Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism - Neoimperialism Is a Parasitic and Decaying Late Imperialism

Table of contents

As Lenin stated,

Imperialism is an immense accumulation of money capital in a few countries.… Hence the extraordinary growth of a class, or rather, of a stratum of rentiers, i.e., people who live by “clipping coupons,” who take no part in any enterprise whatever, whose profession is idleness. The export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labour of several overseas countries and colonies.76

In the era of neoimperialism, the number of rentiers is increasing sharply, and the nature of the rentier countries is becoming more pronounced. The parasitism and decay of a small number of capitalist countries is further worsened, as can be seen specifically in the following aspects.

First, the United States employs its military, intellectual property, political, and cultural hegemony, as well as the U.S. dollar, to plunder the wealth of the world, especially that of developing countries. The United States is the world’s largest parasitic and decaying country. As evidence of this, we may take the trade between China and the United States. China sells to the United States goods produced by cheap labor, land, and environmental resources. The United States does not need to produce anything in order to buy these goods; it can simply print banknotes. With the money earned, China can then buy only virtual assets such as U.S. treasury bonds, and provide finance for U.S. consumer lending and outward expansion. The United States exports to China securities to which value cannot be added, while China exports to the United States mainly physical goods and labor services. The National Health Report released by the National Health Research Group of the Chinese Academy of Sciences shows that the United States is the country with the most hegemonic dividends in the world, due to the position of its currency, while China is the country with the largest loss of hegemonic dividends. For the year 2011, U.S. hegemonic dividends totaled $7396.09 billion, corresponding to 52.38 percent of the country’s GDP, and the average hegemonic dividends obtained per day came to $20.263 billion. Meanwhile, the sum lost by China totaled $3663.4 billion. In terms of labor time, about 60 percent of the working hours of the Chinese workforce were effectively given without recompense to serve international monopoly capital.77

Second, military spending has increased, which in turn increases the burden on working-class people. Neoimperialism leads and promotes military-related scientific and technological research, the development of advanced weapons, and the expansion of military production. As the People’s Daily observed in 2016, “the military-industrial complex supported by monopoly capital and the cultural hegemony formed on the basis of colonialism have prompted the western countries to intervene in other countries’ affairs at their will.”78 Neoimperialism has thus become the initiator of regional turmoil and instability, and the engine of war. Over the past thirty years, the United States has spent $14.2 trillion on waging thirteen wars.79 Meanwhile, lack of money hinders improvements to the living conditions of the U.S. people in areas such as medical insurance. Exorbitant military spending has become a heavy burden on the country and its people, while the parasitic monopolies in the arms industry have reaped immense profits. According to statistics of the British Institute for International Strategic Studies, official U.S. military expenditures in 2018 came to $643 billion, and in 2019 will reach $750 billion, more than the sum of the military spending of the world’s eight next largest military powers. Since the end of the first Cold War, the United States has launched or participated in six major conflicts: The Gulf War (1991), Kosovo War (1999), Afghanistan War (2001), Iraq War (2003), Libya War (2011), and Syria War (2011).80 The addiction of monopoly capitalism to war is a manifestation of its parasitic and decaying nature. This barbaric characteristic of the system runs counter to civilization and threatens the shared future of the human community. It proves that neoimperialism is the primary root of war.

Third, wealth and incomes are concentrated in the hands of a specific class of owners of financial assets, as reflected in the 1 percent versus the 99 percent formulation. At the neoimperialist stage, the socialization, informatization, and internationalization of production have reached unprecedented levels, and the ability of human beings to create wealth is many times greater than in the old imperialist period. Nevertheless, the advance of productivity that is supposed to be a common gain for humankind has mainly benefited the financial oligarchy. “The bulk of the profits go to the ‘geniuses’ of financial manipulation,” one observer notes.81 In 2001, for example, the financial wealth (excluding property rights) held by the wealthiest 1 percent of the U.S. population was four times greater than that of the poorest 80 percent. The 1 percent held assets on the stock market of $1.9 trillion, roughly equivalent to the value of the stock held by the other 99 percent.82

Fourth, monopoly hinders technological innovation, slowing its advance. The greed and parasitism of financial monopoly capital make its attitude to technological innovation ambivalent. Monopoly capital relies on technological innovation to maintain its monopoly status, but the high profits that result from this status mean that monopoly capital shows a certain inertia in promoting innovation. Even if many advanced functions of mobile phones are successfully developed in the same year, the monopoly producers of mobile phones will divide up these functions to be introduced and promoted over several years. The purpose is to ensure that consumers will continuously purchase mobile phones with new functions, allowing the corporations to obtain high monopoly profits every year.

Fifth, the tendency for monopoly capital and its agents to cause decay in the mass movement is becoming more serious. Lenin observed that “in Great Britain the tendency of imperialism to split the workers, to strengthen opportunism among them and to cause temporary decay in the working-class movement, revealed itself much earlier than the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.”83 Neoimperialism divides the working class, striking at and weakening the labor unions using the excuse provided by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the tremendous changes in Eastern Europe. It also uses its monopoly profits to buy the support of individuals, and fosters opportunist and neoliberal forces within the workers’ movement and various other mass movements. The results of such ploys include the downturn in size and activity of labor unions and other progressive movements, the low ebb of the world socialist movement, and a more obvious and serious tendency for workers to worship the forces of neoimperialism or to be intimidated by them.