Interestingly, one can find imperialist discourses in the 19th that are closer to Trump's tweet than to Lenin's theory. For instance, in a 1884 speech, Jules Ferry justified french colonial expansion because of the need to find new outlets for exports :
"In the area of economics, I am placing before you, with the support of some statistics, the considerations that justify the policy of colonial expansion, as seen from the perspective of a need, felt more and more urgently by the industrialized population of Europe and especially the people of our rich and hardworking country of France: the need for outlets [for exports]. Is this a fantasy? Is this a concern [that can wait] for the future? Or is this not a pressing need, one may say a crying need, of our industrial population? I merely express in a general way what each one of you can see for himself in the various parts of France. Yes, what our major industries [textiles, etc.], irrevocably steered by the treaties of 1860-1 into exports, lack more and more are outlets. Why? Because next door Germany is setting up trade barriers; because across the ocean the United States of America have become protectionists, and extreme protectionists at that; because not only are these great markets . . . shrinking, becoming more and more difficult of access, but these great states are beginning to pour into our own markets products not seen there before."
I also distinctly remember being taught that one of the causes for World War I was Germany's problem of industrial surpluses, and the fact that unlike France and the UK, Germany did not have a colonial empire where they could sell them off (I don't know which historian was the source, though).
So perhaps, historically as well, imperialism was as much about captive markets than it was about extraction of resources.
Fully on board with the theory of an historical dingbat imperialism, too. Studying colonial history, it's often striking how much the colonial ventures were an outlet for all kinds of adventurers and misfits who had no place elsewhere. Which makes the way the misfits in Trump's administration eye over Greenland quite striking.
I may have oversold my competence ! I had courses on this and read a lot on France's colonial history (above all in Africa), but it's not academic studying and my readings are not very orderly. You could be interested, though, in Sven Lindqvist's essay "Exterminate all the brutes". It is not focused on economy, Sven Lindqvist tries to build, convincingly, a case that the colonial adventures built the ideological framework for race science and for genocide that was later used by the Nazis. He relies on historical sources and stories, and on Joseph Conrad's writing. It's an extremely unsavory, antiheroic account and when reading it, you really get the feeling that many of the men who built colonies were total freaks.
America’s demand that Japan open its markets sounds like a clear domestic clear precedent for the kind of thing you’re talking about. But while Trump loves mercantilism, it’s not clear yet if what he’s after is export markets in Venezuela? Definitely might be but not something he’s stressed.
Re dingbat imperialism, there was a twitter discussion a few days ago about how the real benefit of having colonies was it could solve the problems of a “dual economy” (dynamic globalized economy with lagging untraded sectors) by creating an outlet for “excess” people in unproductive regions/fields without needing to redistribute domestically. Under that theory, one of the real benefits of empire is you keep your dingbats busy.
Wonder what Lenin would make of the most parasitic and unproductive sectors imaginable - gambling and crypto-asset trading (more gambling) - being among the few capital accumulation growth sectors in 2026.
Great read. The Lenin comparison has generated a lot of interesting discussion among eg yourself, Yglesias, and Tooze. At the end of it I’m a lot more compelled by the broken-brain theory, he melds the beliefs of a late-80s cable news fan & 16th century mercantilist.
Must say tho, Lenin’s ideas about imperialism being tied up in private finance rather than state power seems to me to have been proven rather dubious in the meantime.
The Soviet Union was the force for Imperialist expansion more than any other in the 20th century despite the rhetoric. Meanwhile the Western world for all its worts mostly dismantled its colonial empires over the same period. Not to say, imperialism is dead, particularly not with Trump reviving it. But Trump is reviving it with state power.
The monopolies that matter today are Big Tech. They make up a historically large proportion of the US equities market and are continuing to grow. There is one prize on the board that dwarfs all others - China.
If Google and Meta were allowed to operate in China, they probably 1.5X their market cap. That's ~$5 Trillion (not to mention DoorDash, Uber, AWS, etc.) that is currently unrealized and unlike oil, it doesn't require huge fixed capital investments to materialize...it just requires political change and (over simplifying) they can flip the switch.
From that perspective, the Venezuela move is vaguely aligned with the overall goal of neutralizing potential Chinese allies before the inevitable conflict. Whether it actually help achieves that goal or not, who knows.
This is Imperialism in the 21st Century - the biggest resource to exploit is the attention (and therefore ad revenue) of 1.5 Billion people. That's just too big of a prize and the American Empire as the host for Big Tech is going to inevitably try to crack that egg.
- control over resources vs. competitors, even if not exploiting to the fullest extent
- mineral extraction not of the oil variety (add to discussion: Greenland, Canada)
- China's domination of green technology internationally
- a "multipolar world" still dominated by the US now vs "cops of the world" with respected allies previously
Thanks! Appreciate all your work, I'm sure you can find a way to address/incorporate these factors as well. It seems Trump and Musk are getting along again. I feel like not enough has been made of Musk saying in 2020 "we'll coup whoever we want to" (about Bolivia, which has huge stores of lithium that EVs need), which coincided with his own political turn towards fascism.
I'd recommend checking out Ben Thompson's "Aggregation Theory" (Stratechery is the blog). In short, he makes a very well-reasoned proposal that the Internet inevitably leads to natural monopolies. It's why Google has 95% of the Search ad market and Meta has 95% of social network (except they whiffed on TikTok)
Excellent piece John. Just heard Greg Grandin on American prestige pod where he restated his thesis from Empire’s Workshop: basically every time the US fails at a world dominating project, which often leads to or is connected to the erosion of internal hegemony, it turns to LatAm in the process of seeking consolidate a new hegemonic coalition at home. Greg’s take on the donroe adventure is similar to your dingbat thesis.
Lenin's theory of imperialism was expanded quite a bit by subsequent generations of Marxist thinkers. Emmanuel Arrighi was the first one to put it all in a book and give it a name ("unequal exchange") but it also includes people like Samir Amin, HD Edwards, and more recently Torkil Lauesen. Zak Cope's "Divided World, Divided Class" is a pretty good summary of the field -- it's a shame he completely lost his mind and went full Tory.
It has its roots in some of the earliest Marxist thought. Engels wrote about the "labor aristocracy," and Lenin also talks about it in a post-note to "Highest Stage" called "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism." It's been a big point of contention throughout the years; British Marxists in particular absolutely recoiled at the very thought.
The basic idea is this (and be aware, I'm simplifying and generalizing an awful lot): the _price_ (not value) of labor in the First World is bolstered by underpricing labor in the Third World. The exploitation of the Third World goes beyond raw material exploitation and monopolies, but that the rate of exploitation (the value of labor power minus wages) is particularly egregious. Another way to think of it: the horrors of Victorian era British factories that Marx writes about in Capital didn't disappear, they were just exported abroad.
The workers of the First World, on the other hand, get some of the scraps of that super-exploitation in the form of higher wages, benefits, and social welfare projects. This has two benefits for capitalists. The first is that the workers in the imperial core, and closest to the capitalists themselves, don't feel like they're being egregiously exploited, and keeps revolutionary fervor and class consciousness to a minimum. The other is that, since First World workers benefit at the expense of Third World workers, international worker solidarity is hampered.
From that perspective, I think it's somewhat easy to understand the US attack on Venezuela. It represents not just a source of resource extraction (not just oil, but also rare earth minerals), but also cheap overseas labor. The triple whammy of Chavez's untimely death, severe drop in oil prices, and heavy US sanctions stalled Chavez's project before it fully got off the ground. But it's easy to forget that, at the beginning of the century, Venezuela's success was one of the big contributors to the overall reduction in global poverty (China being the largest). The West needs hordes of desperately poor people overseas willing to work 14 hours a day in factories for $1 a day, otherwise the natives in Ohio start getting restless.
Combine this with its close ties to China and Cuba, as well as neocons like Marco Rubio's inborn hatred of any Latin American government to the left of Milton Friedman, and I don't think it's hard to see why the US felt it was necessary to "get them in line." And yes, it's true that oil prices are low today, and the US is now a net exporter of petroleum thanks to the Ukraine War. But will that always be the case? I am sure the State Department was terrified of a scenario 50 years from now where global supplies are starting to dwindle, and one of the last remaining big reserves is being refined thanks to Chinese infrastructure investments.
Interestingly, one can find imperialist discourses in the 19th that are closer to Trump's tweet than to Lenin's theory. For instance, in a 1884 speech, Jules Ferry justified french colonial expansion because of the need to find new outlets for exports :
"In the area of economics, I am placing before you, with the support of some statistics, the considerations that justify the policy of colonial expansion, as seen from the perspective of a need, felt more and more urgently by the industrialized population of Europe and especially the people of our rich and hardworking country of France: the need for outlets [for exports]. Is this a fantasy? Is this a concern [that can wait] for the future? Or is this not a pressing need, one may say a crying need, of our industrial population? I merely express in a general way what each one of you can see for himself in the various parts of France. Yes, what our major industries [textiles, etc.], irrevocably steered by the treaties of 1860-1 into exports, lack more and more are outlets. Why? Because next door Germany is setting up trade barriers; because across the ocean the United States of America have become protectionists, and extreme protectionists at that; because not only are these great markets . . . shrinking, becoming more and more difficult of access, but these great states are beginning to pour into our own markets products not seen there before."
(https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/imperialism/readings/ferry.html)
I also distinctly remember being taught that one of the causes for World War I was Germany's problem of industrial surpluses, and the fact that unlike France and the UK, Germany did not have a colonial empire where they could sell them off (I don't know which historian was the source, though).
So perhaps, historically as well, imperialism was as much about captive markets than it was about extraction of resources.
Fully on board with the theory of an historical dingbat imperialism, too. Studying colonial history, it's often striking how much the colonial ventures were an outlet for all kinds of adventurers and misfits who had no place elsewhere. Which makes the way the misfits in Trump's administration eye over Greenland quite striking.
Would love more sources on dignbat imperialism and the misfits!
I may have oversold my competence ! I had courses on this and read a lot on France's colonial history (above all in Africa), but it's not academic studying and my readings are not very orderly. You could be interested, though, in Sven Lindqvist's essay "Exterminate all the brutes". It is not focused on economy, Sven Lindqvist tries to build, convincingly, a case that the colonial adventures built the ideological framework for race science and for genocide that was later used by the Nazis. He relies on historical sources and stories, and on Joseph Conrad's writing. It's an extremely unsavory, antiheroic account and when reading it, you really get the feeling that many of the men who built colonies were total freaks.
America’s demand that Japan open its markets sounds like a clear domestic clear precedent for the kind of thing you’re talking about. But while Trump loves mercantilism, it’s not clear yet if what he’s after is export markets in Venezuela? Definitely might be but not something he’s stressed.
Re dingbat imperialism, there was a twitter discussion a few days ago about how the real benefit of having colonies was it could solve the problems of a “dual economy” (dynamic globalized economy with lagging untraded sectors) by creating an outlet for “excess” people in unproductive regions/fields without needing to redistribute domestically. Under that theory, one of the real benefits of empire is you keep your dingbats busy.
Yeah, there are many stories, as well as Australia's early history, that support this "excess" people / "keep your dingbats busy" theory !
Wonder what Lenin would make of the most parasitic and unproductive sectors imaginable - gambling and crypto-asset trading (more gambling) - being among the few capital accumulation growth sectors in 2026.
Great read. The Lenin comparison has generated a lot of interesting discussion among eg yourself, Yglesias, and Tooze. At the end of it I’m a lot more compelled by the broken-brain theory, he melds the beliefs of a late-80s cable news fan & 16th century mercantilist.
Very interesting.
Must say tho, Lenin’s ideas about imperialism being tied up in private finance rather than state power seems to me to have been proven rather dubious in the meantime.
The Soviet Union was the force for Imperialist expansion more than any other in the 20th century despite the rhetoric. Meanwhile the Western world for all its worts mostly dismantled its colonial empires over the same period. Not to say, imperialism is dead, particularly not with Trump reviving it. But Trump is reviving it with state power.
The monopolies that matter today are Big Tech. They make up a historically large proportion of the US equities market and are continuing to grow. There is one prize on the board that dwarfs all others - China.
If Google and Meta were allowed to operate in China, they probably 1.5X their market cap. That's ~$5 Trillion (not to mention DoorDash, Uber, AWS, etc.) that is currently unrealized and unlike oil, it doesn't require huge fixed capital investments to materialize...it just requires political change and (over simplifying) they can flip the switch.
From that perspective, the Venezuela move is vaguely aligned with the overall goal of neutralizing potential Chinese allies before the inevitable conflict. Whether it actually help achieves that goal or not, who knows.
This is Imperialism in the 21st Century - the biggest resource to exploit is the attention (and therefore ad revenue) of 1.5 Billion people. That's just too big of a prize and the American Empire as the host for Big Tech is going to inevitably try to crack that egg.
Yeah I'm gonna recalibrate with Big Tech as the protagonists and we'll see
What about:
- control over resources vs. competitors, even if not exploiting to the fullest extent
- mineral extraction not of the oil variety (add to discussion: Greenland, Canada)
- China's domination of green technology internationally
- a "multipolar world" still dominated by the US now vs "cops of the world" with respected allies previously
Thanks! Appreciate all your work, I'm sure you can find a way to address/incorporate these factors as well. It seems Trump and Musk are getting along again. I feel like not enough has been made of Musk saying in 2020 "we'll coup whoever we want to" (about Bolivia, which has huge stores of lithium that EVs need), which coincided with his own political turn towards fascism.
I'd recommend checking out Ben Thompson's "Aggregation Theory" (Stratechery is the blog). In short, he makes a very well-reasoned proposal that the Internet inevitably leads to natural monopolies. It's why Google has 95% of the Search ad market and Meta has 95% of social network (except they whiffed on TikTok)
https://stratechery.com/aggregation-theory/
Excellent piece John. Just heard Greg Grandin on American prestige pod where he restated his thesis from Empire’s Workshop: basically every time the US fails at a world dominating project, which often leads to or is connected to the erosion of internal hegemony, it turns to LatAm in the process of seeking consolidate a new hegemonic coalition at home. Greg’s take on the donroe adventure is similar to your dingbat thesis.
The Kindle version of Lenin’s “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism” can be grabbed for free from Amazon—at least shorty before I typed this.
Lenin's theory of imperialism was expanded quite a bit by subsequent generations of Marxist thinkers. Emmanuel Arrighi was the first one to put it all in a book and give it a name ("unequal exchange") but it also includes people like Samir Amin, HD Edwards, and more recently Torkil Lauesen. Zak Cope's "Divided World, Divided Class" is a pretty good summary of the field -- it's a shame he completely lost his mind and went full Tory.
It has its roots in some of the earliest Marxist thought. Engels wrote about the "labor aristocracy," and Lenin also talks about it in a post-note to "Highest Stage" called "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism." It's been a big point of contention throughout the years; British Marxists in particular absolutely recoiled at the very thought.
The basic idea is this (and be aware, I'm simplifying and generalizing an awful lot): the _price_ (not value) of labor in the First World is bolstered by underpricing labor in the Third World. The exploitation of the Third World goes beyond raw material exploitation and monopolies, but that the rate of exploitation (the value of labor power minus wages) is particularly egregious. Another way to think of it: the horrors of Victorian era British factories that Marx writes about in Capital didn't disappear, they were just exported abroad.
The workers of the First World, on the other hand, get some of the scraps of that super-exploitation in the form of higher wages, benefits, and social welfare projects. This has two benefits for capitalists. The first is that the workers in the imperial core, and closest to the capitalists themselves, don't feel like they're being egregiously exploited, and keeps revolutionary fervor and class consciousness to a minimum. The other is that, since First World workers benefit at the expense of Third World workers, international worker solidarity is hampered.
From that perspective, I think it's somewhat easy to understand the US attack on Venezuela. It represents not just a source of resource extraction (not just oil, but also rare earth minerals), but also cheap overseas labor. The triple whammy of Chavez's untimely death, severe drop in oil prices, and heavy US sanctions stalled Chavez's project before it fully got off the ground. But it's easy to forget that, at the beginning of the century, Venezuela's success was one of the big contributors to the overall reduction in global poverty (China being the largest). The West needs hordes of desperately poor people overseas willing to work 14 hours a day in factories for $1 a day, otherwise the natives in Ohio start getting restless.
Combine this with its close ties to China and Cuba, as well as neocons like Marco Rubio's inborn hatred of any Latin American government to the left of Milton Friedman, and I don't think it's hard to see why the US felt it was necessary to "get them in line." And yes, it's true that oil prices are low today, and the US is now a net exporter of petroleum thanks to the Ukraine War. But will that always be the case? I am sure the State Department was terrified of a scenario 50 years from now where global supplies are starting to dwindle, and one of the last remaining big reserves is being refined thanks to Chinese infrastructure investments.
Arghiri Emmanuel. Giovanni Arrighi is a different guy, same field.