What Is Imperialism?

War is no accident of personality. That’s why world powers like the US or former world powers like Britain have gone to war under Republican, Democrat, Tory and Labour governments.

That’s not to say accidents of personality play no role in history. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand acted as a trigger for the First World War but the key players were already growling at each other and waiting for an excuse to fight.

Capitalism is an unplanned system based on corporate competition between millions of companies across the world. But this unplanned system races into booms and then collapses into busts. When the recessions come the big fish buy up those who have failed and companies grow.

The world is ruled by mega-corporations. Apple alone has a market value of over $4 trillion, ahead of national economies like the Netherlands or Switzerland.

Three systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich took a database listing all 37 million capitalist companies and investors worldwide and analysed all 43,060 transnational corporations and share ownerships linking them.

They found that 147 monster corporations own 40% of all the other companies, while just 737 companies own 80% of all other companies. The top 50 include many of the world’s biggest banks, like Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank, showing the integration of finance and industrial capital reaching giant proportions.

This wouldn’t have been surprising to revolutionaries like the Russian Bolshevik Lenin. He explained that imperialism was a product of several key aspects of modern capitalism. He wrote:

“And so, without forgetting the conditional and relative value of all definitions in general, which can never embrace all the concatenations of a phenomenon in its full development, we must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features:

(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital,” of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.”

For Lenin war was a product of the fact that giant corporations, who have international tentacles, but still have a home base with a state machine that defends corporate interests, will require that home state defend their interests across the globe.

Capital, the great masses of wealth stolen from the working class, travels the globe looking for profitable outlets. But if local states won’t play ball the vultures use their economic might to demand their home state acts in their interests.

Over 40% of the world’s biggest corporations are in the USA and their state acts as a gang of pirates raiding the world in the interests of those corporations. But war also leads to rebellion.

From the 1916 Rising in Dublin to the Russian Revolution of 1917, workers have risen against war and imperialism. You cannot stop war unless to get rid of capitalism and build a democratically planned economy where corporations no longer call the shots.

Here in Ireland our role is to defend neutrality and through activism on all the key issues that hit working class people, build a radical movement that can actually challenge the Irish establishment and set an example for working people the world over.

A 32 County Socialist Republic could act as a beacon of hope in a world torn apart by competing ruling class dogs.