Imperialism: What it Is, What it Isn't and How it Ends

On Monday 18 November, the CWO held a public meeting in Manchester on the topic of imperialism. We publish here the presentation followed by notes from the discussion.

The Presentation

‘Imperialism’, in Marxist terms, has a specific definition. It is an economic definition that explains how capitalism came to dominate the world and how it continues to survive. It’s an explanation that implicates the ruling-classes of every nation great and small. Frustratingly for us, the term ‘imperialism’ has been tampered with and obscured until it means something else entirely to most of society. When Lenin wrote Imperialism: The Highest State of Capitalism in 1916,⁽¹⁾ he was responding to the misuse of the term by the so-called socialists of the Second International. In this case, socialists, of whom Kautsky is the most famous example, had lost their Marxist minds and instead put their trust in the state and reformism. When the First World War was on the horizon, they performed various opportunist backflips to invent a definition of imperialism that justified supporting their own nation’s war efforts. In fact, throughout Lenin’s critique, we see that the capitalist defenders of imperialism, those who cherished the destruction of the world, put forward better understandings of imperialism than the misguided socialists.

Today, we have even more problems, not least since Stalin’s distortion of numerous terms.⁽²⁾ In fact, perhaps the only word that’s been distorted more than imperialism is communism itself. Now, the word ‘imperialism’ is found on every ‘communist’ poster. Where the second-internationalists redefined imperialism to defend their own Western countries, leftists influenced by Stalinist and Trotskyist distortions redefine imperialism to defend any enemy of the West. Gaddafi, Hussein, Chavez, and most recently Sinwar, all become noble anti-imperialist fighters. Then again, Ukraine reminded us that plenty of ordinary liberals are happy to use the term too, now applied to Russia – again, to support one warmonger against another.

In short, imperialism is not simply a policy that one country takes against another.

We cannot talk of imperialism without talking of capitalism. Capitalism, in theory, we are taught, is defined by its free market, free competition between the individual owners of manufacturing businesses. In Europe in the 1860s, this form of capitalism was at its peak, with industrialisation having been completed. The crash that followed in 1873 saw the growing emergence of cartels – businesses joining together to take out the competition. During a short boom in 1889, more and more businesses were taking to joining cartels, and throughout the 1890s the cartel system became an established and durable business form – mostly in the trade of raw materials. By the next economic crash of 1900-1903, cartels seemed like the solution for the capitalists, and free competition, the problem. Ownership of the means of production was now well on the way to being concentrated in the hands of a shrinking minority. In another word, monopoly. Monopolies, formed by the initial alliances of a few businesses, were in the position to bully, blackmail and eradicate smaller businesses. The owners of these conglomerates have no particular knowledge of industry but know how to accumulate and invest wealth. We call these financial speculators.

While the means of production were being concentrated, so the banks were too, and their purpose changed in the process. Originally, the bank was an intermediary through which capitalists made payments. As with the cartels, the small banks became absorbed or eliminated by growing banking alliances, alliances which eventually could take total control over the capitalist business owners, and essentially run capitalism. Then finally, the biggest banks and the biggest businesses came to operate together, and this monopolist system was completed by the union of the banks, the businesses, and the state. In Lenin’s words, “a sort of division of labour amongst some hundreds of kings of finance who reign over modern capitalist society”. Total control of the economy was no longer in the hands of the owners of industry, but in the hands of speculators and bankers; the vast separation between money capital and productive capital, this is finance capital at its most powerful. The country that produces the most is no longer the most powerful – but the country that owns the most. There we have what we would call superpowers, a tiny minority of countries running capitalism through financial domination.

At a certain point, the capitalist drive for expansion leads capitalists beyond their own homelands in search of greater profit. They start to export capital to less economically developed countries, investing in industry abroad, handing out loans, and ultimately forcing a monopolist model of capitalism onto the entire world. The entire world then is divided among a minority of highly developed capitalist countries. No stone is left unturned – where a profit can be made, it is made – without any regard to human life or ecological health. And once again, alliances are formed between the capitalists of different countries, among the state and among the owners of capital, to eliminate the competition from other countries. It is easy to see, without much explanation at all, how such a system arrives at international rivalries, and at times of crisis, war. This has not changed today. The political independence of countries is never 'true' independence as their economies and militaries rely on backing from a superpower, or indeed are caught between rival superpowers. We might call these states proxy or client states. In this situation, no economic rivalry, no war, no coup, exists outside of capitalist world domination – outside of imperialism.

Imperialism then is a phase of capitalism, not just the foreign policy of individual states. Lenin provides five essential features:

1) The concentration of production and capital developed to such a high stage that it created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life.
2) The merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this ‘finance capital’ of a ‘financial oligarchy’.
3) The export of capital, which has become extremely important, as distinguished from the export of commodities.
4) The formation of international capitalist monopolies which share the world among themselves.
5) The territorial division of the whole world among the greatest capitalist powers is completed.

Today, we are on a terrifying path to another world war. Wars in Ukraine and Russia, Israel, Palestine and Lebanon, Sudan, Myanmar, and countless other tragic massacres, are not isolated incidents. They are not simply the product of particular demagogues, religious tribalism, or exceptional national histories. They are all capitalist wars with the powerful capitalist states shifting and lining up behind them. As the desperate capitalists fear losing their profits, and war beckons the proud defenders of national capital, closer, albeit shifting, alliances are being formed between powers to prepare. From this comes one of our partings with Lenin, namely in his assertion of the right of nations to self-determination. The 1915 Theses on Imperialism published in the Polish Gazeta Robotnicza, was signed, among others, by Karl Radek.⁽³⁾ The theses reflects on the First World War, as well the experience of Polish independence campaigns. They’re worth quoting:

Today, in light of the experience of the world war, the adoption of the slogan of independence as a means of struggling against national oppression would be not only a damaging utopia, but the denial of the simplest foundations of socialism. This slogan would mean striving to create a new imperialist power, a power that would itself strive to subjugate and oppress foreign nations. The only result of such a programme would be the weakening of class consciousness, the exacerbation of national contradictions, the division of the forces of the proletariat, and the amplification of new dangers of war.

On the other hand, if independence does not result in the creation of a state powerful enough to subjugate and oppress foreign nations, the newly independent state becomes “the military colony of one or another superpower bloc, a football of their military and economic interests, a territory of exploitation of foreign capital, and a battleground of a future war.”

Essentially, imperialism cannot be fought through national liberation struggles – these are struggles only to become a new imperialist power, or an imperialist satellite.

This is why the struggle against national oppression must be conducted as a struggle against imperialism, for socialism.

Imperialism is not just any phase of capitalism; it has the potential to be the final phase. It is the phase at which war is a constant feature, but it is also the phase in which the conditions are suitable for the overthrow of capitalism, thanks to the socialisation (in a sense) of the means of production, and the internationalisation of social relations. Anti-imperialism, through the misguidedly leftist lens of opposition to Western imperialism, leads these people only to support rival imperialists, or to undermine proletarian struggle in smaller nations. The role of communists is, in the words of Gazeta Robotnicza, to “support the proletarian struggles in the colonial countries against European and domestic capital, and [...] also try to spread the perspective among the colonial proletariat that its permanent interest requires solidarity not with its national bourgeoisie, but with the European proletariat fighting for socialism.”

This is why in the CWO, we have consistently put forward the slogan of 'no war but the class war', and we continue to do so where we can⁽⁴⁾ – though the working-class struggles are currently largely dormant. We carry our positions against imperialism, as a form of capitalism, and against all its iterations, whether at pro-Palestinian protests, trade union picket lines, anarchist bookfairs, or mass demonstrations – and we try to publish regularly on the imperialist machinations of the powers, through military means as well as economic means, to educate ourselves and others on what we must prepare for.

It isn’t an easy position to take when not only is the bourgeois narrative one of imperialist defence, but so too is the distorted position of self-proclaimed communists. And it isn’t an easy position to take when lives are already being taken victim to imperialism at such a huge scale, and when the prospect of world war is undoubtedly terrifying. But nor was it an easy position for our political ancestors in previous world wars. When Poland was being devastated by three rival empires, and the Polish bourgeoise still was advocating national independence as the only “solution”, communists wrote the following:

Imperialism is the policy of capitalism at the stage of development that makes the socialist organisation of production possible. [...] The struggle against the war opens up this new epoch. By showing the proletariat how capitalism, which in the name of its own interests sends peoples to the slaughterhouse, tears nations to pieces, tramples national needs, treats the masses like dumb cattle, and by protesting against this waste of peoples’ blood, this arbitrary splitting of nations between superpowers, this doubling down of national oppression, we prepare the proletariat for revolutionary struggle.

The Discussion

Following the presentation, the floor was opened to discussion, beginning with a question on the practical implementation of our political stance and 'what we in this room' could do, especially given the fact that our politics differ from most of those responding to the issue, for example in how we see ourselves as relating to existing movements like the Palestine protests. In response, we clarified the basis for our differences – namely, that while we share the sympathy of those at Palestine protests with the victims of the massacre in Gaza and Lebanon, we see that nationalist solutions are no solutions at all, but can only lead to an endless redrawing of the battle lines. We pointed to 'successful' national liberation struggles such as Poland and Israel as working examples of this, as well as the decolonisation movement in Africa; in each case, nominal independence has in no way meant 'true' independence in any meaningful sense with the global system of capitalism in its imperialist phase left intact. Far from leading to any kind of liberation for anyone, this can only endlessly prefigure conflicts to come.

What’s more, history has shown us that the only force capable of stopping war is the mass movement of the working class – here we gave examples of the First World War being brought to an end by the revolutionary wave that began in Russia and spread to Germany and then around the world, compared to the mass protest movements that nevertheless failed to stop the the invasion of Iraq in 2003. So, in terms of what the few of us who have come to these conclusions can do, in the absence of a working class movement up to the task, the answer is not a lot, but we can continue to advocate for our perspectives in our capacity as members of the working class, in our workplaces and communities. The Bolsheviks also started out as a small minority – it was the experience of war which made their internationalist message relevant to the wider masses.

In the meantime, we can also point to positive examples of resistance to the ongoing wars, such as deserters from both Russia and Ukraine, as one contribution pointed out. There was general agreement that this was a positive thing that our propaganda should certainly highlight, and this led to discussion of other instances of desertion, for example in Israel, and other instances of resistance to the war, for example stories of women organising to resist conscription in Ukraine, and various workers across Europe refusing to ship arms. While some of these cases are only of people coming to partially similar conclusions, they nevertheless show that people can and do begin to question and resist war on their own, and our role is to provide them with a political framework and a sense of historical precedent for the action they’re taking.

There was also a contribution on how migration and precarity has affected the working class by contributing to our atomisation and our sense that we are disposable, undermining many working class people’s sense of community, and their sense that it’s possible and worthwhile to try and change something about our situation. We recalled how workers have always been a class of migrants, moving from one place to another in search of work and a better life.

Another question compared the situation at the end of the First World War and now, suggesting that while the end of the First World War saw a revolutionary wave that spread across Europe, if the working class in Ukraine or Palestine, for example, tried to revolt, they would simply be massacred. To this we responded that the Russian working class had to deal with this reality as well, and this was precisely why, then as now, any revolutionary movement must be premised on the hope that it spreads internationally, or else it is doomed to fail. Indeed, the ultimate failure of the revolutionary wave in Europe was exactly what in the end condemned the revolution in Russia.⁽⁵⁾

There was then a question on the topic of anti-fascism, which acknowledged that all the popular front movements in history had ultimately betrayed the working class, but that nevertheless surely we would still rather live under Churchill than under Hitler, and so we were asked how we dealt with this apparent contradiction. To this we responded that we oppose fascism with the working class struggle against capitalism, since struggles against fascism alone have not got rid of it.⁽⁶⁾ We understand fascism to be a consequence of capitalism, a desperate response of the capitalist class to the crisis of the system and the threat of working class revolution. Furthermore, we have seen that the defeat of Germany and Italy in the Second World War has not actually put an end to fascism. In fact, neo-fascists are currently in parliaments and even governments of a number of countries, and nationalism and militarism is the natural outgrowth of the capitalist system itself – the only way we can genuinely rid the world of it is by overthrowing capitalism itself.

This led back to how we see our role in relating to the working class and its struggles. To latch onto popular fronts or national liberation movements would only be a hindrance to any revolutionary potential. Though it can be disheartening going against the grain, we must continue to represent the genuine internationalist position.

The meeting was concluded and wide-ranging informal discussion followed. The meeting was attended by both new and familiar faces. The discussion was certainly enriched by the range of people present who had come from varying political backgrounds, and conversations will be continued. The discussion never lost a sense of urgency. There was no theorising for the sake of theorising, but rather an understanding that the abyss of war is opening up further by the day, and that this will only embitter the lives of workers everywhere, and a shared question of where we go next.

Communist Workers’ Organisation
December 2024