Lenin’s ([1917] 2011) Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism exemplifies this approach and therefore deserves attention. Lenin draws on Hobson’s ([1902] 2006) Imperialism: A Study, Hilferding’s ([1910] 1981) Finance Capital and Bukharin’s ([1917] 1929) Imperialism and World Economy to periodise capitalism. However, his approach is problematic for various reasons and not very useful in providing an understanding of the contemporary period of capitalism. First, Lenin was fixated on showing how the capitalism of his time differed from the competitive Victorian capitalism of Marx’s time. We are living in a different phase of competitive capitalist expansion and restructuring from the one Lenin wrote about. Second, Lenin placed an emphasis on the concentration and centralisation of capital as the basis for inter-imperialist rivalry among colonial empires. In the contemporary world we do not have colonial empires, but instead we have a single US superpower and a bloc of forces it leads at a global level. This also means global rivalry is driven by a new set of accumulation dynamics and conditions. The forms and practices of imperialism have a historical specificity and are distinctive. Third, Lenin’s conception of imperialism works with a teleology in which capitalism reaches an end point, or the highest stage of capitalism, after national monopolisation takes root in developed capitalist countries. Yet capitalism has endured for almost a century since Lenin wrote this work, despite various cyclical and general crises. Capitalism has adapted, restructured and is increasingly taking on a transnational character in the contemporary period. Finally, Lenin’s conception of capitalism’s place in world history fails to recognise that capitalism had origins before Marx’s time and therefore imperialism has a longer history. The origins of capitalism and imperialism have to be located in the prototypes of capitalism that emerged in the transitions from pre-capitalist societies. At least in the context of the West, this has to be related to the transition from feudalism to capitalism.4
What follows is an attempt to provide a periodisation of capitalist civilisation which draws on but differs from a world-systems perspective. Although world-systems theory provides a reading of world history that allows for variances and continuities by focusing on cycles of accumulation related to hegemonic powers (see Arrighi and Moore 2001), its emphasis on more general historical patterns fails to recognise historical and geographical contingency, or the role of class struggle in shaping capitalism’s history. While keeping this in mind, the various keys to periodisation and the technical issues involved are beyond the scope of this chapter (see Jessop 2001), except to say that each of the stages of historical capitalism delineated here can be further delineated into conjunctures and phases based on historical, political, geographic and economic contingencies. For our purposes, the important point is the making and existence of capitalist civilisation and, more specifically, the recognition that this takes place through particular non-teleological historical stages.
Capitalist civilisation, which has been established over the last 500 years, has been marked by three major historical stages, each defined by a particular mode of capital accumulation. In this periodisation there is an emphasis on key features as they relate to forms of capital, imperial power, technological development, ideological shifts and struggles from below:
Mercantile accumulation (1400s–1800s) involved a prototype of capitalism linked to slavery, colonial conquest, trade and exchange. Sea-based expansion took off in this period, supported through merchant capital and empires such as the Spanish, Dutch and British. The Reformation in Europe, which challenged the control of the Roman Catholic Church, the Dutch Revolution (1566–1609), the English Revolution (1637–1660) and the Enlightenment (c.1650–1800) all shaped this stage of expansion.
Monopoly industrial accumulation (c.1750s–1980) involved struggles against land enclosures; technological innovation, such as the steam engine; the emergence of factories and increasing concentration and centralisation of capital. Colonial expansion continued but was also rolled back by the American Revolution (1775–1783), the Slave Revolution in Haiti (1791–1804) and the so-called Bolivarian revolutions (1810–1830) against Spanish rule in South America. The French Revolution (1789–1794) also shook up the heartlands of capitalism. Mid-Victorian competitive capitalism gave way to national monopolies. The Italian nation state was founded (1859–1870) and Germany was unified (1864–1871). The American Civil War (1861–1865), the Paris Commune (1871), the scramble for Africa (1870–1914) and the first great depression (1873–1896) happened. National monopolies displaced competition, which descended into national rivalries. The period also saw World War I (1914–1918), the Great Depression (1929–1941), World War II (1939–1945), and the end of British hegemony and the Ottoman Empire. The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) and a wave of socialist revolutions, including those in Russia (1917), China (1949) and Cuba (1959), and various national liberation struggles shaped the peripheries. US-centred hegemony, the cold war (1947–1991), Fordism, the Keynesian welfare state and the end of colonialism also determined the character of this stage.
Transnational techno-financial accumulation (1973 to the present) took root as social democracy reached its limits and stagflation kicked in (1973). There was a wave of struggle (1968–1975) in Western Europe, Prague and the US. The US suffered a defeat in Vietnam, and the Nicaraguan Revolution (1979) took place. There was a shift to containerisation, information-and-communications technology, post-Fordism and global financialised restructuring. Finance was globalised and played a crucial role in transnationalising class structures. The cold war ended, formal political apartheid ended in South Africa (1994), democratisation swept through Africa, parts of Asia, Latin America and the former Soviet Union, while US hegemony was tenuous but increasingly centred on financialised expansion and military power. Power was increasingly diffused with the rise of regional state–society complexes, such as China and Russia, and since 9/11 the War on Terror has expanded. Global rivalries come to the fore as systemic crisis tendencies deepen. Anti-neoliberal and ‘anti-globalisation’ movements emerged as central to rolling back neoliberalisation and saving planetary life.
In the current stage of transnational techno-financial accumulation, contemporary capitalist civilisation has four crucial dimensions to its global political economy. First, it is underpinned by globalised financial, production and trade structures at the heart of a globalised capitalist system. Second, there is a political system of state and civil-society complexes, intergovernmental organisations and private transnational bodies. Third, there are large and powerful transnational corporations wielding immense structural and direct political power. Fourth, a US-led historical bloc of transnational forces provides strategic leadership and advancing neoliberal ideological concepts of control shaping policy, culture, law, media spheres and consumption. This also means various capitalist class projects come to the fore to advance variants of neoliberal capitalism to deepen globalisation.
THE CRISES OF CAPITALIST CIVILISATION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
We now turn to testing the thesis of the systemic crises of capitalist civilisation empirically. Ahmed (2010) provides a Marxist-inspired account of the current systemic crisis tendencies confronting capitalism. However, there are three crucial shortcomings in his perspective, which this chapter attempts to rectify. First, Ahmed does not provide a historicised premise for his perspective of capitalism and contemporary capitalist civilisation. Second, he does not break with a reductionist account of the systemic dimensions of capitalist crisis. The role of the US superpower and state is not brought into his account of the making of systemic crisis and its dimensions. Third, class practices, including the role of transnational capital and its ideological articulations of neoliberalism, are not linked closely enough to the systemic dimensions he brings into view. Capital as a geological force prevailing over and destroying planetary life is not clearly demonstrated empirically in that work.