No Third World country can or will develop today into an economically advanced industrial power with the class structure of the United States, Canada, the countries of Western Europe, Japan, Australia, or New Zealand. No new centers of world finance capital are going to emerge. That has been settled by history. That is one of the great lessons of the twentieth century. It hasn't changed since Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin summed up the scientific conclusion of the communist workers movement seventy-five years ago. The imperialist world, Lenin said, has been "divided into a large number of oppressed nations and an insignificant number of oppressor nations, the latter possessing colossal wealth and powerful armed forces."¹

It must have seemed unbelievable to many people when Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and other leaders of the Soviet Communist Party and Communist International insisted on this conclusion at the time. After all, it had not been true for that long. It had not been true in the previous century. Only seventy-five years before Lenin spoke those words in 1920, Germany was still one of the most economically backward regions in Europe; it wasn't even a united nation-state at the time. And even just a decade or so prior to the turn of the century, no one could have accurately predicted that coal- and oil-poor Japan - just beginning to emerge from feudalism - would soon develop into an imperialist power, while Argentina would end up among the oppressed not the oppressor nations in the world.  
 

More, not less dependent

Since the consolidation of imperialism at the opening of this century, every action by finance capital in relation to the more economically backward countries ends up further warping the economies of the colonial or semicolonial countries. That is the effect of every bank loan to their ruling classes; every investment in landed, industrial, and commercial capital; every purchase of bonds issued by a semicolonial administration; every trade pact; every scheme to peg the value of weaker currencies to stronger ones. Every one of these moves makes the oppressed nations of Latin America, Asia, and Africa more, not less, dependent on capital, technology, and imports from the imperialist nations. Their currencies are ever more reliant on, and vulnerable to, the U.S. dollar, the British pound, the German mark, the French franc, or the Japanese yen.

Capitalist classes do arise in these countries, and they do come into conflict with the imperialist overlords over division of the surplus value produced by the peasants and workers. But the national bourgeoisies are ultimately too weak to come out on top in these conflicts, short of the kind of working-class and peasant mobilizations that would threaten the privileged classes' own wealth and power in the process. That is why as long as the bourgeoisie remains in power in a semicolonial country, national sovereignty cannot be achieved.

When you read or hear the terms "developing countries" or "emerging economies," be sure to notice the "-ing" on the end of the adjectives - "develop-ing," "emerg-ing." That is the tip-off that not one of these "developing" countries has developed into an advanced industrial power in the twentieth century. Not one "emerging" economy has emerged from bondage to the big banks and strong currencies of the ruling families of finance capital. Emerging forever; emerged...never. Not one.

It is not surprising, in face of this reality, that many workers and young people initially conclude that the deepening crisis that surrounds them must be a symptom of chaos. Everything seems to be out of control. Everything seems unpredictable.

Others suppose there must be a conspiracy. I am sure all of us will be talking to workers over the next few weeks who will tell us something to this effect: "I didn't expect miracles in Mexico, but I thought things were getting a little better. I thought there would be some progress. What happened? How could it be so sudden? There must have been some kind of a plot."

That is not an unreasonable assumption. Workers know from bitter experience that the employers and their politicians scheme and plot all the time. They scheme to cut wages and extend the workday. They plan ways to cut social programs the working class has fought for and won to the benefit of all. They are always cheating on the edges; they are always plotting to one degree or another. They lie as a matter of course. And workers learn never to trust them.  
 

Workings of capitalism

But no plot is necessary to explain what is happening in Mexico - or in Orange County either, for that matter. Nor is what is happening chaotic. It is the outcome of the lawful workings of capitalism in the imperialist epoch. It can all be understood and explained to other workers. Our point - the point of the politically conscious vanguard of the working class - is not that something didn't work, but that this is how it works.

Capitalism by its very laws of motion operates to take tools and land away from working farmers and other small producers. It operates to amass the wealth produced by the toiling majority in the hands of the propertied minority. It operates to produce and reproduce not only commodities and the profits from their sale, but also the entire class structure and social relations of subordination that make this system of exploitation possible.

As I was leaving to catch the plane to come out here this morning, a comrade in New York handed me a copy of Lenin's Imperialism. He urged me to reread it during the flight. Given what had begun happening in Mexico, he said, I was bound to find something useful in preparing for this meeting. He was right.

When Lenin used the term "imperialism" - and Marxists still use the term the same way - he was not just speaking in a political and military sense about the aggression and oppression imposed by the rulers of a handful of wealthy and powerful nation-states on colonial peoples. He was not just referring to the colonial system and related forms of semicolonial exploitation. That is a permanent aspect of imperialism, but Lenin was referring to something more fundamental.

Imperialism, Lenin explained, is the final stage of capitalism. He described its features. Reading Imperialism, I discovered once again, is well worth the effort. The chapter that struck me in a new way this time is the one entitled, "The Parasitism and Decay of Capitalism."

Lenin wrote the booklet in 1916, just a year before the Russian revolution. At that stage in the development of world capitalism, he explained, "The income of the bondholders is five times greater than the income obtained from the foreign trade of the greatest 'trading' country in the world [Britain].

"This," Lenin said, "is the essence of imperialism and imperialist parasitism."

For that reason, Lenin added, Marxists should not object to those at the time - including some bourgeois commentators - who had begun to refer to the major capitalist industrial powers of the day as "rentier states" or "usurer states." The rival imperialist powers remain industrial giants and fight over markets for their exports, Lenin said. But at the same time, "The world has become divided into a handful of usurer states on the one side, and a vast majority of debtor states on the other."

Since Lenin's time, of course, the absolute increase in the industrial output and exports of manufactured goods by the imperialist powers has been enormous. But Lenin would not have been at all surprised by the even greater relative increase, especially over the past two decades, in the income capitalists derive from interest, dividends, commissions, royalties, and returns on a widening range of paper securities - what Marx called "fictitious capital."

Lenin would not have been surprised that the world's quantity of bonds, stocks, and other paper values since 1980 has grown two and a half times faster than the national income of the major imperialist countries, and that the volume of trade in these securities has accelerated even more. He would not have been surprised that international sales and purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds alone shot up from $30 billion in 1983 to $500 billion in 1993, nor that the ratio of international currency transactions to world trade in actual industrial and agricultural goods rose from 10 to 1 in 1983 to 60 to 1 in 1992.

Nor would Lenin have been at all surprised by the much-talked-about proliferation of "derivatives" on Wall Street in recent years - basically, bets placed on the future rise or decline in the prices of stocks, bonds, or other pieces of paper - whose total value has now reached some $20 trillion. In fact, he would remind us that such speculative devices always become necessary to the capitalist rentier class at a certain point. When the total yield from their bonds goes down, they always attempt to float new kinds of paper that turn a heftier profit.

Yes, bonds are just pieces of paper. But as long as capitalism exists, they are the most important pieces of paper in the social world. And if you want to know what happens when you do not show the bondholders the proper respect, just ask the Mexican bourgeoisie or the officials of Orange County!

"The creditor is more permanently attached to the debtor than the seller is to the buyer." Lenin approvingly cites that assessment from a book on British imperialism by a bourgeois writer. And it remains true today.  
 
 
¹ V.I. Lenin, "Report of the Commission on the National and Colonial Questions" to the Second Congress of the Communist International, July 26, 1920, in Collected Works, vol. 31, p. 240 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966). It can also be found in Pathfinder’s Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920, vol. 1, p. 212.  
 
 
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