Imperialism

Capitalism must expand or die. When the capitalists of a country are driven to reach beyond their own borders — economically and militarily — in the hunt for profit, that is imperialism: the highest and last stage of capitalism.

What forces capitalism into imperialism?

At a certain stage, production and capital pile up in the hands of a few giant monopolies. Lenin analyzed this stage in “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” written in 1916, and drew out five marks of it that are still on the world today: monopoly grown up out of free competition; the merging of bank and industrial capital into a “finance capital” that dominates economic and political life; the export of capital itself, on top of the old trade in goods, hunting higher profits abroad; the world market divided up among giant international monopolies; and the earth itself parceled out into spheres of plunder among the great powers.

To survive, the monopolies must pile up ever-greater profits — which means exploiting the working class more intensively, since labor is the source of all value.

To guard their investments and markets, the imperialist powers build huge armies and navies — both to hold down the oppressed nations reaching for independence and to make war on rival imperialist powers. The two World Wars were such inter-imperialist bloodlettings, carving whole portions of the world among the powers of Europe, Japan and the United States.

World War II was the turning point. After six years of slaughter that killed more than 70 million people, the United States emerged as the strongest imperialist power, taking over the former empires of Europe in Asia and Africa. The U.S. — an imperialist power since 1898 — had already brought Latin America under its control by the end of World War I.

Today they call it globalization, but it is still imperialism. U.S. military spending now tops $1 trillion a year, and the Pentagon runs some 750 bases in more than 80 countries. A few lands under U.S. rule are outright colonies — Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam. Others are neocolonies: formally independent, but ruled by governments that answer to Washington and the banks. Either way the result is the same. The oppressed nation is kept a one-crop or one-mineral “underdeveloped” economy, its wealth pumped out to fill the vaults of the big U.S. banks.

These banks, standing at the pinnacle of imperialism, keep branch offices from Bangkok to Beirut, from Buenos Aires to Bombay.

Mighty as U.S. imperialism looks, it is already past its peak and has begun to decline.

Imperialism is the enemy of all working people — whether they live in the imperialist country or in the country it preys on. But the workers of the imperialist country carry a special obligation: to stand with those fighting to free their nations from super-exploitation and foreign domination.

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