Capitalism makes great power war inevitable- states have to expand to get access to markets, and uneven development means power is constantly shifting

If the United States remains the command centre of global capitalism, a multiplicity of crises has been flashing up on its screens in the past few months. Let’s consider them in ascending order of importance from the perspective of US decision makers. First, there was Israel’s latest war on Gaza—not a crisis for Washington, more the kind of violent outburst through which a kind of equilibrium is re-established, but for growing numbers of people around the world an outrage and a crime. Secondly, there was the war—now halted by an uneasy ceasefire—between the pro-Western government in Kiev and Russian-backed forces in south eastern Ukraine. Thirdly, there is the US bombing campaign to halt the advance of the jihadi group that calls itself the Islamic State, but which we will continue to call ISIS, in Iraq and Syria. And, finally—not yet a crisis, but potentially the most serious conflict—there’s the increasingly intense interstate competition in East Asia in response to China’s growing power.1 One interesting thing about this list is that two of the items—the war in Ukraine and the rise of ISIS—wouldn’t have figured in anyone’s predictions at the beginning of 2014. This is a sign of the volatility of the international situation, which is a consequence of power shifts among the leading capitalist states. But it’s also quite frightening. Christopher Clark in his influential recent book on the outbreak of the First World War argues that, despite the polarisation of Europe into two rival power blocs, in the summer of 1914 “the danger of a conflict between the great alliance blocs seemed to be receding, just as the chain of events that would ultimately drag Europe into war got underway”.2 War can take even the greatest powers by surprise, as we can see now in Barack Obama’s reluctant redeployment of US military power in Iraq. But for many on the left internationally this reluctance is feigned. For them, the unifying theme in these different crises is the assertion of American power to maintain and even expand Washington’s global domination, in the process pulverising states such as Iraq, Syria and Ukraine. This diagnosis often dovetails into a revival of what was called “campism” during the Cold War—that is, political support for states that, because they resist the US geopolitically, are seen as in some sense progressive. The Ukraine war has, as Rob Ferguson discusses elsewhere in this issue, been accompanied by an outburst of campism, with the highly respected Russian Marxist Boris Kagarlitsky going so far as to claim about the Russian-backed forces in south eastern Ukraine: “What is happening in Novorossiya is a revolutionary movement, though it’s not yet a revolution in terms of social change”.3 In the Middle East campism takes the form of support for the alliance orchestrated by the Islamic Republican regime in Iran, including notably the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Hizbollah, the Shiite Islamist movement that dominates Lebanon. More generally, many on the left look to Russia and China as counterweights to the US. The problem with this complex of ideas is simultaneously factual, theoretical and political. We’ll return to the politics. Factually: the US has often harboured expansionist designs. This was true in broad terms after the Cold War, when successive administrations sought, by exporting neoliberalism and expanding NATO, to create a global order economically and politically dominated by the US.4 And, more specifically, the administration of George W Bush in the neocons’ heyday after 9/11 sought to seize Iraq in order to entrench US domination of the Middle East, topple hostile regimes in Syria and Iran, and spread bourgeois democracy neoliberal style to the Arab world.5 But the Middle East today is shaped above all by the failure of this vainglorious project and by the Arab revolutions and the reactionary attempts to crush them. The Obama administration is profoundly conscious of this. This doesn’t mean that it won’t inflict more evils on the region, or collude in them (for example through its support for Israel), but, as we will see in more detail below, its current aims are primarily defensive. Understanding imperialism today The problem is also theoretical. For much of the left imperialism is equated with US domination. But this is not how it was understood by the classical theorists of imperialism—and not because they were writing a hundred years ago, long before the onset of American hegemony. For them, imperialism had two crucial features. First of all, it involved a system of geopolitical rivalries among the Great Powers. As the Liberal J A Hobson (a major influence on Lenin) put it, “the novelty of recent imperialism regarded as a policy consists chiefly in its adoption by several nations. The notion of a number of competing empires is essentially modern”.6 Secondly, the emergence of these rivalries was a consequence of a specific phase of capitalist development, as Lenin underlines in his pamphlet Imperialism. The concentration and centralisation of capital that Marx identifies in Capital, Volume I as one of the main tendencies arising from the capitalist accumulation process led by the beginning of the 20th century to the intersection of economic and geopolitical competition. Capitals, increasingly large in scale and operating internationally, came to depend on the support of their nation state to defend their interests; equally, to maintain themselves against their rivals, states had to promote the industrial capitalist economies that alone could provide complex modern weapons systems and the infrastructure of war. The growing interdependence of states and capitals gave rise to the intensification of geopolitical rivalries that exploded into world war in August 1914 and that produced a second bout of carnage in 1939-45.7 So from a Marxist perspective, modern imperialism is a system of intercapitalist competition and rivalry. Lenin’s key contribution to the theory was the concept of uneven development. Capitalism doesn’t grow uniformly: some states and regions leap ahead; others lag behind. This unevenness defines the hierarchy of power in the world. But, crucially, the uneven development of capitalism redistributes power among the leading states. This means that the balance of power is constantly shifting, creating the circumstances of new conflicts. The key geopolitical development in the first half of the 20th century was the shift in relative power between Britain, hitherto the dominant capitalist state, and the US and Germany; today another shift in relative power is taking place between the US and China. Changes of this nature, Lenin insisted, make the peaceful transnational integration of capitals that Karl Kautsky called “ultra-imperialism” and Michael Hardt and Toni Negri have more recently named “Empire” impossible: the redistribution of power among states undermines the deals that would be needed to make such integration work.8