Such a struggle did not have to concentrate on investing in foreign countries. It could turn into something else: the effort to wrest from other countries already industrialised areas or sources of important raw materials by force. As Bukharin put it, "The further it [imperialism] develops the more it will become a struggle for the capitalist centres as well" .45
It was necessary, in other words, to turn vast amounts of value into means of destruction-not only in order to try to obtain more value but to hold onto that already possessed. This was the logic of the capitalist market applied to the relations between states. Each had to invest in preparations for war in order not to lose out as the other invested more, just as each capital had to invest in new means of production so as to hold its own in market competition. "Imperialist policies" were "nothing but the reproduction of the competitive struggle on a worldwide scale," with "state capitalist trusts", not individual firms, "the subjects of competition" . The "explosions of war" were a result of "the contradiction between the productive forces of the world economy and the 'nationally' limited methods of appropriation of the bourgeoisie separated by states" .46 In other words, just as competition between capitals (and with it the free operation of the law of value) was reduced within states, it operated on an ever more ferocious scale between them.
Rosa Luxemburg: imperialism and the collapse of capitalism
Lenin and Bukharin were not the only Marxist opponents of imperialism to attempt to prove that it was an essential stage of capitalism. Rosa Luxemburg also did so with a rather different theoretical analysis in her The Accumulation of Capital, published in 1913.47 It rested on what she believed to be a central contradiction within capitalism that had escaped Marx's notice.
Marx had produced tables in Volume Two of Capital showing the interrelation between accumulation and consumption. Each round of production involved using the products of the previous round, either as material inputs (machinery, raw materials, etc) or as means of consumption for the workforce. This required that the material products in one round corresponded to what was needed for production to proceed at the next round. It was not merely a question of the right amounts of value passing from one round to the next, but also of the right sorts of use values-such and such quantities of raw materials, new machinery, factory building, etc, and such and such quantities of food, clothing, etc, for the workforce {plus luxury goods for the capitalists themselves). Rosa Luxemburg, in examining Marx's tables, came to the conclusion that discrepancies were bound to arise between the distribution of value from one round to another and the distribution of the use values needed to expand production. More consumer goods would be produced than could be bought with the wages paid out to workers or more investment goods than could be paid for out of profits. In other words, the system inevitably produced an excess of goods for which there was no market within it. Overproduction was not just a phase in the boom-slump cycle, but endemic. Conceived of as a closed system, in which all the outputs of one round of production had to be absorbed as inputs in later rounds, capitalism was doomed to tend towards a complete breakdown.
Beyond Marx: Monopoly, War and the State
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