The following is a review of The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left, by John Bellamy Foster, Editor, Monthly Review, November 2024.
In the beginning of the article, Foster states: "It is a sign of the structural crisis of capital in our time that not since the onset of the First World War and the dissolution of the Second International - during which nearly all the social democratic parties joined the inter-imperialist war on the side of their respective nation-states - has the split on imperialism on the left taken on such serious dimensions."
“Denial of imperialism dates back to the Fabian Society in Britain and was reflected in the social chauvinism of the main European social democratic parties at the time of First World War.” After the Second World War period, various national liberation struggles inspired Western socialists to adopt strongly anti-imperialist stances. This began to fade in the aftermath of the anti-Vietnam war movement in the early 1970’s.
Today, the Marxist theory of imperialism is rejected in large part or entirely by many self-proclaimed socialists in the West who deny the economic exploitation of the periphery by core imperialist countries. Many of them are from these same social democratic parties.
Foster goes on to enumerate and refute the ideas proposed by various theorists who try to dismiss the Marxist theory of imperialism. There are some pretty strange ideas floated by imperialism deniers. Foster says: "We are now commonly confronted with such contradictory propositions, emanating from the Western left as (1) one nation cannot exploit another; (2) there is no such thing as monopoly capitalism as the economic basis of imperialism; (3) imperialist rivalry and exploitation between nations has been displaced by global class struggles within a fully globalized transnational capitalism; (4) all great powers today are capitalist nations engaged in inter-imperialist struggle; (5) imperialist nations can be judged primarily on a democratic-authoritarian spectrum, so that not all imperialisms are created equal; (6) imperialism is simply a political policy of aggression of one state against another; (7) humanitarian imperialism designed to protect human rights is justified (8) the dominant classes in the Global South are no longer anti-imperialist and are either transnationalist or sub-imperialist in orientation;(9) the "anti-imperialist left" is "Manichean" in its support of the morally "good" Global South against the morally "bad" Global North; (10) economic imperialism has now been "reversed" with the Global East/South now exploiting the Global West/North; (11) China and the United States head rival imperialist blocs; and (12) Lenin was mainly a theorist of inter-imperialism, not of the imperialism of center and periphery."
Whew! One can see why Foster required 27 pages to explore these fallacies.
Despite protracted attempts by non-revolutionary "Marxists" to undermine the Marxist theory of imperialism, Lenin's classic work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, together with subsequent writings from 1916-1920 have been central to all discussions of imperialism for more than a century. Even critics of Lenin's theory habitually refer back to it as Foster points out.
Karl Marx had nothing but scorn for those he said could not see "how one nation can grow rich at the expense of another." Similarly Lenin explicitly stated that the dominant tendency of imperialism was "the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by an extremely small group of the richest and most powerful nations."
Lenin said "If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say imperialism is the monopoly stage of
capitalism." …. "A handful of wealthy countries - there are only four of them, if we mean independent, really gigantic, "modern" wealth: England, France, the United States, and Germany have developed monopoly to vast proportions, they obtain superprofits running into the hundreds, if not thousands of millions, they ‘ride on the backs' of hundreds and hundreds of millions of people in other countries, and fight among themselves for the division of the particularly rich, particularly fat and particularly easy spoils This [exploitation, and the spoils it delivers] in fact, is the economic and political essence of imperialism."
Engels refers to such superprofits enabling the “bribing” of a narrow section of the working class (the upper stratum of labour). No wonder that social democrats feign outrage at the thesis of the “labour aristocracy" that there is an upper stratum of the working class that benefits from imperialism - they're part of it, along with the union bureaucracy. They (and others) like to claim that Marx and Lenin didn't support this idea - dead wrong!
Foster continues: the rise of monopolistic accumulation had supplanted the era of free competition, creating an enormous surplus profits in relatively few corporations, which came to dominate the economy. In the five characteristics of imperialism that Lenin listed ... he emphasized the concentration and centralization of capital on a national and world scale as the primary characteristic of imperialism. The second characteristic was the merging of industrial and banking to form financial capital and a financial oligarchy. The third was the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities, that is, the shift of capital to a global field of operation. The fourth, summing up the previous three, was the domination by a relatively small number of international capitalist monopolies. The fifth was the completion of "the territorial division of the world among the great capitalist powers."
In Foster’s concluding paragraphs he refers to the debates in the Western left on the class character of China as well as the significance of the “multi-polar world” and urges readers to apply the learnings from Marx and Lenin.
This insightful article provides far more examples and quotations than can be dealt with here. It is a great gift to revolutionary socialists in countering imperialism deniers.