Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism - Neoimperialism Is a Transitional and Moribund Late Capitalism

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Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism has revealed the transitional and moribund nature of monopoly capitalism for more than a century. However, except in a very small number of countries where socialism is being constructed, most capitalist societies have not perished. They have in fact achieved varying levels of development, and will continue to develop. This raises a very important question: How do we judge the transitional nature of contemporary capitalism, or its tendency to decline and perish? If we use the historical materialist method, the transitional nature of neoimperialism can be characterized on the basis of two points. First, like everything in the world, the neoimperialist system is constantly changing. It is a transient phenomenon in human history, and is not eternal. Second, there are reasons to believe that neoimperialism can eventually transition into socialism through various forms of revolutionary struggle.

In the era of neoimperialism, the developed capitalist countries have undergone many important technological and institutional reforms, which have provided the basis for a certain further development of capitalism and have delayed its demise. High and low growth rates continue to succeed each other, and the period of decay mentioned by Lenin has been greatly extended. This is because the capitalist countries have made many adjustments to their production relations and superstructure, including a degree of macroeconomic regulation, improvements to income distribution and social security, and so forth. In particular, there is no doubt that for the developed capitalist countries the advantages of economic globalization outweigh its disadvantages. Within the process of economic globalization, the powerful developed capitalist countries occupy an absolutely dominant position, through which they set out to maximize the benefits they receive. Their general drive to extend globalization in order to expand their markets does not, however, exclude the possibility of particular countries temporarily reversing the process in response to domestic crises, or as part of efforts to damage commercial competitors. “In the past two years,” a 2019 study notes, “the Trump administration has deepened its reverse globalization trend in the light of the domestic crisis. It adheres to the principle of ‘America first,’ and provokes international economic and trade disputes, trying to get rid of and pass on the domestic crisis.”84 The purpose of the United States in adopting a range of protectionist anti-globalization measures is to alleviate the domestic difficulties and crises it encounters within economic globalization, so as to advance its hegemonic interests.

Meanwhile, there is no essential conflict between the fact that neoimperialism and capitalism can look forward to existing and developing for some time to come, and the fact that a transition to a higher social formation is practically inevitable, provided that these societies do not degenerate into barbarism. The classic Marxist writers avoided setting out a specific timetable for the demise of capitalism and imperialism. Lenin’s scientific judgment is that “imperialism is a decaying but not completely decaying capitalism, a moribund but not dead capitalism.”85 He foresaw that moribund capitalism was very likely to drag out its existence for a prolonged period. Nor, on the basis of a comprehensive analysis, could it be denied that capitalism would see some kind of development even during its moribund stage. Discussing the decay of imperialism, Lenin stated: “It would be a mistake to believe that this tendency to decay precludes the rapid growth of capitalism. It does not.… On the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before; but this growth is not only becoming more and more uneven in general, its unevenness also manifests itself, in particular, in the decay of the countries which are richest in capital (England).”86

John Bellamy Foster also stressed that, “to say that capitalism is a failed system is not, of course, to suggest that its breakdown and disintegration is imminent. It does, however, mean that it has passed from being a historically necessary and creative system at its inception to being a historically unnecessary and destructive one in the present century.”87

The basic contradictions of capitalism still exist and continue to develop. Likewise, the law of capitalist accumulation still exists and continues to develop. At the point when monopoly capitalism was coming into existence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the law of uneven economic and political development of imperialism made it possible for the revolution against capitalism to be victorious initially in one or several countries, before eventually spreading globally.

Decades after The Communist Manifesto proclaimed that capitalism would inevitably expire and Capital declared that the death knell of capitalist private ownership was about to ring, the October Revolution brought the downfall of the Tsarist Russian Empire. Then, the proletarian party led by Mao Zedong in China ended the semicolonial and semifeudal society ruled by the Kuomintang (Mao stated that China represented a feudal and comprador monopoly capitalism after the Second World War). The Soviet Communist Party led by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin consciously betrayed Marxism-Leninism, resulting in the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist countries, with the exception of Belarus, regressing to capitalism. This demonstrates the twists, turns, and general difficulties experienced by the development of socialism and its economic system. But it cannot change the nature and general trend of the historical process.

China’s position on the main international fault lines is clear. In October 1984, Deng Xiaoping stated: “There are two major problems in the world that are very prominent. One is the issue of peace and the other is the North-South issue. There are many other issues, which are not of the same underlying importance or global and strategic significance as these two.” In March 1990, he reiterated: “As for the two major issues of peace and development, the peace issue has not been resolved, and the development issue has become more serious.”88 Deng emphasized that “peace and development” were the two major questions to be resolved.89

Based on the analysis of the character of neoimperialism, it can thus be concluded that neoimperialism represents a new phase of international monopoly into which capitalism develops after passing through the stages of free competitive capitalism, general private monopoly, and state monopoly. In addition, neoimperialism represents a new expansion of international monopoly capitalism, as well as a new system through which a minority of developed countries dominate the world and implement a new policy of economic, political, cultural, and military hegemony. If we examine the current situation on the basis of the international forces of justice and the development of the twists and turns of the international class struggle, the twenty-first century is a new era in which the world working class and the masses can carry out great revolutions and safeguard world peace; in which the socialist countries can carry out great feats of construction and promote ecological civilization; and in which progressive nations can work together to build a community with a shared future for humankind, a world in which neoimperialism and international capitalism gradually make way for global socialism.