Imperialism, the ‘old’ and the ‘new’

Marx did talk about capitalism emerging as a world system and the role of foreign trade in hastening the falling tendency of the rate of profit. In Capital I, Marx refers to a process that creates a division of the world suited to centres of industries and how advanced capitalism chiefly exploits the agricultural field of production, which supplies raw materials through relative productive advantages. Marx also indicated how an international credit system helps in overcoming the barrier to circulation and sphere of exchange. These are all ingredients in brewing a theory of imperialism that Marx could not take up in detail. Setting the design for capital in Grundrisse, he expressed his intention to deal with ‘The colonies. Emigration… . The international relation of production. International division of labour. International exchange. Export and import. Rate of exchange… . The world market and crises.’ ² The unfinished task was taken up by later Marxists during the first half of the twentieth century, which became the springboard for diverse theories of imperialism thereafter. Imperialism conceived as intrinsic to systemic necessity of realising unconsumed surplus at the core; imperialism as modes of reproducing unequal exchange; imperialism as territorial expansion for cheap resources, markets or avenues to invest where the rates of profit are relatively higher; imperialism as the political superstructure of monopoly capital and expanding finance, and also as an outcome of a terminal phase of capitalist cycle; and so on. Hence, we do not have a single theory of imperialism which is applicable for all times in the post-competitive phase of capitalism, nor do we find an abstract rationale to favour one theory over the other. In fact, we can have an abstract theory of capitalist accumulation that Marx had offered, but the abstract theory of accumulation, expectedly, does not deal with irregularities, frictions and concrete domains of power which have always been intertwined with and overdetermined by the realities of accumulation. It is the unevenness of 16capitalism that creates the pretext of power-driving accumulation in a specific space and time. As a result, we come across multiple historical manifestations of imperialism which were explored and debated by scholars and activists.