BY the beginning of the 20th century, big capitalist powers like France, Britain etc. had already carved up the less and least developed parts of the globe amongst themselves as colonies, semi-colonies (such as pre-revolutionary China, different parts of which were colonised by Japan, USA, Britain etc.) and spheres of influence, putting on the agenda a struggle for their redivision. Simultaneously, the emerging “trusts and cartels” (the initial forms of MNCs) began to spread their operations in different parts of the world — to carve up the world economically- and to fight amongst themselves on this score. Lenin described these as important features of imperialism and added : “... finance capital and its foreign policy, which is the struggle of the great powers for the economic and political division of the world, give rise to a number of transitional forms of state dependence. ... Diverse forms of dependent countries which, politically, are formally independent, but in fact, are enmeshed in the net of financial and diplomatic dependence, are typical of this epoch ...”

In the world today, we find many such dependencies, though not colonies as such (with few transitional exceptions like Iraq). Powers like the US, Japan, UK and France continue to hold their respective spheres of influence in the shape of trade and investment blocs – the dollar, yen and euro zones and regional trade bodies. Except for socialist countries, others in Asia, Africa and Latin America are still subjected to economic plunder, political intervention, diplomatic pressure, cultural invasion, technological subjugation and often military threats or aggression by imperialist powers. The working people in these semi-colonial and neocolonial countries are fighting tooth and nail against the neo-liberal offensive of the global North. Considering the grand scale of this struggle, the number of people involved, and the cardinal facts that imperialism thrives precisely on the pillage of these countries and that the latter’s road to substantive development and people’s democracy can open up only by overthrowing the imperialist yoke, it must be affirmed that the deep-seated, historic contradiction between imperialism and these peoples constitutes the principal contradiction of the world today, the axis of the world people’s long-drawn battle for a better, brighter place to live in.

On the basis of these and other observations, Lenin declared :

“Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small and weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations - all these have given rise to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism which compel us to define it as parasitic or decaying capitalism...”

Do we need evidence of the parasitic character of metropolitan capital? Just remember the gory story of British Petroleum and Burma Shell, of countries like England, Holland, America building up their oil empires on the liquid gold plundered from Middle East; just look at the continuing dependence of petrodollar imperialism on OPEC oil. There are a thousand other means - the WTO regime including IPRs, TRIPs, the proposed Singapore issues, etc. — whereby the G-7 countries suck the third world dry. Lenin had already talked of the financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of “advanced” countries — by “international banker countries” and “usury imperialism” — a trend that has assumed more institutionalized shape with the rise of the transnational financial corporations and the IMF, World Bank, Asian Development Bank etc.

Parasitism is indeed well known and well documented, but how about decay?

“It would be a mistake to believe that this tendency to decay precludes the rapid growth of capitalism. It does not. In the epoch of imperialism, certain branches of industry, certain strata of bourgeoisie, and certain countries betray ... now one and now another of these tendencies. On the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before.”

Spectacular but extremely uneven, lopsided growth and pronounced decay in fact constitute a unity of opposites — where, in the ultimate analysis, decay is the principal aspect of the contradiction. This contradiction manifests itself at all levels: inter-sectoral (high-speed growth in the “new economy” vis-a-vis crisis in the “smokestack” industries), inter-national (say Argentina compared to the USA) and inter-class (everywhere a small minority growing fatter and the vast majority sliding further down in relative or absolute poverty) and so on.

Overall, signs of decay are all too manifest in corporate scandals in some of the richest countries, in speculative financial boom (the bubble bust syndrome) juxtaposed against persistent recessionary trends in manufacturing sectors, in the rapid environmental degradation and mindless depletion of scarce resources of the planet and not the least in the rampant cultural decadence and rise of obscurantist forces worldwide. Compared to the liberating impulses provided by nascent capitalism in economic, political and cultural arenas a few centuries ago, the all-pervasive decay witnessed over the last hundred years or so is indeed appalling.