Essays on Imperialism 0851240240

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ESSAYS ON IMPERIALISM

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ESSAYS ON IMPERIALISM Michael Barratt Brown

SPOKESMAN BOOKS 1972

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Printed 'by The Russell Press Limited

Set in Baskerville (IBM 72) Published by The Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation Limits d Bertrand Russell House, Gamble Street, Forest Road West, Nottingham NG7 4ET for The Spokesman Copyright© The Spokesman 1 9 7 2

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Certain states were made over to King Cogzdumnus, who has maintained his unswerving loyalty right

down to our own times, it being the ancient and

now Kong established custom of the Romans t o make even kings the instruments of subjection. . . . ..

.. .. . ....

.

Formerly they had (only) a single king, now two were imposed upon them, of whom one, the governor, was t o exercise his cruelty upon their

lives, other, the property;

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imperzlzzl agent, upon their

Tacitus Agricola, 14 & 15.

1.

Preface and Acknowledgements

These four essays are held together by three links: first by the fact that they have a common theme, second that they were written within a few months of each other and thirdly that they show different aspects of a particular view of imperialism that I have come t o hold. Only the first essay has been previously published in English. This essay is a slightly cut version of a paper delivered to a symposium at Oxford held in the Spring of 1970 and appears in ~a volume of essays on Theories o f Imperialism edited by Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe. I am extremely grateful to Messrs. Longmans for permission to publish this essay in this volume. The second essay forms the Preface to a Spanish translation of After Imperialism published in South America by Ediciones Signos to whom I am most grateful for permission to publish here. The third essay was presented to a Conference organised at Elsinore i.n the Spring of 1971 by the Danish Institute for Peace and Conflict Research. The last essay is based on a paper read at the john HopkinS Centre in Bologna also in the Spring of 1971. Neither of these bodies should be held responsible for any of the views expressed in the last two essays.

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Contents

I

Critique of Imperialism

Marxist

Theories of

II

The Stages of Imperialism

III

Imperialism and Working Class Interests

in the Developed Countries

IV

Wiling.E.C.

Africa

II 59

79

and Neo-Colonialism in 137

I A Critique of Marxist Theories of Imperialism

1.

A Note on Theories in General and Marxist Theories ire Particular

To write about theories of imperialism is already to have a theory. Indeed until very recently it would have been widely assumed that theories of imperialism would be Marxist theories. .Just to use the word was to tie a label to what was said. This was not simply because the word had emotive associations as a catchall for those who regarded United States' foreign policies as being guided by something less than altruisrn- Much more important for our purpose here, .the word 7 like capitalism - implied a theory of social and political economic systems and epocE which can be

clearly identified and analysed, since : f .1 ore than one can be identified in human history, are presumably subject to some laws of change, Even to rapid, not to say revolutionary, changes. For those who prefer things to remain much as they II

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are, or to change very slowly, this was disturbing. A steady continuum with no such clear distinctions would be more reassuring.

Now all this has changed and it is not a solecism to speak of capitalism and imperialism. In part, no doubt, this is because increasing numbers of people have come to question what motives the United

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ESSAYS ON IMPERIALISM

States can have for doing what it is doing in VietNam; for the most part it is the result of a new approach to Marxism in academic circles. It can no longer be ignored, thanks to a more critical generation of students; but words and concepts which were developed within the Marxist tradition are looked at and given new meanings. True followers

of the Marxian tradition should be grateful; the Marxist view had been narrowed down into a dogma, excluding a great wealth of theory which the tradition had created. What follows is a critique

of Marxist theories of imperialism by one who stands within the Marxian tradition; it is certainly not limited to the .one received theory in the canon, and if it is critical it certainly does not reject the whole tradition.

I have spoken here of the Marxist tradition; I could have spoken of the Marxist system of ideas or the Marxist general theory of society. Any general theory of society like Marxism provides a way of looking at the facts and ordering our collection and classification of them. The collection of facts that have a certain similarity (as in the natural sciences with rocks, or plants, or animals) reveals certain regularities and sequences and certain discontinuities which all require explanation. These

suggest hypotheses which we test to provide possible theories within our general theory. These sub~theories, of course, will depend upon the original decision to collect certain facts together, in one box so to speak. We may find that our theories

give satisfactory explanations and there are no relevant facts outside the box; or we may find that there are important facts which we did not include in our original collection. This is a question of judgment of what is relevant. In the natural sciences we can make precise predictions, once we have isolated certain factors in a situation, about

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MARXIST TI-IEORIES OF IMPERIALISM

how these factors will interact. We can do somewhat the same in the social sciences, but the process of isolation is more difficult. The writings of social scientists are punctuated with the words "other things being equal".

In history we have to rely for our tests mainly on retrodiction, lm looking to see if what happened is what we should have expected to happen. Sometimes as in the case of Marx we can test what h writer said would happen against what actually happened. in 'problem here is not

that men are less predictable than natural forces but that we stand inside the social system ourselves and can take avoiding action when dire calamities are forecast for us. The value of a general theory as E. H. Carr has emphasised is the fruitfulness of the hypotheses it suggests? The point was made in criticism of Professor Popper's attach on the usefulness of the predictio~'-lil-~-I-=-»l=nl.1llmm history. But Popper himself had been arguing that all social scientists start from some theory or hypothesis; No-one goes out to collect the facts with an open mind2 There are nary classification has t o e ma e. upper suggests that in- is done by the need to solve a specific prob M ; Marxists believe that this is the use of a

H;-H'

general theory.

The general theory of Marx is well known and is most succinctly formulated in the Preface to the Contribution to the Crzrique of Polz°tz'caZ Economy (1859). Social formations in successive epochs can be distinguished by their modes of_production; these depend on a certain je ii of technology (what Marx calls the "forces of production" which the economic structure of society corresponds. (This Marx identifies as above all the "property relations"). This in

II

L

I

is

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ESSAYS ON IMPERIALISM

foundation on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness". Revolutionary changes occur when the advance of technology comes into conflict with the existing economic structure, however much it may appear to be fought out in ideological terms. Therefore Marxists will tend to collect facts about societies in different epochs according to the economic or property relations that are to be found, and not. according to the ideas that men had about them. They will not, however, forget Marx's insistence that it is as men become conscious of the conflict between the forces of production and the economic relations which contain them that revolutionary changes are

made; and it is classes of men having a special relationship to the new and the old forces of production that fight it out.

2. The Origin of Marxist Theories of Imperialism Imperialism has undoubtedly been developed as a Marxist theory. As such it was used to describe and explain the spread of British and, later, of other European capitalism throughout the world in the Nineteenth Century. The word did not enter the English language until the 18505 and 60s (although "imperialist" had been used for much longer as an adjective to describe earlier imperial powers. In origin it was not, however, Marxist word and does not appear in Marx or Engels. It was used to describe the views of those .who wished to strengthen the links between Britain and the British Empire as it was emerging in the 18705. Who were they? Disraeli and Carnarvon in the 1870s, the Liberal Imperialists in the l880s, Chamberlain, Rhodes and Hewins in the l890s, writers like Froude and Seeley, Tennyson and Kipling, a few Trade Unionists and a group of men

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like Torrens who were themselves colonials, i.e. Australians and Canadians.4

It seems a rather mixed bag of names. What they had in common was first of all an interest primarily in the self-governing colonies (the dominions). These newly developing territories had a great need for capital, for technical know-how and for skilled artisans from Britain. There were those in Britain who looked forward to supplying these on privileged terms. Secondly, they were all powerfully conscious of the tensions inside English society. Schumpeter5 who set out to criticise the Marxist interpretation of imperialism, spoke of Disraeli taking up imperialism in 1872 as a catch phrase6 for winning elections;_ may be; but it won elections; it was as successful catch phrase, people were caught. Consciously, at least in the case of Disraeli, Rhodes and Hewins, unconsciously perhaps with others, E view developed that what was needed after the concession of the franchise in 1867 was an overlaying of class tension by a sense of national belonging. Nationalism in Britain was fostered not

by a war of liberation, nor even by wars of domination (though there were to be several of these),

but by glorification of the Empire 'and the common interest of the British people in it.

Disraeli's

emotive appeal has died hard . _]. A. Hobson, who wrote the first major critique of imperialism at the turn of the century, was at

pains to distinguish the "genuine expansion of nationality" into "vacant or sparsely peopled foreign lands" and the debasement of nationalism in imperial rule over "reluctant and unassimilable" peoples'7. Rejecting Rhodes' claim that the conquest of Africa was needed for the settlement of Britain's unemployed and the expansion of her trade, he sought for the "economic tap root of

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imperialism" in the export of capital in search of investment opportunities that were declining at home8. For what had happened in the last two decades of the Nineteenth Century was that the area of the British Empire had been increased by nearly 50% and the area of the dependent territories almost trebled, but scarcely any of these was

hospitable for emigration or a potential market for exports of goods. In fact as I have argued elsewhere the export of British capital, to which Hobson drew attention, did not go mainly to these newly added territories. The opening up of mineral and raw material production in them was of undoubted importance and it replaced the declining flow of investment to India, but it failed to raise the share of British overseas investment in the dependent Empire. The dominions and South America received the major flow, and between the 1860s and 1913 their share of the total rose from a third to over a half.9

Schumpeter, aware of this British trend, concluded in 1919 that the connection between capitalism and imperialism was not substantiated.

Lenin unaware and drawing upon the facts of capital exports

from other European

countries

than Britain enthusiastically endorsed the chief

elements in Hobson's analysis1 0 ; which only shows how important it is what facts you choose to collect together in the box marked "Imperialism".

The class of event which we are seeking to explain under the concept of imperialism is the claim of the leaders of advanced industrial countries in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century and thereafter to privileged positions for their goods and capital in other countries. Those who made the claim believed that they were of great economic importance. They may have been deceiv-

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in themselves and others. real motive in Britain may have been "jobs -l-or the boys'I as Schumpeter suggests, for art. otherwise decaying military aristocracy and for an underemployed and inflated middle class. Rhodes may have been driven in fact by his own self importance, Chamberlain by political calculations and Hewins by the mystical aim of a catholic empire. In that case similar explanations have to be found for French and Belgium empire building in Africa, French and Dutch colonialism in South East Asia, Russian expansion into Central Asia, United States pressure on South America, [Japan's war on Russia and the German d r a g each Often. is very likely that some such explanations could be found but the simultaneous concern with ivileged economic positions abroad suggests a common origin.

n

If we could discover certain factors that all the colonial powers had in common in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century, it would suggest a causal connection. A decaying military aristocracy and an underemployed middle class was a common feature of Britain, Japan, Austria and Germany and perhaps of France, but not of the U.S.A. or Russia, Belgium or the Netherlands. Moreover, there were similar sociological structures in other countries

that showed no sign of outward expansion to obtain privileged positions in other lands. China provides an obvious example. Wfhat all those that did expand had in common was a certain level of technological development - some more advanced than others and the driving force in this technological development of a capitalist class. It is from the special circumstances of this class and the economic relations that it established that Marxist theories of imperialism start. -.-

Schumpeter's argument against the association

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of capitalism and imperialism is based in the last resort on his belief in the efficiency of a moderately scaled competitive capitalism which thrives on free trade. characters italian leads to large scale produc-with few exceptions large scale production . not lead to HEe kind of unlimited concentration that would leave but one or only a few firms in each

Ann:

indust1~1".1°!*!

As a prediction made in 1919 this proved far wider of the mark than Lenin's estimation two years earlier of a growing division of the world among capitalist combines. Nonetheless, Schumpeter was right to emphasis in the case of Britain - the home of imperialism -- the absence of protected monopoly export before the First World War and the failure of Chamberlain's attack on Free Trade. Imperialism in Britain quite evidently did not grow é Q state protected monopolistic stage of capitalism. This does not prove that it did not grow out of capitalism. The association between the rise of capitalism E Britain and the expansion of the empire has been clearly traced elsewhere12. It is the sudden outburst of empire building by Britain

§

in the 1880s that we are seeking to explain. It could have developed_ either in the attempt to impose k whole_ world free trade for the most advanced industrial producer's goods or as a response by British capital to the protected monopoly exports go her countries when Britain's advanced position was challenged. .,_._...

For the U.S.A. and for those countries of Europe, which ind ustrialised after Britain, the process involved state support in protected markets first at home and then overseas, in order to establish themselves in competition with Britain. Their giant combines spread out all over the world to obtain control over sources of raw material and

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markets for goods and capital. In the end they forced British capital, too, which had rejected Chamberlain's pleas for protection at the beginning of the century, to abandon free trade and to establish the combinations and mergers of the 1920s Distillers Co (1925), I.C.I. (1926), Unilever (1927), Vickers Armstrong (1927), British Match Corp. (1927). The association between the outward spread of United States, German, French, Belgian, Dutch, Russian and .Japanese capital at the end of the Nlneteenth Century and their governments staking of claims to territory all over the world was well established by both Hobson and Lenin. Such an association does not of course prove a causal connection; and the mechanism of connection suggested by each of them was rather different. Hobson was not a Marxist,

attempts

as"

apply Marxist analysis to the question of imperialism had already been made by Hilferding and Luxemburg before Lenin. To understand them it is necessary, first, very briefly summarise Marx's model of capitalist economic structure. Its essence is contained in the formula M.C.M.1 Owners of money (capital) turn it Into commodities for the purpose . at is the rationale of

w

1

private capital ownership, ...lot hoarding or

ex-

travagant consumption; and in industrial capitalism money in made through setting l a b o r tO produce commodities for sale at a profit. An essential part

of this model is the competition of private firms for new capital. This means firms must maximise their profits to generate their own new capital or to attract capital from the profits of others; for this they must keep up their investment in new equipment and for this in turn they must expand their markets to obtain the economies of I

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larger scale operation. The limits to the growth of scale in production have proved much wider than Schumpeter anticipated. For the most technically advanced producer free trade is wholly beneficial. The less advanced must protect themselves behind tariffs until they can compete on equal -terms. In any one free trade area (and indeed in the whole world once it was opened up to capitalist trade) there will be a limit to the expansion that is possible. The competitive pressure for profit maxirnisation will create

surplus of capital ever

seeking profitable opportunities for investment. Since every increase in profit is at least relatively at the expense of the current purchasing power of the mass of the people, crises of over production will regularly occur throughout the capitalist world. Thus not only were cycles of boom and slump inevitable, but a steady polarisation of wealth and poverty would occur throughout the capitalist world. On the one hand, therefore, the additional capital formed in the course of accumulation attracts fewer and fewer laborers in proportion to its magnitude. On the other hand, the old capital periodically reproduced with change of composition, repels more and more of the labourers formerly employed by it. 1 3 Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the

same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation at the opposite pole, i.e. on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capitaL14

This is the essential Marxist economic model, but Marx's general theory of society, as we saw earlier, went beyond the analysis of the conflict between the advances of technology and the economic relations of private capital ownership, to embrace a whole superstructure, as he called it, of political, military, legal and religious forms which 20

MARXIST THEORIES OF IMPERIALISM

corresponded to and supported the property relations. He allowed, moreover, for the hangover of the superstructures of past social formations and equally for the nuclei of the superstructure future social formations, from all of which Man's social consciousness derived. When ,Schumpeter emphasised the role of monarchs and aristocrats in the development of capitalism he was not contradieting Marx. ld forms are used and transformed by the new capitalist class which for long existed side by side and interlocked with an older ruling class. At a certain stage it can nevertheless be said that the central driving force of society is the private ownership of capital and machinery and not of land and associated military power. It is with the aid of this central model that Marxists have approached an understanding of international relations over the last century. We may list the relationships that have seemed to them central in their definition of imperialism as a stage of capitalism'

1.

(widening gap in economic development between industrialised European (and Euro~ ii settled) countries and those restricted to primary production ;

am

2. The outward movement of l a b o r and capital (especially capital) from the more developed

countries to the less ,

3. The annexation of territories all over the world by the more developed nations in a competitive

scramble for supposed strategic and economic advantages, especially in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century;

4. The growth of international economic rivalries and of a series of arms races leading to two world wars and threatening a third ;

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5. The emergence of the international firm and the continuation of attempts by the more economically developed nations to maintain and extend their political, military or economic power over the less, even after the ending of direct colonial rule. It is to be hoped that the phrasing of these statements of observed events, and particularly the association of economic and military actions and

intentions in 3, 4 and 5,may not seem to beg too many of the questions that have to be answered. Few will deny that economic and military acts have occurred side by side at the same time and to state the fact does not imply a causal relationship. After these rather lengthy preliminaries the procedure to be followed here is a brief review of the main Marxist theories .inperialism both in their original f and in that of their followers. After reviewing each theory, there will follow some

discussion of the main criticisms that have been made of them. At the end there will be a summary of what remains both of Marxist theories and of their critics' theories, and on the basis of this some suggestions of the general lines which an acceptable theory of imperialism would have to follow. I shall distinguish first Marx's own views, then in suceession Hilferding's, Rosa Luxelnburg's and Lenin's, and finally the followers of each of these and their critics. ...I "' ote on Soviet imperialism leads the essay to certain predictions that may be made about the future of relations between the developed and underdeveloped world.

3. Marx's View of Foreign Trade Marx's view of the expansion of Britain's world-wide military and political power, including colonial expansion, was that this was an essential

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part of freeing the trade of the world to the products of the most advanced industrial producer. For such a producer free trade, and not protection or privilege, was the key to increased profit. This does not mean that Marx ignored other forces that were n AM. ul`r . me most explicitly stated in his writings on India but they have to be stépplemented by what he Ingle on Foreign Tra e in Volume III o f Capital, and understood in relation to his general view of capitalist accumulation; viz in Lhis tends I i ie a polarising process: wealth centralised in fewer and fewer hands, poverty and misery growing at the other end of the scale; the reason that capital is not hoarded but laid out in setting l a b o r to l)rk being precisely to increase the amount of the capital in a situation of com~ peting capitalists, and the process by which this is effected being, in Marx's view, one of extracting sur jus value from the laborers who are set to 'Emu relationship between owners of capital and owners of l a b o r power is, despite the competition of capitals, an unequal one and there is a tendency for the inequality to bccorne cumulative and for the rate of profit to fall. Capital used in production increases in relation to l a b o r used in production and a "reserve army of l a b o r " is for ever replenished by new technology. There are, however, "counter-acting" tendencies, and foreign trade is one of them. »

mfr.

New technology is assumed to be l a b o r saving so that capital equipment used in production increases in relation to l a b o r used in production. A "reserve army of l a b o r " is replenished with each new advance in technology and the rate of profit tends to falL* The counteracting tendencies in-

*

This follows logically because the rate of profit in Marx's equation is the relation of surplus value to

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elude mehorology might be 14 tal saving, exploitation flight stepped *Up* and wages deprem.=ma......, foreign trade might prortunities expanding the capitup new alists' surplus. I

In the Third Volume of Capital Marx writes in the following way of foreign trade as one of the counteracting forces to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Foreign trade permits an expansion of the scale of production . . . The expansion of foreign trade which is the basis of the capitalist mode of production in its stages of infancy, has become its own product in the further progress of capitalist development thro innate necessities,

p.:

through its need for an eve expanding market

Las

an

advanced country is enabled to sell its goods above their

value even when it sells them cheaper than the competing countries . . "`

.

On the other hand, capital invested in colonies etc. may

yield a higher rate of profit for the simple reason that the rate of profit is higher there on account of the backward development, and for the added reason that slaves, coolies etc. permit a better exploitation of l a b o r .

..

capital laid out on equipment and l a b o r i.e.

S C+ V

(when S = surplus, C = capital laid out on equipment

and V = wages). But this is the same as

v

Q+X

V

that is to say that the surplus

V

(S) in relation to wages

(V) depends