I went through the trouble of formatting the very end of the essay for a comment buried deep in a thread, so I thought I'd share it here in a post so more people can see it.
Here's the end of it (I went ahead and formatted more of it for this post), but you'd benefit if you read the whole essay:
Lenin
Lenin’s account of imperialism was derived from those which developed within the Second International left - starting with Ernest Belfort Bax, and proceeding through Parvus to Hilferding.5 The broad line of reasoning was that general overproduction, within the framework of the restricted consumption of the working class, had been expected by the German Social Democratic Party leadership to result in a general breakdown/crisis of capitalism - Zusammenbruch or Kladderadatsch. But the dynamic of overproduction, according to the theory, drove also towards two other phenomena, which mitigated the tendency to Zusammenbruch: first, cartels and monopolisation as means of controlling overproduction, and protectionism to protect the monopolies; and second, overseas investment (especially in the high-capital-intensity sectors, like railways, particularly affected by overproduction).
These two phenomena together, along with the tight links between banks and industrial oligopolies (‘monopolies’) seen in Germany, Austria and the US around 1900, are taken (according to the theory) to have driven the scramble for colonial territories in the late 19th century and the efforts to dismember the Ottoman and Chinese empires in the same period. The colonial territories provided more protected space, behind which the cartels/monopolies could operate. This development was taken to force the need for competing alliance systems, which in turn led to 1914.
It was always problematic to explain how tsarist Russia could be characterised as “imperialist” within this framework, since, if anything, it was affected by underproduction rather than overproduction, even in high-capital-intensity sectors like railways. Nonetheless, tsarist Russia did combine some features of a colonial economy (dependence on primary agricultural and extractive activities; and on inward investment for industrial technology) with some features of an imperial economy (its own financial sector, and export of (second-tier) industrial production to its dependent territories).
Capitalist
Norfield’s more general theory of competition between monopolistic/oligopolistic capitals allied to states, which are thereby enabled to set the terms of trade in their own favour, works better for this case: Russia could be subordinated to Britain and France, yet superexploit its own colonial territories. The same was, in reality, true of Portugal - subordinated to Britain, yet also a colonial power. It can also successfully include the imperial operations of Venice and Genoa in the later Middle Ages, the Netherlands from the 17th century and Britain in the 18th - and so avoid the delusion that there was a period of ‘free trade’ capitalism, which gave way to a new imperialism.
We do, nonetheless, need a theory of capitalist imperialism, as opposed to the empires of antiquity (Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Roman, Chinese ...) and to both the ‘imperialism’ and the expansionism of the Middle Ages. Essentially, the point is that capitalist imperialism produces the economic subordination of the colonised economy to the metropolitan economy. The colonised economy becomes - as I have already indicated - dominated by low-value-added activities, especially agricultural and extractive. The imperial economy shifts towards high-value-added activities.
It is to secure this international division of labour that the colonised economy is held also in military subordination - whether by direct colonialism or by dependence on supplies of arms and military matériel from the imperial country, which can be cut off at will.
In contrast, the antique empires within their borders spread more or less uniform relations of production across their territories - strongly visible in the archaeology. Medieval ‘imperialism’ was merely a political ideology of the universal authority of the Holy Roman Empire in competition with the ‘papal monarchy’. Medieval expansionism - the German Drang nach Osten, the English expansion into Wales, Ireland and the Scottish lowlands, and so on - similarly produced a spread of ordinary feudal relations of production. It turned out the locals could copy the techniques, producing kingdoms like Poland and Scotland, capable of standing off the expansionists because they had become like them.
In this analysis, the idea that the old USSR was engaged in capitalist imperialism was plain nonsense. If anything, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA or ‘Comecon’) and Warsaw Pact produced a duplication of national heavy industry, arms industry, and so on in each ‘socialist country’ - which then fell to be demolished after the 1989-91 collapse, in the interest of creating dependency on ‘western’ arms supplies of the sort currently being drip-fed to Ukraine.
Is Russia today engaged in capitalist imperialism? The answer is contradictory. In the first place, the answer is a plain no. Callinicos wants to call only the ‘top six’ countries imperialist; it is then wholly artificial for him to include Russia among them. More fundamentally, the Russian economy is primarily agricultural and extractive, with significant secondary line in arms exports; and there is not - yet - a fully-autonomous banking sector. On the contrary, Russian ‘foreign direct investments’ consist of individual oligarchs pulling cash out of the Russian domestic economy and putting it into prestige objects like Chelsea FC or real estate. It is not investment of capital: that is, money put to work as investments, which return a profit through the application of capital and labour in combination. If the US wins this proxy war, Russia will more or less rapidly become a semi-colony.
On the other side, Russia might become capitalist-imperialist - if it devises financial mechanisms independent of Swift, etc, and wins this war. Japan in 1894 was not an imperialist power, but victory over China in the war of 1894-95 made it into one, with the annexation of Taiwan. The Russo-Japanese war of 1904 could have reduced Japan to the status of a semi-colony of Russia; Japanese victory produced, instead, annexation of Korea and clear Japanese entry into the ranks of the great powers. Going further back, but similarly, Germany in 1870 was not an imperialist power. Prussian victory over France in that year provided the conditions for both German unification and an imperialist expansion.
1870
1870 is a better guide to our political tasks than either 1914 or 1940. As Mason asserts and Callinicos accepts, the workers’ movement cannot possibly use this war to challenge for power, as the 1912 Second International Congress at Basel urged and as Lenin and Zinoviev urged in 1914. We do not have a powerful mass movement, built up over decades, which could pose an international alternative.
Equally, however, this is not 1940. The Russian regime is authoritarian, but not fascist. There have not been mass arrests of oppositionists, as in spring 1933 in Germany, but merely harassment and repression of protests. There continue to be multi-party elections - violently skewed in favour of United Russia, true, but Republicans and Tories aspire to skew elections in the US and Britain in their favour too. Our own states increasingly demand police permission for demonstrations, and so on. Russia plays footsy with far-right nationalists - but so does the ‘west’ - and not only in Ukraine. To advocate a people’s front with ‘liberal’ imperialism - as Callinicos rightly says Mason does - for fear of Russian ‘fascism’, is to repeat the betrayals of the Eustonites and other ‘left’ backers of the invasion of Iraq.
In 1870 Germany was not yet an imperialist power. The war appeared to be a war launched by French emperor Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon III). French victory would have prevented German unification and secured the subordination of the Germanies as semi-colonies. The left had small and divided forces. But Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel - leaders of an organisation less than 10,000 strong who by chance held parliamentary seats - raised their voices against the Prussian regime and its war plans. Their principled commitment - ‘Not a penny, not a man for this system’ - allowed German social democracy to build a voice of unambiguous opposition to the regime under which they lived, which was able to grow on a mass scale because it offered a voice of unequivocal opposition.
Today, again, the left has small and divided forces. But we can raise our voices against our own state’s wars: and by doing so take a stand which in the long term can rally forces for unequivocal opposition to the warmongering imperialist regime under which we live.