ABSTRACT
LE N I N ’ S T H E O R Y , W H I L E making a particular case of economic imperi-alism, is also defined by the cases it does not make, by the dimensions and actors of imperialism which are marginalized and obscured in this perspective: the role of strategic objectives and the military, the international states system with its own dynamics and players, the role of nationalism, the cultural dimensions of imperialism, the role of race, the role of religion. Most conspicuously it is the role of the state, the actual imperialist agent itself in most instances, that is underplayed in this perspective. Generally the assumption is simply that the state operates as an instrument of capitalist interests: ‘The state is a reflection of the economic infrastructure’. A simplification in its own right, this is also contradicted by many data. Moreover, it lags behind developments in Marxist thinking on the state over the past two decades, although these theoretical developments have been mainly concerned with the relationship between the state and society, the state and domestic
to the ‘imperialist chain’ only paraphrase Lenin’s metaphor. The work of James Petras is exceptional in that it provides a developed theory of the imperial state: ‘It is time that we discard the notion that imperialism is an “economic phenomenon” that can be analyzed by looking merely at the flow of capital and corporate behavior. The literature on the multinationals, as unsystematic and rich in detail as it may be, tends to forget the institution that created the universe in which they function: the imperial states’.
