Re: [Pen-l] Lenins Imperialism reads like it was written yesterday

["Jim Devine" <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

Louis wrote:
> Lenin had to contend with the same kind of crap in his day as well, as evident from this paragraph in chapter 3, titled "Finance Capital and the Financial Oligarchy".

>> As a matter of fact, experience shows that it is sufficient to own 40 per cent of the shares of a company in order to direct its affairs, since in practice a certain number of small, scattered shareholders find it impossible to attend general meetings, etc. The "democratisation" of the ownership of shares, from which the bourgeois sophists and opportunist so-called "Social-Democrats" expect (or say that they expect) the "democratisation of capital", the strengthening of the role and significance of small scale production, etc., is, in fact, one of the ways of increasing the power of the financial oligarchy. Incidentally, this is why, in the more advanced, or in the older and more "experienced" capitalist countries, the law allows the issue of shares of smaller denomination.<< ...  <

Lenin was wrong! the "wisdom" in business circles is that it's enough
to own about 10 or 15% of the shares.

>> Turning to chapter 4 titled "Export of Capital", I was quite surprised to learn that Lenin did not theorize imperialism as exclusively involving investments by "core" countries in the "periphery" in the standard interpretation of Maoists, for example. He did believe that the export of capital was critical to the survival of the latest stage of capitalism, but the target of that export might be just as developed as the country doing the investing. ...

> In other words, the core-periphery paradigm familiar to those who have read A.G. Frank might be true or false, but it simply cannot be extracted from Lenin's work. In a table analyzing capital flows, Lenin demonstrated that the total capital imperialist countries invested twice as much in other imperialist countries than in Africa, Asia and Australia. ...This did not undercut his main point, which was that capitalism was forced to expand beyond national borders in pursuit of profits.<

I agree that the standard interpretation of Lenin as emphasizing
"core" investment in the "periphery" is wrong. (I think it was Steve
Hymer who emphasized that core investment in the periphery is only on
the margin but that marginal matters can be very important.) However,
what makes Lenin's IMPERIALISM problematical seen from 2008 is that
we're in a completely different "stage" of imperialism. When he and
Bukharin wrote (and Lenin himself saw B's book as better), the issue
was inter-imperialist rivalry, on not just a financial or political
level but also the military level. Nowadays, it's more like the
ultra-imperialism that Kautsky wrote about -- but it doesn't stabilize
the system and is damned ugly.

My theory about A.G. Frank is that because (back when he was "Andrew")
he studied economics at the University of Chicago (and not in the biz
school), he rebelled and produced an anti-Chicago extreme: where the
Friedman boys see markets as akin to gods, for Frank they were akin to
devils, forming a gigantic hierarchy of unequal exchange on a world
scale.  NB: it's not capitalism that was the enemy to Frank, but
markets. This is just my theory: if someone knows his work better than
I do, I'm glad to be corrected.
-- 
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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