Claudio Katz*
International Viewpoint 345, November 2002
The renewal
of interest in the study of imperialism has changed the debate on
globalization, previously centred exclusively on the critique of neoliberalism
and on the new features of globalization. A concept developed by the main
Marxist theorists of the 20th century — which enjoyed a wide diffusion in the
1970s — has again attracted the attention of analysts because of the
aggravation of the social crisis of the Third World, the multiplication of
armed conflicts and the deadly competition among countries.
The notion
of imperialism conceptualizes two types of problem: on the one hand, the
relations of domination in operation between the capitalists of the centre and
the peoples of the periphery and on the other the links which prevail between
the great imperialist powers at each stage of capitalism. What is the
contemporary relevance of this theory? To what extent can it contribute towards
clarifying contemporary reality?
The
polarization of incomes confirms the importance of the theory in its first
sense. While the wealth of three multimillionaires exceeds the GDP of 48
nations and a person on the periphery dies of hunger every four seconds, it is
difficult to ignore the widening of the gap between the advanced and
underdeveloped countries. Today nobody could believe that this asymmetry is a
temporary phenomenon, to be ultimately corrected by the benefits of globalization.
The peripheral countries are not simply the “losers” from globalization; they
are also subjected to an intensification of the transfers of income that have
historically held back their development.
This
drainage has led to the intensification of extreme poverty in the 49 poorest
nations and major deformations of partial accumulation in the dependent
semi-industrialized countries. In this second case, the prosperity of those
sectors inserted in the international division of labour is bought at the
expense of those economic activities centred on the internal market.
The
analysis of imperialism does not offer a conspiracy theory of underdevelopment
nor does it absolve the local governments of responsibility for this situation.
It simply presents an explanation of the polarization of accumulation on a
world scale and the reduction of the possibility of its evening out among
different economies. The accelerated margin of development which in the 19th
century allowed
The theory
of imperialism attributes these asymmetries to the systematic transfer of the
value created in the periphery towards the capitalists of the centre. This
transfer is concretized through the deterioration of the terms of trade, the
extraction of financial resources and the transfer of industrial profits. The
political effect of this drainage is the loss of the political autonomy of the
peripheral ruling classes and the increasing level of
[…]
[…]
[T]he
Military
aggression is the imperialist response to the disintegration of states,
peripheral economies and societies, provoked by the growing
These
effects are most visible in Latin America and the
Economic
expropriation, political recolonization and military interventionism are the
three pillars of the current imperialism. Some analysts limit themselves to
describing this oppression as an inexorable destiny, in a resigned manner. Some
present the fracture between ‘winners and losers’ of globalization as a ‘cost
of development’, without explaining why this price persists over time and is
still being charged to those nations who have already paid it in the past.
The neoliberals tend to prognosticate that the end of
underdevelopment will happen in those countries that gamble on ‘attracting’
foreign capital and the ‘seduction’ of companies. However, the dependent
nations who have entered on this road in the past decade by opening their
economies up are now paying the heaviest price in the ‘emergent crises’. Those
who were the most committed to privatization have lost most on the world
market. In providing every facility to imperialist capital, they have lifted
the barriers that limited the pillage of their natural resources and they are paying
for it today by more asymmetrical trade exchanges, growing financial
instability and a sharpened industrial disarticulation.
Some neoliberals attribute these effects to the limited
application of their recommendations, as if a decade of negative experiences
had not furnished enough lessons as to the result of their recipes. Others
suggest that underdevelopment is a consequence of the temperamental
inadequacies of the population of the periphery, the weight of corruption or
the cultural immaturity of the peoples of the
* Claudio
Katz teaches at the
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