The Stage of Imperialism

Abstract

In my view the stage of imperialism reaches its most classical expression between 1890 and 1914 in Germany and the U.S. In important respects it is not entirely homologous with the previous two stages. Whereas they reached their most classical expression in the decades just prior to the dawning of a new stage, the apogee of the stage of imperialism is long before the waning of the stage with the advent of World War II. As we shall see later, it is not surprising that the development of this stage is violently disrupted by world war (World War I). Efforts to reestablish the mode of accumulation characteristic of imperialism after World War I were largely unsuccessful, resulting in economic crisis, fascism, and eventually World War II. While the new stage of consumerism was prefigured in the U.S. by the development of the automobile industry prior to World War II and as early as the 1920s, it did not fully emerge until the post-World War II American hegemony. Thus the period between the wars is a kind of hiatus in which efforts to reestablish the pre-World War I mode of accumulation were unsuccessful, and the new stage of consumerism had not yet completed its gestation. From the classical expression of imperialism’s mode of accumulation prior to World War I until the birth of the new stage in 1945, there were 31 years of economic instability and relative chaos.