The concept of "imperialism" we use today when discussing the historical development of countries is so widespread that we don't even consider whether it's progressive or reactionary. Meanwhile, our modern understanding of what "imperialism" is very different from the understanding of this phenomenon by thinkers like Marx and Bakunin in the 19th century. ---- The purpose of this article is to analyze how the idea of "imperialism" and its subsequent development from Marxism fueled a social democratic vision that subtly and imperceptibly shifted the critique of capitalism toward an "anti-imperialist" struggle, reactionary to social change. Moreover, we will see how something similar would happen later, beginning in the second half of the 20th century, with concepts such as "neoliberalism," "extractivism," and "colonialism," which not only fail to enrich the anti-capitalist critiqueas the left typically calls itbut often replace it with ideas that serve as part of a reactionary worldview. After all, they contribute to the fragmentation of struggle, which, at the electoral level, benefits social democracy through class collaboration and the rejection of genuine anti-capitalism.
For Marx, the idea of "imperialism" did not refer to the colonial or economic expansion of capitalism as we understand it today, since Marx, like all radical thinkers of his time, considered these phenomena an integral part of the capitalist system itself. For Marx, the idea of imperialism was equivalent to "Bonapartism" or "Caesarism": an authoritarian regime in which executive power is concentrated in the hands of a leader acting in the general interests of the bourgeoisie, suppressing parliamentary institutions and seducing the popular classes with demagogy, without changing capitalist exploitation. Marx understood this as the highest form of bourgeois state power. In the 20th century, this concept acquired a completely different meaning.
The English economist John A. Hobson (1902) reinterpreted it as the search for new markets and investment opportunities through colonial expansion, driven by domestic underconsumption stemming from income inequality. For Hobson, imperialism was a correctable flaw of capitalism, overcome through redistribution and nationalization, without the need for revolution.
This new meaning was adoptedwith variationsby Marxists such as Parvus, Kautsky, Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg, and Lenin, who converged on the view that imperialism was a response to the internal crises of capital's reproduction, though they differed in their diagnosis of these crises. The term "imperialism" evolved from a designation of the political form of the bourgeois state to a designation of the economic dynamics of capital's global expansion, and this has since become the dominant interpretation in the collective consciousness of the left and the anarchists influenced by it.
Marx didn't need the concept of "imperialism" to describe the global expansion of capitalism, as he understood this expansion as an integral part of the system itself. Likewise, neither Bakunin, nor Kropotkin, nor Malatesta spoke of "imperialism" or used it as an analytical category. This wasn't because they were unaware of the phenomenon of capitalist expansion at the time, but because, like Marx, they understood that capitalism and the states that support it are expansionist by nature, and don't become so by accident or as a result of perversion by one of its factions.
Thus, for example, for Bakunin, "the newest state, by its very nature and purpose, is necessarily a military state, and a military state with the same necessity becomes a conquering state; if it does not conquer itself, then it will be conquered for the simple reason that where there is force, there must certainly be its manifestation or action" ("Statehood and Anarchy", 1873).
However, the idea of imperialism (and consequently its opposite, "anti-imperialism") as the main front in the left's struggle has continued to grow and expand since its formulation by Hobson. When 20th-century Marxists reconceived imperialism as a phase, a stage, a specific policy of finance or monopoly capital, they made an analytical shift with enormous political consequences: if imperialism is not capitalism itself, but one of its historical forms, then it is possible to imagine a capitalism without imperialisma "healthy," national, productive, non-monopoly capitalism. And therein lies the problem.
This rethinking opened the door to a politics of alliances that, from an anarchist perspective, can only be described as catastrophic. If the enemy is not capital as a social relation, but foreign finance capital, the imperialism of one power or another, then the national bourgeoisiewhich "produces," creates employment, and supposedly "builds the country"can be an ally. Class struggle is suspended in the name of anti-imperialist struggle. According to this logic, national workers and employers share a common enemy: foreign capital, foreign intervention, and dependence. Class collaboration is presented not as treason, but as a tactical necessity, even a patriotic duty. What anarchism condemns as the most sophisticated form of proletarian integration into the bourgeois order is presented as anti-imperialist radicalism.
This shift also has far-reaching cultural consequences: it instills nationalism at the very heart of the left and the anarchists who follow it. If imperialism is essentially defined as the domination of one nation over another, then the logical response is the affirmation of the oppressed nation. The national liberation of the "people" becomes the horizon of emancipation, and the nationthat imagined community that has always served to dissolve class solidarity into a vertical identity uniting the exploited and exploiters under a single banneracquires an almost sacred status in leftist discourse and anarchism.
From Bakunin to the anarchists of the early 20th century, there has been a constant critique of this process: nationalism, even in its "popular" or "revolutionary" version, precisely reproduces the form of domination it claims to combat, because a nation is not a population, but a state, and the state is always an apparatus of control, regardless of who governs it. Herein lies the deepest trap.
The anti-imperialist struggle, as conceptualized by Lenin and subsequent traditions, inevitably leads to the conquest of the state. If the problem lies in national dependence, the solution is a strong, sovereign nation-state capable of resisting external pressure. The party, the vanguard, the revolutionary organization strive not to dissolve power, but to seize it, to occupy the mechanism that Marxist analysis of BonapartismMarx himself, whom we quoted at the beginningdescribed as the highest form of bourgeois power. Thus, the state-controlled left inherits the apparatus it was supposed to destroy, and with it its functions: the management of exploitation, the discipline of labor, the management of accumulation. The historical experience of "real socialism," of Latin American progressive governments or national liberation fronts that seized power, illustrates this cycle with brutal clarity: anti-imperialist rhetoric coexists perfectly with the suppression of workers' autonomy, the militarization of public life, and integration into the world market under virtually the same conditions.
From an anarchist perspective, this is not a problem of individual deviations or betrayals, but a structural one: all policies aimed at seizing power reproduce the logic of power. Whether the state calls itself socialist, Bolivarian, or a state of national liberation, its function as a machine of coercion and management of capitalist relations of production does not disappear with the change of those occupying positions within it. In this sense, the concept of imperialism developed by the Marxist-Leninist tradition has not weakened capitalism, but rather weakened the critique of the state, which is the institution that guarantees and reproduces capitalism.
There's also an economic aspect to this trap that deserves attention. The demand for national industry, a domestic market, and economic sovereignty from foreign capital implies the defense of capitalist production relations as long as they are national in nature. A worker in a nationally owned factory is just as alienated and exploited as a worker in a transnational corporation. Surplus value has no passport. However, anti-imperialist policies make national propertystate or privatea value in itself, subordinating the elimination of exploitation to the assertion of sovereignty. The development of economics, state industrialism, and economic nationalism that characterized much of the 20th-century left are direct consequences of this conceptual shift.
From an anarchist perspective, the question that a critique of capitalism must address is not where capital comes from, but rather what capital is: a social relation of domination based on the appropriation of others' labor, the hierarchy of production, and the commodity-mediation of all human relations. This relation does not change with the nationality of the owner or the flag flying over the factory. A radical critique demands an attack on the relations themselves, not their national forms or historical stages. And it is precisely this critique that the concept of imperialism, in its dominant version within the left, has helped to repress, postpone, and subordinate to interim goals that ultimately proved to be the stabilization of new forms of domination.
Today, it's worth asking whether concepts like "extractivism," "colonialism," or "neoliberalism" (which might explain some characteristics of capitalist development) have become blurred in practice, becoming fetishes and mantras in leftist discourse, dissipating the focus of direct critique of capitalism and the bourgeoisie and replacing it with more limited responses that social democracies can accept in their governments and parliaments, indefinitely postponing social revolution or simply excluding it from the horizon of possibilities. This mechanism also benefits leftist elites and their collaboration with their allied national and transnational bourgeoisie.
The "anti-imperialist" trap set by the Social Democrats, and the entire discursive apparatus they subsequently developed, ultimately proved to be a very elegant mechanism for dismantling genuine anti-capitalist and revolutionary critique, and was constructed using the same language as that of the exploiter.
Pedro Peumo
Original: https://bibliotecadigitalbdela.blogspot.com/2026/05/el-imperialismo-como-parte-del.html
https://aitrus.info/node/6370
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