Five Characteristics of Neoimperialism by Cheng Enfu and Lu Baolin: Building on Lenin’s Theory of Imperialism in the 21st Century
Cheng Enfu is a principal professor at the University of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, director of the Research Center for Economic and Social Development at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and president of the World Association for Political Economy. He can be reached at 65344718[at]vip.163.com.
Lu Baolin is a professor at the School of Economics, Qufu Normal University.
Neoimperialism is the specific contemporary phase of historical development that features the economic globalization and financialization of monopoly capitalism. The characteristics of neoimperialism can be summed up on the basis of the following five key features.
First is the new monopoly of production and circulation. The internationalization of production and circulation, together with the intensified concentration of capital, gives rise to giant multinational monopoly corporations whose wealth is nearly as great as that of whole countries.
Second is the new monopoly of finance capital, which plays a decisive role in global economic life and generates a malformed development, namely, economic financialization.
Third is the monopoly of the U.S. dollar and intellectual property, generating the unequal international division of labor and the polarization of the global economy and wealth distribution. Fourth is the new monopoly of the international oligarchic alliance. An international monopoly alliance of oligarchic capitalism, featuring one hegemonic ruler and several other great powers, has come into being and provides the economic foundation for the money politics, vulgar culture, and military threats that exploit and oppress on the basis of the monopoly. Fifth is the economic essence and general trend. The globalized contradictions of capitalism and various crises of the system often undergo an intensification that creates the new monopolistic and predatory, hegemonic and fraudulent, parasitic and decaying, transitional and moribund form of contemporary capitalism as late imperialism.
The historical evolution of capitalism has passed through several distinct stages. At the beginning of the twentieth century, capitalism reached the stage of private monopoly, which Lenin termed the imperialist stage.
The era of imperialism brought with it the law of uneven economic and political development. In order to expand overseas and redistribute the territory of the world, the leading powers formed various alliances and launched a fierce struggle that led to two world wars. Eurasia suffered from continuous wars throughout the first half of the twentieth century. One after the other, national democratic revolutions and the communist movement developed continuously. After the Second World War, a number of economically underdeveloped countries adopted a socialist path of development, intensifying the confrontation between capitalism and socialism. Although The Communist Manifesto had long anticipated that capitalism would inevitably be replaced by socialism, this was only possible in a very few countries. The capitalist and imperialist system, despite suffering grave problems, survived.
From the 1980s and early 1990s, capitalism carried out a strategic shift to neoliberal policies and evolved into its neoimperialist phase. This represents a new phase in the development of imperialism following the Cold War.
Please DOWNLOAD to read full text