A reply to “Is Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism”?
Posted by seumasach on November 10, 2008
Cailean Bochanan
10th november, 2008
Paul Anderson has written an interesting piece within the marxist framework, a piece that we hope some marxists will wish to reply to. My own reply to Paul is another attempt by me to look beyond that framework and, indeed, that of the enlightenment as a whole whose roots in turn lie deep within antiquity.
There are a lot of emotionally highly charged big words in this article, like Capitalism and Imperialism. But what do they mean exactly?
For me capitalism would be the system established in England after 1688 based on the establishment of the Bank of England and the national debt. But the left always supported this “glorious’ revolution in most glowing terms as laying the very foundations of progress itself. As for imperialism, this was an imperialist system par excellence, allowing as it did the financing of endless wars of conquest. Indeed British imperialism was already well underway in Elizabethan times and not just in the activities of our pirates. John Dee had already coined the term British empire and layed its ideological foundations in the British-Israeli doctrine, namely that as one of the lost tribes of Israel we were a chosen people. The Virginia trading company was up and running soon after, displacing Indians with the helped of a freshly adapted version of Christianity.
If capitalism is as Marx would have it the development of industrial capitalism in England in the 19th century then it succeeds imperialism as he implicitly concedes in Capital vol 1, chapter 31. Capitalism is then logically a stage in the development of imperialism; it wouldn’t have happened without the “opening up” of India providing a massive and captive market for textiles.
The article implies,I think correctly, that we are now back on course for a development which had begun in the Renaissance, a development which centres around re-emergent nation states, and examines why the left remain unimpressed by this development.
As I suggested above, as keen supporters of the post-1688 Whig oligarchy you wouldn’t expect them to celebrating their demise. But this is a bit unfair: they only support 1688 because it leads to capitalism , which they also oppose, but which they see as “progressive’ leading, as it inevitably must in their eyes to socialism. But capitalism in their view transcends and ultimately negates national development. In that sense, in my view, it is an imperialist construct since it lumps together diverse developments under a single schema. Thus, whatever distinctions there may be German. French and British “capitalism’, the important thing is that they are all “capitalist”. Lenin, writing in his imperialism, is caught in this contradiction as, in the process of trying to show the same stage of capitalism emerging in England and Germany, unwittingly shows the two to be quite distinct. This was a strange error for the man who liked to repeat Hegel’s dictum that “the truth is always concrete”. Through a deceptive overgeneralisation he relegated Germany to the role of one more capitalist power morphing into an imperialist one, instead of seeing its developmental, productivist model of “capitalism’ as being the victim of the British parasitic financier, imperialist model, as had been Paraguay and as would be Japan.
Incidently, this bellittlement through generalisation has time-honoured pedigree in the annals of empire.”The rise of natural law as a universal system coincided with the rise of large empires and kingdoms in the Greek world”(wikipedia) and the Romans used the notion of Natural Law in precisely the same way to lump together the nations which it absorbed and to negate their individuality and therefore, independence.
The left is virulently hostile to the nation state and in this sense the neo-cons are a logical offshoot. For the left any nation is fair game because it is capitalist,( or not capitalist enough: they have to become capitalist in order to become socialist, remember!) But there is a deeper philosophical issue here beyond the imposition of unity on diversity: some, after all, argue for many, diverse ‘capitalisms”. Capitalism isn’t just counterposed as the general to the particular. There is a deeper counterposition: that of mode of production to political association or body politic.
We are entering into the realm here of state of nature theory. This is most commonly associated with Hobbes and his famous quote:
“during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man”
However, while falsely implying that man at some stage existed outside a framework of law, in a “state of nature” at least Hobbes’s state is recognised as necessary to ‘civilized’ life. But Marxism actually goes further relegating the state to a mere appendage of one party in a new characterisation of the struggle for existence, this times between classes, not individuals. In Hobbes the state of nature ends with the hegemony of the state: in Marx the hegemony of the state ends with the state of nature, appearing as an Arcadia in the future, rather than in the past as in the ancient world. That Marxism is a further reedition of “State of Nature ” theory seems to have been generally ignored reflecting the fact that this doctrine has only ever been subjected to the most superficial critiques, usually limited to comparing it to to its sister theory liberalism. But as Sir Henry Maine points out in his Ancient Law
“the philosophy founded on the hypothesis of a
state of nature has fallen low in general esteem, in so far as it
is looked upon under its coarser and more palpable aspect, it
does not follow that in its subtler disguises it has lost
plausibility, popularity, or power.”
Thus the central fact that the non-existence of a body politic, a political association a nation state(as the modern correlate of the city state) is axiomatic within Marxist theory is lost: they are
, at best, merely products of divisions within “the bourgeoisie”. What surprise then that the Marxist left can find nothing at all positive in the reemergence of Russia, China, Venezuela as counterpoles to the empire. Indeed, they are showing growing hostility often verging on hysteria towards this development. Their ideology is deeply immersed in the ideology of empire itself, specifically in its “enlightenment’ reedition. Not only will they not update their ideology as the empire totters,it will go to the grave with it. They can’t think out of the box and consequently it will be the box in which their worldview will be laid to rest.
In These New Times 
smeddum said
I have more trouble with Marxists than Marx. Marx was a pioneer, it is less excusable for his followers to follow their leader blindly. Lenin is less of a pioneer but he ventured into areas that Marx barely touched. Here is Harris on Morgan
“What we must bear in mind is that to Morgan and most of his contemporaries the most interesting features were their similarities rather than their differences. For it was on their similarities that a science of universal history depended. A modicum of sympathy for the attempt to found such a science will suffice to justify Morgan’s strategy. the first step in the development of any science must be that the phenomena to be studied are related in a orderly fashion. It does less harm to begin with a picture of of maximum order than with a minimum order, for exceptions will soon enough make their claim to attention.”
This attempt at a science of a universal history, was not just Morgan’s but Marx’s also.
The Marxist theory of State by the looks of things now, was a narrow definition of State. This namely that it is an instrument of class oppression. This is one-sided in that the State has functions that merely cohere society in areas of health, and transport regulation etc. The State also conserves national heritage, through libraries, museums etc. The “administration of things” can hardly be posed as an alternative to the State. It is the State. Defining the State as ” armed bodies of men” only addressed the State protection of private property.
Engels, and I assume, Marx takes his vision from Morgan,
“Since the advent of civilization, the outgrowth of property has been so immense, its forms so diversified, its uses so expanding and its management so intelligent in the interests of its owners, that it has become, on the part of the people, an unmanageable power. The human mind stands bewildered in the presence of its own creation. The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations. A mere property career is not the final destiny of mankind, if progress is to be the law of the future as it has been of the past. The time which has passed away since civilization began is but a fragment of the past duration of man’s existence; and but a fragment of the ages yet to come. The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. It will be a revival, in a higher form, of the liberty, equality and fraternity of the ancient gentes”
Morgan seems richer in terms of subtlety of generalisation than Marx and indeed Lenin in later writings.
The work of Morgan describes a primitive state of law rather than nature. However, Morgan does not describe a withering away of the State. He looks for a stronger definition of the State.
“The time will come, nevertheless, when human intelligence will rise to the mastery over property, and define the relations of the state to the property it protects, as well as the obligations and the limits of the rights of its owners. The interests of society are paramount to individual interests, and the two must be brought into just and harmonious relations”
It looks to me that Marx by over projecting the abolition or withering away of the State lay himself open to the “state of nature” attack you have made.
Finally I would like to touch on the oppression, I believe that it will wither away as human intelligence comes to mastery over societal relations. The disentanglement of oppression from the State is the ultimate goal of Marx but his expression of this goal kowtowed to anarchism to make a bogeyman out of the State as a whole and over-emphasised the destruction of the old order, and made way for nihilism, philistinism, Year Zero thinking, and undermined the idea that a new society will come out of the womb of the old.
This distortion has also allowed the “state of nature” ”world markets” morass to engulf most of the left with a view of “globalisation” as historically progressive as part of their philosophy. Along with this the tacit acceptance and naturalisation of US hegemony. The transplanting of internationalism with belittlement and hostility towards national liberation and anti-imperialist movements will ensure that old Karl will spend a long time spinning in his grave.
inthesenewtimes said
It is precisely in the notion of “universal history” that the problem resides. The first of such was written by Polybius under the patronage of Scipio the Younger and was a blatant apologetic for the Roman Empire and a gift to the Roman imperialists, from Greek philosophy, of the notion of “natural law”, a universal law which could be projected outwards to those states which fell under Roman domain, rather as human rights are today. It was a “monist” theory, abstracting from diversity in favour of an abstract universality: gone now was the study of comparative politics that Aristotle had carried out.
In the same way Morgan and Engels bring the monist appraoch to bear on the history of the family and early constitutions as in the quote you have given:
“The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim; because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction.”
Whilst true,the assumption, or suggestion, is that the Roman/Anglo-saxon paradigm of indivisible, heritable property prevails everywhere: in fact this was very much the exception and goes a long way to explain the empire building propensities and capacities of both these cultures. Fortunately, French sociology provided a much needed counterpoint to the monists in the 19th centurywork of Emile de Laveleye, Primitive Property(online) and his present day successor Emmanuel Todd, La diversite du monde.
It looks like my point on “state of nature” theories was not clear. I categorise Marx as a state of nature theorist not so much because of his anarchistic conclusion but because like Hobbes he posits the state as something separate from society,civil society, which is in some form of State of nature, in this case, a perpetual struggle between classes. With Marx,the state is not a body politic, something you exist in as a social individual or citizen as Aristotle described it. In Marxism there is no such body politic and national divisions and frontiers are arbitrary; therefore, Marx is a state of nature theorist.(This doesn’t particularly strike us because all the rest of the enlightenment, post-enlightenment thinkers, except,at times, Rousseau, were state of nature theorists) By extension, it is unsurprising that marxists,in general, fail to defend national sovereignty against the empire: to do so would be to contradict the essential nature of their philosophy. In fact, for marxists, the empire doesn’t really exist: everything is capitalism which is all pervasive or, if not, should become so. Thus getting rid of “pre-capitalist residue” i.e. the foundations of other nation states or cultures, is necessary. We are already back with the neo-cons, amongst whom some “popinjays” who still like to cite the Communist Manifesto.
The problem, however, is very much marxism rather than marxists, many of whom have simply strayed or been lured into marxism by its stand against injustice and oppression without realizing how it contains within itself the precepts of empire.
smeddum said
The project of a universal history in itself has no ideological content, that is added content from historians and philosophers. Aristotle produced his own schemata as cycles of forms of regimes.
The comparative method is the only method available to any thinker on the matter. If the patterns he sees are flawed then they can be improved upon.
The positing of one set of property relations as a law for all is indeed a mistake, but it does not take away the need for a meta-narrative which describes both uneven and combined developments of nation States. I do not see how thinking about them is possible if it is not so.
Marx’s thinking on the national question went under various transformations and according to his daughter Eleanor called himself a “Fenian”. He also approved of the Highland clearances and made references to non-historic peoples.(perhaps the latter was only Engels but they were close enough)
I don t think Marx was as clear as Lenin on the national question. Present-day Marxists tend to avoid Lenin on this matter completely and the fact that he took up Marx’s Irishness.
Marx was also all over the place with “pre-capitalist residue” which saw in the “Grundisse”, how
the jury system was such an inheritance.
The element in the ” Communist Manifesto” which is catastrophic “all that is solid melts” . I think does undermine any thought of the body politic. Yet he has moments of insight which capture it when he is writing descriptively rather than entering the realms of abstract theory .
The relation of Marxists to Marx is skewed, they tend to see nothing contradictory in his political development.
The influence of Marx on those who have been “lured” has not been uniform, and have been champions of the oppressed, everywhere. I doubt if they took the entire body of Marx’s work at face value, they would have not sought any line of independent thought. The religious aspect of the cult of personality which pervades the modern sects seems to take all in Marx uncritically, and take out only what is useful to their purposes.
The fact that there is much there that suits their purposes does go on the shoulders of Marx.
This is based on the whole superstructure of empire being housed in Western “precepts of empire”
Yet I think Marx made steps that has allowed humans to decipher science from ideology, truth from lies, by asking the question “in whose interests?”.
“In the succession of economic categories, as in many other historical and social science, it must not be forgotten that their subject, here modern bourgeois society – is always given in the head, and as well as in reality, and these categories express forms of being, the characteristics of existence, and often only individual sides of this specific society, this subject and therefore this society by no means begins only at the point were one could speak of it as such ; this holds as well for science”. Grundisse
This link might interest you
inthesenewtimes said
Yes, Aristotle and Plato had their schemas and conceptual frameworks but there was never any doubt as to what was the subject of their studies: the city state.
Contrasts that with Marx:
“In the succession of economic categories, as in many other historical and social science, it must not be forgotten that their subject, here modern bourgeois society – is always given in the head, and as well as in reality, and these categories express forms of being, the characteristics of existence, and often only individual sides of this specific society, this subject and therefore this society by no means begins only at the point were one could speak of it as such ; this holds as well for science”. Grundisse
That is a pretty terrifying quote and would often be a debate stopper. But let’s not be fazed by the German philosopher and try and see what he is saying. What is the subject of his study? Is it the emerging modern nations states, the British empire, the new American republic?Is it “a meta-narrative which describes both uneven and combined developments of nation States”. No, it is “modern bourgeois society” meaning, as we know from elsewhere, the “capitalist mode of production”. But my argument is that this is itself an abstraction of a type stemming from the “state of nature” view of society. I’ll try to clarify this.
For Aristotle, the state was something you lived in. The forms of governments were part of the city state according to its constitution. This notion of living in a state disappeared with the emergence of Rome, a particular type of city state capable of becoming an empire. Henceforth, people tended to see themselves living in civil society with the state as something separate and over and above them, even becoming completely sublimated into a “city of God”. The enlightenmemnt, recapitulating the ideas hellenistic, post-city state Greek philosophers, consolidated this viewpoint. We lived in civil society whether in a permanent state of war between all(Hobbes), a society of property holders(Locke)etc. The state was something brought in from outside to regulate or protect people, usually by way of a contract I think these various constructs are the ideological expressions of imperial aspirations which, by definition, wish to negate the nation state in favour of the empire. The clearest example of this was “political economy”.
People continued to live in states, of various sorts,(after all, where else can we live), but we increasingly saw ourselves as living in “civil society”. This prejudice has even entered the language: the British state means either the British nation or the institutions of the British state, those being understood as being quite distinct.
The “capitalist mode of production” was another of these constructs based on a false antithesis between state and society. Its study is not the study of a real thing but of an abstraction. We need rather to study actual society. Had Marx given us a history of the British Empire that really would have been something he could have got his teeth into. Instead he took us into the high flown world of the “categories” from which his adherents are yet to descend.
smeddum said
I too find the notion of an abstract universal fixed base devoid of superstructure highly inadequate. I think Engels recognises some of these short comings somewhere. If I never hear the term “categories” again I will be quite pleased. I think I remember thinking that the terms ‘use value’,’ exchange value’ “wage labour” and “surplus value” , ”money circulation”, ” commodities” , all help to describe something of the life I experienced, and I still do.
How does this fit into the development each nation State? The bigger picture as such is as far as I can see a story yet untold. There is something elemental in Marx’s political economy that can be used as reference point. Yet the fetishness of categories has driven the orthodox left blind to the obvious inadequacy of these categories as a summation of societal relations. Everytime I hear the term “categories” from the left, I just want to run away.