Since the invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968, the Chinese leaders have termed the USSR an imperialist country. This designation is by no means a new one. It has appeared regularly in the writings of members of tendencies which consider that the USSR is a capitalist country.¹ There is even a certain logic in this position. For if the USSR is really a capitalist country, and if we have been witnessing a real expansionism on its part, then this—in the epoch in which we live, termed by Marxists the epoch of imperialism, ‘highest stage of capitalism’—can be nothing other than imperialism in the classical sense of the term.
The aim of this article is to examine this theory according to which the USSR is ‘imperialist’. Leaving aside versions of it which have by now been forgotten, it will concentrate on views which have some influence within the revolutionary vanguard today: the position developed by Tony Cliff and the International Socialism group; the position of the Chinese Communist Party and its followers throughout the world; and the position of the French organization Révolution!
Tony Cliff and ‘Russian Imperialist Expansion’
The International Socialist position was developed by Tony Cliff in his Russia: a Marxist Analysis, which contains a chapter on ‘The Imperialist Expansion of Russia’. State capitalism is therefore, in his view, an imperialist capitalism.
In discussing Cliff's views, I shall deliberately ignore certain of his arguments concerning the Russification of the Soviet republics. This aspect of a manifestation of great-Russian chauvinism already existed—and was denounced at the time by Lenin—in 1922-3, i.e. at a time when, even according to Cliff, there was not yet any question of Russian imperialism.
Cliff's overall theoretical approach to the question is somewhat individual. He begins by asserting correctly that the indiscriminate use of the term ‘imperialism’ to denote different forms of expansion generates confusion. He then recalls the criteria developed by Lenin in Imperialism: Highest Stage of Capitalism to characterize imperialism. Then he attempts to show that one of these criteria (the export of capital) does not apply to certain cases (Japan). Since, after this, he feels justified in abandoning this criterion, he considers that its non-applicability to the Soviet Union has no significance whatever, and that, in spite of that non-applicability, the USSR is ‘indeed imperialist’. In this way, as we shall see, he forgets what he himself had taken as his starting-point, i.e. that the indiscriminate use of the term imperialism leads to confusion. For to abandon the Leninist definition of imperialism leads inevitably to using the term for all cases of economic and territorial expansion.
Let us take a closer look at the arguments we have summarily outlined. The criterion used by Lenin to distinguish imperialism from the other stages of capitalism and referred to by Cliff is the following: ‘the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance.’ This feature itself results, as Cliff recognizes, from the tendency of capital to go where the rate of profit is highest and, in a more general way, imperialism results from the decline of the rate of profit as the organic composition of capital (c/v) increases.
Now Japanese imperialism, Cliff asserts, which all agree in characterizing as an imperialism, does not have this feature. At the time when it was exporting vast quantities of capital to Manchuria—its only important colony prior to the Sino-Japanese war—profits were high in Japan itself. Cliff notes that Japanese investments in Manchuria went up from 97.2 million yen in 1932 to 263 million yen in 1936 and to 1,103 million yen in 1939, while average profits were extremely high: between 16 and 20% in 1936 and 1937 (see pp. 178-9). The source of Cliff's error is here plain to see. He takes as his starting-point the fact that there were high rates of profit in 1936. But the starting-point which he should have taken is 1. not an absolute rate of profit but changes in the rate of profit, and 2. not rates of profit in 1936 but those in 1930-31—i.e. at the moment when Japanese capital began to move into Manchuria on a large scale.
Henri Claude² informs us in this respect that the profits of all Japanese industrial companies taken as a whole fell from 831 million yen in 1928 to 268 million yen in 1931. It was precisely at this moment that Japanese capital began to invest massively in Manchuria. Inversely, the figures given by Cliff himself for 1936-7—a period in which the rate of profit was exceptionally high (and in which it moreover incorporated the profits from Manchuria)—show that at the moment the tendency to invest in Manchuria was declining: 378 million yen in 1936; 263 million in 1936; 348 million in 1937. The first part of Cliff's argument thus rests on an incorrect selection of facts. However, it allows him to ignore the key criterion: the quest for a higher rate of profit.³
Having admitted that the USSR does not have this feature of imperialism, Cliff then develops an argument which is virtually a caricature of Marxism. He says: the USSR has had, without any doubt, the means to close the gap which separates Russia from the capitalist West; essential elements in this policy were the dismantling of factories in the satellite countries and the installation in these countries of Russian enterprises. The dismantling of factories and the ‘joint stock companies’ [belong to the period up to 1955]. ‘Moreover, this dismantling is not an export of capital, but rather the precise opposite! As for the ‘unequal exchange’, we shall be discussing this below when we examine the views of Peking.
The Chinese Positions
Since the invasion of Czechoslovakia, and in particular since Chou En-lai’s speech of 23 August 1968 to an official reception offered by the Rumanian ambassador in Peking, when Chou declared that ‘the clique of Soviet revisionist renegades has degenerated long since into social-imperialism and social-fascism’, the term ‘imperialist’ has been used by the Chinese leaders on numerous occasions in referring to the Soviet Union. According to the Chinese, the USSR carries out imperialist policies in two spheres: in the people's democracies and in the colonial and semi-colonial countries.
The People’s Democracies
The ‘USSR revisionists’, it is alleged, use Comecon to pillage and exploit the peoples of East Europe.⁴ Czechoslovakia, for example, is a ‘Soviet revisionist colony’.⁵ In Mongolia too, ‘the Soviet revisionists’ follow a policy of colonial domination, forcing Mongolia to develop its stock-rearing and pillaging the country by demanding exorbitant prices for exports to it of Soviet industrial products.⁶ Similarly, the Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Central Asia are allegedly transformed into grain-stores or into producers of wool and cotton, while being unable to develop their local industry. Moreover, their agricultural produce is bought up at low prices, while they have to pay top prices for what is supplied to them.⁷ However, these denunciations of Soviet ‘imperialism’ in East Europe have become muted since the 1971 right turn in Chinese foreign policy.
Asia, Africa and Latin America
In the countries of these three continents, ‘Soviet revisionist social-imperialism’ is said by the Chinese to infiltrate under cover of economic and military ‘aid’. ‘By giving "aid", Soviet revisionism aims not only to pillage the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, but above all to control politically the beneficiary countries in order to establish its colonial domination as new tsars.’⁸ Although the Chinese leaders recognize that the USSR often only asks for a very low rate of interest (2.5%) on its loans, they consider that the ‘real rate of interest is to be found in the high prices of their goods’ and that what is involved is in fact a disguised system of usury.
It is above all with respect to India that Soviet aid policy is criticized.⁹ According to the Chinese, Russian economic ‘aid’ is nothing but a simple export of capital. The USSR has become India’s second biggest creditor, to the tune of 10.22 thousand million rupees since 1955. Through its aid to the public sector in India, the USSR controls 30% of steel production, 35% of oil refining, 20% of electricity production, 60% of power station equipment, 85% of heavy machinery production, 75% of production of electric motors, 80% of oil prospecting and extraction and 25% of aluminium production. India will have to export increasing quantities of goods to the Soviet Union and import increasing quantities from the latter, thus becoming more and more dependent.
Critique of the Chinese Positions: a new Kautskyism?
The Chinese positions on social-imperialism differ from those of Cliff in that they do not take as their starting-point the definition of imperialism given by Lenin. Yet that definition, despite its incomplete character, remains the most scientifically correct definition of imperialism to have been put forward up to now. Let us recall it briefly, well-known as it is:—
a) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life;
b) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this ‘finance capital’, of a financial oligarchy;
c) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance;
d) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and
e) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed.’¹⁰
The two first criteria are linked to the analysis of the development of the relations of production in the capitalist countries. We shall not discuss them here (but see our ‘The State Capitalist Genealogy’ in International, Vol. 2, No. 1). The last two criteria are the consequence at a world level of the functioning of the system. The kernel of the definition, which forms the crucial intermediary link between the first two and the last two criteria, is the third: the export of capital which becomes more and more important and which aims, as we said earlier, to find the possibility of making higher profits and thus of combating the tendency—inherent in capitalism—for rates of profit to decline. The Chinese hardly discuss this aspect of the problem.
In the same work in which he gives this definition (Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism), Lenin criticizes Kautsky, the representative of centrism in the workers’ movement. He reproaches him with considering that imperialism is simply one policy among others, which may equally well be replaced by another policy, i.e. a question of choice, rather than an organic tendency of monopoly capitalism. The Chinese positions on the USSR are, in fact, nearer to this view of Kautsky’s than they are to that of Lenin, inasmuch as they make no reference whatever to what conditions imperialism (the tendency of the rate of profit to fall), and inasmuch as Soviet aid to the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America is often presented as a means which the USSR uses for the purpose of establishing its political domination.
There are two further arguments used by the Chinese leaders to prove that the USSR has imperialist policies:
a) arrangements like that with India, whereby the USSR buys goods manufactured in India thanks to Soviet aid, are presented by the Chinese as a measure for the subordination of the Indian economy;¹¹
b) the phenomenon—also, as we have seen, denounced by Cliff—of unequal exchange, above all in relations between the USSR and the people's democracies.
The first argument does not show that what is involved is imperialism, quite the contrary. For the arrangements under which the USSR buys products made in India are not necessarily a measure of subordination at all. Indian governments have long sought to safeguard the economic development of the country by arranging to pay for their imports in non-convertible national currency, in order to push the countries who supply them to spend the currency obtained either in India itself or in exchange for Indian products.¹² This has been the case since the fifties with the USSR, the GDR and Poland.
As for ‘unequal exchange’, it should be noted that this criticism is made with respect to the people's democracies, and not with respect to economic and commercial relations between the USSR and the countries of the ‘third world’. This problem has often been debated in the past with respect to exchanges within COMECON. These exchanges have certain specific characteristics¹³:
—the contracts were based, from the end of the war until 1951, upon current world prices;
—from 1951 until 1956, world prices in 1949 and the first half of 1950 were taken as a basis, in order to avoid the price fluctuations provoked on the world market by the Korean War;
—in 1957 the average 1956 prices were used;
—after 1957, hard prices were used for the entire period of the various trade agreements—in other words world prices ‘corrected’ to eliminate the fluctuations provoked by speculation or by the conjuncture;
—after 1962 the average of world prices between 1957 and 1961 was adopted;
—a further revision of prices was made in 1965-6, and the average of world prices for the period 1960-64 was adopted.
Now, the use of world market prices inevitably introduces an inequality between the countries involved, because of the unequal degree of economic development of each. As Marx explained in Capital, trade allows advanced countries to sell goods at a price which is higher than their value. At the same time, this does not alter the fact that this price is lower than that at which the less developed countries could themselves produce the same goods. For the quantity of labour incorporated in the exporting country is much less than that which the less advanced country would have to put in. Thus international trade between the ‘socialist’ countries involves a continuous drain of value from the [poor] countries to the rich countries.¹⁴
Here the criticism levelled by the Chinese is based on [an argument which will] remain valid as long as there is exchange of goods at world prices. However, it should be noted that the solution to this problem is hard to find in economic terms: for it would be practically impossible to carry out exchanges systematically on the basis of the costs of production in each producing country. If such were indeed the case, the producing country would very often find it more advantageous to reorient its exchanges towards the capitalist world. Let us take an example. Suppose for a moment that Britain is a workers’ state exporting cars to Yugoslavia and importing in return raw materials (copper, zinc, mercury, etc.). If the costs of production were taken as the basis, Britain would have to export its cars (which we can assume for the sake of the example to cost less than the world market price, since they would contain less crystallized labour than elsewhere in the world) extremely cheaply. On the other hand, it would have to import raw materials at very high prices. Consequently, it would go elsewhere for its raw materials and would sell its cars to other countries (Scandinavia, for instance).
Thus, the problem is by no means one related solely to imperialism. The solution of such a problem in the framework of the workers’ states can, therefore, only be sought in another direction: the international coordination and planning of investment, aid, interest-free loans, etc. to permit the economically less developed countries to ‘catch up’ with the more advanced ones.
It should furthermore be noted that there are cases in which the USSR sells at prices above the world market. When the USSR and Cuba signed the 1965-70 sugar agreement—in 1964—the price fixed (6 cents a pound) was below the world market price. But all forecasts suggested a decline in world market prices, and indeed for almost the entire period covered by the agreement world prices were below 6 cents a pound. Moreover, the price fixed for the Chinese-Cuban agreement covering the same period was based on the terms of the Russian-Cuban agreement.
Thus all the criticisms levelled by the Chinese leaders, rather than adding up to a critique based on Marxist criteria, appear instead to be merely polemics against particular political actions on the part of the USSR (e.g. the occupation of Czechoslovakia).
The position of ‘Révolution!’
The position of the French group Révolution! is more nuanced. It flows from the group's position on the class name of the Soviet Union. For Révolution!, the USSR is not (yet) a capitalist state. As early as 1927-8 power was won by a ‘new exploiting class’. The latter is forced by the economic crisis to orient itself towards the restoration of classical capitalism. Thus the thesis of Révolution! is situated midway between the notion of a ‘new class’ and that of a ‘new bourgeoisie’. It sees a new class which is in the process of becoming differentiated and of giving birth gradually to a new bourgeoisie. This process, however, is far from being completed. The comrades of Révolution! consider, therefore, that the Chinese position on ‘social-imperialism’ is without theoretical foundation¹⁵ and that one will only be able to speak of imperialism when capitalism is fully developed (i.e. when the law of value once again operates). Nevertheless, according to these comrades, the USSR is already inserted within ‘the imperialist concert’ (has been since Yalta), having entered it ‘for the purpose of redefining new spheres of influence’. During the last few years, the turn ‘towards an active imperialist policy’ has been particularly marked.
In the positions of the Révolution! group, the definition of this turn ‘towards’ an imperialist policy is marked by a predominance of the ‘political level’. In reality, what they call ‘insertion within the imperialist concert’ covers Russian efforts to maintain the status quo vis-à-vis imperialism. But this is not an imperialist policy. At most, it is a policy of complicity with imperialism, i.e. a policy characteristic of a conservative bureaucracy.
The comrades of Révolution! also denounce the fact that, under cover of economic aid, Russian capital competes with American capital for the economic domination of certain countries. However, they do not offer any detailed explanation of the mechanism of Soviet aid which, in most cases, does not lead to economic domination of the firms or sectors which receive it, but on the contrary to a reinforcement of national bourgeoisies and national capitalism (sometimes ‘state capitalism’) in the ‘third world’ countries to which it goes.
Conclusion
In October 1939, Trotsky wrote as follows concerning the ‘imperialism’ of the Soviet Union:
‘Can the present expansion of the Kremlin be termed imperialism? First of all we must establish what social content is included in this term. History has known the "imperialism" of the Roman state based on slave labour, the imperialism of feudal land-ownership, the imperialism of commercial and industrial capital, the imperialism of the Tsarist monarchy, etc. The driving force behind the Moscow bureaucracy is indubitably the tendency to expand its power, its prestige, its revenues. This is the element of "imperialism" in the widest sense of the word which was a property in the past of all monarchies, oligarchies, ruling castes, medieval estates and classes. However, in contemporary literature, at least Marxist literature, imperialism is understood to mean the expansionist policy of finance capital which has a very sharply defined economic content. To employ the term "imperialism" for the foreign policy of the Kremlin—without elucidating exactly what this signifies—means simply to identify the policy of the Bonapartist bureaucracy with the policy of monopolistic capitalism on the basis that both one and the other utilize military force for expansion. Such an identification, capable of sowing only confusion, is much more proper to petty-bourgeois democrats than to Marxists.’¹⁶
The theories of ‘Russian imperialism’ or ‘social-imperialism’ offered by the Chinese bureaucracy, or by groups like the International Socialists and Révolution!, attempt to provide us with an ‘elucidation’. But this turns out, on analysis, to be an extremely fragile one, like every explanation based on analogies. It in no way arms us to study concretely the contradictory behaviour of the Soviet bureaucracy.
¹ Erich Farl, ‘The State Capitalist Genealogy’ in International, Vol. 2, No. 1. For some typical examples see:— a) R. Louzon, ‘L'héritage du Czar ou celui de Lénine?’, La Révolution Prolétarienne, 1 August 1929; Contre le Courant, 21 September 1929, p. 11. b) Daniel Logan, ‘L'explosion d'impérialisme bureaucratique’, Quatrième Internationale, February 1946, pp. 5-10. c) Tony Cliff, Russia: A Marxist Analysis, International Socialism, London 1963, pp. 176-191. d) Peking Review (and other publications from People's China), passim: since 1968. e) Cahiers Révolution! No. 3, ‘Révolution et contre-révolution en URSS’, Paris 1972, pp. 62-4. f) Milovan Djilas, ‘Thèmes contemporains’, Questions Actuelles du Socialisme No. 1, April-March 1951. (See also E. Germain’s refutation, ‘The Theory of State Capitalism’, in Fourth International No. 112, September-October 1951). Djilas’s article represented the official view of the Yugoslav leadership in the early fifties—a view, however, which they subsequently abandoned.
[Lenin, Selected Works in three volumes, Moscow 1967, Vol. 1, p. 745.]
² Henri Claude, De la crise économique à la guerre mondiale, OCTA, Paris 1945, p. 8.
³ It should be added that Cliff's entire line of argument on Russian imperialism is merely a secondary aspect of the theory of state capitalism. Indeed, according to Michael Kidron, one of the principal theorists of the IS group, imperialism is only the penultimate stage of capitalism (see Michael Kidron, ‘Imperialism: Highest Stage but One?’, International Socialism 9, Summer 1962). A capitalist country may therefore have ‘passed beyond’ the imperialist stage.
⁴ Peking Review, 26 August 1968, p. 9. See too [illegible] Peking Review.
⁵ Peking Review, 21 December 1968, p. 24; 13 January 1969, p. 6.
⁶ Peking Review, 29 July 1969, p. 19.
⁷ Peking Review, 25 August 1969, p. 31.
⁸ Peking Review, 4 November 1968, p. 44.
⁹ Peking Review, 24 January 1972, article ‘Soviet Revisionism’s Neo-colonialism in India’, p. 20.
¹⁰ Lenin, Selected Works in three volumes, Moscow 1967, Vol. 1, pp. 745-6.
¹¹ India, a Reference Annual, 1960, Delhi 1960, p. 339.
¹² According to [figures of USSR-India trade (1946-1963)], [illegible].
¹³ [illegible], ‘L'évolution du COMECON et les problèmes [des] ouvriers bureaucratisés’, Quatrième Internationale No. 23, November 1964.
¹⁵ Cahiers Révolution! No. 3, pp. 62ff.
¹⁶ Leon Trotsky, In Defence of Marxism, New York 1965, p. 26.