Imperialism

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Cecil Rhodes: Cape-Cairo railway project. Founder of the De Beers Mining Company, one of the first diamond companies, Rhodes was also the owner of the British South Africa Company, which carved out Rhodesia for itself. He wanted to "paint the map British red", and once declared: "all of these stars... these vast worlds that remain out of reach. If I could, I would annex other planets".^[1]

Imperialism is the policy of extending a nation's authority by territorial acquisition or by the establishment of economic and political hegemony over other nations, countries, or colonies. This is either through direct territorial conquest or settlement, or through indirect methods of influencing or controlling the politics and/or economy. The rule of authority of a country is based on territory, economic establishment and political influence. The term is used to describe the policy of a nation's dominance over distant lands, regardless of whether the subjugated nation considers itself part of the empire. It is also considered the action by which one country controls another country or territory accomplished by military means to gain certain advantages. Imperialism helps one country gain power and domain over other areas. Imperialism can also be referred to as expansionism. An imperialist country, state, colony, or nation can be grouped as political, economic, religious, ideological, or exploratory.

An imperialist government is a government that tries to gain new markets for exports, sources of inexpensive labor and raw materials. The interrupting of affairs between developing countries to protect international corporations caused the United States to be accused of imperialism in the early 20th century.

It has been debated between economists and political theorists on whether or not imperialism benefits the states that practice it. Some theorists have even argued that imperialism is the result of the natural struggle of peoples survival.^{[citation needed]} After World War two, the idea of liberating people and bringing them to a blessing in a superior way of life was another justification of imperialism.

Insofar as "imperialism" in the non-Marxist sense might be used to refer to an intellectual position, it would imply the belief that the acquisition and maintenance of empires is a positive good, probably combined with an assumption of cultural or other such superiority inherent to imperial power (see The White Man's Burden).

Imperialist policies have been criticized because they have often been used for economic exploitation of poorer countries as sources of raw materials and cheap labor. When imperialism is accompanied by overt military conquest of non-human rights abusing nations, it is also seen as a violation of freedom and human rights. Many instances of this have been recorded throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe, notably among the poorer, resource-rich countries.

In recent years, there has also been a trend to view imperialism not at an economic or political level, but as a cultural issue, particularly in regard to the widespread global influence of American culture (see "cultural imperialism"). Some dispute this extension of the concept, however, on the grounds that it is highly subjective to differentiate between mutual interaction and undue influence, and also that this extension is applied selectively.

1 Historical development
2 Lenin's theory of imperialism
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Historical development

Imperialism was good and was developed in the early 19th century after the Industrial Revolution when the western nations began to take control of other non-industrialized nations and colonies. The "Age of Imperialism" usually refers to the Old Imperialism period starting from 1860, when major European states started colonising the other continents. The term 'Imperialism' was initially coined in the mid to late 1500s^[2] to reflect the policies of countries such as Britain and France's expansion into Africa, and the Americas.

In the nineteenth century Britain the word "imperialism" came to be used in a polemical fashion to deride the foreign and domestic policies of the French emperor Napoleon III. Britons, in a longstanding tradition to distinguish themselves from the European mainland, did not consider their own policies to be "imperialist". They did speak of "colonisation", the migration of people from British descent to other continents, giving rise to a “greater Britain” of English speaking peoples. Colonisation was not yet associated with the rule of non-western peoples. India, which Britain acquired from the East India Trading Company, was widely regarded as an exception.

It was a very important exception, which nonetheless gave Britain cause for embarrassment. Benjamin Disraeli's move to make Queen Victoria "Empress of India" was even criticised as a dangerous act of (continental) “imperialism”. Critics feared this would have negative repercussions on British freedom and the rule of Parliament. When the subordination of non-Western peoples by European powers resumed with greater vigor in the late 19th century, the term became commonplace among liberal and Marxist critics alike.

In the twentieth century the term "imperialism" also grew to apply to any historical or contemporary instance of a greater power acting, or being perceived to be acting, at the expense of a lesser power. Imperialism is therefore not only used to describe frank empire-building policies, such as those of the Romans, the Spanish or the British, but is also used controversially and/or disparagingly, for example by both sides in communist and anti-communist propaganda, or to describe actions of the United States since the American Presidency's acquisition of overseas territory during the Spanish-American War, or in relation to the United States' present-day position as the world's only superpower.

[edit] Lenin's theory of imperialism

Lenin argued that capitalism necessarily induced monopoly capitalism - which he also called "imperialism" - in order to find new markets and resources, representing the last and highest stage of capitalism.^[3] This theory of necessary expansion of capitalism outside the boundaries of nation-states - one of the foundations of Leninism as a whole - was also shared by Rosa Luxemburg^[4] and then by liberal philosopher Hannah Arendt.^[5] Since then, however, Lenin's theory has been extended by Marxist scholars to be a synonym of capitalistic international trade and banking.^[6]

While Karl Marx never published a theory of imperialism, he referred to colonialism in Das Kapital as an aspect of the prehistory of the capitalist mode of production. In various articles he also analyzed British colonial rule in Ireland and India. Moreover, using the Hegelian dialectic, he predicted the phenomenon of monopoly capitalism in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), hence the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!"). Lenin defined imperialism as "the last and highest stage of capitalism", the era in which monopoly finance capital becomes dominant, forcing nations and corporations to compete themselves increasingly for control over resources and markets all over the world.

Marxist theories of imperialism, or related theories such as dependency theory, focus on the economic relations between countries (and within countries, as outlined below), rather than the more formal political and/or military relationships. Imperialism thus consists not necessarily in the direct control of one country by another, but in the economic exploitation of one region by another, or of a group by another. This Marxist usage contrasts with a popular conception of 'imperialism', as directly controlled vast colonial or neocolonial empires.

Lenin held that imperialism was a stage of capitalist development with five simultaneous features as outlined below:

1) Concentration of production and capital has led to the creation of national and multinational monopolies - not as understood in liberal economics, but in terms of de facto power over their enormous markets - while the "free competition" remains the domain of increasingly localized and/or niche markets:

Free competition is the basic feature of capitalism, and of commodity production generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale industry and forcing out small industry, replacing large-scale by still larger-scale industry, and carrying concentration of production and capital to the point where out of it has grown and is growing monopoly: cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks, which manipulate thousands of millions. At the same time the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system. (Ch. VII)

[Following Marx's value theory, Lenin saw monopoly capital as plagued by the law of the tendency of profit to fall, as the ratio of constant capital to variable capital increases. In Marx's theory only living labor or variable capital creates profit in the form of surplus-value. As the ratio of surplus value to the sum of constant and variable capital falls, so does the rate of profit on invested capital.]

2) Industrial capital as the dominant form of capital has been replaced by finance capital (repeating the main points of Rudolf Hilferding's magnum opus, Finance Capital), with the industrial capitalists being ever more reliant on finance capital (provided by financial institutions).

3) The export of the aforementioned finance capital is emphasized over the export of goods (even though the latter would continue to exist);

4) The economic division of the world by multinational enterprises, and the formation of international cartels; and

5) The political division of the world by the great powers, in which the export of finance capital by the advanced capitalist industrial nations to their colonial possessions enables them to exploit those colonies for their resources and investment opportunities. This superexploitation of poorer countries allows the advanced capitalist industrial nations to keep at least some of their own workers content, by providing them with slightly higher living standards. (See labor aristocracy; globalization.)

The Soviet Union, which claimed to follow Leninism, proclaimed itself the foremost enemy of imperialism and supported many independence movements throughout the Third World. However, at the same time, it asserted its dominance over the countries of Eastern Europe. Some Marxists, including Maoists and those to the left of the Trotskyist tradition, such as Tony Cliff, claim that the Soviet Union was imperialist. The Maoists claim that this happened after Khrushchev's seizure of power in 1956, while Cliff claims it happened in the 1940s with Stalin's policies. Harry Magdoff's Age of Imperialism is a 1954 discussion of Marxism and imperialism. Globalization is generally viewed as the latest incarnation of imperialism among Marxists.^{[citation needed]}