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Vladimir Lenin Imperialism As The Closure of The World Market and The End of Capitalist Free-Competition

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MJ Botor
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10 views4 pages

Vladimir Lenin Imperialism As The Closure of The World Market and The End of Capitalist Free-Competition

An article.

Uploaded by

MJ Botor
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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However, European Marxists picked up Hobson's ideas

wholeheartedly and made it into their own theory of


imperialism, most notably in Vladimir Lenin's Imperialism,
the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). Lenin
portrayed imperialism as the closure of the world market
and the end of capitalist free-competition that arose from
the need for capitalist economies to constantly expand
investment, material resources and manpower in such a way
that necessitated colonial expansion. Later Marxist
theoreticians echo this conception of imperialism as a
structural feature of capitalism, which explained the World
War as the battle between imperialists for control of
external markets. Lenin's treatise became a standard
textbook that flourished until the collapse of communism in
1989–91.[36]

Entrance of the Russian troops in Tiflis,


26 November 1799, by Franz Roubaud, 1886

The capture of Lạng Sơn during


the French conquest of Vietnam in 1885
Some theoreticians on the non-Communist left have
emphasized the structural or systemic character of
"imperialism". Such writers have expanded the period
associated with the term so that it now designates neither a
policy, nor a short space of decades in the late 19th century,
but a world system extending over a period of centuries,
often going back to Colonization and, in some accounts, to
the Crusades. As the application of the term has expanded,
its meaning has shifted along five distinct but often parallel
axes: the moral, the economic, the systemic, the cultural,
and the temporal. Those changes reflect—among other shifts
in sensibility—a growing unease, even great distaste, with
the pervasiveness of such power, specifically, Western
power.[37][33]
Walter Rodney, in his 1972 How Europe Underdeveloped
Africa, proposes the idea that imperialism is a phase of
capitalism "in which Western European capitalist countries,
the US, and Japan established political, economic, military
and cultural hegemony over other parts of the world which
were initially at a lower level and therefore could not resist
domination."[38] As a result, Imperialism "for many years
embraced the whole world – one part being the exploiters
and the other the exploited, one part being dominated and
the other acting as overlords, one part making policy and
the other being dependent."[38]
Imperialism has also been identified in newer phenomena
like space development and its governing context.[39]
Issues
[edit]
Orientalism and imaginative geography
[edit]

Napoleon visiting the plague victims of


Jaffa, by Antoine-Jean Gros
Imperial control, territorial and cultural, is justified
through discourses about the imperialists' understanding of
different spaces.[40] Conceptually, imagined
geographies explain the limitations of the imperialist
understanding of the societies of the different spaces
inhabited by the non–European Other.[40]
In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said said that the West
developed the concept of The Orient—an imagined
geography of the Eastern world—which functions as
an essentializing discourse that represents neither the
ethnic diversity nor the social reality of the Eastern world.
[41]
That by reducing the East into cultural essences, the
imperial discourse uses place-based identities to
create cultural difference and psychologic distance between
"We, the West" and "They, the East" and between "Here, in
the West" and "There, in the East".[42]
That cultural differentiation was especially noticeable in the
books and paintings of early Oriental studies, the European
examinations of the Orient, which misrepresented the East
as irrational and backward, the opposite of the rational and
progressive West.[40][43] Defining the East as a negative vision
of the Western world, as its inferior, not only increased the
sense-of-self of the West, but also was a way of ordering the
East, and making it known to the West, so that it could be
dominated and controlled.[44][45] Therefore, Orientalism was
the ideological justification of early Western imperialism—a
body of knowledge and ideas that rationalized social,
cultural, political, and economic control of other, non-white
peoples.[42][16]: 116
Cartography
[edit]
See also: Cartographic propaganda
By displaying oversized flags of British
possessions, this map artificially increases the apparent
influence and presence of the British Empire.
One of the main tools used by imperialists was
cartography. Cartography is "the art, science and technology
of making maps"[46] but this definition is problematic. It
implies that maps are objective representations of the world
when in reality they serve very political means.[46] For
Harley, maps serve as an example
of Foucault's power and knowledge concept.
To better illustrate this idea, Bassett focuses his analysis of
the role of 19th-century maps during the "Scramble for
Africa".[47] He states that maps "contributed to empire by
promoting, assisting, and legitimizing the extension of
French and British power into West Africa".[47] During his
analysis of 19th-century cartographic techniques, he
highlights the use of blank space to denote unknown or
unexplored territory.[47] This provided incentives for imperial
and colonial powers to obtain "information to fill in blank
spaces on contemporary maps".[47]

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