From Imperialism to Dependency - 1

From Imperialism to Dependency - 1

What led Lenin to change his mind and propose
the overthrow of the Provisional Government
when he arrived in Russia in April 1917? It was
not simply opportunism. Like so much of Lenin's
political strategy, his decision was rooted in a
theoretical understanding of the decline of capitalism
on a world scale, as worked out in Imperialism:
The Highest Stage of Capitalism([I9161
1967, Volume One, pp. 667-768; see also Harding
1983, Volume Two, Chapters 2 and 3).

Whereas Trotsky analyzed the political consequences
of the expansion of capitalism into
backward countries, Lenin projected Marx's
economic theory of capitalism onto the world
level. He attempted to digest what was both an
anomaly and a profound setback to the socialist
movement: the support given by socialist parties
for national war in violation of international
working class solidarity. Lenin tried to turn this
anomaly into a corroboration of Marxist theory
by showing how wars were a sign of the fettering
of the forces of production (P3) and would necessarily
lead to revolution (P4).
Influenced by Hilferding's classic, Finance
Capital ([I9101 1981), Lenin argued that the
concentration of capital took place not only in
industry but also in finance. He postulated a new
stage of capitalism, monopoly capitalism, d e f i
by the rise of a financial oligarchy which bound
together international finance and industrial cartels.
Whereas the earlier stage of capitalism was
characterized by the overproduction of consumer
goods, this new stage saw the overproduction
of capital, which sought "superprofits" through
export to backward countries. When the whole
world had been divided up among cartels and

there was no further outlet for excess ca.vi tal. ,
then only through imperialist wars could tenitories
be redistributed among capitalist nations. The
instability brought about by the uneven development
of capitalism on a world scale would lead
inevitably to imperialist wars among the most
powerful capitalist countries. National wars would
precipitate civil wars between classes as the
working class realized the costs of supporting
their own bourgeoisie.
Luxemburg had formulated an earlier version
of this argument, but Lenin's was the most comprehensive
reconstruction of the original Marxian
theory of the dynamics of capitalism. It addressed
a number of anomalies and made a number of
predictions, some of which indeed came to pass.
Thus, Lenin, never one to ignore the importance
of nationalism, anticipated that a major challenge
to capitalism would come from wars of national
liberation in the colonized Third World. In the
core countries, on the other hand, Lenin argued
that the spoils of imperialism would trickle down
to the working class to create an aristocracy of
labor. Therefore, certain sections of the working
class had a definite material interest in imperialism.
and this was the material basis of the "refo-
formism" of social democratic parties and of their
support for national wars. Lenin also saw how
the expansion of capitalism into backward

countries would uproot the population and provide
a pool of cheap labor, further balkanizing
the labor movement in advanced capitalist countries.
In characterizing the world system in terms
of core, colonized and semi-independent nations
Lenin had already anticipated contemporary
world systems analysis.
Perhaps the most contentious part of Lenin's
argument was the inevitability of imperial wars.
This was a direct challenge to Kautsky who argued
that imperialism was a policy preferred by
finance capital rather than an inevitable outgrowth
of capitalism. The weak link in Lenin's argument
was the one tying the division of the world
among cartels to the division of the world among
nations. He assumed that nation states are the
instruments of cartels. But if the latter become
truly international they have no national affiliation
and states would be less and less compelled
to enter wars on their behalf