Vol. 77/No. 40      November 11, 2013

Below is an excerpt from Capitalism’s World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. The French edition is one of Pathfinder’s Books of the Month for November. The piece is from a report entitled, “So Far from God, So Close to Orange Country: The Deflationary Drag of Finance Capital,” based on a talk given by Barnes at a socialist educational conference in Los Angeles over the 1994-95 New Year’s weekend. Copyright © 1999 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY JACK BARNES  
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.” …

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.  
 
 
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