For Bukharin, imperialism is necessarily a form of a state capitalism, which is difficult to apply in the context of a neoliberal form of imperialism based on worldwide corporate domination. He saw countries as “state capitalist trusts” that stand in a “worldwide struggle”, resulting in a world war (Bukharin 1917, 158). “Countries are state capitalist trusts that engage in world wars for centralizing and concentrating capital in their hands” (Bukharin 1917, 120–121). Imperialism is “the expression of competition between state capitalist trusts” (Bukharin 1917, 185) and a form of “state capitalism” (Bukharin and Preobrazhensky 1920 [2007], 127). Lenin (1917, 269) in contrast wrote that “an essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between several great powers in the striving for hegemony, i.e. for the conquest of territory, not so much directly for themselves as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony”. The formulation of a competition between “great powers” is more careful than Bukharin’s concept of state capitalist trusts because it encompasses both companies and states.
For Rosa Luxemburg, imperialism is the violent geographical and geo-political expansion of the accumulation of capital:
Imperialism is the political expression of the accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle for what remains still open of the non- capitalist environment. […] With the high development of the capitalist countries and their increasingly severe competition in acquiring non-capitalist areas, imperialism grows in lawlessness and violence, both in aggression against the non-capitalist world and in ever more serious conflicts among the competing capitalist countries. But the more violently, ruthlessly and thoroughly imperialism brings about the decline of non-capitalist civilisations, the more rapidly it cuts the very ground from under the feet of capitalist accumulation. (Luxemburg 1913, 426–427)
Luxemburg argues that capital wants to globally extend capital exploitation, it wants to “mobilise world labour power without restriction in order to utilise all productive forces of the globe” (p. 343).
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Themes