The antagonistic, vampiric empires of old never truly died, they simply moved towards cooperation. This was first theorized by Karl Kautsky in his article Ultra-Imperialism, written days before the breakout of World War One, which outlined his predictions for how capitalism would progress. According to Kautsky, the progression of capitalism, and in turn imperialism, was trending towards a scenario where the monopolies of capital would replicate themselves in the functioning of states.
To fully understand Kautsky’s predictions and how correct they are in the contemporary era, the concept of free trade must be examined. Firstly, free trade, or the exchange of goods on a capitalist market, is unequal when viewed at the industrial level. Industrial trade is not done through petty cash purchases, it is done through resource exchange, whether that resource is cash, raw materials, finished goods, or anything else that can be commodified. In this case, a commodity is anything that is produced to be traded as opposed to being produced for direct usage. this would include money, which is defined as a commodity that had been elevated to the primary value expression of any given market. At the scale of industrial production, however, often the exchange can be boiled down to raw resources being traded for finished goods or other specialized commodities that cannot be produced where it’s needed.
It’s important to note that, on this level of resource exchange, there are two types of states: Agrarian and Industrial. The agrarian state is sparsely populated and lags in development compared to the industrial state. Its main source of economic power comes from the resources that lay within the state, as opposed to the productive power of the state itself. These types of states are limited in their ability to actualize their resources, as they don’t have the capital or population to fully exploit their own resources. Industrial states, however, do not have this issue. They are densely populated, and their primary source of economic power comes from their ability to produce finished goods with resources either found within the state, or more commonly, from external markets, which are almost always agrarian in nature.
Free trade between industrial and agrarian states is inherently unequal. The agrarian state cannot actualize and utilize its latent resources, forcing it to sell them as raw materials as opposed to produced industrial goods. This leads to a situation where the industrial state has the capacity to actualize agrarian states’ raw materials and sell them back to them, fostering a vampiric relationship. The agrarian state has no capacity to do anything with their resources, so they must sell them to the industrial state, which in turn transforms the resource and sells it back to the agrarian state at a higher cost. The end of the commodity cycle lays within the agrarian state, where the vast majority of items sold there are for consumption in some form. this is in contrast to the industrial state’s position, where the goods brought in are mainly to feed the growing population and further encourage capital accumulation.
This leads to a peculiar relationship, where, to further expand the agrarian market, capital from industrial states must be exerted. This is done through expansion of logistics, the development of extraction methods, and general infrastructure improvements. This, however, is not mutually beneficial. These new avenues for capital accrual are owned decisively by the capitalists of the industrial state, who retain control of railways, ports, roads, and other developments. In fact, localized capital is often destroyed or otherwise stopped from participating. In some agrarian states, the localized capital is able to break out and retain autonomy, even develop into an industrial state, as we’ve seen with the USA, Tsarist Russia, and, more recently, China.
However, this isn’t the case for the vast majority of agrarian states, who would see their industrial gains owned by foreign interest. This continued for a time, where industrial powers would expand their agrarian markets until an issue arose; there was no more unspoken agrarian states for the industrial states to take over. The world was completely subjugated, and new markets could not be found or necessarily created, so they were fought over. Industrial empires would completely capture the agrarian states, leaving no independent states left, bar some that barely retained their autonomy, such as Ethiopia, which was a feudal state with rampant abuses toward the commoners. The empires would first begin land arms races, and once the immediate land around them was spoken for by either them or another power, the naval arms race begun.
This would culminate in the two World Wars. Massive conflicts where colonies and imperial states would be ravaged by the carnage that ensued. Kautsky predicted that this would cause enough strife for the capitalist class that they would, instead of further the arms race, act in congress and peacefully divide the world into spheres of influence. For the most part, this would happen. European states would cease their wars over colonies and spheres of influence and would instead act in cartelistic fashion to secure these markets for these newly cooperative empires. the only exception would the the USSR, who would establish it’s own pseudo-colonial relationship with the entirety of the Warsaw Pact, where the Soviet leadership would domineer the entire functioning of the Warsaw Pact states.
The age of Imperial wars would, for the time being, be over, and the age of colonial wars would begin. Instead of empires fighting over foreign markets, they would fight the markets themselves, attempting to maintain control of a rapidly deteriorating position. With the USSR and China joining the fray as supposed liberators, the situation became even more dire for the empires. There would have to be a change.
The empires of the world would slowly but surely release their colonies, but not without ensuring their complete control of their economies. France, for example, owned a vast majority of West African mineral resource rights until Ibrahim Traoré, the dictator of Burkina Faso, recently began to nationalize them for his own opportunistic purposes, with Mali and Niger following suit. The agrarian states would be freed in as much that they were no longer ruled by their former empire in name, but economically speaking, the foreign capitalists would reign supreme.
This would culminate in all of the empires of the world working toward either a conglomerated private or state capitalism, or Neo-colonialism. The supposed free world and the Sino-Soviet spheres would coalesce into powerful imperial blocs, with Latin America, Africa, and Asia as their primary trade war zones. The Cold War itself was a collection of lukewarm flashes in these regions as these new and reformed empires fought for dominance. It would end, as Francis Fukuyama says, in the End of History, or the veritable end of political progression. To Fukuyama, the world had settled, with the fall of the Soviet Union, into a liberal status quo. It’s important to note that Fukuyama did not mean that there would be no more conflict, but that new conflicts would only replicate the capitalist liberal paradigm. To Fukuyama, this status quo would be excruciating.
History, however, is not over. Marx states in many different works that written history is the record of class struggle. This class struggle simply will not end until Communism is achieved, where not only is the proletariat the dominant class in society, but the only class in society. The goals of communism is the complete dissolution of the current bourgeois order, which would see the bourgeois class turned into workers, equal to everyone else. Only then will history end. This pausing of historical development, according to Fukuyama, is due to the inherent liberal order being more ready and able to control the world, but not through peace. Instead, this stoppage of history is caused by an invisible hand: one connect to the bourgeois arm and body of the state.