Conference in Honor of Boris Kagarlitsky: Imperialism(s) Panel

Robert Brenner, Ilya Matveev & Hanna Perekhoda

Posted November 9, 2024

Free Boris Kagarlitsky and all anti-war political prisoners in the Russian Federation!

A message from Boris Kagarlitsky, November 14, 2024

Suzi Weissman: Welcome to Jacobin Radio. I’m your host, Suzi Weissman. On October 8th, the Boris Kagarlitsky International Solidarity Campaign held an online conference on “Boris Kagarlitsky and the Challenges of the Left.” Although Kagarlitsky is serving a five-year sentence in a Russian penal colony, he has just published a book called The Long Retreat: Strategies to Reverse the Decline of the Left. This international conference addressed the double aspect of Kagarlitsky, his contribution, his wide ranging analysis of the left’s dilemmas in the face of multiple global crises, and the advance of the far right and his resistance, along with other persecuted antiwar activists in Russia, to the authoritarianism of Putin’s regime. Today we feature the panel on imperialism with speakers Robert Brenner, Ilya Matveev and Hannah Perekhoda.

This panel tries to understand the nature of imperialism historically and in today’s world, where Russian imperialism threatens Ukraine’s very existence as a sovereign nation. We begin with Robert Brenner, who looks at the theory of imperialism from the period before World War I through the postwar period and up to the present, essentially arguing that in the present period of American hegemony. Imperialism is the weapon of weaker powers.

Ilya Matveev then follows with the theoretical discussion of imperialism, using three theorists, Lenin, Schumpeter and Mearsheimer, to look at the Russian case through the lens of their different theories.

Finally, Hanna Perekhoda, originally from Donetsk in the war-torn Donbas region, argues that Putin’s ideology sees Ukraine as a creation of the Western enemies of Russia. Putin sees Lenin as the agent who created Ukraine and divided Russia, preventing it from becoming from becoming a leading imperial power in the world. In Putin’s view, so long as Ukraine exists in this view. Russian sovereignty is under threat.

Adam Novak: I’m one of the coordinators of the European Network for solidarity with Ukraine. We participate in the Boris Kagarlitsky International Committee because we think that liberation of all Russian anti-war prisoners is an important pillar in the struggle to end the war. This session is on imperialism.

To what extent is Russia imperialist? To what extent is Russia defending itself in a defensive war against imperialism? To what extent is this an inter-imperialist conflict? Those are questions, I think, that all of us have thought about intensively in the last few years. So as you’ve seen in the program, we have three interesting panelists.

Robert Brenner has written extensively on the class struggle aspects of capitalist development. Ilya Matveev’s work includes a very interesting recently published article in Green Left Weekly about ideological and political aspects of the Putinist project. And we have Hanna Perekhoda, a Donetsk native, active in the Ukrainian radical left, whose academic work is on Russian imperial history, nationalism in Russia and Ukraine.

So we begin with Robert Brenner.

Robert Brenner: The topic I was assigned is imperialism today. My argument is that the theory of imperialism put forward by Lenin in 1916 remains the best point of departure for understanding imperialism today.

Lenin’s theory was profoundly historical and this is its strength. It was designed to understand the operation of the international capitalist system at a certain phase of its development, namely the first decades of the 20th century. Still, I would say that it provides a surprisingly powerful conceptual framework of imperialist competition, addressing not only Lenin’s epoch but our own.

What Lenin is talking about is a division of the world between one country that develops earlier, which we might call a hegemon, and those that develop later. The characteristics of each have to do with their functional requirements for reproducing international leadership on the one hand, and challenging that leadership on the other.

The first round of this system is in the late 19th-early 20th century with the UK as the hegemon, and the United States, Germany and Japan following behind. Later in the 20th century-early 21st century the advanced capitalist countries include Germany, Japan and East Asia, with the United States as the hegemon.

Lenin is talking about inter-capitalist relations among advanced capitalist countries. Equally important from the standpoint of the picture that we would want to draw is that the agents within these frameworks are further defined by their relationship with the “Indigenous population.”

A hugely important determinant of the form of development is its relationship to the underlying population. It’s not just an imperial power but a settler power. For example, American imperialism comes from the relationship to the Indigenous population and its destruction and displacement.

The institutional arrangements that we’re talking about are also forged, in part, from international rivalry. Here you have the earlier developers versus the later developers, with an important distinction between the two based on the vicious military political character of the advanced capitalist countries. You cannot understand the global regime without grasping that difference.

What I want to do is take Lenin’s theory of imperialism and apply it to the post-World War II world, hopefully bringing it up to date up by revealing the basic outcome of the fight for international hegemony. This international rivalry imprints itself on both leaders and followers.

Lenin talked about concentration of production and capital, merging of bank and industrial capital, trade production, the domestic market, formation of international monopolies, colonies. Surviving through this capitalist competition is the road in which later developers travel through these ever more elaborate set of institutional arrangements. That is true for the hegemon as well as for those countries that follow.

These institutions were also created in what became the colonized world, for example, in Latin America. On the one hand is the set of institutional arrangements designed to catch up, challenge and reproduce the hegemony, but these are also arrangements that weaken the older hegemon.

After World War II, United States hegemony totally dominated in every sphere. It had the power to impose its will across the board. It was able to take the form of hegemony that the British exercised in the late 19th century and impose it on the rest of the world.

While diplomacy and war was in the hands of the United States, its power also created conditions for the rapid development in those countries most agile in transforming property relations. Not every country could “play” the game — only those who developed capitalist social property relations.

Probably without the Cold War and the pressure to confront the Soviet Union, the United States wouldn’t have had the motivation economically develop its allies. But that in turn led to a problem: The flip side of this transformation opened the door to decline of the hegemon. The advantage of coming early to development turned bit by bit into a disadvantage, especially given the U.S. role of being the international policeman.

The dilemma is imposed by the structure. But what we find is that starting in the 1970s, and revving up in the ‘80s, is a reshaping of international institutions in order to enable the hegemon to function without being eclipsed. In my opinion it’s quite a spectacular adjustment to leave U.S. hegemony even more entrenched than before.

Russia Plays Catchup

This picture explains early 21st century developments. But where does Russia fit into this picture?

The Russian case is a one of extremely late development burdened with non-capitalist institutions. It is necessary for this particularly non-capitalist formation to devise a way to catch up in international competition.

Despite not having much in the way of fully developed capitalist institutions, Putin needs to use political instrumentalities to catch up. In this sense, Putin cannot simply adopt a set of capitalist institutions and therefore must forgo the classical development road. Deviating from the classical capitalist road, Putin is driven toward the politically driven situation of warfare. The invasion of Ukraine is an artificial attempt to solve the problem of backwardness through a particularly backward means.

Ilya Matveev: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be speaking at this event, in such esteemed company, and to be able to support Boris in this way. To continue this theoretical discussion of imperialism, I want to take up some of the themes discussed by Robert Brenner in his presentation. But I think I have a slightly different perspective on the nature of Russian imperialism.

What I propose to do is to use three authors who wrote about imperialism, and to look at the Russian case through the lens of three different theories.

The first has already been mentioned, that is Lenin’s theory. For Lenin, imperialism was ultimately an outgrowth of contradictions and tendencies inherent in capitalism, such as a tendency towards monopoly. The tendency towards overaccumulation of capital drives capital’s need for external expansion, and this in itself leads to inter-imperialist rivalries and ultimately world wars. This is Lenin’s theory in a nutshell.

Interestingly, a few years after Lenin published his famous essay on imperialism, the liberal thinker Joseph Schumpeter put forward a kind of liberal interpretation of imperialism in response to Lenin’s theory and the theories of other Second International Marxists such as Rudolf Hilferding and Rosa Luxemburg. According to Schumpeter, imperialism is inimical to capitalism, especially capitalism in its pure form, and imperialist impulses represent ideologies and social structures from the pre-capitalist past.

This was Schumpeter’s major thesis, namely that imperialism is essentially a legacy of the absolutist state and ruling classes and ideologies from the absolutist period. They survive in a new capitalist era. And this is why states adopt aggressive imperialist policies.

For Schumpeter, imperialism could ultimately be compatible with capitalist interests, but it is a sort of artificial combination. Like other liberals, Schumpeter thought that the development of capitalism somehow would lead to the withering away of imperialism and war. That is the second theory I want to look at.

The third theory is that of John Mearsheimer, a contemporary of ours, unlike Lenin and Schumpeter. His main point is that country-specific factors are ultimately irrelevant for this whole discussion; internal capitalist contradictions are irrelevant, and ideologies and social structures are irrelevant because imperialism, or what he calls “great power politics,” stem from the very nature of the international system.

In this view, every state struggles for security and makes other states insecure. Thus, inter-imperialist wars are built into the international system. When one state threatens another state, the threatened country will respond with aggressive measures. This is basically inevitable and does not depend on the domestic, social and geological structures in the threatened country.

So here we have three kinds of guiding ideas. And we can analyze Russian imperialism using these three perspectives.

I want to start with Mearsheimer because I think this is the easiest sort of case to consider. We can ask whether Russia was actually threatened when it initiated aggression action against Ukraine in 2014. Objectively speaking, Russia was not threatened by NATO. It was not threatened by Western imperialism.

The major argument for the proposition that Russia and its security interests were somehow threatened by the West is the expansion of NATO. But this should be seen in the context of actual developments on the ground, which demonstrate that NATO was in fact becoming weaker as a conventional military alliance. It was expanding, but it was also becoming weaker.

This chart shows that NATO armies were becoming smaller and America was withdrawing its troops from Europe. Back in the ’80s, there were 300,000 American soldiers in Western Europe, and by 2014 it was something like 30,000, or ten times fewer. And it’s the same story with equipment. The chart comes from a report published by the Rand Corporation, a U.S. national security think tank. The report states that Russia was, in fact, becoming stronger than NATO in the specific Eastern European potential theater of war.

Mearsheimer himself actually admitted this fact. In his famous or infamous article in 2014, he stated that NATO was expanding, but that it was also very careful not to provoke or threaten Russia in terms of conventional military strength. He went on to make an interesting argument. He said that it doesn’t matter that NATO was not objectively a threat. What matters is that Russia felt threatened, so the Kremlin perceived the situation as threatening.

But this is a different argument, of course. It’s not about objective developments anymore. It is about perceptions and, therefore, about ideology. I think that Mearsheimer’s theory is actually the weakest of the three theories we are looking at in terms of explaining Russian imperialism.

Then we have Lenin, and this theory is actually stronger, in my opinion. We can see the emergence of certain criteria for imperialism in Russia in the post-Soviet period, especially during the period of economic recovery in the 2000s and the early 2010s.

The criteria that Robert Brenner already mentioned began to appear in Russia: the concentration of capital, capitalist monopolies, the over accumulation of capital, and the need for external expansion. I think this was all present in Russia in the 2000s. Russian companies were extremely interested in post-Soviet countries because they could rebuild Soviet-era supply chains under their control. They could benefit from those old Soviet industrial economic ties.

I would argue that any Russian government, and not just Putin’s government, would feel some pressure to be more assertive, maybe even more aggressive, in the post-Soviet space because of the needs of capital accumulation. This argument is valid to a certain extent.

But at the same time, what is different from the pre-1914 period, for example, is that Russia was integrated into global capitalism in a very specific way. On the one hand, it was quite influential in its region, the post-Soviet region. On the other hand, Russian capitalism was a dependent form of capitalism. In fact, it’s dependent on Western centers of capital accumulation.

Politics of Russian Imperialism

So Russia was in an intermediate position: a classic case of semi-periphery. I don’t believe that the impulse for this extreme confrontation with the West could have come from the economic sphere, from the sphere of capital accumulation. Russian capitalism just wasn’t built for this confrontation. The impetus could only come from outside the economic sphere, probably from the political sphere.

The impulse was not just towards imperialism, but towards a specific form of imperialism that would not only break with the West but engage in extreme confrontation with the West. That could only come from elsewhere, not from Russian capitalism, because Russian capitalism really benefited from the way it was integrated into the global economy.

The Russian ruling class derived huge benefits from this intermediate position, or what we could call its sub-imperialist position, in post-Soviet countries. There Russian corporations were very influential and sometimes even dominant.

At the same time, Russian corporations had deep ties with Western companies and Western centers of capital accumulation. In fact, western capital was exploiting the post-Soviet region through Russian capital — not directly, but through Russian capital. This is the essence of a sub-imperialist position.

Speaking strictly in economic terms, that was the essence of Russia’s global integration. An illustration of this was Russia’s participation in the Davos forum. Take Dmitry Medvedev, for example; he was not a bloodthirsty nationalist back then. He was a kind of a moderate semi-liberal politician. And he spoke at Davos. This demonstrates that the Kremlin’s intention to maintain its sub-imperialist role.

In sum, Lenin’s theory goes some of the way towards explaining Russian imperialism, but not all the way, in my opinion. Then we have Schumpeter, who offers not just a non-Marxist explanation, but to some extent an anti-Marxist explanation. Nevertheless, I think it is compelling in some respects, because Schumpeter emphasizes historical elements in imperialist policy. He sees it as a kind of revenge of the past.

If we look at Russia’s imperialist discourses, we find in them an echo of the Soviet and especially the imperial past. The arguments that the Kremlin uses and that Putin uses resemble the arguments of the Russian Empire and specific ideological tropes about how Ukrainian identity was somehow invented by foreign intelligence specifically to weaken and destroy Russia.

All that was already present some 120 years ago. These discourses have somehow made their reappearance in Russian politics. So the idea that Russian imperialism is a product of the past is compelling. One obvious argument is that Putin is preoccupied with the past. He is constantly reading history books, and his obsession with Russia’s place in history and his own place in history is evident in his thinking, in his public speeches, and in the articles that he publishes.

In terms of ideology, the influence of the past is very clear. But then there’s the question of Putin’s transformation from a cynical materialist into an ideological imperialist. Why did he suddenly develop this interest in historical ideas? For me, that points to limitations of Schumpeter’s theory as it doesn’t really explain how the past reasserted itself in the present in Russia.

I think that the explanation ultimately lies in contemporary events and not just some kind of metaphysical revenge of the past. More specifically, the Kremlin’s ideology is based on the experience of primitive accumulation in the 1990s, when people, including Putin, participated in a kind of dog-eat-dog free for all in which you need to be on the offensive all the time or else you will be destroyed by your competitors. This was the essence of Russian capitalism in the 1990s, and this kind of experience was projected by the Kremlin elites onto the world stage.

In Putin’s view, the world works just like Russian capitalism in the ’90s: it’s the Wild West. You cannot show weakness. You need to take the offensive at every opportunity, and you can never bluff. Bluffing is a sign of weakness, and weakness means you will be destroyed.

Based on these kinds of experience and habits, to borrow Bourdieu’s term, the ideology fashioned after the Kremlin was radicalized by the Arab Spring and by the color revolutions in the post-Soviet space. The Kremlin felt threatened by these events, and interpreted them as an attack by the West -— not as genuine popular protests, but as something inspired by the West in order to weaken these countries and destroy these political regimes.

The conclusion was that the West is plotting the same thing against Russia so the Kremlin needs to strike first in order to neutralize the threat of a color revolution or something similar to the Arab Spring. These were the triggers that dredged up discourses and ideologies from the past and made them so relevant to the Kremlin in the present moment.

Ultimately this explains the ideological consolidation of the Kremlin. In my opinion, ideology is the crucial factor in Russia’s aggression in 2014 and 2022. It cannot be accounted for simply with a reference to objective contradictions, such as the contradictions of capital accumulation or geopolitical contradictions. By themselves they cannot explain the Kremlin’s decisions and actions, including the decision to annex Crimea or the decision to invade Ukraine. Ultimately, the explanation lies in the sphere of ideology.

This argument is based on reliable sources, and I’ve just summarized some of the points in a book I am nearly finished writing with Ilya Budraitskis on Russian imperialism. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

Hanna Perekhoda: Thank you for the invitation and the opportunity to speak. First of all, I would like to be clear. I don’t work on the issue of imperialism as such. My topic is related to different expressions of Russian-Ukrainian political imaginaries. I guess I’m here more as an activist and not as a researcher. My analysis has no pretension to be extensive or a scientific one.

It’s now a commonplace to say that fossil fuels and the trade of fossil fuels are closely linked to dictatorship, corruption, and militarism. But paradoxically, this is something we do not talk about systematically when it comes to understanding Russian imperialism. Let’s start with the observation. Since oil and gas extraction doesn’t require much labor, the wealth that is produced doesn’t go back to the population. Instead, it goes directly into the hands of those who own the fields.

In Russia, it’s basically a circle of Putin’s friends. Gas and oil are practically the only things that bring in real profits in Russia. These profits are then redistributed to other areas. A huge part of these profits, of course, goes to a few hundred families of the highest state officials who use it to buy the longest yachts in the world, the biggest palaces, and the most extravagant luxury goods.

Some of these profits go to maintain the military industry, the army, the police, in short, all the structures that help keep this small circle of people in power. What is left is generally used to keep the rest of society in a relationship of extreme dependency on the state.

As Ilya said, this system could continue like that. But there is an ideology shared by Putin’s circle, by himself, and we suppose by a few people around him, an ideology that perceives the world in a certain manner, and where Ukraine occupies a central place.

It would not be an easy task to summarize why Ukraine ended up occupying this central place in the Russian political imaginary. But if we can roughly summarize Russian political elite’s imaginary, we obtain a following narrative. Ukraine is a part of the Russian nation because they have a primordialist conception of nation. A distinct national identity of Ukrainians was deliberately created by the Western enemies of Russia and by their agents (Vladimir Lenin was agent number one, he created Ukraine and he did it to divide the Russian nation). By doing that, all these enemies of Russia aimed to prevent Russia from taking its rightful position as a leading imperial power in the world.

Ukraine is seen as a pawn in a zero-sum game. If there is an independent Ukraine, Russia cannot become a great power. Russian sovereignty is chronically under threat if Ukraine exists.

According to this worldview, only great powers have true political sovereignty. This is an important point: the way sovereignty and agency are understood in this ideology. For those who hold this worldview, those who have the capacity to act are not mobilized human communities, like nations or classes, nor even the elites who represent these communities. Only the leaders of the so-called great powers have real agency. They are the only real sovereigns. According to Putin, the world has only two such sovereigns: himself and the American president.

Seeing the world through the lens of this ideology, which is a closed system, like any ideology, Putin is sincerely convinced that every emancipation movement in the world is ultimately a plot led by the United States against Russia. Whether in Syria or other countries, it is perceived as an act of aggression by the global hegemon against the aspiring hegemon.

The war against Ukraine was a political choice. It was conceived, let us not forget, as a short, victorious war in which there would be no resistance. Let’s keep this fact in mind. It was imagined as a rapid overturning of the balance of power, with the aim of imposing a new, lasting status quo—a status quo that would allow these two leading great powers, Russia and the United States, to establish exclusive zones of influence, in other words, to create colonies where they could exploit populations and natural resources without limits or regard for any norms or rules, whether environmental protection or human rights.

Through this war in Ukraine, which may appear local, Russian political elites are openly promoting a global project, and they conceive it in these terms. Essentially, they argue: “You see, international law doesn’t work. So what do we do? Let’s admit that the only law that truly exists is the law of the strongest. Let’s just be honest and make it official.”

The risk of accepting this logic is very high, especially today, as we witness Israel destroying Gaza and the complicity of the United States, along with the paralysis of many other countries in the face of this total disregard for all rights and laws. It is the clearest evidence that, indeed, international law doesn’t work. We are witnessing an enormous crisis. The need to maintain the current international structure seems practically useless.

The problem is that in a world where these structures disappear abruptly, those already in positions of weakness—states like Palestine, Ukraine, Armenia, to name just a few examples—  and political forces in a position of weakness, such as the international left, will be among the first to lose in this struggle where only pure force and power matter. The authoritarian, productivist right that Putin represents, as well as many other politicians in other countries, is determined to completely erode these international structures and prevent the emergence of any alternative mechanisms that could limit their supremacist, polluting ambitions.

Ultimately, any act of aggression, however remote, if normalized, has implications that should concern all of us. The military victory and rise to power of a reactionary, militaristic state like Russia inevitably mean the rise of reactionary, militarist, fascist forces in other countries, and vice versa. When the victims of aggression are not defended, in any part of the planet, it emboldens the countless psychopaths in power to resolve their problems of political legitimacy through war. And right now, they face many problems of political legitimacy, given the rising inequalities, among other issues.

I would like to say a few words about the conference itself.

I want to thank the organizers for this initiative and for what they are doing, because any act of solidarity is precious in these times. We need to maintain the practice of solidarity.

I also want to say that I don’t know Boris Kagarlitsky personally and I don’t share most of the analysis I’ve seen from him. But I support your initiative of solidarity because he is a political prisoner.

As someone originally from Donetsk, as was mentioned, my friends and family there have lost a lot—some lost everything, some lost their lives—because of the Russian occupation of our region that began in 2014. I must say I was deeply upset at that time to see how many Russian left intellectuals and activists, including Boris, completely missed the point of what was happening in the Donbas.

Many downplayed or failed to recognize the role of the Russian state and army, often being inattentive to the fact that without direct Russian involvement, this war in Donbas would never have happened. This was openly acknowledged by people like Igor Strelkov, who complained that the locals in Donbas didn’t want to separate from Ukraine or fight against Ukraine. The Russian army, he said, had to do it for them. In 2014, I was very young, but even then, I was surprised to see how many leftists projected strange fantasies about class struggle onto what was, in reality, a Russian intervention. That’s why it should not come as a surprise that many Ukrainian leftists are reluctant to express their solidarity.

As for me, my position is simple: nobody deserves to be subjected to the torture of a Russian prison, which is one of the worst places you can imagine. I truly hope that political prisoners and prisoners of conscience are released as soon as possible, especially those like Boris, who opposed the military aggression of their country. But I also want to stress that there are left activists who had the courage to stand against this, not only in 2022, but already in 2014. For all these long years, they have been in Russian prison. I’m speaking of people like Daria Poludova and Igor Kuznetsov.

Most of the victims of repression in Russia today are ordinary people who had no significant involvement in political activity. Many now face long prison sentences for expressing opposition to the war on social media, even if their posts reached only ten people. They are imprisoned for that, and they don’t have social capital or international friends. Sometimes we only learn about their existence and courage after their deaths in prison.

A huge number of prisoners are random Ukrainian citizens who went to occupied territories for personal reasons, such as visiting dying parents. They are being held hostage in Russia, accused of terrorism. They are tortured, humiliated, and used for propaganda purposes. An even larger number of prisoners are Ukrainians from occupied territories, with a significant number being Crimean Tatars. Since 2014, tens of thousands of people have been kidnapped, most of them disappearing forever. Many are killed without trial. This has been the reality in occupied territories for years, while in Russia, most people were living in a period of so-called “blissful times,” to use the expression that was mentioned today and that Boris Kagarlitsky referred to in his letter.

Finally, we must not forget that repression is severe in Russia and in Russian client states like Belarus. In Belarus, it’s a real slaughter, but it mostly goes unnoticed.

To conclude, let’s be clear: victims of repression in Russia and Belarus need support and active, practical solidarity. In Ukraine, we also see cases of completely arbitrary accusations, such as accusations of collaborationism. Please check the project “Graty” to learn more and support their work, as they make these cases known and help the victims. Regular donations to initiatives like OVD-Info or the Association of Relatives of Political Prisoners of the Kremlin can also make a difference.

It’s crucial to support progressive movements that still operate in Russia, like the Feminist Anti-War Resistance. But what would make a real difference, in my opinion, is to support those who fight against the source of the problem, not just against its consequences. I mean the Ukrainian army and especially anti-authoritarian and left soldiers that have chosen to risk their lives to fight Russian imperialism. So please donate to Solidarity Collectives.