Explaining Imperialism Today

In the 1990s and early 2000s, the question of imperialism—the reproduction of global uneven and combined development and inter-capitalist geopolitical conflict—effectively disappeared from serious discussions among neoliberals, radicals, and Marxists.¹ For neoliberals, free trade would allow each national economy to pursue its Ricardian “comparative advantage” and produce a more uniformly developed world economy.² For some on the Left, the freeing of capital mobility on a world scale would industrialize the Global South and deindustrialize the North.³ A uniformly developed world economy laid the basis for the rise of “Empire” and the eclipse of imperialist political-military conflict.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2002 and 2003 renewed Marxist discussion of the realities of imperialist political–military action.⁴ The 2008 recession, which initiated a long period of stagnant profitability and accumulation, decisively buried the notion of a “seamless” world economy whose component parts were becoming increasingly homogeneous.⁵ The Global North remains the site of most of the capital-intensive, high productivity manufacturing that pays relatively high wages, and whose reserve army of labor is comparatively small compared to the “active” armies.

Industry in the Global South remains for the most part labor-intensive, and its rate of productivity low while workers are paid extremely low wages; and the region’s reserve armies of labor are relatively enormous. In a handful of societies (South Korea, South Africa, Mexico, Taiwan, Singapore, Brazil, Argentina), foreign-owned assembly plants produce for their relatively large domestic markets. Despite being a continued subject of controversy, China alone appeared to have made substantial strides toward challenging the established imperialist economies both economically and politically prior to the Covid pandemic beginning in 2020.

John Smith’s Imperialism in the 21^st Century, Sam King’s Imperialism and the Development Myth, and Guglielmo Carchedi’s and Michael Roberts’s essay, “The Economics of Modern Imperialism,” have offered provocative explanations of the reproduction of the division between the Global North and South as well as critical perspectives on Chinese capitalist economic development.⁶ All three contributions make some form of the transfer of surplus value from the periphery to the core of the world economy the defining feature of imperialism and a central mechanism producing uneven and combined development on a world scale. All three reject the claim that China is an emergent competitor with the polities and economies of the Global North, insisting instead that China retains a subordinate position in the imperialist world economy.

For Carchedi and Roberts, unequal exchange defines imperialism. They argue that the competitive equalization of profit rates on a world scale results in the transfer of surplus value from labor-intensive but highly exploitative producers in the Global South to more capital-intensive and less exploitive producers in the Global North. Smith, by contrast, emphasizes the superexploitation of workers in the South, marked by wages below the cost of the reproduction of labor power that attract capital, enriching all classes in the Global North while ensuring the South’s continued economic dependency.⁷. King, relying on Lenin’s analysis of imperialism, focuses on the dominance of monopolies in the Global North, which guarantee the North’s economic dominance and prevent any society in the South from developing its own globally competitive capital-intensive industries.⁸

None of these theories—unequal exchange, superexploitation, and monopoly—are adequate for grasping the specificity of capitalist imperialism. The direction of “unequal exchange” and the realities of either superexploitation or monopoly are often assumed, but not documented with systematic and rigorously constructed data. Analytically, three problems flow from these theoretical unclarities. First, none of these frameworks appropriately analyze the economics of capitalist imperialism. Second, all of them fail to explain the relationship of economic and political-military imperialist competition. Finally, none can account for the rise of China as an economic competitor and the sharpening great power rivalry between China and the established imperialist powers led by the US.

At stake in these seemingly abstract theoretical and complex empirical questions are two key political issues. The first is whether imperialism reconfigures class antagonisms. Do workers in the Global North share in the exploitation of workers in the Global South, forming a “labor aristocracy” that benefits from imperialism?⁹ Or does imperialism substantially increase the exploitation of workers in both zones of the capitalist world economy, continuing to pit them against their “own” capitalists?

Second, does China remain a society subordinated to imperialism, one that must be defended against the dominant imperialist powers, in particular the US? Or is China an emerging imperialist competitor, whose repression of workers and racialized minorities serves the interest of their capitalist rulers alone? Despite the intentions of some of the authors, their analyses can and have been utilized to argue against the centrality of class struggle in the imperialist core and for politics that ally the socialist left with the ostensibly “anti-imperialist” Chinese state.

The alternative analysis of imperialism presented here asserts the continued salience of class struggle in the Global North and a politics that solidarizes with workers and oppressed groups in China. It is my contention that capitalist imperialism’s origins, the reproduction of uneven and combined development on a world scale, and political-military competition among capitalist powers are the “emergent properties” of profit-driven real capitalist competition.¹⁰ Put another way, real capitalist competition, fought with the “heavy artillery” of fixed capital, does not produce uniform conditions of production within and between industries, but heterogeneous labor processes, rates of profit, and wages. This unevenness is the basis for both global economic inequality and economic and inter-state competition.¹¹

This article first examines Carchedi’s and Roberts’s deployment of the theory of unequal exchange, raising questions about its capacity to explain the origins and reproduction of global economic inequality. It then moves to evaluate Smith’s arguments about the superexploitation of workers in the Global South as the primary source of capitalist profitability in the North over the past four decades. It turns next to an assessment of King’s defense of Lenin’s claim that the North enjoys a monopoly on capital-intensive industry. Finally, I outline an alternative analysis of imperialism’s origins and dynamics based on real capitalist competition and profitability before concluding with a tentative assessment of the changing place of China in the contemporary imperialist order.

Unequal Exchange

The Greek Marxist, Arghiri Emmanuel argued that global trade results in transfers of surplus value from the Global South to North in his seminal work, Unequal Exchange.¹². Unequal exchange was not the result of market manipulation but of the operation of Marx’s law of value—socially average necessary abstract labor time regulating the production and exchange of commodities—on a global scale.

Marx, in CapitaI III, argued that the tendency to equalize profit rates between industries in a single country results in commodities no longer being exchanged according to their direct value (the socially average necessary labor time required for their production).¹³ Rather, commodities are exchanged, he argues, according to their prices of production (the cost of means of production, raw materials, and labor power for each unit of output, plus an average rate of profit). If commodities were exchanged at their value, more labor-intensive producers would earn higher rates of profit—despite their less efficient use of labor—than more capital-intensive producers. In other words, labor-intensive industries like the garment industry would generate a higher rate of return on investment than more technologically advanced industries such as automobile manufacturing. The formation of prices of production results in a transfer of value from low-organic-composition-of-capital producers to high-organic-composition-of-capital producers, allowing the turbulent equalization of the profit rates of the regulating capitals (those with most efficient, reproducible technique) between industries.

Drawing on the work of Henryk Grossman, Emmanuel extends the formation of prices of production to the problem of imperialism.¹⁴ As the mobility of capital across the world creates a global profit rate, goods are exchanged on the world market according to their prices of production, not their values. The result is the international transfer of value from low- to high-organic-composition-of-capital producers: unequal exchange.

Emmanuel believed that production in the Global South has a uniformly, or at best average lower organic composition of capital than production in the Global North.¹⁵ As a result, there is a systematic transfer of value from the less to more developed parts of the capitalist world. According to Carchedi and Roberts:

Economic imperialism is in the first instance the appropriation of surplus value by high technology companies from low technology companies in different countries … The imperialist countries can be defined as those countries with a persistently higher number of high technology companies and thus with persistently higher national average OCC [organic composition of capital].¹⁶

This value transfer explains the persistent underdevelopment of capitalist production in the Global South, and its persistent overdevelopment in the Global North; and, for Emmanuel, it is the source of persistently higher wages for workers in the Global North.

Carchedi and Roberts attempt to measure the volume and direction of unequal exchange between the Global South and North and its sources from 1950 to 2019.¹⁷ Asserting that the Global South has, on average, “a higher rate of surplus value and lower organic composition of capital,”¹⁸ they estimate that about 1 percent of global GDP has flowed to the North annually, with sharp rises during the crises of 1974 to 1980, and again after 2004.¹⁹ While acknowledging that a relatively small portion of global GDP comes from unequal exchange, Carchedi and Roberts assert that this may be an artifact of studying only eleven countries in the South and is offset by “the cumulative transfer over 70 years.”²⁰ Value transfers as a share of annual export profits for the Global North is significantly higher, peaking at nearly 80 percent in 1974, averaging around 40 percent since.

Unequal exchange in bilateral export trade was generally lower, reaching a high of 26.3 percent during the global recession of the mid-1970s, but fluctuating around 10 to 11 percent annually. Value transfers between US and Mexico averaged between 16 and 21 percent of northern GDP when either bilateral trade is considered or when all the US’s and Mexico’s trading partners are examined. Finally, Carchedi and Roberts attribute between 50 and 60 percent of value transfer to the North to a higher average organic composition of capital, and 40 to 50 percent to a lower average rate of surplus value.

While adding a level of concreteness often lacking in discussions of unequal exchange, the claim of a net transfer of value from the periphery to the core of the world economy is questionable.”

While Carchedi and Roberts add a level of concreteness often lacking in discussions of unequal exchange, their claim of a net transfer of value from the periphery to the core of the world economy is questionable. The “direction and amount of net value transfers between the regions are rather complicated,” because production in the Global South is not uniformly more labor-intensive than in the North.²¹ In reality, the Global South’s export industries have a “dual structure.”²² The bulk of exports from the Global South to North—agricultural and consumer goods and parts for industrial processes in the North—tend to be produced in significantly more labor-intensive labor processes than those goods the South imports from the North.

However, the Global South is the site of some of the most capital-intensive global industries, in particular energy (oil and natural gas) and natural resources extraction (mining). An accurate measure of the path and mass of global value transfers would require a rigorous disaggregation of the relative weight of lower- and higher-than-average organic composition of capital in global trade.

Unfortunately, Carchedi’s and Roberts’s method of calculating unequal exchange obscures rather than clarifies this issue. Instead of attempting to measure the transfer of value as a result of competition between industrial sectors on a world scale, they simply assume that “countries replace sectors” in foreign trade.²³ At best, we can conclude, along with Ahmet Tonak, that value transfers from the South to the North “obviously contribute to the perpetuation of imperialistic relations” but “not to their creation.”²⁴

Superexploitation

John Smith roots his account of persistent value transfers from the Global South to North in higher rates of exploitation in the Global South. Smith recounts Marx’s discussion of the two main modes by which capitalists increase the appropriation of surplus value, which are often pursued simultaneously. The first is absolute surplus value: the extension of the working day (or week or year) without any change in real wages or the labor process. The second is relative surplus value: increasing the productivity of labor in industries producing “means of consumption” and thus reducing the portion of the working day devoted to reproducing the workers’ labor power and increasing the portion capital appropriates as surplus value. Smith points out that Marx recognized but never pursued a discussion of a third mode of increasing surplus value extraction: superexploitation, when the wage is depressed below the value of the historically constituted conditions for the reproduction of workers’ capacity to labor.²⁵

According to Smith, imperialism in the neo- liberal era is based in the superexploitation of workers in the Global South, the result of the relative and absolute size of the reserve army of labor in the periphery, whose geographic immobility prevents any tendency toward global wage equalization.²⁶ It is the persistent inequalities of wages and levels of exploitation that has driven “imperialism’s most significant shift … toward the transformation of its own core processes of surplus-value extraction” through “the global labor arbitrage-driven globalization of production.”²⁷ Smith claims that “outsourcing” has become the “alternative to investment in new technology”²⁸ in the Global North, leading him to question claims of a growth of labor productivity, no less the rate of exploitation, in the Global North since the 1970s:

Statistics on labor productivity, obtained by dividing the value added of a firm, industrial sector, or nation by its total labor hours, are highly deceptive.²⁹ Much of the alleged increase in labor productivity in the imperialist nations is an artifact resulting from the outsourcing of low value-added, labor-intensive production processes to low-wage countries … when a firm outsources labor-intensive production processes, the productivity of the workers who remain in its employment rises, even though nothing about their specific labor has changed.³⁰

Put simply, the superexploitation of the working class in the Global South explains the continued reproduction of an underdeveloped imperial periphery and an increasingly parasitic core.

There are a number of conceptual and empirical problems with Smith’s argument. Smith rejects Marx’s discussions in Capital I of how the growth of labor productivity through capital-intensive innovation in the production of both consumer and capital goods increases relative surplus value. For Marx, as long as the rate of increase of real wages is less than the rate of increase in labor productivity, a process guaranteed by the constant reproduction of the reserve army of labor in all parts of the world,³¹ the intensification of work through mechanization, “produces in the same time more value.”³² As Tonak points out, “even if the worker is paid more, the rate of exploitation still increases by virtue of mechanization (cheapening of consumer goods) and efficient management of the production process (increasing the intensity of labor).”³³

Smith gives three reasons for rejecting Marx’s claims that increasing mechanization and labor productivity increases the rate of surplus value. First, Marx used European examples from the mid-nineteenth century of “competing imperialist nations,” while nations of the contemporary Global South “cannot be regarded merely as less-developed capitalist nations” who will follow the same path of capitalist development. Second, Smith asserts that because capitalists in the Global North produce different commodities than those in the Global South, they do not directly compete with one another, unlike nineteenth century European capitalists producing similar goods. Finally, capital in the nineteenth century only exploited “their own” workers, whose means of subsistence were produced in their own countries: “this was an age before foreign direct investment, outsourcing, etc.”³⁴

All three of these claims are theoretically and empirically questionable. It is true that most of the societies of the Global South will not replicate the level of capitalist development in the Global North. However, this is the result of real capitalist competition in the pursuit of profitability. Put another way, while these societies are not at different stages of some teleological “stages of development,” they are all subject to the same laws of motion, that of the capitalist mode of production. Higher-than-average rates of exploitation are the result of mechanization and the intensification of labor in both regions of the capitalist world economy.

Higher-than-average rates of exploitation are the result of mechanization and the intensification of labor in both regions of the capitalist world economy.

It is also the case that most capitals in the Global North and South do not compete within the same industry, and that much of the exports from the periphery are labor-intensive inputs for the core’s capital-intensive industry. However, whether capital in the core competes “head-to-head” with capital in the periphery, the introduction of new and more efficient machinery will intensify work and raise the rate of exploitation in either zone of the world economy. Again, capitalists in all zones of the world economy are subject to the dynamics of capitalist competition and profitability.

Finally, it is simply historically inaccurate that capitalists in the nineteenth century exploited only workers in their own nations whose means of subsistence were produced locally. Not only were many industries dependent upon imported raw materials in the nineteenth century (cotton textiles), but the global market in tobacco, sugar, grains, and other foodstuffs was well established by the time Marx drafted the first volume of Capital.

Despite the centrality of superexploitation to his theory of contemporary imperialism, Smith presents no comparative data on rates of surplus value. However, there is some evidence, for a number of countries, that the average rate of exploitation in the Global South may be higher than in the Global North. Tonak compiled data on average rates of exploitation between 1969 and 1977 for four industrial economies (US, Germany, Sweden, and Canada), and eight less developed economies (Egypt, Turkey, India, South Korea, Bolivia, Panama, Puerto Rico, and Malawi).³⁵ The four core economies ranged between 202 and 259 percent, while the peripheral economies ranged from 244 to 465 percent. In the early twenty-first century, the gap persisted but appears to have narrowed. The rate of exploitation in the US was estimated to be 300 percent in 2001, while Turkey’s was 312 percent in 2006.

Although rates of exploitation are higher in the Global South, there is no basis for Smith’s claims that evidence of increased rates of surplus value and labor productivity in the Global North are, at best, statistical aberrations caused by the growth of global outsourcing of inputs to the Global South, making both capitalists and workers in the core “parasitic” on workers in the periphery. Tonak, drawing upon his work with Shaikh in the 1990s, demonstrates that the rate of exploitation in the US jumped over 40 percent from 1948 to 1989, from 170 to 244 percent.³⁶ He estimated that the rate of surplus value increased another 18 percent from 1989 to 2001, to 225 percent. Simon Mohun also documented a rise of 18 percent in the 1990s, from 258 to 305 percent.³⁷

Kim Moody has demonstrated convincingly that this rapid increase in the rate of surplus value is the result of actual increases in labor productivity, not statistical anomalies.³⁸ Most of this increase was the product of labor-saving technical innovation—both directly labor-displacing machinery and technology to monitor and surveille workers in order “squeeze the pores” out of the working day. Smith’s claims that lower cost of inputs produced by low wage workers in the Global South account for most of this gain is theoretically untenable. Lowering the cost of inputs would have no impact on labor productivity, or output per worker. The reduced costs of inputs do, however, lower the cost of constant capital (the circulating element used in each production cycle), increasing overall profitability.

Most importantly, Smith fails to demonstrate that the source of higher average rates of surplus value in the Global South is superexploitation—pushing wages below the historically constituted value of labor power. There is clearly evidence of both absolute and relative surplus value extraction as the sources of the higher levels of exploitation in the Global South. Roberts points to Foxconn, the Taiwan-based technology manufacturer, which combined extremely low wages (not necessarily below the value of labor power) with long hours (absolute surplus value) and the latest technology (relative surplus value).³⁹ Tonak examined five hundred large Turkish-owned firms and six large joint ventures with foreign capital in 1996 and found that the “joint-venture firms are technologically sophisticated and able to implement managerial supervision to increase the intensity of labor.”

Smith fails to demonstrate that the source of higher average rates of surplus value in the Global South is superexploitation—pushing wages below the historically constituted value of labor power.

The joint ventures enjoyed higher rates of surplus value than the average of five hundred Turkish-owned firms. Four tobacco and car firms achieved rates of exploitation four to six times higher than the Turkish-owned firms, while two other joint-venture auto manufacturers enjoyed two to three times higher rates.⁴⁰ Nor is superexploitation—extremely low wage work—absent in the contemporary Global North:

“Zero-hour” contracts, where workers are at the beck and call of employers at all hours for minimal pay, now affects two million workers in Britain. Across southern Europe, where youth unemployment rates are about 40–50%, young people are forced to live with their parents and earn pitiful amounts in low wage retail and leisure jobs. And the data show that poverty has risen for the bottom 10% of households since the 1980s in the North.⁴¹

Rather than workers in the Global North somehow sharing the benefits of the super- exploitation of workers in the South with their employers, workers in both zones of the capitalist world economy have experienced rising rates of exploitation since the 1980s. Ranaa Vasudevan, using labor share of GDP as a proxy for the rate of surplus value, argues instead that global labor arbitrage and the resulting movement of many labor-intensive operations to the periphery has produced “the intensification of the global rate of exploitation of labor, as workers in different regions are compelled to compete with each other.”⁴²

Capitalists in the Global North have used the mere threat of “offshoring” operations to drive down wages and intensify work since the 1980s, and simultaneously benefit from mass migrations of workers from the periphery who enter the core labor markets without the minimal protections that “citizen” workers enjoy. Put simply, imperialism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has produced greater levels of exploitation of the entire global working class.

Monopoly

Following Lenin’s classic pamphlet, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Sam King roots global uneven and combined development in the emergence of monopoly.⁴³ To distinguish his argument from other theories of “monopoly capitalism,” King rejects the equation of a declining number of firms in an industry (industrial concentration) with monopoly. King argues that monopoly takes the form of the Global North’s exclusive control of the most efficient, capital-intensive technology. The global division of the world into developed and underdeveloped capitalist societies thus maps with geographic distribution of fundamentally different types of capital.

“Monopoly capitalists” dominate the Global North, producing “commodities under conditions reflecting their dominance of the technologically highest, most complex and productive processes.” By contrast, “non-monopoly capital” have “limited access to technologically complex and productive processes and as a consequence, are restricted to mostly simple production processes.” Capitalist states in the core provide massive subsidies for transnational corporation’s research and development on a scale that states in the periphery usually cannot and do not.

Imperialist state policies, enforced through multilateral development institutions like the World Bank (WB) and World Trade Organization (WTO) reproduce the imperial core’s monopoly of the most advanced labor processes through the removal of protective tariffs and restrictions on investment, and the protection of “intellectual property” from appropriation by capitalists and their states in the dependent periphery. Neoliberalism accelerated all these tendencies, deepening of the Global North’s monopoly of the most advanced productive technique and “the shift of low-end production to the Third World,” which “has not and is not bringing about a convergence of the income wealth or social and economic development of the rich and poor countries.”⁴⁴

Unlike the best known proponents of the monopoly capital thesis, Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, King attempts to reconcile the emergence of monopoly capital with the continued operation of the law of value: the fluctuation of prices around socially average labor time and the turbulent equalization of profit rates between branches of production.⁴⁵ King asserts that monopoly capital’s capital-intensive labor processes constitute a nearly insurmountable obstacle to entry to the branches of production they dominate.⁴⁶ While capital flows from one branch of monopolized production to another, non-monopoly capitals are generally unable to enter these sectors, guaranteeing “superprofits” for these firms.

Competition among monopoly capitals leads to what Ernest Mandel called an “equalization of surplus profits” creating “two average rates of profit … one on the monopolized and the other in the non-monopolized sector.”⁴⁷ King uses a single year’s data from Forbes’s annual survey of “returns on assets” as a proxy for the rate of profit and finds that profitability for large firms in the Global North was higher than those in the South.⁴⁸ These profit differentials, rooted in monopoly capital’s dominance of capital-intensive labor processes, are central to King’s understanding of the transfer of surplus value from the periphery to the core of the capitalist world economy.

King’s analysis correctly identifies the concentration of high organic composition, high productivity labor processes in the Global North, accelerated by neoliberal “free trade” and investment as a defining feature of the continued division of the world economy into developed and underdeveloped capitalist societies. He acknowledges that his description of “monopoly competition is “in important respects” consistent with “Shaikh’s real competition”—cost-cutting through the deployment of fixed capital, producing uneven and combined development within and between different branches of capitalist production. However, his notion of “non-monopoly capital” and a dual economy with two average profit rates allows for the sectoral operation of neoclassical economics’ “perfect competition”: a large number of small, labor-intensive, “price-taking” firms quickly adopt uniform labor processes and profit rates.

The existence of a “dual economy” with two distinct average rates of profit, has been the subject of debate since the 1970s. As the higher-than-average profit rates enjoyed by “oligopolistic” or monopoly industries became lower-than-average profits in the mid-1960s, a series of statistical studies of the relationship between industrial concentration and profit rate differentials challenged the notion of stable profit rate differentials. In the early 1980s, Willi Semmler reviewed the existing literature on industrial concentration and profit rate differentials, carrying out his own statistical analysis for the US and West German economies since the second world war.⁴⁹

Not only did he find a weak correlation between profit rate differentials and industrial concentration, but there was a clear tendency for profit rate equalization across the capitalist economy when the timeframe was expanded from 1945 to 1970 to the early 1980s. A decade later, Botwinick’s review of the literature found that the highly concentrated, capital-intensive industries that experienced higher-than-average profits prior to 1970 were experiencing lower-than-average profits in the 1970s and 1980s.⁵⁰

Shaikh has done the most extensive research on this question, demonstrating the equalization around a single profit rate on the “regulating capitals” across all industries, both capital- and labor-intensive.⁵¹ The longer turnover time of fixed investments in heavy industries requires a lengthier period of “fat and lean” years than in labor-intensive industries, resulting in years of both higher- and lower-than-average profits in this sector, thus generating the appearance of a “dual economy.” However, all industries turbulently equalize around a single average rate of profit. Put simply, real competition characterizes the relationship among all capitals, regardless of their level of industrial concentration or organic composition of capital.

Real Competition and Imperialism

Most radicals and Marxists mistakenly equate competition with neoclassical economics’ notion of perfect competition where a large number of “price taking” small firms allow the instantaneous mobility of capital between branches of production, uniform technology, equal profit rates, and wages. Any deviation is oligopoly, a form of “imperfect competition” that creates obstacles to capital mobility, different techniques, and higher-than-average profits and wages. Perfect competition is an ideological construction, it idealizes capitalist competition as the basis for an efficient and just economic order.

Real capitalist competition, from the birth of capitalism in sixteenth century English agriculture to contemporary transnational corporations, has never resembled perfect competition. Capitalist competition involves constant technological innovation, taking the form of the increasing mechanization of production. Older investments in fixed capital, even if they no longer allow a particular firm to reduce unit costs and raise its profit margins and rates, cannot be abandoned immediately in favor of new and more efficient machinery. As a result, competition and accumulation do not homogenize labor processes, rates of profit, and wages, but constantly differentiate these conditions of production.

Smith’s claim that Shaikh and others who explain imperialism through global real competition leads them to “dismiss facts not consistent with their theory, namely the imperialist division of the world into dominant and subject nations with divergent rates of exploitation” is false.⁵² Unlike the dreamworld of perfect competition, which produces uniform and mutually beneficial outcomes for all participants, real competition is “antagonistic by nature and turbulent in nature,” and “it is as different from so-called perfect competition as war is from ballet.”⁵³ Capitalists in the core of the world economy have long enjoyed productive superiority and lower cost-per-unit output than most of their competitors in the periphery.

Capitalists in the Global South struggle “to exploit their workers in peace” but “find themselves beset by foreign devils: first their industries are ruined by cheap imports, and then those that survive are taken over by foreign capital.”⁵⁴ The Global North’s lower costs of production lead to the creation and replication of South’s chronic trade deficits and debt. Armed with superior reserves of profits and access to credit as a result of the competition-driven concentration and centralization of capital, northern capitalists constantly deepen their economic dominance over the Global South.

'Free trade'—real capitalist competition—creates and reproduces the division between the Global North and South, while sharpening class antagonisms within both zones.

At the same time, real competition increases the size of the reserve army of labor, particularly in the Global South, forcing capitalists in the periphery to specialize in labor-intensive production for the domestic and world market. Put simply, “free trade”—real capitalist competition—creates and reproduces the division between the Global North and South, while sharpening class antagonisms within both zones of the capitalist world economy.

Profit-driven real capitalist competition also provides a rigorous explanation of the origins of imperialism as the internationalization of capitalist production and competition, and the relationship between imperialist economic and political-military competition.⁵⁵ Marx, in Capital III, identifies three ways the expansion of foreign trade and investment mobilizes countertendencies to the tendency of the average rate of profit to fall, as a result of real competition and a rising average organic composition of capital.⁵⁶

First, the production and trade in relatively inexpensive raw materials and consumer goods “cheapens the elements of constant capital and … variable capital,” raising “the rate of profit by raising the rate of surplus-value and reducing the value of constant capital,” while expanding markets for capitalist-produced commodities.⁵⁷ Second, Marx pointed to the value transfers that accompany the equalization of the global rate of profit augmenting the mass of profits in the more developed capitalist economies (unequal exchange). Finally, the rate of profit in the less developed regions is higher because of their lower organic composition of capital in the periphery.

Although rarely discussed in most early twentieth century analyses of imperialism (Lenin, Bukharin, Luxemburg, Kautsky), the global expansion of capitalist social relations of production from the 1890s to the first world war was one of the key elements (alongside a slow devalorization of inefficient fixed capital and a rapid rise in the rate of exploitation in the developed capitalist economies) ending the Long Depression of the 1870s and 1880s.⁵⁸ The continued importance of imperialist investment and trade in raising profitability in the core of the world economy can be seen today.

First, as Kim Moody and David McNally point out, the creation of global supply chains since the early 1980s significantly lowered the cost of the circulating elements of fixed capital and key consumer goods in the Global North, cheapening both constant and variable capital and raising profitability before 2008.⁵⁹ Second, there is strong evidence that profits earned abroad or accrued through unequal exchange as a proportion of total profits for US capital rises sharply when domestic profits fall.⁶⁰ Finally, an understanding of imperialism rooted in real competition and profitability is crucial to unravelling the vexing question of the relationship between capitalist economic competition and capitalist state political military rivalry.

For Lenin and Bukharin, the relationship was simple and direct: imperialism (export of capital, monopoly, finance capital) led inevitably to the political-territorial division of the world into colonial empires and “spheres of influence.” Bukharin argued that imperialism saw an historic shift toward the fusion of state and capital into militarily competitive “state capitalist trusts.”⁶¹

These formulations have faced a number of criticisms. First, imperialist domination of the world economy survived the destruction of colonial empires and the growth of international trade liberalization after World War II.⁶² Second, the notion of a “fusion” of state and capital in the form of “state capitalist trusts” opened the door, in particular in the Stalinized Communist Parties of the 1960s to a theory of “state monopoly capital” in which capitalist state regulation could dampen the business cycles and prevent a generalized crisis of profitability.⁶³ Not surprisingly, such theories were progressively challenged in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the capitalist world economy entered its first global crisis since the 1930s.⁶⁴

Finally, the rise of neoliberalism and the removal of most capitalist state regulation of capitalist competition and accumulation have laid bare the continued relative autonomy of the capitalist state from the capitalist class, contrary to claims of a “fusion” of state and capital.⁶⁵ The theoretical and empirical impasse of the Lenin–Bukharin analysis has led many Marxists, in particular David Harvey and Alex Callinicos, to eschew any attempt to analyze the relationship of market competition and political-military rivalry, viewing them as “dual dynamics” with a high degree of autonomy.⁶⁶

Joaquim Hirsch’s essay, “The State Apparatus and Social Reproduction: Elements of a Theory of the Capitalist State,” a contribution to the German “state derivationist” debate of the 1960s and early 1970s, provides elements of an alternative analysis of economics and politics of imperialism.⁶⁷ Hirsch argued that the capitalist state was a “public power” separate from the private sphere of exploitation and accumulation. This separation was rooted in the operation of the law of value—the reproduction of capitalism through accumulation and real competition, rather than political-juridical compulsion.

This institutional separation of state and capital defined the scope and limits of state regulation to the mobilization of the countertendencies to the falling rate of profit, which might delay but not prevent general crises of profitability. As we have seen, imperialist trade and investment in the Global South is a key countertendency to generalized crises of profitability. Capitalist economic competition is an emergent property of multiple capitals seeking their self-expansion in conflict with other capitals.

The efforts of multiple capitalist states to open different parts of the Global South to their “own” transnational capital’s trade and investment comes in conflict with the efforts of other national capitalist states to secure access for “their” transnationals. Particularly in periods of stagnant and declining profitability and exacerbated market competition, these state policies create the conditions for political-military rivalry among imperialist powers.

Whither China?

There is little doubt that China has experienced rapid economic growth and a growing role in the world economy over the past four decades. China’s share of global GDP jumped from 1.3 percent in 1980 to 15.3 percent in 2020. Its share of world exports increased from 1.2 percent in 1990 to 12.8 percent in 2020; and its share of global foreign direct investment increased from a 1999 low of 2.7 percent to a high of 26.5 percent in 2019.⁶⁸ While many Marxists see this growth as evidence of China’s transition to becoming an imperialist power in its own right since the Communist Party-led restoration of capitalism that began in the 1990s, Smith and Carchedi and Roberts reject this claim.⁶⁹ Smith discounts data on Chinese GDP growth which excludes:

externalities—for instance, the pollution of all its major river system and 80% of its groundwater, heavy metal contamination of vast swathes of farmland, its poisonous levels of air pollution—[when they] are taken into account, it is highly questionable whether China has experienced any development at all.⁷⁰

Carchedi and Roberts point to the continued transfer of surplus value from China to the Global North, “averaging 5–10% of Chinese GDP since the 1990s,” and “China’s average productivity level is still less than 25% of that of the US.”⁷¹ King argues that China’s economic growth in the twenty-first century has yet to challenge the imperialist monopoly of “complex, sophisticated and difficult types of labor,” blocked by WTO rules banning subsidies to state industries, opening it to foreign investment and trade, and protecting the “intellectual property” of transnational corporations in the core of the world economy. Chinese industries are competitive in a limited series of industries, few of which require levels of imperialist capital’s capital-intensity and technical sophistication.⁷²

Each of these arguments is problematic. First, Smith’s claim that environmental destruction cancels any economic growth in China would make sense if China’s growth was governed by the logic of a democratically planned economy—a noncapitalist logic. In reality, environmental destruction is a necessary consequence of capitalist economic growth throughout its history.⁷³ China is no exception.

Carchedi’s and Roberts’s claims of lower labor productivity and continued unequal exchange at China’s expense are also open to challenge. China’s lower average labor productivity compared to the US may be the result of the weight of China’s still large, labor-intensive export sector (garments, shoes/boots, and low-end electronics and parts for other manufacturers) in this average. It remains unclear, however, whether Chinese producers are closing the gap in labor productivity in more capital-intensive branches of production. Carchedi and Roberts point to possible gains in these industries, as the Chinese technical composition of capital (capital stock/employees) has increased five-fold, from around 5 percent in 2000 to nearly 25 percent in 2019.⁷⁴

Nor is the continued but declining drain of surplus value through unequal exchange or the limit of China’s current competitive dominance to certain “intermediary” branches of production necessarily indicative of a permanently subordinate position in the capitalist world economy. The position of mid-nineteenth century “late developers” in the capitalist world economy—the US, Japan, and Germany—was not dissimilar.

Agricultural and forestry goods dominated US exports from after the US Civil War to the eve of World War I, constituting 85 percent of the value of exports from 1869 to 1878, and accounting for over 58 percent between 1904 and 1913. Manufacturing exports grew but remained only 27.5 percent of the total in the latter period. Nearly one-third of the value of US manufacturing exports remained “semi-manufacturers”—inputs for other industries—in the decade before the first world war.⁷⁵ While US agriculture was more capital-intensive and productive than its other capitalist rivals, productivity levels were still relatively low compared to the industries which produced US imports, resulting in a continued flow of surplus value out of the US economy.

The Chinese party-state has been able to simultaneously shield their state and publicly owned producers from the impact of real competition, while ensuring their international competitiveness in some branches of production.

As in the case of all so-called “late developers” in the Global North, the only road open to capital in the Global South is to violate the rules of “free trade” through capitalist state intervention that both protects themselves from foreign competition, while ensuring these capitalists become “internationally competitive producers.”⁷⁶. The Chinese party-state has been able to simultaneously shield their state and publicly owned producers from the impact of real competition, while ensuring their international competitiveness in some branches of production.

Alone among the bureaucratic ruling classes, the Chinese party-state was able to avoid “shock therapy”—a sudden adjustment of prices to world market levels—and the wholesale collapse of their state-owned industrial base during market reforms of the 1980s and 1990s.⁷⁷ Unlike in much of Eastern Europe, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank had little leverage over the Chinese bureaucracy, which had avoided financing economic development with foreign credit.⁷⁸

While initially willing to serve as an export platform for foreign capital, the Chinese party-state made a significant shift in economic orientation in the first decade of this century. The Chinese ruling class has systematically protected and subsidized key state and joint ventures in infrastructure construction, solar panels, wind turbines, and certain pharmaceutical and electronic goods which are now becoming globally competitive.⁷⁹ While Chinese spending on research and development as a percentage of GDP remains lower than that of capitalist states in the Global North, total Chinese spending on research and development was second only to the US in 2019.⁸⁰

The Chinese party-state has also systematically and successfully violated the “intellectual property” rights of foreign capital, reverse engineering and later improving on their techniques in a number of industries.⁸¹ Whether the new Chinese capitalist class can successfully challenge the established imperialist capitals in telecommunications, railroad construction, electrical power equipment, robotics, high-end automation, and new energy vehicles is not guaranteed. However, Chinese capital has emerged as a potentially powerful imperial competitor in the twenty-first century whose continued rise will require even more brutal exploitation and oppression of its working classes.

Notes & References

I would like to thank Anwar Shaikh, Howard Botwinick, and Ahmet Tonak for their willingness to answer an endless stream of questions from this non-economist. Special thanks to Ahmet Tonak, Zachary Levenson, and Ashley Smith for suggestions on an earlier version of this article.
World Bank, Globalization, Growth and Poverty: Building an Inclusive World Economy, Policy Research Report (December 2002), http://hdl.handle.net/10986/14051.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
David Harvey, The New Imperialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London: Verso, 2003).
Alex Callinicos, Imperialism and Global Political Economy (New York: Wiley, 2009).
John Smith, Imperialism in the 21^st Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation and Capitalism’s Final Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016); Sam King, Imperialism and the Development Myth: How Rich Countries Dominate in the 21^st Century (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2021); Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts, “The Economics of Modern Imperialism,” Historical Materialism 29 no. 4 (2021): 23–69.
Smith, Imperialism in the 21^st Century, chpts. 7–8.
King, Imperialism and the Development Myth, chpts. 7–10.
For a detailed critique of the notion of a “labor aristocracy” sharing the benefits of imperialism with their own capitalists, see Charles Post, “Exploring Working-Class Consciousness: A Critique of the Theory of the ‘Labor-Aristocracy,’” Historical Materialism 18, no. 4 (2010): 3–38.
My arguments are based in the work of Anwar Shaikh, in particular his Capitalism: Competition, Conflict, Crises (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
My arguments bear a superficial similarity to the arguments of Vivek Chibber in “To Fight Imperialism Abroad, Build Class Struggle at Home” Jacobin (October 16, 2022). While I share a rejection of the notions of “monopoly capital” and the “labor aristocracy,” I reject Chibber’s assertion that imperialism is not rooted in the reproduction of capitalist social relations.
Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981), Part Two.
Henryk Grossman, The Law of Accumulation and Breakdown of the Capitalist System: Being Also a Theory of Crisis (London: Pluto Press, 1992). Marx makes a similar argument in Capital, vol. 3, 344–45.
Both Emmanuel, and Carchedi and Roberts argue that differences in the rate of surplus value—the rate of exploitation—between the Global North and South contribute to value transfers.
Carchedi and Roberts, “Economics,” 32–33.
They present their data on pp. 47–51.
Carchedi and Roberts, “Economics,” 47.
As I argue below, the importance of imperialist investment in, and trade with the Global South increases during period of global crisis, when the South’s lower capital-intensity and higher profit rates provide an important countertendency to the falling rate of profit.
Carchedi and Roberts, “Economics,” 48.
E. Ahmet Tonak, “Moribund Competitive Capitalism” in The Veins of the South Are Still Open: Debates Around the Imperialism of Our Time, E. Lopez, ed. (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2020), 79.
Anwar Shaikh, “Foreign Trade and the Law of Value,” Part II, Science & Society 44, no.1 (Spring 1980): 49.
Carchedi and Roberts, “Economics,” 43.
Tonak, “Moribund,” 79.
Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 430–31.
Smith, Imperialism in the 21^st Century, chpt. 5.
Ibid., 200. Smith does recognize that factors other than low wages determine the location of capitalist investment. However, he insists that low wages are the primary driver of the creation of global supply chains. Tonak, “Moribund,” 81–83, cites studies based on interviews with executives of transnational corporations who identify other factors—political stability, large domestic markets in the periphery, the legal and regulatory environment, lower taxes, and so on—as more important in determining the location of their foreign direct investment than low wages. Tonak cites David Gordon, “The Global Economy: New Edifice or Crumbling Foundations?” New Left Review 1, no. 168 (March–April 1988): 24–64; World Bank, Global Investment Competitiveness Report 2017/2018: Foreign Investor Perspectives and Policy Implications(Washington DC: World Bank, 2018).
Smith, Imperialism in the 21^st Century, 238.
“From a Marxist point of view, total labor hours should include only productive workers’ hours. Unfortunately, even most Marxists ignore this adjustment and adopt the mainstream notion of labor productivity” (Tonak to author, personal email, July 6, 2022).
Smith, Imperialism in the 21^st Century, 174–75. Carchedi and Roberts make a similar argument when they urge Marxists economists to adjust rates of surplus value—“surplus value divided by variable capital”—to account for unequal exchange. They claim that “exploitation is underestimated in the countries with a negative unequal exchange … and overestimated in the countries with a positive unequal exchange” (“Economics,” 43).
Howard Botwinick, Persistent Inequalities: Wage Disparity Under Capitalist Competition (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), Chpt. 3. Botwinick also challenges claims that “free mobility” of labor within a nation produces uniform rates of exploitation, while obstacles to “free mobility” between nations produces differential rates of exploitation. As Botwinick points out, the constant reproduction of the reserve army, in both the Global North and South, constantly differentiates levels of capital-intensity, rates of exploitation, and wages both within and between nations. It is indisputable that wages, on average, are lower in the Global South, and there are indications of higher-than-average rates of exploitation in parts of the South. However, these are primarily the product of the relative and absolute size of the reserve army in the Global South, which legal–juridical obstacles to the global mobility of labor exacerbate but do not create.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 702. Shaikh makes a similar point in his article on the “Organic Composition of Capital” in The New Palgrave: Marxian Economics, J. Eatwell, M. Milgate and P. Newman, eds. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990), 306.
Tonak, “Moribund,” 85.
Smith, Imperialism in the 21^st Century, 234.
Tonak, “Moribund,” 88–89.
Shaikh and Tonak, Measuring the Wealth of Nations: The Political Economy of National Accounts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also Tonak, “Moribund,” n. 31.
Simon Mohun, “On Measuring the Wealth of Nations: The US Economy, 1964–2001” Cambridge Journal of Economics 29, no. 5 (2005): 799–815.
Kim Moody, “Productivity, Crises and Imports in the Loss of Manufacturing Jobs,” Capital & Class 44, no. 1 (2020): 47–61; Moody, On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), chpt. 1 and appendix A.
Roberts, “Imperialism and Super-Exploitation: A Review of Imperialism in the 21^st Century,” The Next Recession (March 7, 2016).
Tonak, “Moribund,” 87.
Roberts, “Imperialism.” Similar patterns of precarious employment, falling real wages and the reorganization of the reproduction of labor power is documented in Moody, On New Terrain, chpt. 3 and appendix C.
Ranaa Vasudevan, “The Global Class War,” Catalyst 4, no.7 (2020): 131. The author presents data on global labor share in Figure 6, p. 130.
Smith, alone among the texts reviewed here, rejects monopoly as central to imperialism, arguing “the source of imperialist profits and imperial rents is not to be found in any form of monopoly but in super-exploitation” (Imperialism in the 21^st Century, 230). Roberts embraces King’s attempt to reconcile notions of monopoly with capitalist competition in his forward to King’s Imperialism and the Development Myth.
King, Imperialism and the Development Myth, 4–6.
Paul A. Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).
King, Imperialism and the Development Myth, chpt. 8.
Mandel, Late Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1976), 95. Mandel acknowledges that this notion of a “dual economy” (monopoly/oligopoly v. competitive) is drawn from the work of two Keynesian economists, E.M. Chamberlain, The Theory of Monopolistic Competition (London: MacMillan, 1933) and Joan Robinson, Economics of Imperfect Competition (London: MacMillan, 1933). See also the collection of essays edited by Chamberlain, Monopoly and Competition and Their Regulation: Papers and Proceedings of a Conference Held by the International Economic Association (London: MacMillan, 1954).
King, Imperialism and the Development Myth, 173–77.
Willi Semmler, Competition, Monopoly, and Differential Profit Rates (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
Botwinick, Persistent Inequalities, 172–89, 191–97.
Shaikh, Capitalism, 295–313.
Smith, Imperialism in the 21^st Century, 229.
Shaikh, Capitalism, 14. What follows is drawn from Shaikh, “Foreign Trade,” 38–45; Shaikh, “On the Laws of International Exchange” in Growth, Profits and Property, E.J. Nell, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 211–12, 217–30; Shaikh, “The Economic Mythology of Neoliberalism” in Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader, A. Saad-Filho, ed. (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 41–49; Tonak, “Moribund,” 74–78, 91–92.
Shaikh, “Foreign Trade,” 45.
As Roberts points out in “Imperialism,” most of the recent contributions to the debate are silent on the role of crises of profitability in the origins and reproduction of imperialism. The exception is Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), which argues for the importance of peasant-produced, cheap tropical goods exported from the Global South to North. David Harvey, in his “Commentary” in A Theory of Imperialism effectively criticizes this claim, pointing to the capitalization of the bulk of agricultural export industries in the periphery under neoliberalism.
Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 344–47.
Ibid., 344.
Mandel, Late Capitalism, 82–83; Michael Roberts, The Long Depression: How It Happened, and What Happens Next? (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), chpt. 2.
Moody, Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy (London: Verso, 1997), chpts, 2–4; McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), 40–41, 128–130.
See data in Post, “Exploring,” 19–23; and Carchedi and Roberts in note 16 above.
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), Marxist Internet Archive (2001); Nikolai Bukharin, Imperialism and the World Economy (1915 and 1917), Marxist Internet Archive, (2001).
Michael Kidron, “Imperialism: Highest Stage But One,” International Socialism Journal 1, no.9 (Summer 1962); Wood, Empire of Capital, chpt. 6.
For an overview of this literature, see John Fairley, “French Developments in the Theory of State Monopoly Capitalism,” Science & Society 44, no. 3 (Fall 1980): 305–25.
See the essays collected in J. Holloway and S. Picciotto, eds., State and Capital: A Marxist Debate(London: Edward Arnold, Ltd., 1978).
K. Moody, “Alex Callinicos on State and Capital,” Against the Current 2, no. 52 (October 1994) and “A Reply to Callinicos on the State and Capital,” Against the Current 2, no. 56 (May–June 1995).
Harvey, The New Imperialism; Callinicos, Imperialism and Global Political Economy.
In Holloway and Picciotto, eds., State and Capital, chpt. 5.
All data from “China Economic Indicators,” TheGlobalEconomy.com.
Callinicos, Imperialism and Global Political Economy. In a series of blog posts (“China: Xi’s Third Term,” The Next Recession [October 16–18, 2022]), Roberts has gone as far as to argue that the dominance of the state sector makes China a noncapitalist economy. Despite the dominance of “State-Owned Enterprises,” China may be considered capitalist because these state-owned firms are subject to global market competition.
Smith, Imperialism in the 21^st Century, 257.
Carchedi and Roberts, “Economics,” 55, 59.
King, Imperialism and the Development Myth, 4, 221–23, 243–46.
John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000); Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso Books, 2017).
Carchedi and Roberts, “Economics,” 60.
Robert E. Lipsey, “US Foreign Trade and The Balance of Payments, 1800–1913,” NBER Working Papers Series, 4710 (April 1994), 22, 24.
Shaikh, Capitalism, 760. See Vivek Chibber, Locked in Place: State-Building and Late Industrialization in India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003) for a discussion of the success of state protection and subsidies in South Korea and their failure in India after World War II.
Isabella M. Weber, How China Escaped Shock Therapy (New York: Routledge, 2021).
Despite its theoretical confusion on capitalism’s dynamics, “What Chinese Capitalists Owe to Mao Zedong: An Interview with Ho-Fung Hung,” Jacobin (July 30, 2022) makes this point effectively.
A fact recognized by Smith, Imperialism in the 21^st Century, 84–86. Despite his attempt to uncritically use Lenin’s theory of imperialism, Ho-fung Hung’s Class of Empires: From “Chimerica” to the “New Cold War”(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022), chpt. 3, presents a clear account of the growing competitiveness of Chinese firms in some branches of the global economy.
OECD, “Gross Domestic Spending on Research & Development,” OECD Data, https://data.oecd.org/rd/gross-domestic-spending-on-r-d.htm.
Wayne M. Morrison, “China’s Economic Rise: History, Tends, Challenges, and Implications for the United States,” Congressional Research Service (February 6, 2018).

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