This feature is an excerpt from “Capitalism’s Long Hot Winter Has Begun,” by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. It’s the title article in New International no. 12. Issues no. 7, 10, 11 and 12 of the New International are being promoted in discussions with working people by members of the SWP and Communist Leagues to help explain what’s behind decades of growing crises and spreading wars confronting workers and farmers worldwide. This is accelerating today as the U.S. rulers and their capitalist rivals rearm and seek new allies to try to defend their place in the disintegrating world imperialist “order.” Copyright © 2005 by New International. Reprinted by permission.
Lenin’s description and explanation of imperialism [in his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism] are a foundation stone for everything the communist movement has done for close to a century. And that continues to be the case.
Lenin focused on clarifying two questions:
- First, he presented a concrete and detailed explanation of the more and more parasitic character of capital’s operations in the imperialist epoch.
- Second, drawing out the practical implications of that analysis, he rejected the possibility of any form of “superimperialism,” or “ultra-imperialism,” that could reduce the sharpening contradictions of capitalism, buffer conflicts among rival national ruling classes, soften class struggle, let alone foster world peace. Instead, Lenin insisted, imperialism opened an epoch of recurring crises, of imperialist wars, of civil wars, of wars for colonial domination, of struggles for national liberation, and of proletarian revolutions.
The imperialist stage of capitalism is marked by the increasing domination around the world of giant monopolies in industry, commerce, and banking. Drawing on what [Karl] Marx had already explained in Capital, Lenin demonstrated that far from reducing competition, increasing monopolization makes the blind operations of rival private capitals more violent. And in the face of crises, the violence increasingly involves forces that are not purely economic — from private goon squads and local cops and sheriffs to, above all, the capitalist state and its cops, courts, and armed forces.
The merging of banking capital and industrial capital — “the creation, on the basis of this ‘finance capital,’ of a financial oligarchy,” as Lenin puts it — increases the parasitism of the bourgeoisie. Above all it increases their reliance on multiplying forms of debt in their ruthless competition among themselves to capture the largest shares of surplus value created the world over by the labor of workers and farmers, of miners and fishermen. The debtor-creditor relationship becomes increasingly central to the functioning of international capitalism, outstripping the earlier centrality of the relationship of buyer and seller. “This is the essence of imperialism and imperialist parasitism,” he writes. …
We also need to discuss and absorb the second major aspect of Lenin’s Imperialism: the polemic against the assertion by German centrist leader Karl Kautsky of a trend toward the consolidation of what Kautsky called ultra-imperialism. This was not a “theory” or an “idea.” It was a rationalization for the political course that had led Kautsky and many other leaders of the Second International away from Marxism, in fact, and toward reconciliation with “their own” bourgeoisies — concretized as a horrible reality during the interimperialist slaughter of World War I and its aftermath. It was, and remains, a matter not just of the head but the gut, a matter of political backbone — that is, of class orientation.
Kautsky and other centrist leaders did not challenge the basic facts presented by Lenin about the growing domination of monopolies, of finance capital. Rather, they denied that these tendencies increased the violence of capitalism on a world scale and created the conditions for its overthrow by the toilers led by a proletarian vanguard. In fact, the centrists said, these trends fostered the conditions for the development of a stable order, based on a convergence of interests of the largest capitalist powers, that would transcend contradictions and conflicts and could lay the basis, over time, for peace on earth.
It’s only a short distance from such an “analysis,” Lenin said, to beginning to worship at the altar of finance capital and its seeming omnipotence. Centrists can be very critical of what they call “ultra-imperialism” and its greedy and downright mean actions. They can speak very harshly about it. They nonetheless ascribe powers to the capitalist world order that it does not have — embellish it with fetishes that make it appear more and more impregnable. Much of the talk we have heard the last few years about “globalization,” and about “transnational” institutions replacing national states, is simply a retread of the Kautskyist rationalizations Lenin ripped apart in Imperialism and elsewhere.
One or another variety of this notion became the banner under which the petty-bourgeois opposition in the Socialist Workers Party, on the eve of World War II, retreated from the working class and from proletarian internationalism under the pressures of the impending imperialist slaughter. Pick up In Defense of Marxism by Leon Trotsky, and The Struggle for a Proletarian Party by James P. Cannon, and read what these communist leaders had to say about the “theory” of bureaucratic collectivism during the 1939-40 fight with the opposition led by James Burnham and Max Shachtman. Together with Lenin’s Imperialism, these polemics by Trotsky and Cannon remain our historical benchmarks on these questions.
As these renegades from Marxism recoiled from proletarian struggle, they often continued for quite some time writing about, complaining about, and pointing to shortcomings and moral evils of capitalism, its industry, and its agriculture — all the while building up the case that it was pointless for the working class to try to do anything about it — anything revolutionary, that is. Anything that can lead to a workers and farmers government, to the dictatorship of the proletariat.