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Two different Spanish organizations have told MIM that the u.$. imperialists own Spanish monopolies and hence Spain is not an imperialist country; even though Spain is at least the 10th greatest economy in the world. This is certainly counter- intuitive for MIM and it is a reason MIM does not comment much on the Spanish economy.
Others have shown MIM that southern Korea exports capital to Central America and now we also have a challenge that India is exporting capital. These points are also counter-intuitive for MIM.
What these various points raise is that who exactly is imperialist and who is not is not entirely nailed down; although MIM holds that India and southern Korea are not imperialist.
MIM has put these questions on the back burner for many years, because the situation of the bulk of imperialist countries is clear and MIM does not organize in India or southern Korea for example. However, MIM's leadership does intend to answer these questions decisively in the long run. We invite the public's participation in forwarding any research to MIM on this question. The easiest question to answer is who really owns what. The public data on that certainly does exist, though poorly distributed and often shrouded.
Since before the united $tates became a net debtor country, MIM has argued that the particular statistic referred to as "net import (export)" of capital is not central to the theory of imperialism. It is especially important to refute use of that statistic by those who claim that Lenin's theory of imperialism disproves itself because imperialists fail to stabilize themselves by exporting capital. Lenin never said imperialism was stable and if the profits end up being greater than the exported capital, there is nothing in Lenin saying the labor aristocracy won't consume super-profits galore--even if the imperialists themselves cannot find anymore outlets to stash their wealth. Yet, even the appropriation of labor by the labor aristocracy does not make imperialism stable. It has to export even more capital and all the wars that go with that. The super-profits come from somewhere and those places are more objectively revolutionary as a result.
There is another use of the "net import (export) of capital" statistic that is of more interest. There are those seeking to use that statistic to define imperialist and oppressed nations.
The bottom line problem for this approach is that it assumes that profits are smaller than fixed capital exported--and that assumption is more misleading than not. To take apart this question in Marxist terms, we have to realize that once surplus labor becomes profit, it becomes indistinguishable from capital in many statistics. Hence, the appropriation of labor can be mistaken as the import of capital and result in the perverse conclusion that an exploiter country is not imperialist--if we define imperialism incorrectly in the first place.
There are non-u.$. companies borrowing money like hell from the united $tates or Japan which then turn around to invest it in U.$. bonds or export a little somewhere. Some of these operations are really u.$. operations disguised under other countries' names. Other imperialists use the same strategy.
The use of the net capital export statistic may help us to see the absurdity of calling some such countries with such companies "imperialist." However, the net export of capital statistic will only help in the easiest, most-straightforward "slam-dunk" cases. In fact, a central tactic of the imperialist financial institutions is often to force debtor countries to buy U.$. bonds. That does not make these countries imperialist.
What is important is who owns capital and who controls the financial aspect of business relations. It is dominance of the financial aspect which will determine who gets to appropriate surplus labor in relations that may appear imperialist. It is important to remember that Lenin said imperialism was characterized not just by export of capital and monopolies, but monopolies dominated by finance capital. Unless we understand how finance capital exerts its dominance, we cannot understand what imperialism is.
MIM is aware that the dominance of the financial aspect of imperialism is far from adequately explained concretely even among those calling themselves "Leninist" thanks to revisionism. It is in fact the case that there exists no easy training in the world for how to recognize financial dominance in real life today. MIM intends to remedy that problem in a matter of years. What is now shrouded in difficult theoretical works needs to be brought forward and made easily accessible.
The two-prong attack of revisionists and social-patriots is as follows: 1) treating capital as only a number exhibiting itself in monetary form. 2) assuming that labor aristocracy wages are actually "deserved" or based in great productivity--a notion long ago denounced not just by Lenin but by Marx himself on the question of the "theory of productive forces."
When MIM says to forget capital as a monetary number and look at labor appropriation, the revisionists and imperialist country social-patriots say that the Third World is lazy and inefficient or they take a more shrouded approach which effectively amounts to the same thing when we push them on the calculations involved. Then when we say capital inflows to the united $tates (repatriation of profits) reflect labor appropriation, they say that capital inflows prove that the united $tates or similarly situated countries are not imperialist. The commodity fetishism regarding statistics on money has an underlying root in failing to understand how labor appropriation comes about. The majorities of imperialist countries excluding Russia have a self-interest in denying labor appropriation.
On the one hand, the question is politically simple: with few exceptions those calling themselves "Marxist" in the imperialist countries are a form of social-patriotic garbage actively engaged in denying exploitation. At the same time, exploited workers and peasants are fighting as in Vietnam during the Vietnam War to seize power despite whatever obstacles. So in this sense, the question is politically simple, as Marx explained it would be in Das Kapital.
On the other hand, further theory work on ownership of assets, capital flows and financial capital's dominance will help the proletarian camp to enlighten itself and prevent even the slightest wavering or confusion. Such theoretical work may also further demonstrate to a small section of the exploiters why the imperialist system is doomed.