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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 177 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 177, July/August 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Why is the world in such a mess? Economic collapse in the former Communist bloc has been accompanied by prolonged economic crisis and recession in the West. There has been an upsurge of nationalist and ethnic conflict.
A new book, Marxism and the New Imperialism, seeks to explain what has been happening since the end of the Cold War.
Alex Callinicos in the book’s opening essay locates the world order, old and new, firmly within the Marxist theory of imperialism. Imperialism is the stage of capitalism where there is, on the one hand, the development of huge companies increasingly integrated with the state, and on the other, a growing internationalisation of production, trade and finance compelling companies and states to compete for markets, investments and raw materials across the world.
Competition increasingly takes the form of military competition between states, and a small number of states through their economic and military strength come to dominate the rest of the world. Intensified competition leads increasingly to wars among the dominant imperialist powers and arising out of the struggles of the dominated, oppressed nations against imperialist domination.
This explains the basis of the increasingly bloody conflicts, culminating in the Second World War, which characterised the period of classical imperialism between 1875 and 1945.
The period of superpower imperialism known as the Cold War, which lasted from 1945 to 1990, was not a competition between fundamentally different systems, free market capitalism on one side and Communism on the other, as apologists for both sides claimed. Both systems mirrored the other.
The West saw a huge degree of state intervention after the Second World War including unprecedented peacetime levels of state directed arms spending. The so called Communist countries, on the other hand, were controlled by a tiny minority within the state apparatus who directed production to compete with the West, primarily in arms production.
Superpower imperialism, with the world dominated by the US and the USSR, did confer an eerie kind of stability on the world, with both superpowers wary of engaging in direct conflict. Military conflict was conducted by proxy in economically more peripheral parts of the world. Economic developments, however, were to undermine superpower imperialism in the end and return the world to an era more like that which preceded the Second and even the First World War. The United States found itself under increasing competition from the West German and Japanese economies. These two growing postwar economies were not encumbered with the very high levels of arms expenditure undertaken by the US to preserve its domination of the Western world. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, found itself increasingly weakened by having to compete militarily against a Western order able to command much more of the world’s resources.
John Rees in his essay shows how the permanent arms economy of the Cold War helped to prolong economic boom both West and East but ultimately contained the seeds of the destruction of that growth.
Economic pressures have encouraged the US to seek to reduce the burden of arms spending. The countries of the former Soviet Union are now, after their economic collapse, in no position to sustain the very high levels of arms spending as a percentage of their economies that they once had.
The political revolutions in Eastern Europe were the product of the faltering attempts to reform an economic system that entered serious endemic crisis sometime in the 1970s and which was grinding to a halt. The underlying economic crisis and the ruling class divisions it produced then stimulated mass popular protest producing some of the most dramatic political changes in recent years.
Most people in Eastern Europe looked to the West as a preferable alternative to the system they had lived under: The West appeared to deliver economic prosperity with its ideology of the free market. But as the free market experiment has turned sour, nationalism has come to fill the vacuum, cynically encouraged by sections of the ruling class, with the most devastating consequences in former Yugoslavia.
In a fitting final chapter, Chris Harman provides a Marxist theory of nationalism. Prior to the development of capitalism there was no nationhood in the modern sense. But capitalism needed a strong and unified state to establish markets, protect business from their rivals and from those that capital exploited and oppressed. The development of technology under capitalism also increased the ability to encourage the mass of workers to believe in this imagined community in which accident of birth, race, religion or language was to override issues of class.
National identity and nationalism are ideas which serve the interests of the ruling class. But workers also have contradictory ideas arising from their own interests and experience. At times of economic and political crisis, national chauvinism can rapidly rise, but can also be rapidly replaced as workers find their nationalist leaders are unable to meet their basic needs.
Crucial however in the political turmoil will be an organisation of socialists who oppose the separation of cultures which plays into the hands of reactionaries in both oppressor and oppressed nations, but who also recognise that workers of different nationalities can only be brought together on the basis of free secession.
This is a brilliant selection of essays with insights on every page. Socialists concerned to arm themselves not only with an understanding of but also the means to change a seemingly incomprehensible and often horrific world must read it.
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