"New imperialism" theories are grounded in the classical statements of Lenin, Bukharin, and Hilferding and are based on this assumption of a world of rival national capitals and economies, conflict among core capitalist powers, the exploitation by these powers of peripheral regions, and a nation-state-centered framework for analyzing global dynamics. Hilferding, in his classic study on imperialism, Finance Capital, argued that national capitalist monopolies turn to the state for assistance in acquiring international markets and that this state intervention inevitably leads to intense political-economic rivalries among nation-states. There is a struggle among core national states for control over peripheral regions in order to open these regions to capital export from the particular imperialist country and to exclude capital from other countries. "Export capital feels most comfortable ... when its own state is in complete control of the new territory, for capital exports from other countries are then excluded, it enjoys a privileged position," observed Hilderding. Lenin, in his 1917 pamphlet Imperialism: The Latest Stage of Capitalism, stressed the rise of national financial-industrial combines that struggle to divide and redivide the world among themselves through their respective nation-states. The rivalry among these competing national capitals leads to interstate competition, military conflict and war among the main capitalist countries. Hilferding, Lenin, and others analyzing the world of the early twentieth century established this Marxist analytical framework of rival national capitals that was carried into the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by subsequent political economists via theories of dependency and the world system, radical international relations theory, studies of U.S. intervention, and so on. As we have seen, capitalism has changed fundamentally since the days of the classical theorists of imperialism, yet this outdated framework of competing national capitals continued to inform observers of world dynamics in the early twenty-first century.
Global Capitalism, Capitalist Equations and Global Crises
