The Specificity of Imperialism, by Salar Mohandesi – 1 February 2018

From Viewpoint Magazine

La bataille du riz
Gilles Aillaud, La bataille du riz, 1968

“Imperialism,” David Harvey announced at a roundtable last year, should be seen as a “sort of metaphor, rather than anything real.” This came as quite a shock, not least because it was none other than Harvey himself who wrote one of the most acclaimed accounts of contemporary imperialism, The New Imperialism.

Harvey went on to explain that recent developments in capitalism – such as multinational corporations, technological networks, or shifts in the global division of labor – have raised enormous questions about how we understand imperialism today. What, for example, are we to make of the fact that Latin America is being turned into a massive soybean plantation, with most of the exports headed for China? Or, to take a similar, though even more drastic example that Harvey does not mention, how can we explain the fact that the single greatest U.S. export to China is soybeans, while China’s biggest export to the United States is computers? Does that make China an imperialist power? Is it extracting wealth from the periphery? Is the United States slipping into the periphery?

Reality, Harvey suggested, has become far too complicated for conventional models of imperialism. In fact, the concept of imperialism has become a kind of “straightjacket,” preventing us from really understanding new historical developments. Instead of trying to “cram all of this into a universal concept of imperialism,” we “need a new way of looking” at the world. For Harvey, that means we have to start by ditching the word “imperialism.”

Harvey is certainly right that most Marxist theories of imperialism have run into stumbling blocks trying to explain the richness of contemporary reality. I would go further to suggest that these limits are not actually new. In fact, from the start, most Marxist theories of imperialism had a difficult time offering an accurate account of historical developments. Even when their predictions seemed to be true, for example V. I. Lenin’s claim that capitalist rivalries were leading to world war, these theories were sometimes right for the wrong reasons. 

For a time, these limitations were overlooked, not only because these theories did seem to explain some very important features of the late 19th and 20th centuries, but because “imperialism” doubled as both a scientific concept and as a popular rallying cry. In addition to its scientific function of attempting to explain historical reality, imperialism also served a number of incredibly important political functions. It named an enemy, united different struggles, and signaled a collective project to change the world. By the 1970s, imperialism was perhaps the most commonly used word in the radical vocabulary, but it was also one whose specific meaning was becoming increasingly unstable. 

But by the late 1970s and into the 1980s, the defeats of so many anti-imperialist struggles, alongside new and strange historical developments, forced many thorny questions – some old, others new – onto the table. Why was it that for many countries, colonialism preceded capitalism? How do we explain the fact that for many states, colonial expansion in the late 19th century was in many cases not primarily motivated by the search for greater profits? How come many empires fought to retain their colonies even though the extreme violence they imposed on subjugated peoples did not really generate anticipated profits for the metropole? How was it that some peripheral countries supposedly doomed to perpetual “backwardness” came to develop highly advanced capitalist sectors? Why did newly independent countries themselves start to exhibit imperialist behaviors? Indeed, how do we make sense of the fact that in the 1970s three socialist countries in Southeast Asia threw themselves into what looked very much like an imperialist war?

These are only some of the questions that have challenged conventional theories of Marxism. The fact that these theories have often failed to offer convincing answers has led some to doubt the usefulness of the term. But the solution to the impasse is not, as Harvey suggests, to jettison the word “imperialism.” On the contrary, the concept of imperialism can still provide answers to these questions, make sense of recent developments, and help inform internationalist struggles today. But before that can happen, the concept of imperialism has to be modified. That means, first and foremost, rethinking some of the key assumptions of older Marxist theories.

The most fundamental of these assumptions, and what has become the primary weakness of most Marxist theories of imperialism, is the tendency to see imperialism as a symptom of the inevitable contradictions of capitalist development. For many of the classical theorists, the theory of imperialism was an extension of crisis theory. But even the later dependency theorists, like Andre Gunder Frank, who criticized some aspects of the classical theories, retained a similar assumption. For many of them, imperialism was more or less equated with the global expansion of capitalism. 

Today, this automatic connection between imperialism and capitalism has become a commonplace. Yet it often rests on a kind of economic reductionism that simply cannot explain the overdetermined nature of imperialism. While imperialism may have economic motivations, it is always conditioned and propelled by a plurality of other, often contradictory, forces. This is why imperialist policies often seem so incoherent. This is why so often in history imperialism has actually worked against capital accumulation. And this is why many nation-states trying to free themselves from imperialism often found themselves exhibiting behavior that came dangerously close to the very imperialism they sought to abolish.

The key to developing a more accurate understanding of imperialism lies in finding a different starting point. As some other writers, such as Sam Gindin and Leo Panitch, have suggested, instead of approaching imperialism as an extension of economic theories of capitalist expansion, and crisis theory more specifically, we should develop imperialist theory out of a theory of the state. Unsurprisingly, this was also the most under-theorized aspect of Marxist theories, especially the classical writings of the early 20th century. The economic reductionism of these theorists led them to treat the state as a mere instrument of capital, a transparent tool wielded by the dominant classes to do their bidding. As a result, they could only think of the state as that which realizes the interests of capital. In so doing, they completely erased the specificity of the state, and with it, that of imperialism.

In contrast to these earlier accounts, we have to see the state as an ensemble of contradictory institutions themselves traversed, and produced, by fierce struggles between and within classes. Approaching the state as a social relation, rather than as a thing, and seeing states as themselves embedded in contradictory, even antagonistic relations with each other, helps us refine the concept of imperialism. Imperialism, to anticipate the argument, has to be broadly understood as a relationship of domination between states, rather than as a synonym for capitalist expansion. 

To be sure, we must continue to oppose both imperialism and capitalism, but it is precisely by insisting on their specificities, rather than conflating them into an undifferentiated whole, that we can better organize our struggles to overturn them.

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Salar Mohandesi is an Assistant Professor of History at Bowdoin College and a founding editor of Viewpoint Magazine.

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