How strongMarxistsstrong Have Viewed Global Capitalism in History.pdfVIP

Review of Radical Political Economics10.1177/0486613405283118 Hosseini / From/ Winter 2006Communist Manifesto to Empire From Communist Manifesto to Empire: How Marxists Have Viewed Global Capitalism in History HAMID HOSSEINI King’s College, 133 N. River Street, Wilkes-Barre, PA 18711; e-mail: hshossei@kings.edu Received January 31, 2003; accepted June 15, 2005 Abstract This article surveys the recent Marxist globalization debate and its roots in Marx’s post-1848 writings and the Lenin-Kautsky unity-rivalry debate on the eve of World War I. The post-1916 Marxist view of capitalist imperialism is contrasted with the Hardt-Negri “Leninist” view of global capitalism they call “empire.” To refute their thesis, the author analyzes the Lenin-Kautsky debate, proving that it is not empire, but Kautsky’s notion of ultraimperialism that best fits today’s global capitalism. JEL classification: F02; B14; B51 Keywords: globalization; imperialism; ultra-imperialism; empire; nation-state 1. Introduction After 1917, Marxists came to accept Lenin’s argument that, beginning with end of the nineteenth century, capitalism had entered its final stage of development. This final stage, discussed by Lenin in his celebrated (1916) pamphlet Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, was called monopoly capitalism, or imperialism. For Lenin, as discussed in section 5, imperialism is that stage of capitalist development at which, among other things, monopolies, finance capital, and export of capital have become dominant. This was the Marxist-Leninist view of capitalism until recently. In fact, even Marxist writers who ac- knowledged the new (global) developments under capitalism after World War II—develop- ments like the ris