Imperialism in the Marxian conception of globalisation

Andrii Maliuk - Candidate of Sciences in Sociology, Senior Research Fellow, Department of Theory and History of Sociology, Institute of Sociology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4542-220X

Abstract. The paper aims to reconstruct the Marxian vision of the place and role of capitalism in shaping worldwide, global relationships and interconnections, as well as in setting the historical limits of globality. It is shown that both globality as a product of capitalism itself and the worldwide expansion of capital are imperialist by nature. With regard to Marx’s viewpoint on how the law of value works on an international scale, non-equivalent exchange as a basis for imperialist domination can be attributed to the fact that the value created in peripheral countries of the global capitalist system is handed over to its industrially developed core — without receiving any value in return. This usually takes place in three ways. The first one involves direct exploitation of indigenous labour force by the capital of the core. The second one is related to the mechanism of the world market where backward countries sell the produced commodities at a price below their value to advanced countries which, in turn, sell their commodities at a price above their value (with respect to the average price for a particular commodity worldwide). The third way is a combination of both the above. Another aspect worth mentioning is that capitalism eliminates economic fragmentation of both the means of production and ownership, which prevailed at earlier stages of the evolution of private property. Furthermore, capitalism incorporates local, regional and national markets into a single global one, as well as concentrates productive forces of the entire humankind through global value chains and production networks. This entails socialisation of labour (which Marx referred to as ‘Vergesellschaftung der Arbeit’) on an unprecedented scale. This also enables the transition to social (in Marx’s terms, ‘gesellschaftliche’) production, which serves to overcome alienation and eradicate poverty. In Marx’s opinion, capitalism is historically justified because it creates the material basis for a new society. On the one hand, capitalism fosters new types of relations, which are global in character and based on interdependence among people; besides, it generates means for these relations. On the other hand, capitalism facilitates development of human productive forces and makes it possible, by means of science, to transform production of material goods into control of nature. Therefore, history turns into a truly global history, and this is a prerequisite for its transformation from prehistory into a real history. This process coincides with the transition to a communist economic system.

Keywords: Marx, materialist conception of history, capitalism, world capitalist system, imperialism, theory of a global historical process, social theory, globalisation.

Publication in: ukr | rus

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