Tomáš Tengely-Evans - Death Rides Out: Imperialism in the 21st Century

As Socialist Worker editor Tomáš Tengely-Evans has had to cover more than their share of imperialist conflict and the threat of such conflict. In the last few years we've seen war in the Middle East, genocide in Palestine, a bloody proxy-war between Nato and Russia over Ukraine and Trump's aggression against countries as varied as Greenland, Canada and Venezula. 

Understanding the tendency for nations to go to war under capitalism, and the particular forms these wars take, has been one of the great tasks of Marxism. Tengely-Evans' new book is a brilliant synthesis of this historical work with insightful studies of current conflicts and their source. The book begins with Tengely-Evans's comment that he wrote the first draft of the book in Sarajevo, close to were Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated - one of the events in the run up to World War One. It's a fitting beginning, because he begins with how Marxists like Lenin, Luxembourg and Bukharin developed and updated Marx and Engels' war to explain the origins of the slaughter. The war did not arise out of the killing of Ferdinand, but what was it about society at the time that meant that within a few weeks of the assassination millions of men were being murdered? 

For Marxists it is the economic division of the globe that leads to conflict. More precisely it is the uneven division of the globe between capitalist interests. As Tengely-Evans writes:

Because capitalism does not develop equally acorss the world, there is a constant fluctuation of the relative power of the different nation-states within the global imperialist system, and this drives a logic of imperialist competition that tends to build towards war.

In hindsight these insights don't feel particularly novel. But Tengely-Evans makes the point that some Marxists thought in the run up to World War One that global capitalism made war impossible. Tragically they were proved wrong, and it was left to a few individuals like Lenin to critique this. One brilliant aspect of this new book though is that it neatly summarises how Lenin, Bukharin and Luxembourg developed a new understanding of the particular capitalist moment. In particular the question of "finance capital" playing a role in pushing and organising production. But Tengely-Evans does point out the limits of this approach, which saw both Lenin and Bukharin generalising too much from the nature of German capitalism - leading Tengely-Evans to point out that "the core of Lenin's theory stands the test of time if creatively applied".

The "core" refers to the way, in Bukharin's words, "the struggle between state capitalist trusts is decided in the first place by the relation between their military forces, for the miliatry power of the country is the last resort of the struggling 'national groups' of capitalists." Tengely-Evans uses this approach in his very stimulating analysis of current conflicts. For instance, writing about East Asia, he says:

East Asia is now the most dnamic region of global capitalism - and consequently, a key battleground of imperialist comptetition ebtween the US, China and regional powers. It makes up around 40 percent of global domestic product and over 50 percent of global economic growth. China, Japan and India are the leading economies in the region making up 65 percent of the continent's GDP.

It is this startling growth that terrifies Washington. Tengely-Evans goes on to show how the US state has been preoccupied particularly by China, but more importantly for understanding the world today, he shows how conflicts in Venezula and the Middle East, are often shaped by the US government acting in response to the threat from China. As he says:

The US may want to focus on the Western Hemisphere. But it does so within a global system of increasing competition and while trying to contain China across muiltiple parts of the world. War with Iran hasn't turned out the way the US planned. But it's a product of that increasing competition, unleashed on the world in large part by China's rise, and that logic of competition drives war between the competing parts of the system.

Does the left really need another book in Imperialism? Especially when those of authors' like Lenin have proved so useful. I would argue that one great strength of Tengely-Evans' book is that it offers an understanding of imperial through a Marxist lens, while demonstrating how Marxism is a tool to understand the world. This constantly needs to be refreshed and new generations of activists taught how the system works, not least because there will be more and more war. Indeed Tengely-Evans quotes Marx: "The working classes have the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics". Unpicking why Russia is in Ukraine, or how Israel makes it hard for Trump to stop war on Iran needs an wider understanding of the system itself.

In addition Tengely-Evans shows how an Marxist understanding of war and imperialism leads to a revolutionary approach to stopping war. The final section, on how revolutionaries have tried to turn war into revolution is a lesson for everyone today - if we are to avoid imperialist escalation leading us all to our doom.

Related Reviews

Bukharin - Imperialism and World Economy
Lenin - Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
Callinicos - Imperialism and Global Political Economy

Jakub S. Beneš - The Last Peasant War: Violence and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe

From the end of World War One through to the 1950s Eastern Europe's peasant societies were engaged in a new continuous "Peasant War". It is a struggle that is rarely acknowledged, except perhaps by those looking to understand the dynamics between workers and peasants during the Russian Revolution. Those who do study these events tend to seem the separately, as struggles around particular events, rather than as part of a longer continuity. The peasant struggles that began as mutinies and rebellions against the War, then morphed into radical nationalist struggles as European nations and empires crumbled at the end of the War, became battles over land and power in the inter-war years.

Jakub S. Beneš' The Last Peasant War is an excellent read that emphasises the continuity and change of these movements, while sympathetically treating the peasant as an object of history. I have been asked to write a fuller review of this book for another publication, and I will link that here when it becomes available.

Iain M. Banks - Feersum Endjinn

Despite my love of Iain M. Banks' science fiction novels I have never read Feersum Endjinn. When I first attempted it soon after it's first publication in the mid 1990s, I was put of by the "difficult" chapters. These are written phonetically, and I found them impenetrable. Today, after nearly three decades of text speak, I was less challenged by them. Perhaps younger audiences will find them normal.

Feersum Endjinn is set on a future Earth facing a gigantic astronomical calamity. Precisely what this is, and what the solution is, is unclear until nearly the end of the book and I won't ruin that here. But living on the Earth, long after huge populations have deserted the planet, are a number of waring factions that inhabit different levels of a colossal structure known as the Fastness. This is the remnant of Earth's spacefaring past, the anchors for its space elevators, and a monument to civilisational collapse. The factions that inhabit the ruins do so in a feudal structure - something that Banks often uses to represent retrograde or backward human societies that have falled from their technology appogee. The war between these factions takes place on a number of vertical levels. It also takes place on a number of cyber levels too. Humans in this future have the ability to enter different dimensions, places were time moves differently, and engage with others physically and mentally.

Banks explores this conflict from multiple points of view. One of them is a senior aristocratic Count, who has been assassinated multiple times, before escaping to a new "level" to solve the riddle of his murder at a different time scale. The other is a scientist who has receved a cryptic message from a seemingly alien presence that alerts her to a potential solution to Earth's dilemma. Finally we have an initially aimless being who appears suddenly at the estate of a minor noble, but whose innocence betrays the fact that she has deeper knowledge of what is happening. Finally there is a oddly minor figure, whose account is told phonetically, whose innocent quest to find his talking pet ant takes him on a strange quest, full of all sorts of beings, that gradually point toward the resolution.

The backdrop to the story is the various factions who are trying to cover up the danger to Earth, and also to protect themselves. the resolution sees the coming together of representatives of the various factions, manipulated by unseen forces and made to overcome their differences.

Writing in 1994 it is possible to see Feersum Endjinn as a metaphor for social intrasigence in the face of oncoming environmental disaster. At the time it was also possible to believe that techology alone would be enough to "save Earth". Today that is unlikely, and perhaps this literal ex machina escape rings less true that it did when the book was first written. Nonetheless for Iain M Banks' fans this is an excellent read, though its structure and language makes the book a difficult one.

Bryan D. Palmer - Capitalism, Colonialism & Crises: The Remaking of Modern Canada 1960-2025

The third volume of Bryan D. Palmer's trilogy on the history of Canada brings the account right up to the present date. Indeed, so recent is some of the material that it covers 2025. It means that there's the slightly uncanny experience, for this reader at least, of reading a history book cover events that are part of your own experience.

Palmer opens his book by making a general point about the period covered. Before the 1960s he says, there was  "scan indication" that oppositional movements could unite together. As both the previous volumes have shown, there is a long and rich tradition of resistance and organisation from below in Canada. This includes movements such as Indigenous struggles, working class movements, including radical socialist and anarchist ideas, movements against war and movements for liberation. At times, particularly in the period covered in the first book, when those movements failed to unite. Had they done so, they was a potential for systemic and radical change. But Palmer says about the first decades covered in this volume:

In the 1960s, voices of anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism gew louder, amplified in many ways. There were also hints that the long-standing divide keeping those challenging the profit system and those opposing colonial thought and practice separate and consequently weakened was breaking down. This 1960s development was paralleled by a strengthening and increasing penchant for militancy among mainstream working-class trade unions and Indigenous organisations, groups and associations.

What these movements saw was a proliferation of radical groups, parties and organisations - a process that mirrored what was happening elsewhere in the world as the post-war boom turned to economic and political crisis, and the movement against US imperialism was fuelled by resistance on the ground. Revolutionary ideas inspired these movements. In Canada, "anti-capitalist and anti-colonial thought... captivated those drawn to the New Left" and "causes traversed one another". Palmer tells the story of an Abortion Caravan that left Vancouver in April 1970, but by the time it reached the capital, some of its participants were also raising demands as "Victory to the NLF" and "Smash Capitalism" was written on the outside.

The peculiarities of Canadian history however added new factors to the radicalism of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Quebec, there was an "upsurge of radical nationalism, supported by many Québécios workers" which built upon a movement for independence that had grown up in the 1950s and 1960s. The movement included many who saw colonialism and capitalism as the "enemy". Canada's 1968 moment, in the summer of that remarkable year, saw a massive protest at Dorval Airport near Montreal. Traffic was stopped, buses set afire and molotov cocktails thrown. Gunshots were heard. Palmer says:

New Left aspirations, anti-colonialist indépendantiste demands, and a militant class struggle and anti-capitalist politics thretaened to come together. This was a rare development in Canada... The often young and unusually militant Quebec sovereigntists situatied their struggle within the global anti-colonail mobillisations of the 1960s. They railed against the mainstream politicians and capitalist interests, both French and English-speaking. They held this rich elite responsible for deepening the subordination of oppressed and working-class Québécios.

These revolutionary and radical ideas "appeared to resonate with wider sectors of society" terrifying the ruling class. Here, as in the previous volumes, Palmer places the history of Indigenous people, and their resistance, central to his account. He shows how revolutionary ideas influenced "Red Power" movements, and these in turn, fed back into wider radicalisation. In 1969, the Government struck back, it appeared to offer concessions, but did so by arguing that the Indigneous peoples of Canada, where "burdened... with a historically constued paternalism" this required dismantling and an end to the allocation of "First Nations a plus status as an addition t their citizenship".  While superficially appearing radical, in reality this "would inevitably leave First Nations peoples without any possibility of successfully pursuing land claims or holding on to entitlements that shored up their traditional ways of life". The backlash, including the publication of the tremendously successful book The Unjust Society by Harold Cardinal, saw a retreat by the Canadian government, but it did see the "drift of Indigenous leadership into collaboration with the colonial state" and the decline of the revolutionary Red Power movement.

The radicalism of these movements was the context for a wider awaking of knowledge of Canada's colonial past. In the years after the 1960s Canada saw renewed attempts at control of radical movements and First Nations peoples, what Palmer calls "coercive continuities". If the 1960s had seen Red Power, revolutionary radicalism and "class war from below", including some spectacularly powerful trade union movements, 1975 onward saw "class struggle from above". The political and economic gains of the 1960s  that had been won by working class and First Nations struggles, were eroded as Canada turned toward neoliberalism and austerity to try and resolve the contradictions of its economic crisis. This period saw systematic and brutal deindustrialisation as thousands of workers lost their jobs. In Montreal, for instance, between 1976 and 1996, 27,000 jobs in the garment industry were lost. What strikes there were, were unable to significantly turn this tide. In the case of Montreal, a strike against job losses was sold out, a "scathing indictment of the cozy relationship between the union leadership and garment industry bosses".

The final chapters of this book are perhaps the most depressing. They paint a picture of Canada dominated by economic precarity, low levels of struggle and rampant capitalism - massive levels of homelessness, low wages and economic insecurity are one picture of the period. But Palmer is careful to note that there is resistance, including another rise in the level of organisation by First Nations peoples, often building links with the wider working class movements. This includes the struggles against oil infrastructure and the expose of the horrors of the Residential School system. A horrific chapter on the "murdered and missing Indigenous Women", the thousands of women who have lost their lives and disappeared, makes it clear that much more needs to be done. Indeed the racism at the heart of the Canadian state continues to be exposed by the lack of action on this.

The weakness of the trade union movement, Palmer argues, means that there is a tendency for the trade unions to respond to the current economic situation, including the pressures from the Trump administration, with nationalist answers rather than class struggle. As the labour movement lines up behind national demands, "working people and their interests were hitched to the cart of Canadian capital and the state". 

Palmer's book is, however, written in the spirit of the need to rebuild a new and radical left, that can shift the narrative. If the urgent need is there, so the crisis creates the potential. As Palmer says Canadian capitalism, like that around the world, is "increasingly riddled with contradictions and challenges". Understanding the history of Canada, and the interplay between class struggle, anti-colonial and Indigenous resistance, and updating that for the 21st century is an urgent need.

The final volume of such a series will be distorted by the narrowing of the writer's lens. If the first two books covered sweeping periods of history, this later book covers shorter periods in more detail. This reflects both the author's and the readers' experiences. Inevitably it means that things are missed. For instance I thought it would have been helpful to have more detail on the growth of Canadian fossil capitalism and the politics and economics of (say) the Tar Sands. But this is a minor complaint against a powerful book and a wonderful series. Everyone who is interested in the fight for liberation and the struggle against capitalism today ought to read these three books.

If Bryan D. Palmer's book teaches us anything it is that the history of Canada shows that ordinary people have frequently resisted oppression and exploitation, and they have often done so in the most militant and inspiring ways. The knowledge of that history will be immeasurably helpful in rebuilding the sort of radical left we need to face the challenges of 21st century capitalism. Palmer is owed a huge vote of thanks.

Related Reviews

Palmer - Colonialism & Capitalism: Canada's Origins 1500-1890
Palmer - Capitalism & Colonialism: The Making of Modern Canada 1890-1960

Sinclair Lewis - Elmer Gantry

Sinclair Lewis' Elmer Gantry is a delightfully cynical black comedy. It is also a book very much for our times. The eponymous Elmer Gantry is a happy go lucky young man, brought up in a stifling religious home, but now at college he's a partying, womanising and drinking law student. Realising that becoming a lawyer is hard work, and will likely keep him poor, he decides on a different course of action. Confounding his critics - the hardworking and deeply religious students around him - he heads to a Baptist College where he begins his planned ascent through religious bureacracy to make his fortune, strip the gullible masses from their wealth and sleep with as many attractive parishioners as possible.

When it was first published Elmer Gantry scandalised the good Christian folk of the United States. Small wonder really. Gantry is a lying, swindling, blackard. He is not afraid to dump his friends, betray his flock, and commit adultery. Indeed he happily changes churches, not out of actually religious fervour, but because he sees better chances of enriching himself. Gantry isn't lazy. He's perfectly happy to seep himself in religious works to better understand his place. He just doesn't believe any of it.

Perhaps his worst habit is the way his infatuation with young women leads eventually to boredeom and betrayal - and then abandonment. The only case where this bucks the trend is his encounter with the evangelist Sharon Falconer, to whom he seems genuinely committed - at least to the extent of only creaming off some of the cash, and only having one brief affair. 

Gantry's rise and fall, then rise and further rise, is the story of an obsessive and clever swindler. But it is also the story of hypocritical 1920s America when the church was happy to sell love, truth and future happiness for a decent enough donation in the collecting tray. The only difference Lewis says, is that Gantry is the most extroverted at it. He's also very good, and ambitious. The rest of the Church hate him but his gilded tongue, superb sermonising and his ability to cover his tracks usually gets him through.

HG Wells apparently wrote an article on America based in part on Lewis' descriptions in this book. While Wells probably ought to have done more first hand research, Elmer Gantry feels very much like its based on real people. Indeed Lewis lived with various preachers, went to multiple religious services on a daily basis for months, to research the background to the book. One of those whom he lived with was a preacher determined to show Lewis that his portrayal of priests and preachers in early books was deeply inaccurate. One can only imagine how he felt (and sermonised) about what Lewis did with his hospitality.

It is alleged that Lewis wrote much of the last chapters of the book in a deep alcoholic hole. If that's true than I didn't really find the book any worse for it. Indeed, the ending spoke very much to 21st century America. Lewis is a fine observer of the dirt beneath America's surface.

Bryan D. Palmer - Capitalism & Colonialism: The Making of Modern Canada 1890-1960

Volume two of Bryan D. Palmer's trilogy on the history of Canada begins where the previous book left off. But, as Palmer immediately notes, Canada on the cusp of the twentieth century "was remarkably different than the disparate collection of British North American colonies" that had come out of the 17th century. Canada was now a fully fledged capitalist nation, with economic crises to prove it, and part of a global capitalist economy. Capitalism was "most assiduously cultivated in the open yeaes of the twentieth century" writes Palmer. The country "took off" economically in the period before 1914 and by every aspect of measurement the economy was growing. New technologies were introduced, whole new industries appeared, and class relations were "reconfigured".

The opening chapters explore this growth in different sectors. This was a period of class struggle from below and above, and one of consolidation of the economy. Palmer writes:

The layers of colonialism in which Canada was richly enveloped grew increasingly complicated, with capital imports rising to £100 million annually in 1911-1913. British capital supplied three-quarters of this influx... securing the loyalty of the Canadian chartered banks"... On the eve of the First World War, 60 per cent of Canada's government debt was held abroad, and servicing this borrowing consumed one-quarter of the country's export earnings.

At the same time the Canadian government was continuing and expanding its colonial control at home. New laws oppressed Indigenous people still further, and "Ottawa also worked diligently to extend the domination of the Dominion into the last frontier of capitalist exansion, an enclve of the preservation of Indigenous ways of life: the resource-rch North." Finally, "francophone Quebec" was further subordinated within the Confederation. There were also significant examples of workers' resistance and organisation in this period. But the key line of development was the increased centralisation and consolidation of capital.

While there were significant economic differences through the Canadian regions, there was a general growth in large corporations such as steel manufacturing, coal and industrial farming. But the wealth from these accrued to a small minority of the population. Hard work by miners, industrial workers and farmers drove capital accumulation, but they were not its main beneficiaries. Take farming. Palmer explains that on the prairies:

It was wheat... that proved the major engine of capital accumulation... the single most important crop enticing homesteaders. They settled on some ninety-nine million acres of land between 1870 and 1927, successfully patenting 58.2 million acres by 1930. Settlers bought more land than they acquired for free through federally overseen pre-emptions, with fifty million acres purchased from the railways, Hudson's Bayt Company and other agents... These lands, traditionally the territory of various First Nations, sustained the wheat economy of the Canadian west. Harvests of the prairies proved a juggernaut of capital formation for the railways and their beneficiaries, the monopolistic grain elevator owners who controlled the sales and distribution of what. Powerful interests like these bled farmers dry.

Such growth required massive numbers of workers. Between 1901 and 1931 Canada's population nearly doubled. Urban centres like Toronto and Vancouver grew at astonishing rates. The immigrants who came arrived from enormously different areas, and experienced appalling racism.

The prejudice and poverty faced by these recent arrivals disfigured Canada, the intolerance they confronted paralleling the marginalisation and discriminatory treatment accorded the country's original colonised peoples. Confederation's economic margins now included First Nations, Métis, Inuit, Québécois, the labouring poor, the immigrant masses, most Maritimers and wage-earning women, whose pay in the 1920s averaged 54-60 per cent that of males.

These immigrants had arrived hopeful of owning and farming land. The Canadian government "extolled the virues of European peasants as the kind of human material best suited to the settlement of the West" but most lacked the experience and resources and instead usually "ended up as itinerant harvesers... peripatetic railroad navvies...miners; or the lowest-paid labourers in industrial factories." 

There was, inevitably, a racist dimension too. These immigrants "became the racialised 'other', scapegoated in the social construction of a Canada htat had to be constantly remade in the image of a British Dominion championed as 'White, forever'."

One of the great strengths of Palmer's histories of Canada is his subtle exploration of the relationship between capital and colonisation. Thus he traces the impacts of capitalism's expansion on the First Nations, Métis and Innuit peoples and its impact on the workers. The growth of new industry, followed by the industrial decline and depopulation of the Maritimes or the expansion of capital and resource extraction into the North and the displacement and genocidal policies against the Innuit. These are handled with care and thought, and never once does Palmer dimminish the horror of what happened to First Nations, the oppressed and exploited. Canada's colonism wasn't just internally. It was central to expansion of the British Empire into the global south: "Sugar refineries in Canada, for instance, were at the centre of capital's expansion in the 1890-1914 years". Imports of sugar from Asia transformed the people and economies of places like Fiji. These were now part of the "sphere of influence" that Canadian capital cultivated. Canadian banks were at the forefront of expansion into South America and the Carribean. 

The middle part of the book covers the Great Depression and the horror experienced by working people in the 1930s, it also covers a great period of resistance. Massive strikes, in particular in the "year of rebellion" 1937, saw millions of workers fighting back over pay and conditions. This also saw an expression electorally with the growth of the Communist Party and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. Palmer traces the evolution of these groups, and their intersection, well. For those on the Canadian left this is probably a well trod path. For most of us outside of Canada it will be very new material. 

Canadian capitalism did not recover until World War Two. Palmer accurately describes this as "capital's saviour". But production of food, weapons and ammunition drove the Canadian economy to new heights, bringing new opportunities for women workers'. Economically it was also transformative. US capitalism spent "nearly $12 billion" in Canada during the war, which "helped keep the wartime domestic economy huming and further solidified the Dominion's integratin into a new continentalism, driven by rising American demand". Uranium mining in Canada also meant the country, and its government, became closely linked to the US atomic bomb programme. Coming out of the War the Canadian government needed to implement a Welfare State - much like in Britain, fear of further workers' rebellion fuelled the belief in reforms to buy off the potential threat. But it is striking to learn that so racist was the Canadian state that the original plans for Welfare did not even feature the poorest Canadian people - the First Nations.

By the end of the period, "obvious voices of anti-capitalism" and anti-colonialism were "quieted" and "in retreat". the left was weaker and the post-war consensous seemed to have gained for the trade union movement "much of what it had long sought to attain". But the 1960s were to be a "decade of tumultuous change and oppositional turmoil" and would see Indigenous movements, those of the oppressed and organised workers, and the left, grow and pose radical challenges. But, argues Palmer, these changes were all rooted in a the longer trajectory of colonialism and capitalism boom and slump across Canada.

This book tells a wonderful, if frustrating, story. In the face of a vicious, settler, state power, working and Indigenous people were sacrified to the interests of capital. Resistance was almost continuous. But with the exception of the period after World War One and the later 1930s, rebellion did not fundamentally challenge capital. Palmer tells the story of the few brave radicals who led that fight, and more emerges in the final period in the third volume. But this reader felt that there were too many missed opportunities for radical resistance.

I enjoyed volume two almost as much as Palmer's first volume. I was surprised at the ommission of two things. One was any mention of the experience of Canadian troops during World War One. I had expected that the slaughter in the trenches would have had a political impact back home, but this was not discussed. Secondly I was surprised that there was little discussion of far-right and Nazi politics in Canada in the 1930s. Was there such a movement like much of the rest of the world? Was there anti-fascist resistance? These omissions aside, Palmer's sweeping history is excellent.

Related Reviews

Palmer - Colonialism & Capitalism: Canada's Origins 1500-1890
Palmer - Capitalism, Colonialism & Crises: The Remaking of Modern Canada 1960-2025

Nikolai Bukharin - Imperialism and World Economy

Three great works of Marxism mark the transition from Marx and Engels' work on economics into the modern era. They are Lenin's Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Nikolai Bukharin's Imperialism and World Economy and Rosa Luxemburg's Accumulation of Capital. Each of them was written to attempt to engage with a changing world - one where Great Powers had divided up the world and were clashing with each other for redivision of the spoils.

Most revolutionary socialists have read Lenin's contribution to this. Fewer have read Bukharin's and Luxemburg's. Bukharin's work is a more detailed work that has many overlaps with Lenin's book but develops the points further. It also has an interesting history. Because it was lost to the censor and only recovered after the revolution it is published with an additional chapter that reflects the post-revolutionary hope of the era. Bukharin, as with Lenin, elegantly paints a picture of a transformed world where everything is in flux:

In various ways there thus takes place the trasnfusion of capital from one "national" sphere into the other; there grows the intertwining of "national capitals"; there proceeds the "internationalisation" of capitalism. Capital flows into foreign factories and mines, plantations and railroads, steamship lines and banks; it grows in volume; it sends part of the surplus value "home" where it may begin an independent movement; it accumulates the other part; it wides over and over again the spehere of its application; it creates an ever thickening network of international interdependence.

He continues:

We thus see that the growth of the world economic process having as its basis the growth of productive forces, not only calls forth an intensification of production relations among various countries, not only widens and deepens general capitalist interrelations, but also calls to life new economic formations ,new economiv forms unknown to the past epochs in the history of capitalist development.

These new formations, syndicates and cartels and other such capitalist constructs, signal the emergence of a new order. Bukharin argues that the old world economy could be compared to the structure of a national economy until the late 19th century, but the new economy is marked by the "considerable narrowing [of] the hitherto unhampered 'free play of economic forces'." National economies are now geared towards the international economy, but the global economy is much more than a sum of national economies it is a everchanging, interacting and evolving system. Even if competition was abolished, he argues, in a national economy, there would still be crises because of the international economy.

This, Bukharin argues, is also true of war. War "in capitalist society" is an example of competition, extended to the world economy. "War is an immanent law of a society producing goods under the pressure of the blind laws of a spontaneously developing world market". But, he argues, not one of a sociaet that consciously regulates the process of production and distribution - i.e. socialism.

For Bukharin it is the newness of 20th century capitalism that is remarkable. He describes the changes as "radical" and it is driven by finance capital which has reached "colossal proportions". Banking capital "appears in the role of an organiser of industry". But it is unplanned and disorganised. The growth of the productive forces "clashes with the antagonistic form of distribution and with the disproportion between various parts of capitalist production". It is a profoundly unstable world, without planning or equilibnrium, "hence terrific crises and precipitous changes".

For those reading Imperialism and World Economy in the era of Trump it is worth noting Bukharin's comments on tariffs. These are "partial sorties". In the long run he says, "conflict is solved by the interrelation of... force of arms".

Some of the book takes up political questions. Bukharin points out that pacifists cannot solve war - because of its centrality to the logic of capital. Less convincing his Bukharin's insistance, along with Lenin, that there is an aristocracy of labour in the rich countries that is bought off by the surplus from imperialism. Not least because there is no satisfactory explanation of how this process happens, and the capitalists have never knowingly handed over cash to their workers - however important they are - without serious class struggle.

Also Bukharin fails to foresee what might happen when capitalism has further developed in colonial countries. How could new imperialisms, or sub imperialisms, evolve and challenge the powerful nations. This is a process I would argue that plays a central role in modern political economy. The emergence of China as a new imperialist power is one example. But so are the regional imperialist interests of countries like Israel and Iran. Their interplay with global politics is shaping the modern world.

Overall though, this is a must read for a deeper grasp of the history and development of world capitalism and of Marxist thought on imperialism. Tragically a book written for the early 20th century that is still massively relevant to today.

Related Reviews

Lenin - Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
Callinicos - Imperialism and Global Political Economy

Christopher Clark - Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-1849

In January 1848, Francesco Bagnasco, a radical Scilian who believed in the "universal regeneration" of society in the face of inequality, unemployment and hunger, spoke:

The time of useless prayers has passed. The protests, the pleas, the peaceful demonstrations were useless. Fedinand II viewed it all with contempt; and as for us, a free people reduced to chains and misery, will it take us yet longer to regain our legitimate rights? To arms, children of Sicily, to arms! The strength of all is omnipotent: the union of peoples is the downfall of kings. On 12 January, at dawn, the glorious epoch of universal regeneration will begin.

Such sentiments arose in almost every part of Europe in the years 1848-1849. They represented a huge desire for fundamental change. On the one hand their were the poverty stricken masses in town and country, for whom life was unbearable. On the other, there were a newly emergent class of wealthly, liberal bourgeois people for whom the existing order was preventing them engaging in, and expressing, their real desires - the pursuit of wealth. Bagnasco, represented the latter, a class for whom the world was changing, but not fast enough. Liberals imagined a different way of organising society. As Christopher Clark says:

Liberals liked markets. In an era when markets are dominated by mighty global entities like Google and Amazon, it is hard to recapture the subversive magic that still attached to the idea of the market in this era. Markets were not manorial or feudal, they did not represent royal power, they were not ecclesiastical. They were a space of exchange in which individuals could operate - in theory at least - on a more or less level playing field, outside the prescriptions of an arbitary authority.

The quest for a bourgeois capitalist order, was also one that threatened to shatter apart the older order, on every level in which it existed. While the ideas of the bourgeois class were radical, so were those of the lower orders and these ideas radicalised as the masses began to move into action against their rulers. One of the patterns that Christopher Clark describes, which was almost universal to the European revolutions of 1848, was the way in which the initial euphoria of revolution, the unity of classes against common enemies, deteriorated as their contradictory interests emerged from the struggle. One example comes from Paris. There the initial revolution had instituted a Provisional Government for France. The make up of the new assembly was a "bitter disappointment" to the left, and it set about writing a new constitution:

Odilon Barrot, who was a member of the Constitutional Committee, later recalled how the 'fear of social war' left its mark on the drafting of the constitution: ' the agitation that had suffused this society, the exasperation of some, the anxiety of others, did not permit the calm, the coolness of mind required for such a task;. He could not forget, he wrote, how in a the room where the commission was deliberating, the sounds of civil strife could be heard through the windows.

Clarke notes that in this constitution the writers' objective was "not to project the revolution forward into the future, but t capiture it in something cool and inert, conserve a liberal understanding of what had been achieved and thereby prevent further radicalisation."

Clarke's analysis here is not new. The gap between the liberal bourgeoisie's interests and those of the masses was plain at the time, and has much been commentated on. Marx and Engels noted this often in their writing, and indeed - to relate this work to my own recent interests, the whole purpose of Engels' work on the German Peasants' War was to explore why the bourgeosie in Germany in 1848 was so cowardly through contrast with 1525.

There were other factors too. The lack of radical leadership from below often undermined the revolutionary movements. Clark notes how mass demonstrations in Berlin were curtailed by the use of the popular radical orator Friedrich Wilhelm Held, who was chosen at a crucial moment to speak to a revolutionary protest:

Held announced that the demonstration would retrace its steps... The tension in the crowd dissipated. To countermand Held's announcement was impossible - his grip on the crowd too strong. The demonstration was over; people began to drift away. Looking back, Paul Boerner felt that this was the moment when the radical movement in Berlain missed its appointment with history.

Crucailly Clark argues, Held's own motivations matter little: "Whether Held was an agent of some kind or simply changed his mind at the last moment is not important. He was a crucial link in the sequence of that day's events, a link made of capricious and changeable stuff. That a man like him should have found himself in such a position on 14 May 1848 tells us something about the absence of a cohesive radical leadership cadre".

Despite the failure of more strident and throughgoing revolutionary change, 1848 did make massive changes. A space was opened up for capitalist development that pushed aside the older order. Clarke notes that these changes "were a direct consequence of the revolutions. They were only possible because conservative political groups that had previously opposed or resisted them had been pushed away from the centre of power." 

Marxists often point to the way that the capitalist class pretend that revolution played no part in their conquest of power. Clark's book demonstrates the opposite. The centrality of mass revolution to their victory. He also celebrates the role of the masses - without whom the bourgeoise could not make a revolution, but who were universally feared and reviled by the same class. In his own discussion of revolution and counter-revolution in France in 1848, Karl Marx concluded: 

Thus the solution is postponed; the status quo continued; one faction of the party of Order compromised, weakened, made unworkable by the other; the repression of the common enemy, the mass of the nation, extended and exhausted — until the economic relations themselves have again reached the point of development where a new explosion blows into the air all these squabbling parties with their constitutional republic.

These revolutions then, in many senses, remain unfinished, at least for the "mass of the nation". Clarke is right to conclude his book by drawing parallels with more recent, contemporary struggles, and revolutions. In reading of 1848, for instance, it is impossible not to visualise the very similar looking scenes that saw the masses take over squares in cities throughout the Middle East in 2011 - not least Cairo's Tahrir Square or Sudan in 2019.

But, as Charlie Kimber notes in his own review of this superb book, "one key difference from 1848 is that our rulers no longer face a working class that is being born. Instead, they face a global one whose members and dependants make up the majority of society."

The 1848 revolutions remade the world for capitalism. But they also began the process by which the working class became a class for itself.

Clarke's book is extraordinary. Its breadth and attention to detail are phenomenal. More importantly it is extremely readable, and avoids trying to tell the story nation by nation. Instead Clark constructs the story by reference to multiple places, drawing out similarities and differences. He thus avoids repetition and boring the reader. There are plenty of exciting, inspiring moments and Clark has an eye for the unusual and the comic. It is a sweeping history. Clark avoids just focusing on the familiar and talks about the whole geographical breadth of the continent, in all the varied forms revolution manifested. He never fails to neglect wider implications of the struggle - the question of women and gender roles, the emancipationary conclusions that the revolutions had for enslaved people and the differences between town and country. All these aspects deserve a review of their own. Above all Revolutionary Spring is a reminder of what we can achieve when millions of us join together.

Related Reviews

Saville - The Consolidation of the Capitalist State
Mehring - Absolutism & Revolution in Germany 1525-1848
Marx - The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Davidson - How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions
Leipold - Citizen Marx: Republicanism & the formation of Karl Marx's social and political thought
Greene - Communist Insurgent: Blanqui's Politics of Revolution