves? You can be sure of this.

Instead, we saw an entirely different alignment of forces. All of capitalist Europe and Japan united with the USA to prevail over the USSR and the colonial revolution. The Cold War was essentially an imperialist crusade to eliminate the institutional foundations of collectivized property relations and to prevent the rise of other Soviet type states. If you total up the number of lives lost in this counter-revolutionary long war, it probably compares with those lost during either World War.

Alongside this imperialist assault, you also had one directed against a series of nationalist-minded or populist states that came into existence largely as a result of the space provided by Cold War rivalries. This includes Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Allende's Chile, the former Angolan colonies, Nehru's India, and others too numerous to mention. They all became subject to a combination of economic and military pressures from the North that eventually led to their replacement by more pliant regimes and/or adoption of neo-liberal policies. If one chooses not to describe this ongoing attack as "imperialist", then choose another word that is more appropriate--just as long as we understand the underlying process that can be easily demonstrated through the kind of "political economy" and "historical determination" that Panitch calls for.

Turning finally to the question of whether the presence of IBM plants in Great Britain rather than Tanzania is supposed to prove anything or not. This is a specious line of reasoning that reminds me of one I have heard about whether the workers in the advanced capitalist countries are more "exploited" than those in the Third World. Based on a schematic reading of the chapters on the production of surplus value in V. 1 of Capital, some Marxists argue that a worker in a highly mechanized factory in the USA is more exploited than a Guatemalan coffee-picker because they produce a higher proportion of surplus value relative to their wage. What this fails to take into account is the overall ability of the worker to reproduce their own existence, which is not only a function of the wage but the material conditions of society as a whole. If your wage cannot pay for adequate medical care, the amount of surplus value you produce is irrelevant. To paraphrase Keynes, you will be dead-- but in the short run. There is no greater form of exploitation than early death because of inadequate food, shelter or medical care.

By the same token, if the USA fails to invest in Burkina Faso or Paraguay at the same rate as it does in Canada or Great Britain, it does not mean that these countries are not victims of imperialism. In nearly every case, including these two nations of the South, an alternative development path is forestalled because the imperialist North cannot tolerate any exceptions to its rule. Even tiny Grenada was overthrown because the New Jewel Movement had decided that the resources of society should have been channeled to the poor. That Grenada today lacks foreign investment is not a sign that imperialism is not operative. Rather it is a sign that there is no material incentive to invest. Ultimately, capitalism is not about development. It is about profit. If there is profit building IBM plants in Great Britain, the capitalist will invest. If there is no profit in Burkina Faso or Paraguay, it will neglect them.

With the declining availability of profitable spheres of investment, we are faced with growing stagnation or what Andre Gunder Frank called the "development of underdevelopment" throughout the 3rd world. It would appear that no matter what people like John Willoughby and others said after 1970, Andre (who is in hospital now and who our thoughts are with) appears more relevant than ever today.

(Jim Blaut's reply to John Willoughby can be read at: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/Blaut/imperialism.htm)