Introduction: The economic function of imperialism

Among the several simplifying assumptions which underlie Marx’s analysis of the reproduction process is the assumption that the capitalist mechanism is an isolated entity without any external relationships: ‘The involvement of foreign commerce in analysing the annually reproduced value of products can ... only confuse without contributing any new element of the problem, or of its solution. For this reason it must be entirely discarded’ (Marx, 1956, p. 474).

Yet Marx himself repeatedly underlined the colossal importance of foreign trade to the development of capitalism; in 1859 he proposed a six-book structure for his investigations of the capitalist economy and intended the ‘world market’ to be one of the six. Although the structure of the work was later changed, its object of inquiry remained basically the same. In Capital we find the ‘creation of the world market’ listed as one of the ‘three cardinal facts of capitalist production’ (1956, p. 266). Elsewhere Marx writes: ‘Capitalist production does not exist at all without foreign commerce’ (1956, p. 474). And:

it is only foreign trade, the development of the market to a world market, which causes money to develop into world money and abstract labour into social labour ... Capitalist production rests on the value or the transformation of the labour embodied in the products into social labour. But this is only [possible] on the basis of foreign trade and of the world market. This is at once the precondition and the result of capitalist production. (Marx, 1972, p. 253)

So what scientific value can there be in a theoretical system which abstracts from the decisively important factor of foreign trade?

People have tried to escape the problem by postulating a gap in Marx’s system; they have argued that after all Capital is an unfinished work. Thus A Parvus argues that the founders of scientific socialism ‘died much too early’ (1901, p. 587) to leave us any analysis of trade policy. Recently A Meusel has argued that Marx was naturally less interested in problems of foreign trade because the only significant foreign trade controversy which he lived to see, the struggle for the abolition of the Corn Laws, appeared to be a conflict between the landed aristocracy and the industrial middle class; ‘it was easy to suppose that the working class had no immediate strong interests of its own in policies relating to foreign trade’ (Meusel, 1928, p. 79). This distortion explains why Meusel cannot grasp the tremendous importance of foreign trade in Marx’s work, even though this is repeatedly and emphatically drawn out in Capital and Theories of Surplus Value. Luxemburg also starts from the conception that Marx ignored foreign trade in his system, that ‘he himself explicitly states time and again that he aims at presenting the process of accumulation of the aggregate capital in a society consisting solely of capitalists and workers’ (1968, pp. 330—1). Luxemburg could only explain this by postulating a gap in Marx’s work, supposedly due to the fact that ‘this second volume [of Capital] is not a finished whole but a manuscript that stops short half way through’ (pp. 165-6). Luxemburg then constructs a theory to fill in the so-called gap. This may be a convenient way of disposing of theoretical problems but it shatters the underlying unity of the system and creates a hundred new problems.

What Luxemburg sees as a gap in Marx’s system is transformed by Sternberg into its basic limitation. Marx turns out to be a builder of completely abstract systems which were bound to lead to untenable conclusions insofar as they ignored the basic aspects of reality. He says that ‘Marx analysed capitalism on an assumption that has never corresponded with reality, namely that there is no non-capitalist sector’ (1926, p. 303). Whereas Luxemburg at least regarded Marx’s whole system as a solid achievement of theory, Sternberg informs us that the whole system is a delapidated structure. He states that Luxemburg ‘broke off too soon’ in her demolition of Marx’s system. She ‘failed to see that every stone of the structure is affected by the fact of the existence of a non-capitalist sector, not only the accumulation of capital but crisis, the industrial reserve army, wages, the workers’ movement and, above all, the revolution’ (p. 9). So all these basic questions of Marxist theory are tackled incorrectly because Marx built his system on the unproven and improbable assumption that there are no non-capitalist countries.

The grotesque character of this entire exposition is obvious. It is the product of a whole generation of theoreticians who go straight for results without any philosophical background, without bothering to ask by what methodological means were those results established and what significance do they contain within the total structure of the system. Sternberg writes a book of over 600 pages simply to register the observation that Marx described only pure capitalism, isolated from external trade relations. Because Marx never ordered the various passages dealing with foreign trade under capitalism into a single, structured chapter, these passages are totally ignored. This is a sad proof of the decline of the capacity to think theoretically.