The spatiotemporal dialectic of capitalism

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Introduction

To understand the history of architectural modernism and eclecticism as they emerged out of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, one must take into account the broader development of architecture over the course of the latter half of the nineteenth century. This development, in turn, must be seen as emerging out of the dynamic of late nineteenth-century capitalism, which had by that point extended to encompass the whole of Europe. For it was the unique spatiotemporal dialectic of the capitalist mode of production — along with the massive social and technological forces it unleashed — that formed the basis for the major architectural ideologies that arose during this period. Before the story of the academicians or the avant-garde can be told, then, some background is necessary to explain both their origin and the eventual trajectory they would take into the early twentieth century.

So while my aim is to eventually account for how a single social formation, capitalism, can give birth to these two opposite tendencies within architectural thought, the space required to give an adequate exposition of the spatiotemporal dialectic of capitalism is such that it deserves to function as a standalone essay. Certainly other trends, both cultural and social, could be understood as reflections of this underlying socioeconomic dynamic. It is thus my intention to post this as its own piece, before then proceeding to detail the way in which architectural modernism and eclecticism mirrored these dynamics. Continue reading →

On Hurt Feelings: The Case of Levi Bryant’s Missing Sense of Humor

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Levi Bryant, humorless "onticologist"

I know that it’s usually in bad taste to publish a private e-mail correspondence with another individual over the internet, but in this case I feel it’s fairly harmless.  Over at Levi Bryant’s blog, Larval Subjects, I was engaging in an interesting discussion between Levi and Michael from Archive Fire.  You can see one of my comments on this thread, as well as Michael’s favorable citation of some of the points I make.  Anyway, sometime yesterday, I added another comment on the entry regarding the debate between Spinoza and Leibniz on actualism vs. possibilism (although Spinoza was dead when Leibniz’s major metaphysical writings began to appear).

After several hours, I saw that new comments had been updated for the post, and so I checked to see if Levi or Michael had responded to anything I’d written.  Much to my dismay, I discovered that my comment was nowhere to be found.  I tried leaving another one, asking what had happened, but this one likewise disappeared after a few minutes.  Concerned, I contacted Levi through e-mail:

[E-mails deleted out of respect for Levi Bryant’s privacy]

Basically, Levi told me that he felt insulted by a comment I’d left the day before, and that, coupled with my satyric post on SR/OOO, he’s decided to cease discussion with me.  My reply to him was that the sendup of SR/OOO was aimed at the movement in general, and that he shouldn’t take it as a personal affront.  I also encouraged him to develop a better sense of humor about things generally and himself in particular.

So far, I haven’t received any further response.  This isn’t the first time this has happened, either.  Back in the ides of April, I published a somewhat lengthier (though similarly fraught) exchange between Levi and me that had resulted from a heated debate on the subject of Marxism on his own blog.  He accused me at that point of “hate speech.”  After some further conversation through e-mail (following the correspondence posted in that entry), I explained myself more thoroughly.  Levi eventually came to his senses and invited me back to comment on his blog.

Now again, it’s his right to exclude certain individuals from posting or commenting on his blog if he wants to.  I just think it’s a shame that he allows his feelings to be so easily hurt, or that he takes an obviously satyrical manifesto directed at a general movement and interprets it as a personal attack.  It’s really too bad that he can’t have a little better sense of humor about this, and have a laugh along with everyone else.

By contrast, the responses I received from the author of the blog ktismatics and Joseph Weissman of Fractal Ontology were unambiguously supportive.  Even the e-mail I received, from Nick Srnicek of Speculative Heresy, was polite and largely understanding:

[A polite and good-natured e-mail deleted out of respect for Nick Srnicek’s privacy]

If this means an end to my participation on Larval Subjects, then so be it.  It’s just sort of sad that it had to be over such a petty matter.

The manifesto of Speculative Realist/Object-Oriented Ontological blogging

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…the infernal piping of those blasphemous flutes…

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Prologue: Of manifestoes and manifestoism

To launch a manifesto you have to want: A.B. & C., and fulminate against 1, 2, & 3.

work yourself up and sharpen your wings to conquer and circulate lower and upper case As, Bs & Cs, sign, shout, swear, organise prose into a form that is absolutely and irrefutably obvious, prove its ne plus ultra and maintain that novelty resembles life in the same way as the latest apparition of a harlot proves the essence of God.

We alone are the face of our Time. Through us the horn of Time blows in the art of the world.

Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity.

  1. Up to now literature has exalted contemplative stillness, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt movement and aggression, feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the slap and the punch.
  2. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath…a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than Тhe Victory of Samothrace.
  3. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
  4. We intend to glorify war — the only hygiene of the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and contempt for woman. Continue reading →

Leon Trotsky’s “Attention to theory: Letter to the editor of Under the Banner of Marxism”

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Screenshot from Tarkovsky's Solaris (1971)

 

Having just noticed this from The Platypus Review #34, I would here like to reprint the excellent translation it rendered of Leon Trotsky’s “Attention to theory: Letter to the editor of Under the Banner of Marxism.”  Their publication of an English version was the first time this letter was made available outside of the Russian language. The original posting of this article can be found here.

by Leon Trotsky

On the occasion of the launch of a new theoretical journal in 1922, Under the Banner of Marxism (Pod Znamenem Marksizma), Lenin singled out the open letter that Trotsky had written to the editors in the first issue, while expressing the hope that the venture would take the shape of a “society of materialist friends of Hegelian dialectics.”Trotsky himself underscored the importance of the letter in The Stalin School of Falsification (1937), which, in pointing to the difference between the changed conditions of education of the younger members of the party from that of their older comrades, outlined the necessity of a new theoretical approach in order to safeguard the theoretical and political experience accumulated within the party. Despite the importance attributed to the letter by Lenin and Trotsky, Leszek Kolakowski, in his Main Currents of Marxism, considered the letter unexceptional.

As the first in an experimental new series of original translations, the Platypus Review is delighted to be publishing the first English translation of this important letter by Trotsky.

Dear comrades!

The idea of publishing a magazine that would introduce advanced proletarian youth into the circle of materialist ideology seems to me highly valuable and fruitful.

The older generation of worker-communists that is now playing a leading role in the party and the country, awoke to conscious political life 10, 15, 20, or more years ago. That generation’s thought began its critical work with the policeman, the timekeeper, and the foreman, then rose to tsarism and capitalism, and then, most often in prison and exile, proceeded onto questions of the philosophy of history and scientific understanding of the world. Therefore, before the revolutionary proletarian reached the critical questions of the materialist explanation of historical development, it managed to accumulate a certain amount of ever-widening generalizations, from the particular to the general, based on its own life’s combat experience. The current young worker wakes up in the atmosphere of the soviet state, which itself is a living critique of the old world. Those general conclusions, that the older generation of workers acquired in battle and were fixed in consciousness by strong nails of personal experience, are now received by the younger generation of workers in finished form, directly from the state in which they live and from the party that governs that state. This means, of course, a giant step forward in terms of creating conditions for further political and theoretical education of the workers. But at the same time that this incomparably higher historical level is achieved by the work of older generations, new problems and challenges appear for young generations.

The soviet state is a living negation of the old world, its social order, personal relationships, views, and beliefs. But, at the same time, the soviet state itself is still full of contradictions, holes, inconsistencies, vague fermentation—in short, the phenomena in which the legacy of the past intertwines with the germs of the future. In such a deeply fractured, critical, and unstable era as ours, education of the proletarian vanguard requires serious and reliable theoretical foundations. It is necessary to arm a young worker’s thought and will with the method of the materialist worldview so that the greatest events, the powerful tides, rapidly changing tasks, and methods of the party and state do not disorganize his consciousness and do not break down his will before the threshold of his independent responsible work. Continue reading →

Dr. Steven Best’s Theory of “Total Liberation”

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The Space Jockey (the Biomechanical Corpse)

Here is Dr. Steven Best’s theory of “Total Liberation,” exposited in the extended quote below.  Best, who achieved some notoriety for his collaborations with Douglas Kellner writing introductory handbooks for continental postmodernism in the 1990s, is now one of the most outspoken voices among the animal liberation community.

The following is taken from his website, authored by Steven Best: Continue reading →

This Essay Has Been Re-Routed

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Sorry for the inconvenience.  The now-completed essay can be found here.

The Works of the Historian and Marxist Theorist Moishe Postone

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Moishe Postone

Below you will find download links for several of the works of the historian and Marxist theorist Moishe Postone.  Postone offers a very original (and some might say heterodox) reading of Marx’s more mature social theory, from the Grundrisse up through all three volumes of Capital.  His most influential work in this regard is his excellent Time, Labor, and Social Domination, in which he elaborates a critical theory founded upon Marx’s theory of society, building upon the Frankfurt School tradition of Georg Lukács , Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas as well as engaging the French structuralist school Louis Althusser and Étienne Balibar.  His other works focus on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu as well as on the nature of antisemitism and its relation to certain characteristics of capitalism.

I was fortunate enough to be able to take two courses with Professor Postone, in his close reading of Capital.  He was both brilliant and thorough throughout.  It was a pleasure studying under him, and I consider my own work to be deeply influenced by him, albeit critically.  And so I heartily recommend checking out all of the following works:

  1. Moishe Postone – Time, Labor, and Social Domination
  2. Moishe Postone – History and Heteronomy – Critical Essays
  3. Moishe Postone – Theorizing the Contemporary World – Brenner, Arrighi, Harvey
  4. Moishe Postone – Anti-Semitism and National Socialism – Notes on the German Reaction to “Holocaust”
  5. Moishe Postone – Critical Social Theory and the Contemporary World
  6. Moishe Postone – Critical Pessimism and the Limits of Traditional Marxism

The Cowardice of the Closed Comment Policy: On Nonhuman Slavery’s Unwillingness to Engage with Dissent

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Meat Inspection, Early Twentieth Century

The editors of the popular vegan/animal rights site On Nonhuman Slavery have recently elected to change their comment policy.  They thus write:

We have decided to return to a comment-free format for this website. With all the misconceptions, anger and fear surrounding animal rights, one of our primary goals is to provide a place of quiet reflection in order to give readers who may not be familiar with these concepts room to explore without the “noise” of  hostile posts from defensive animal exploiters and the contentious arguments which typically ensue.

It was never our intention to serve as another forum for debate (there are plenty of those already), but rather, to present a variety of anti-speciesist arguments, texts and presentations in a safe way which hopefully sparks interest and inspires readers to pursue further study and contemplation on their own.

Thanks for your understanding and continued readership. As always, if you have any feedback, please feel free to email:

contact@nonhumanslavery.com

Of course it’s their own choice, and they have every right to make it, since it is their website.  But their characterization of any comments or criticisms that challenge their own ideology of anti-speciesism and animal rights as just “the ‘noise’ of  hostile posts from defensive animal exploiters” paints everyone who fails to accept the blinding “truth” of political and ethical veganism as just callous exploiters making excuses for themselves.  They thereby close off any opportunity for dialogue, denying from the outset that there are any legitimate grounds for opposition to the arguments and claims that they make.

Chicago Meat Inspection, 1906

Now I hesitate to accuse them of cowardice, but the fact of the matter is that I had been recently engaging their posts by offering what I would consider an idiosyncratic, Marxist critique of vegan politics.  The entries in which I stated my position at length can be found here and here.  My comments are the ones authored by Ben Rosenblum, a nom de guerre that I adopted for myself some time ago.  As you will see, none of the arguments I made were insulting or offensive.  I was both eager and earnest in wanting to hear cogent counterarguments to the criticisms I raised.

Just to give a “taste” of what this dialogue consisted of, I will post the following interchange, in which I politely and respectfully staked out my position:

Well, I’m not going to be personally hurting any animals myself (unless I’m attacked by one), but I will continue to eat meat and use non-meat animal products. After all, you can’t have paradise without the Land of Milk and Honey. Just kidding, but still…I like consuming those products.

Why? Because the consumer choice I make is irrelevant to whether any particular animal lives or dies or even suffers. The consumer choices of vegans, their boycott on animal products, has no influence over the economy of animal death and exploitation either.

And that’s because capitalism has virtually nothing to do with supply and demand, and because the consumer is basically powerless under this system anyway. The meat industry, like any industry under capitalism, is producing for the sake of production, not for consumption. The whole system is built on perpetual crisis brought on by nearly compulsive overproduction. As Marx explains, the flipside of production is not consumption, but the circulation of commodities. And the meat industry will continue to employ the most advanced and efficient means available to minimize input and maximize output, to speed up the turnover rate. So if demand drops, the price of meat will plummet…which means that consumers will rush head over heels to buy it all up. And look, the meat industry still turns a profit.

The inevitable answer I hear to this is: “So what then? Simply do nothing?”

To this I answer: accept the social conditions that exist at present. Only a massive political act can enable such a transformation of those conditions. Until that happens, it really doesn’t matter what consumptive choices you make. Most of you wouldn’t personally go over to China and force children in sweatshops to produce your clothes and sneakers. But in all likelihood all of you wear or at least own many products that have their origin in the massive exploitation of child labor. If you are rich enough to afford not to, then good for you. But again, it won’t make a damn difference whether you choose to consume those products or not.

To this, Jo Tyler composed an equally calm and considerate response:

Ben, when you consume animal products you are harming and killing animals for your own pleasure. Whether you are the one pulling the trigger or not, you are responsible for their suffering and death. To assume otherwise is delusional.

It seems to me you are attempting to hide behind your political theories in order to justify your continued participation in the needless exploitation of animals. (Many pro-human slavery supporters made similar arguments at the time.) But it’s evident from your post that the real reason you continue to harm animals is that you “like it.”

Can I ask you: Is that really an ethical justification? After all, a rapist might “like” raping a woman…but that doesn’t make it ok, does it?

As for your sweatshop analogy — True, it’s nearly impossible to live in the modern world without causing indirect harm to another being somewhere. The idea is to cause the least amount of harm and to avoid the obviously immoral products and situations. I would not knowingly choose products that had come from abusive sweatshops. (Would you?) And I would not knowingly choose products that came from slaughterhouses or slave “farms.” Fortunately, it’s very easy to identify those products. They are: all meats, dairy products, eggs and seafood.

Acknowledging the sincerity of her response, I thus replied:

You make some a heartfelt argument, but I think you missed the central point of my contention. Consumption does not deal on a one-to-one basis with production; supply and demand never balance out. Capitalism only cares about “demand backed by the ability to pay,” as Marx put it, and an intense overproduction of meat combined with a market deficiency in the demand for meat will only cause an acute crisis (affecting other areas of the economy as well) that cuts down the relative rate of surplus-value. The price of meat will be driven down absurdly, and hence those who do eat meat will scramble to buy it up. Demand shoots up again, and the meat industry is buoyed up once again.

Exactly the same number of animals will be killed, if not more, since the meat industry will be frantically trying to produce more meat in order to realize the same amount of surplus-value they would have achieved from a market where meat had originally been in higher demand.

So what I’m saying is that my choice to eat meat has virtually nothing to do with the reasons that led up to that animal’s death, just as my decision (conscious or not) to buy clothes produced under conditions of gross exploitation has nothing to do with the reason those workers were exploited. Not to mention the fact that the fruits, vegetables, and grains you consume are often imported from countries where these products were gathered under extremely degrading and exploitation of labor. The same thing can be said of the meat industry as well, but the point is that suffering takes place no matter how you “slice” it.

And just for those who feel virtuous enough that they only buy from local farms, which supposedly don’t produce under conditions of exploitation, or if the only clothes you wear are artisanally produced under the old system of home production, you’re either living 300 years ago or you have enough cash (from somewhere, God knows) to burn on a supposedly “ethical” lifestyle that has been anachronistic for centuries.

Sorry for the rant, but this is just how how capitalism works. And no, there cannot an “ethical,” “equitable” capitalism.

Discussion never really got more heated than that.  And yet now I see, only a few days later, that they have subsequently closed off comments for the rest of their posts.  This just a guess, but my suspicion is that they wanted to silence a strong, sincere voice of opposition who backed his own position with solid arguments.  It’s the only thing I can really think of that would compel them to take this action.  They may claim to “give voice to the voiceless,” but they certainly don’t seem to be interested in talking to me.

On the Historical Specificity of the Marxist Theory of Imperialism

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Nikolai Bukharin

Grigorii Zinoviev

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If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. Such a definition would include what is most important, for, on the one hand, finance capital is the bank capital of a few very big monopolist banks, merged with the capital of the monopolist associations of industrialists; and, on the other hand, the division of the world is the transition from a colonial policy which has extended without hindrance to territories unseized by any capitalist power, to a colonial policy of monopolist possession of the territory of the world, which has been completely divided up.

— Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalist Development, from Lenin: Collected Works, Volume 22, pg. 266 (1915)

Modern imperialism is the social-economic policy of finance capital tending toward the creation of the most comprehensive economic territorial entities and world empires possible. It is characterized by the tendency to supplant free trade decisively with the system of protective tariffs and to subordinate economic life completely to the great monopolistic combines, such as the trusts, cartels, banking consortia, etc. Imperialism signifies the highest stage in the development of capitalism, in which not only commodity exports but capital exports as well occupy a place of quintessential importance. It characterizes an epoch in which the world is partitioned among a few great capitalist powers and in which the struggle proceeds along the lines of repartitioning it and partitioning the remaining areas.

— Grigorii Zinoviev, “What is Imperialism?” (1916)

The historian or economist who places under one denominator the structure of modern capitalism, i.e., modern production relations, and the numerous types of production relations that formerly led to wars of conquest, will understand nothing in the development of modern world economy.  One must single out the specific elements which characterise our time, and analyse them.  This was Marx’s method, and this is how a Marxist must approach the analysis of imperialism.  We now understand that it is impossible to confine oneself to the analysis of the forms, in which a policy manifests itself; for instance, one cannot be satisfied with defining a policy as that of “conquest,” “expansion,” “violence,” etc.  One must analyse the basis on which it rises and which it serves to widen.  We have defined imperialism as the policy of finance capital.  Therewith we uncovered the functional significance of that policy.  It upholds the structure of finance capital; it subjugates the world to the domination of finance capital; in place of the old pre-capitalist, or the old capitalist, production relations, it put the production relations of finance capital.  Just as finance capitalism (which must not be confused with money capital, for finance capital is characterised by being simultaneously banking and industrial capital) is an historically limited epoch, confined only to the last few decades, so imperialism, as the policy of finance capital, is a specific historic category.

— Nikolai Bukharin, Imperialism and World Economy, pg. 114 (1917)

Modern imperialism is not the prelude to the expansion of capital, as in Bauer’s model; on the contrary, it is only the last chapter of its historical process of expansion: it is the period of universally sharpened world competition between the capitalist states for the last remaining non-capitalist areas on earth. In this final phase, economic and political catastrophe is just as much the intrinsic, normal mode of existence for capital as it was in the ‘primitive accumulation’ of its development phase. The discovery of America and the sea route to India were not just Promethean achievements of the human mind and civilization but also, and inseparably, a series of mass murders of primitive peoples in the New World and large-scale slave trading with the peoples of Africa and Asia. Similarly, the economic expansion of capital in its imperialist final phase is inseparable from the series of colonial conquests and World Wars which we are now experiencing. What distinguishes imperialism as the last struggle for capitalist world domination is not simply the remarkable energy and universality of expansion but — and this is the specific sign that the circle of development is beginning to close — the return of the decisive struggle for expansion from those areas which are being fought over back to its home countries. In this way, imperialism brings catastrophe as a mode of existence back from the periphery of capitalist development to its point of departure. The expansion of capital, which for four centuries had given the existence and civilization of all non-capitalist peoples in Asia, Africa, America and Australia over to ceaseless convulsions and general and complete decline, is now plunging the civilized peoples of Europe itself into a series of catastrophes whose final result can only be the decline of civilization or the transition to the socialist mode of production. Seen in this light, the position of the proletariat with regard to imperialism leads to a general confrontation with the rule of capital. The specific rules of its conduct are given by that historical alternative.

According to official ‘expert’ Marxism, the rules are quite different. The belief in the possibility of accumulation in an ‘isolated capitalist society’, the belief that capitalism is conceivable even without expansion, is the theoretical formula of a quite distinct tactical tendency. The logical conclusion of this idea is to look on the phase of imperialism not as a historical necessity, as the decisive conflict for socialism, but as the wicked invention of a small group of people who profit from it. This leads to convincing the bourgeoisie that, even from the point of view of their capitalist interests, imperialism and militarism are harmful, thus isolating the alleged small group of beneficiaries of this imperialism and forming a bloc of the proletariat with broad sections of the bourgeoisie in order to ‘moderate’ imperialism, starve it out by ‘partial disarmament’ and ‘draw its claws’! Just as liberalism in the period of its decline appeals for a well-informed as against an ill-informed monarchy, the ‘Marxist center’ appeals for the bourgeoisie it will educate as against the ill-advised one, for international disarmament treaties as against the disaster course of imperialism, for the peaceful federation of democratic nation-states as against the struggle of the great powers for armed world domination. The final confrontation between proletariat and capital to settle their world-historical contradiction is converted into the utopia of a historical compromise between proletariat and bourgeoisie to ‘moderate’ the imperialist contradictions between capitalist states.

— Rosa Luxemburg, Anti-Critique (1915)

My reason for citing the above excerpts is that I feel that the Marxist theory of imperialism — as developed by Rudolf Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg, Vladimir Lenin, Grigorii Zinoviev, and Nikolai Bukharin — has been widely abused in recent decades in analyzing the intervention of advanced capitalist states (the U.S. or members of the European Union) into less developed countries.  While there can be no doubt that there exist some parallels and continuities between the kind of self-interested exploitation of Third World countries, typically ex-colonies, that takes place today and the imperialism of old, these theorists understood it as a specific outgrowth of monopoly or finance capitalism.  If I might be permitted to grant this phase of capitalism a periodicity, I would probably place it between 1880-1929.  Since this time, capitalism has undergone not one but two drastic reconfigurations (Fordism and neoliberalism).  For this reason, I think that the term should not be so loosely thrown around in describing current affairs, as many of these categories need to be reworked to fit the present day.

There are many fundamental differences between the phenomenon Lenin et al. described as “imperialism” and what has more recently been dubbed “imperialism” (or, perhaps more fittingly, “neo-imperialism”).

Lenin understood imperialism to entail a certain underlying logic, the bloody competition between great capitalist powers to carve up the earth according to zones of influence and direct colonial administration in pursuit of new markets, raw materials, and cheap labor.  Moreover, he believed that this competition between the great capitalist powers of the world, which were at the time mostly European but also included Japan and the United States, would escalate to the point where an inter-imperialist war, by definition a world war, was inevitable.  This was a multipolar world, in which no one great power could be said to predominate completely, and in which large-scale alliances were formed in anticipation of major conflict that everyone knew was on the horizon.  Also, imperialism constituted the logical outgrowth of the shift from liberal capitalism, where the prevailing Manchester School ideology of “free markets” dominated and liberalism (quite contrary to its historical aspirations) held the reigns of state power, from 1848-1873, to monopoly or finance capitalism, where smaller competitors were gradually pushed out as major trusts swallowed up their rivals and cut deals with the governments in order to corner the market in the aftermath of the “long crisis” of 1873.

What leftists generally understand imperialism to mean today is the more or less cooperative domination of either the single world superpower, the US, or in tandem with its various allies in NATO (another Cold War holdover) or the UN.  While military occupations clearly last over years of bloody conflict, the point is not direct colonial administration but the indirect establishment of quasi-independent regimes that will be “friendly” to US or European interests.  No one really believes that these various military interventions around the world are actually going to lead to an armed conflict between, say, the European Union and the US, or between Russia and the US, or even China and the US.  After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there has been a decidedly unipolar order.  In terms of concurrent transformations in the organic composition of capital and the corresponding historical periodicities of capitalism, we seem to have reverted to a “neoliberal” valorization of free markets and the deregulation of capital flows.  There is some debate as to whether neoliberalism is merely an ideological pretext that masks deep complicity with state powers, or whether it is a socioeconomic reality, but clearly the form of capitalism that Lenin felt specifically motivated imperialism in his time does not exist today.

A Study of the Marxist (and Non-Marxist) Theory of Imperialism

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The Death of Global Imperialism (1920s-1930s)

As part of my study of the spatial dialectics of capitalism, I have been reading not only the more recent Marxist literature by Henri Lefebvre on The Production of Space or David Harvey’s excellent Spaces of Capital, but also some of the more classic works on the subject.

Marx’s own account of the spatiality of capitalism can be found in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, his Grundrisse of the early 1860s, and his posthumously published Capital, Volume II.  In the Manifesto, he talks at length in the first section of the globality of capitalism, of the formation of the world-market as part of the historical mission of the bourgeoisie.  In the latter two works I mentioned, the spatial dimension of capital is raised in connection with the ever-improving means of transport and communication, in facilitating the circulation of commodities.  Marx explains the dynamic in capitalism by which it breaks through every spatial barrier that it comes across, such that it seems to embody a sort of terrestrial infinity realizing itself through time.

But I am interested in some of the later work that was done on the Marxist theory of imperialism, both before and immediately after the 1917 Revolution.  This would have an obvious bearing on the spatial extension of capitalism throughout the world.  In this connection, I have drawn up a brief reading list:

  1. John Atkinson Hobson.  Imperialism: A Study (1902).  Though a pacifist and political liberal, Lenin considered his study of imperialism vastly superior to Kautsky’s, which had by then joined forces with the bourgeois apologists.
  2. Rudolf Hilferding.   Finance Capital: A Study of the Latest Phase of Capitalist Development (1910).  This book was extremely influential in its time, and established a number of concepts regarding monopoly capitalism and finance capital that Lenin would later rely upon.  The two chapters on “The Export of Capital” and “The Proletariat and Imperialism” are relevant to any study on imperialism.
  3. Rosa Luxemburg.  The Accumulation of Capital (1913).  This is Luxemburg’s greatest contribution to the economic theory of Marxism.  Though she and Lenin disagreed over some of its premises and conclusion, the book remains extremely important for the analysis of imperialism.  The chapter on “Foreign Loans” addresses this directly.
  4. Vladimir Lenin.  Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalist Development (1915-1916).  This work scarcely needs any introduction.  The entire book is a study of imperialism as a stage in capitalist development.
  5. Nikolai Bukharin.  Imperialism and World Economy (1917).  This book, which includes a favorable introduction from Lenin, seems to me to perhaps be the most pertinent to my own studies, since it places the “world economy” as  a centerpiece for its analysis.

I am hoping perhaps a few of my Marxist friends will join me in reading some selections of these books.  In my understanding of the subject, the imperialism described by Hilferding, Luxemburg, Lenin, and Bukharin were very specific to the time in which they were living.  According to their theories, it involved vast capitalist trusts and cartels, gigantic monopolies, along with huge amounts of finance capital backing them through the banks.  I think that Lenin’s theory of imperialism is all too often invoked in describing present-day imperialist ventures.  It continues to be a force within the greater complex of capitalist globalization, which has been taking place ever since the social formation first emerged.  But historical conditions have changed since Lenin’s time, and in light of the neo-liberalist recalibration of capitalism, I think some of the fundamental categories we retain from Lenin’s analysis of imperialism might have to be rethought or slightly modified to accommodate present-day realities.

I personally am interested in the historical imperialism that Lenin et al. were studying, i.e. the form of imperialism that existed between 1880 and 1939.  Are there any other suggestions for reading on this subject? Ren, I’m looking to you.  But others are welcome to make suggestions as well.