[Marxism] Imperialism

[Angelus Novus]

Haines Brown:

> Assuming you refer here to a supposed ideological 
> difference between Marx and Lenin, it makes me a bit

> uncomfortable.

No, not so much an ideological difference between Marx
and Lenin, but rather a methodological one.  Marx's
Capital is a form-analytical account of the categories
of  capitalist society, the reified forms that social
activity assumes in a society of generalized commodity
production mediated by exchange.

Lenin's account, on the other hand, seems to be a
sociological theory of domination or rule.  Now, when
you say Lenin practices something more akin to social
engineering than social science, perhaps this is a
reference to these "different levels" of analysis. 
But then it's difficult for me to see what is actually
Marxian about Lenin's account, other than of course
the fact that Lenin, like every other Social Democrat
of his age and milieu, referred positively to Marx and
claimed to stand in a continuity with Marx.

> In Marxist terms, the conventional difference
between > "government" and "state" is that government
addresses > needs specific to the social whole
(actually, this is > my own definition for politics,
but that should make > no difference), and the state
is an institution 
> needed to stabilize a society characterized by class
> contradiction.

That may very well be the "Marxist" terms of
understanding, but since Marx never got around to
writing his planned book on the state, it's not
something I can really begin with.  Some thinkers,
like Joachim Hirsch, are attempting to formulate
form-analytical theories of the state, in the
tradition of Marx's form-analytical account of
economic categories, but I haven't progressed far
enough in my investigations to really comment on their
worth.

> Well, if there is a socio-economic contradiction, 
> _nothing_ can "mediate" it

I'm assuming with socio-economic contradiction you
mean something like the alleged contradiction between
wage labor and capital, but I think writers like
Moishe Postone have demonstrated that Marx's critique
is not a critique of capital from the standpoint of
labor, but rather a *critique of labor* as it exists
in capitalist society.  So I don't see things like
wage demands, etc. as manifestations of a
socio-economic contradiction, so much as the assertion
by wage workers of their interests *within*
capitalism, and thus something that can very
definitely be mediated.

> What you seem to offer is a bourgeois concept of
that
> economic whole in which there are no contradictions,
> and it therefore can be regulated by economic 
> governance (the government's economic intervention).

I think the term "contradiction" is another one of
those fuzzy words that doesn't really clarify social
reality.  A contradiction is something that exists in
formal logic.  It's not always clear to me what it
means when applied to social structures.  Clearly,
people have interests which conflict with one another,
and they act out these conflicts within the general
framework inscribed by capital and the state.

Also, I certainly don't mean to imply that there is no
such thing as instability.  Capitalism, after all, is
fundamentally crisis-prone.

> OK, so you are saying that Lenin read Kapital as a 
> work of history rather than a general analysis of 
> capitalist dynamics?

This was certainly the consensus understanding of the
Social Democracy that Lenin belonged to.  It was also
Engel's understanding (Engels even thought the value
analysis in the first chapter was a reconstruction of
the historical emergence of the commodity form!). 
Lenin's positing of a "monopoly" stage of capitalism
that supersedes competitive capitalism implies to me
such an understanding.

> For better or worse I tried to reply to both 
> questions at some length.

Do you mean this?:

> What Marxism adds is a systemic view that ties 
> politics in with the economy and class. 
[snip]
> This intensified relation with the environment can
be
> manifest in a variety of ways, such as gaining
access > to critical raw materials or raw materials at
a 
> reduced price, gaining access to surplus value 
> generated abroad, dominating trade in one's own 
> favor, etc.

If this is your definition, than it is the other sense
in which imperialism is often used, not the moral
sense, but more as a placeholder term that means "the
stuff that capitalist nation-states do
internationally."  But the problem that I have with
this usage is that it necessarily implies that every
capitalist nation-state on earth is "imperialist" in
this tautological sense, from the militaristic USA, to
economically powerful China, to the miserable EU
protectorate statelet called "Kosovo".

On the lbo-talk list, Doug Henwood suggests a usage
which combines the moral usage and the placeholder
usage:

> don't mean it in Lenin's sense, which is obsolete, 
> but a more colloquial sense, in which a rich and 
> powerful country dominates poorer, weaker ones 
> through economic, political, and military means.  

Which I think has the advantage of saying that
imperialism is only the stuff that the rich and
powerful nation-states do.

Nestor also offers a fragmentary attempt at
definition:

> is defined by class colaboration of vast masses of 
> the proletariat in the core countries of the system 
> with their own bourgeoisies as distinct from class 
> war of the proletariat in the core countries of the 
> system against their own bourgeoisies.

Which implies that if this class collaboration were
absent, then the same activity by the same
nation-states would no longer be classified as
"imperialist", because the necessary ingredient of
class collaboration is absent.




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