University of Venice, Italy

Recent events, far from sounding the death knoll for Marxism, seem to have given new credibility to one of its qualifying tenets, the theory of imperialism as developed over the last century from the Second International to the present. And yet, the many new factors in international politics point to the need for an updating of this theory. If the crisis of the capitalist mode of production

(despite its expansion) - and the increasing disorder in international relations are certainly signs that Marxism has something to say, those who work within that tradition cannot merely be satisfied that other schools of thought seem to be inadequate.

The object of this essay is not to review in detail the enormous quantity of existing scholarly literature on the subject; nor is it to review, as Kemp and Brewer have already done admirably the shadings and contrasts between the various tendencies within the Marxist theory of imperialism although the vigorous debate between them has been an important moment in the development of Marxist thought in the years before the First World War and then after the Second. This essay is, rather, an attempt to indicate the constituent elements of a possible new Marxist synthesis on this subject: in brief, those problems and factors that must be included and the essential relations between them. Similarly, the bibliographical note at the end serves only to identify more completely the limited references in the text.

In its most general sense the Marxist theory of imperialism argues that the vicissitudes of contemporary international affairs-direct and indirect relations and alliances between states and classes can only be correctly understood through an analysis of the capitalist mode of production which has been inexorably expanding outside the national confines of each national capitalism. The primacy of the role of class in international relations has been, in fact, well underlined in an important article by Resnick, Sinisi and Wolff. By mode of production we mean here nothing more mysterious than the social relations of production, which determine the way in which the wealth of a society is reproduced and expanded. A Marxist approach therefore begins with this and not, for example, the fact of world income distribution and disequality or the non-correspondence of international affairs with generally acknowledged human rights and values. Instead, it remains rooted in a class analysis of the continual accumulation of capital through profit; i.e. the extraction of surplus value and its realization.

The specific character of contemporary history derives, for Marxists, from an understanding that capitalism functions differently has different laws of motion than preceding modes of production and their connected social formations. In this sense the imperialism of the capitalist period is something substantially different from the aggressiveness of large powers and the contrast between their empires in other phases of historical development.

Given this, the Marxist theory of imperialism is distinguished from those who use this same term in another manner from Galtung who uses it to indicate the control of territory or Schumpeter for whom it derives from an atavistic spirit wielding physical force as well as the mainstream historians who define the colonial expansion of Europe (and the US) before 1914 as "the age of imperialism".

The theory of imperialism is thus set off from the other principal schools of interpretation of international relations and international political economy. While realists, like Gilpin and Strange, find a common denominator in the egoism of national states, and liberals like Keohane see the possibility of contrasting this only through the presence of a hegemonic power, others such as Falk have interpreted international relations according to ethical values or the UN Charter. It would however be incorrect to view such interpretative positions as rigidly separated one from the other: while each contains descriptive, explanatory and at times normative/prescriptive elements, they all tend to overlap and pieces of them are not absent from Marxist interpretations.

If in Marx's writings themselves there is no clear theory of imperialism, there were enough hints for others to build on: the concept of a necessarily ever-expanding capitalism, the definition of a mode of production and the concrete political and social evaluation of British foreign policy and of the less advanced areas with which it came into contact. The intellectual history of this theory is quite rich and each of its stages from before the First

World War with the contributions of Kautsky, Luxemburg and Lenin (the latter synthesizing elements from Hobson, Hilferding and Bucharin) through the dependency school of Frank and the connected ideas of Amin and Wallerstein up to that which, in the works of Michalet and Palloix among others, has gone under the name of the internationalization of capital has been connected to the specific historic period in which it arose, often responding to a specific moment of development in capitalism.

If despite differences there is something which links these various Marxist tendencies, it may be useful to indicate what the Marxist theory of imperialism is not, despite the views of some of its critics or commentators. There are here two main misconceptions. The first has the theory of imperialism as deriving from political needs and desires: the theory is seen, in the words of Susan Strange, as representing the will of "radicals or Marxists who want to think about how greater equity and justice could be achieved for the underdog". The connection of the theory of imperialism to the political struggle of social classes is complex and more will be said further on. Marxism certainly sees political fall-out for its theories but this must be clearly distinguished from sentimental "Third worldism" and an innocentlike "siding with the workers" where the theory is seen as beginning with political choices. First and foremost, Marxism is an interpretation of the world and its development; despite differences among Marxists, they all see it as a scientific analysis or hypothesis with politics deriving from it.

The second misconception found in many texts, as for example, Frieden and Lake is that Marxism is some form of economic determinism where direct material interests dominate politics (and international politics). On the contrary, any sophisticated version of Marxism sees a fusion where however the specific quality of a situation its framework-is given by the mode of production. (It could be noted, similarly, that the more sophisticated versions of the realist school sustain a fusion between politics and the economy, as opposed to a domination of the latter by the former.) In any case, for Marxists what counts in the contemporary period is that the societal and economic mechanisms are capitalist in nature and thus move in certain directions conditioning the rest. It is thus different from economic determinism to say nothing of the approach which reduces politics to the activities of socioeconomic lobbies (which however are certainly present and active).

Imperialism, thus, is the capitalist mode of production functioning on a world level. Given the private appropriation of the surplus and the competition between individual capitalists or corporations for profits and the control of resources and markets, this functioning is necessarily conflictual and produces a generalized unequal development. The dynamism of capitalism produces, in the words of Harvey who has deftly explored the intricacies of the "concentration and dispersal of capital", "the continuous restructuring of spatial configurations". If in fact such unequal development is the rule in capitalist development, categories like "more advanced areas" and "less advanced areas" are far from homogeneous and not at all static. Moreover, the development of advanced countries is not necessarily combined in every historical phase of capitalism with the non development or underdevelopment of others. And clearly the conflictuality is not only between more and less advanced areas but can also be at times like the present-primarily among the advanced areas themselves.

One can summarize the theory of imperialism as simply the Marxist reading of international relations, an attempt to give an interpretative grid useful for understanding the varied tendencies and structures in the contemporary international panorama. This is, however, far from an easy task since most of these tendencies and structures are not only simultaneously present but are continually interreacting. Moreover, tendencies by definition are not directly observable. If the job of Marxism is to interpret the real existing world that which is observed and observable-one cannot be fooled into thinking that all there is, is immediately visible. Especially in recent decades capital movements and economic decisions in general have come to be more and more disguised and difficult to trace: while the deployment of Soviet tanks was always identifiable, International Monetary Fund guidelines and stock market decisions are much less so.

2. If the Marxist theory of imperialism seems more satisfying and complete than other theories of international relations, in short more correct, this can only be because it appears to explain more elements of the question and their interconnectedness in a more specific way. Moreover even if social sciences are not laboratory sciences, a more satisfying theory should also be able to indicate something of future developments. Among the various tendencies of this theory, that of the internationalization of capital, which emphasizes the characteristics of the mode of production, the ubiquitous diffusion of the capitalist one and its complex articulation" with preceding ones, seems to make "more sense" because of its capacity to adhere more firmly to observable reality, describing more convincingly the relations of current phenomena, those read about in the financial papers and seen on the evening television. Of course, this tendency has benefited from being the most recent one and thus has been more able to "relate" to reality; on the other hand, the various sub-schools of dependency theory, underlining the role of the market, the geographical transference of a surplus and the role in this process of political state power, arose at a moment when the development of capitalism was blocked in vast areas of the world.

In terms of a general approach to the question it is difficult not to emphasise the importance of Lenin's method, as seen in his pamphlet Imperialism. the Highest Stage of-Capitaliw (191é) and other writings of the same period such as that on the development of capitalist agriculture in the United States. The roots of Lenin's intellectual outlook, on the other hand, can be clearly seen in two sets of notebooks written during the First World War: the Notebooks on Imperialism of 1915-1é which copy out and comment on an enormous amount of material in the field of international political economy and politics and the Philosophical Notebooks of 1914-15, indicative of his general approach, which comment primarily on various works of Hegel (The Science of Logic and Lectures on the History of Philosophy).

In Imperialism--described only as "a popular outline"-Lenin utilizes the level of abstraction necessary to characterize the phenomena he sets out to describe, in this case, capitalism in its most recent phase. Abstractions are thus necessary in order to get closer to the total reality. In his Philosophical Notebooks he wrote of the necessity, with regard to the essential impulse in phenomena, to " descover, understand, save, 1 i berate f rom the she 11 , purify, that which Marx and Engels have done". Lenin's attempt, to use the expression of Gyérgy LukAcs, is to take in "the reality of the complex entirety. the totality of social development". Thus, in his notebooks, he sees in the "dialectics of things ... the totality of all sides of the phenomenon and reality, and their (reciprocal) relations; this is what composes truth" and copies from Hegel the expression "was bekannt ist, darum noch nicht erkannt" [that which is acknowledged, is not yet known]. And from the German philosopher he takes the idea of logic as the totality of the laws of development "of all the concrete content of the world and its knowledge" and the existence of a "necessary and objective connection of all sides, forces, tendencies, etc. of a given group of phenomena" even if contradictory.

Not surprisingly he approves of the expression of Aristotle that "the hand, separated from the body, is a hand only in name".

As he stated in the preface to the French and German editions of Imperialism, Lenin wished to present "a complete Picture of the world capitalist system in its international relationships at the beginning of the twentieth century on the eve of the first world imperialist war. Given "the extreme complexity of social life" Lenin felt that specific xamples or data could prove any point; therefore, in order to depict the objective position of the ruling classes in all belligerent countries "one must ... take ... all of the data on the basis of economic life in all the belligerent countries and the whole world". A correct characterization of an entity would therefore also include the shadings within this reality.

The method of Lenin is therefore quite different from the static quality of the dependency school and the centuries-long continuity of the world-system school which negates any importance of stages in the development of capitalism. It is more than obvious that the five characteristics indicated by Lenin in his pamphlet concentration of production in monopolies, formation of finance capital through the fusion of banks with productive capital, capital export, division of the world by the large monopolies, territorial division of the world by the great powers-while in part remaining true, are no longer adequate for an accurate and specific description of contemporary capitalism. It should also be noted that a weak point of Lenin's formulation was the unclarified nature of the link between these characteristics, something which should have flowed from his methodology. The relevance of the method utilized in Lenin's Imperialism lies, in any case, in its encouragement to seek out the specific elements of contemporary capitalist structures in order to arrive precisely at a general description.

3. If the method of Lenin is the most fruitful in developing a Marxist reading of the contemporary international political economy it is clear that the starting point must be the attempt to identify those characteristics which most typify contemporary capitalism. One could better specify these characteristics by dividing them up on the one hand into tendencies-which can be abstracted from groups of single events and, on the other, those structures at the political and economic level in which the tendencies are embodied.

The most recent tendencies in contemporary capitalism can perhaps best be noted in relation to those which were present from the outset and have remained present: that is the underlying laws of motion which represent the needs and drives of the system. Such can be considered the generalized production of commodities; the valorization and accumulation of capital which remains the object of each firm many of which however are today linked oligopolistically-as it strives to increase its rate of profit and control over markets and resources; the periodic crises of overproduction or underconsumption, perhaps connected to a declining rate of profit. Stratification and unequal development with the connected international division of labor have also been constant characteristics of capitalism and this mode of production, despite the tendency towards expansion, has never unified the world with regard to social formation, material wealth or decisional power. The system-neither programmed or programmable given the private ownership of the means of production and the private appropriation of a surplus-has always been both dynamic and chaotic, rarely blocked and only very rarely on the verge of collapsing.

If these factors have remained constants new tendencies have arisen in the last decades to give a new characterization to contemporary capitalism: globalization, changes in production and the organization of work, financialization, the persistent economic crisis, the changing role of the State and a relative decline of US hegemony are tendencies about which most Marxists and non Marxists would be in agreement. How they are to be described, how much they are considered inherent in the socioeconomic system, what relative importance to give to each of them, how they are interconnected and in which direction they are going are of course the controversial questions on which divisions take place. Much has been written about each of them and here no attempt will be made here to enter fully into the discussion itself. On the other hand, more than merely composing a sort of incoherent laundry list, the idea here is to indicate the main lines of those factors that must enter into a future complex synthesis.

Quite clearly recent years have seen a new stage in what has been called the globalization of the capitalist world economy. In part this has included the mere elimination of possible alternatives, that is, the "socialist camp" and various "third world" attempts at a non capitalist line of development. While this has led to an expansion of the market for capitalist goods, the dramatically new phenomenon from the 19é0s has been the export of capital. This, however, has taken the form not only of loans or portfolio i nvestment-f actors strongly present from the mid-19th century on but now more specifically that of the export of the capitalist mode of production itself, that is, of the social relations which characterize the system of salaried labor. This cannot be denied despite the distortions operated or deepened by the arrival of the transnational corporations (tncs) and the evident fact that this new capitalist accumulation is taking place under strongly unequal material conditions. Whatever may be driving the tncs, it is clear that for them distance no longer impedes the possibility of control.

Moreover the content of the leading capitalist sectors has changed: telecommunications and bio-technology depend greatly on intellectual resources and while obviously material in their production, they do spin off more services than commodities in the traditional sense. This however should be distinguished from another aspect of contemporary capitalist political economy, the tendency towards financialization. There has been much idle chatter about post industrial society: the basis of the economy nonetheless remains the production and distribution of material goods in the form of commodities or of services related to these commodities. The latter must be produced somewhere (although the production may be part of the undeclared or even illegal economy and may be geographically far from the connected services) or the system cannot function. On the other hand, it is extemely significant for the system's changing nature that we are faced with an ever greater growth of interest (deriving from the mere movement of capital) as opposed to profit (deriving from surplus value, itself connected to developments and relations in productive and distributive processes) as a source of capitalist revenue.

An up-to-date version of the theory of imperialism must also evaluate the phenomenon of toyotism. Only one part of this-ohnism, as analysed by Pala and Filosa-is similar to taylorism in so far as it is a change in the technical organization of work i n order to extract more surpl us val ue f rom the 1 abor f orce (ei ther relatively or absolutely). Rather, the experience of Japan, as seen in studies by Dore among others, indicates that toyotism, like fordism, should be defined more extensively in terms of societal development. At stake may be a change in the way that capitalism seeks to achieve a form of regulation organizing and integrating all aspects of the society (including the educational system). Similar to the discussion of fordism, the question must be posed as to how universally applicable toyotism is and how much of it is specifically rooted in a national capitalist society. As we have seen in this century, taylorist factories could exist in every corner of the globe--as ohnist factories are today all over but a fully fordist society, as distinguished from the "peripheral fordism" described by Liepitz, due to specific historical development, could really exist only in the United States. And if this was the secret of past US hegemony perhaps toyotism will in this epoch give the decisive edge to Japan as a superior form of state regulation compared with that present in the liberal democratic western societies. Underlying this is the question posed by Albert, Thurow and Hart among others as to whether fundamentally different strategies, due to differences in national capitalism, are being employed in the present-day rivalry between the great powers.

No critical discussion of contemporary capitalism can avoid the issue of the long crisis gripping the system since the early 1970s; typically the present upswing seems incapable of creating permanent qualified new employment. Is this long crisis one of typical underconsumption/overproduction or is it due as the French regulationist school in the work of Aglietta maintains to an imbalance in the expansion of Departments I and II? Is the central question an inability to raise labor productivity with the consequent decline in the rate of profit? Politically, the question can be raised as to whether such a crisis can continue for another decade without undermining the stability of the system.

Lastly, all these tendencies must be linked to current geopolitical considerations. Not everyone agrees that a qualitative decline in US hegemony has actually taken place:

Bromley sees only a loss on a quantitative level while for Strange the United States has acquired new hegemony over structural aspects of international relations. Those on the other hand who sustain the reality of this loss of hegemony must also note that the new stratification among national states and regional economic areas may indicate a long term shift in the center of gravity in the world economy to Asia, something similar to the 1é00s which saw a definitive shift from southern Europe to England and Holland.

If these are the principal tendencies which have developed over the last few decades, the main structures in which they are embodied are essentially three: the transnational corporation which is the dominant form in which the capitalist mode of production is present; the individual national state which remains the quintessential structure of political power; and the many economic and political institutions which attempt to structure political and economic power on the international level. It is perhaps useful to indicate immediately that there is no evidence for the presence of a guiding sort of "supreme engineer" or "spirit of history" which is carrying out consciously, above the contrasting efforts of various structure and social classes, a general effort of coordination.

The present day tncs pose a series of questions to all who attempt to evaluate their nature and role: why corporations internationalize (a natural growth pattern as the business historians Dunning, Vernon and Chandler sustain); how they are structured (the relationship of central offices and subsidiaries as markedly hierarchical according to Hymer); what seem to be their principal interests (profit, expansion, control or a mixture of all three); how and why they form their ever-changing alliances (within a given productive sector or crossing over such sectors) as well as how to measure power and direction within them (the role of management, emphasized by La Grassa, as compared to that of property). And perhaps most important of all, the nature of their relationship to the national states in which they originated. If in fact they no longer possess national roots, as some suggest in the National Planning Association's discussion, this would represent a major change in the connection between capitalism and political structures. At stake in the definition of tncs is no less than the characterization of the contemporary capitalist mode of production.

With regard to the national states the second of the main structures and again a main focal point for Marxist theory--it might be useful to adopt the working hypothesis that each state is a social formation composed of various modes of production (and that the more "advanced" it is, the more the capitalist one is dominant). If the function of the state is in general to guarantee not only its own survival and increasing power and influence but also the furtherance of the dominant mode of production through forms of regulation and the achievement of an economic and political consensus, its way of functioning, at least in the West, seems to have changed. It is perhaps too early to tell if the recent wave of free trade ideology and deregulation is but a passing phase of brief duration. Given however the disequilibrium built into the system and the social crises that this can provoke-clearly a new form will have to be found or one will necessarily return to the traditional role of the state.

Specifically, the evolution of policy in national states should be studied especially with regard to how they evaluate and face their contemporary situation: their relationship to "their" tncs, to their surrounding regional area, to the formation of a political and sdeial consensus and to the other advanced countries (e.g. the debate on "industrial policy" in the United States as seen in the works of Reich and Cohen and Zysman). It would also be interesting to see how middle-range states like Italy carve out an international position and what is the basis of their national economies abroad: with regard to Italy should more importance be assigned to small and medium size firms like Benetton than to the traditional monopolies like Fiat and Olivetti?

Much attention has already been given to the newly industrializing countries (nics) which are an important feature of the new forms of stratification and the international division of work. As Jenkins notes the term "Third world" is now devoid of meaning and if for many countries it is no longer correct to speak of "underdevelopment" in the traditional sense, it is also necessary to go beyond descriptions like "distorted development" since all capitalist development is distorted in the sense of its unequal and unbalanced character: "blocked industrialization" and "dependent industrial ization"--terms used respectively by Altvater and Evans but the concepts are also present in Frbbel--have an infinity of gradations. The more germane question for each of the ex Third world countries is how much independence and development they can hope for, once these terms have been defined.

All scholars--Amsden and Wade among others have underlined the role of the state in nic success stories. Such experiences do seem more possible in a period like the present of inter- imperialist rivalry where world hegemony is far from decided as opposed to that of the US superimperialist domination after the Second World War (only in part moderated by competition with the USSR and ever less so in the 1980s). If however a strongly cohesive national elite, in a less developed country possessing a conscious desire to guide the economy, does today have a certain amount of room in which to manoevre, the changed international economy from that of the 19é0s and 1970s is hardly favorable for generalizing industrial take-offs like that of South Korea and Taiwan. Limited growth of world demand, stiffening protectionism in the form of non-tariff barriers, cut-throat competition to reduce labor costs and the increasing resistance of the more advanced countries to transfer technology all represent powerful difficulties for potential nics. Nor is it clear that the alternatives presented by Broad and Cavanagh and Bello for a domestically oriented development are actually feasible without deep-rooted revolutionary change.

The third of the main structures in which the tendencies are embodied are the many international organizations of which several have been created during the most recent phase of globalization and the dominance of the tncs. Whether universal like the UN or limited in state membership (regionally or through their role in the world economy) or in a self-defined sector of competence, all these structures be they policy planning for executive action or merely a platform for the exchange of ideas and the construction of a new consensus among national or regional elites-seek to give order to the general tendencies indicated. It would be easy to give examples the Balkans, Africa, ecology, indirect forms of protect ion i sm where, these organizations have often become the locus of conflicts as opposed to reducing or composing them.

The free trade and deregulation spirit now dominant in advanced countries has reduced the political will to impose order. Not surprisingly Jacques Delor's White paper an unemployment has met in the European Union a rather tepid response and limited discussion. It could be added that even within the single states the capacity for coordination seems weak. In the US political system it is the president who should most represent the general needs of the system. It is easy to contrast the inability of Clinton to control the pharmaceutical companies in the name of reorganizing the health system- -necessary to have an adequately cared for work force with Kennedy's defeat of the steel barons' attempt to raise prices thirty years earlier.

The institutions and structures indicated, embodying the main tendencies of the contemporary capitalist world are the essential container within, which "events" take place. The difficulty in part is that the connections between these three categories-events, tendencies and structures are interlacing and interlocking and reverberate on one another in a constantly developing dialectical relationship. Problems in delineating future lines of development also derive from the confused and instable alliances of political and economic structures. The IMF, for example,--representative of the international banking system-with its emphasis on restrictive monetary policy, deregulation and indiscriminate privatization is evidently blocking a further expansion of the capitalist mode of production in those areas of the ex Third world still relatively untouched by it. How then does this relate to the "dominance" in the capitalist economy of the tncs? Is this simply a contrast between banking and industrial capital as indicated by Hilton in his study of the "City"--still not completely fused in finance capital? Returning to the question already raised of the relationship between the tncs and the nationstates, one can ask in what way the latter are still necessary to the former in terms of obtaining credits and help when operating abroad. To what extent do the dominant tncs need a protective network composed of a myriad of small enterprises welded into a .. national society"? In this relationship who today is dominating whom?

4. As was clear for Lenin, Marxism is not only an analysis of the world and consequently of international relations but also the drawing of political conclusions. A Marxist theory of imperialism therefore not only purports to explain the main characteristics of these relations and their interconnection as well as indicating future lines of development but also seeks to derive from this how the anticapitalist struggle relates to the conflictuality between states, capitals and classes.

For Althusser, Lenin's method best exemplifies an analysis which maintains the unity of political and economic structures and indicates at every moment the political relevance of these structures on social classes. And according to LukAcs, the superiority of Lenin in his 191é pamphlet "is in his capacity to link continually and organically an economic theory of imperialism to all contemporary political questions". The pamphlet on imperial ism with its sharp polemic against Kautsky and the discussion of the labor aristocracy-was in fact the theoretical support from which derived the actuality of socialist revolution; its originality was precisely in the dynamic synthesis which integrated long term processes and political positions and facts.

If the tendencies are embodied in structures, the structures themselves are, for Marxists. hegemonized by social classes and are the result of the class struggle. The conflictuality between and within social classes is worked out on the level of economic structures (nationally and internationally), nation-states., and the existing international organizations.

The structures and tendencies involved in international relations are certainly material: the values, thought processes and desires of a ruling class are important but only as they take form in material realities or concrete projects which are realized. Otherwise Gramsci will once again be misused as the intellectual history of the ruling class seen in general hegemonic projects like the Trilateral Commission analysed by Gill comes to be exchanged for a materialist analysis rooted in class conflict. In brief, one must show what cultural values have to do with the actual distribution and use of wealth and power which have taken place.

In general the classic Marxist debate over the last century has seen three possible directions in international relations: superimperialism, ultraimperialism, or continually increasing conflictuality. It seems impossible that one power in the near future will be able to impose a superimperialism of the type exercised by the United States for the two decades after the Second World War. And if the international economy is moving in the direction of a universal trust we have as much reason as Lenin had to think that wars and revolutions will prevent the world from arriving at it. Recent years, on the other hand, have much more indicated increasing conflictuality as the main tendency and van der Pijl, a decade ago, spoke well of "the dangerous illusion of Western unity". Sharp trade skirmishes-despite the rhetoric about the new world trade organ i zati on and the persistent jockeying for position with regard to sensitive areas do not of course necessarily mean as Friedman and LeBard have suggested --that war is destined to break out. The tendency towards conflict between national capitals based on the struggle for political domination of resources (natural and intellectual), markets, the labor force and financing-seems however much stronger than that towards an "internationally unified and mobile capital".

On a geo-strategic level the existing interimperialistic conflicts can be analysed with the traditional language of international political science. Conflictuality on the north-east and the north-south grids are in large part connected to the struggle for the reabsorption of the ex socialist camp (where Germany is particularly active) and the division of the less developed world (as Hollerman has analysed with regard to Japanese influence in Brazil). The main questions here center on traditionally defined spheres of influence (connected to the present-day international division of labor) and immigration and protectionism (a non secondary part of domestic politics in the advanced countries). In this view south-south conflicts (based on ethnic or national groupings) seem a sideshow where the war between the poor seems often to cover rivalries among the advanced capitalist powers.

The new stratification in the world economy (and politics) may include-despite the difficulties already noted a few more nics slipping in to the circle of the advanced countries although probably they will remain subordinate to the larger ones in their regional economic area, as is Mexico to the United States and South Korea to Japan. There is even the possibility that some of these nics will truly become-in terms of social formation, distribution of wealth and style of life-similar to the present day capitalist centers. This does not mean, however, that stratification as such would end in that the dynamism of capitalism may well bring these centers to a new stage of their development where they can maintain in some way their control.

With regard to the connection between the Marxist theory of imperialism and the struggle to transform the world and supercede the capitalist mode of production, the situation is not at all as clear as it once seemed. If Marxism remains the most secure basis for understanding the strengths and weaknesses and the driving force of the capitalist system, it is no longer today the basis of a mass political opposition to capitalism. If nothing excludes this as a future possibility, it is however necessary that the present-day minority anticapitalist and anti-imperialist forces come to terms with a completely new reality: absent are both a global superpower which ideologically and politically opposes the capitalist camp (although for some this is a positive fact) and a powerful third world anti-imperialist movement while the working class movement in the advanced countries has rarely been so weak.

one could even sustain that the working class, although more than ever united objectively by the dominance of the tncs and the banking system, is increasingly divided subjectively on ethnic, national and religious grounds. More importantly, such divisions, based on differences in standard of living and privileges in a period of ever more limited resources, represent, as Harrod has shown, functional categories of the international political economy. It is not at all clear today how to begin reconstituting the unity of such forces even if the objective basis does exist. If traditional political parties of the left are all in crisis it is, furthermore, far from evident that ecological questions, citizen initiatives or non governamental organizations provide a more secure basis for such an opposition. An updated Marxist theory of imperialism cannot but deal with such questions.

5. The term "imperialism" is perhaps not that important although it is useful to indicate the main threads and roots of one's general approach. Unfortunately "imperialism" has often been too narrowly associated with adjectives like "abuse of power", .. arrogant action", "overbearing domination", etc., or with the idea of a structural relationship which totally blocks the development of the weaker partner. While imperialism often includes this, it is more useful to see it, as Lenin did, as a stage in capitalist development which includes particular characteristics of the political economy.

If this essay has emphasized Lenin's methodology as a way of understanding the structures and workings of the international political economy of contemporary capitalism, it is because this has seemed to represent the best starting point. As al ready indicated, the particular characteristics of contemporary imperialism are in many cases different from those of Lenin's day. Moreover, a starting point does not indicate where the voyage ends and even includes the possibility that the political fallout may be quite different from that which Lenin drew in 191é.

If the theory of imperialism will prove to be of any use it will have to operate, from its own particular point of view, a reaggregation of disciplines like international relations, political science and economics. What will be necessary, in the words of Georges Corm writing from a Hobson-like sympathy for small-scale competetive capitalism-is nothing less than a rehabilitation of political economy as a discipline, liberated from its contemporary subservience to statistics, engineering, and commercial law.

The difficulty of developing an adequate theory of imperialism is precisely its pretence of comprehensiveness. This brief essay has only sought to indicate in a general way the lines along which such an inquiry should develop. The list of structures and tendencies to investigate is intimidating but equally intimidating is the enormous quantity of material already available from a Marxist perspective. And yet it is clear that many more case studies on specific trics, nics and recent policies in the advanced countries probably represent the best way to procede to a new synthesis. Only in this way can we investigate the behaviour and consequences of structures and tendencies for problems like development, class composition or foreign investment. It is for example through an evaluation of the behaviour of specific trics that one can attempt to conclude whether they are nationally rooted or are in the process of forming a world monopoly. Clearly, the gathering of empirical data is influenced by theory but it is equally true that a theory able to show the interconnectedness of phenomena can only be based on empirical data. Hopefully such an approach could lead to greater agreement among Marxists on central questions such as the role of national states, the extension of the capitalist system and the possibilities of present day class alliances.

The Marxist theory of imperialism is not an automatic formula which is only waiting to be discovered and applied. Like all other theories it must be capable of continual readjustment. And its only "proof" will be a greater reasonability in terms of explaining phenomena. In addition, for Marxists a correct theory must also show a capacity to contribute to political solutions of yet unresolved problems; it must in short be capable of transforming the world. Otherwise stated, the verification of the theory can only be in its application in the fullest sense of the word.

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Hymer, Stephen. Le imprese multinazionali Turin: Einaudi, 1974

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Strange, Susan. States and Markets. London: Pinter, 1988

Wallerstein, Immanuel. Historical Capitalism. London: Verso, 1983