Monday, May 22, 2006
Imperialism as a solution to capitalist crisis. posted by Richard Seymour
Domination, subjugation, oppression, racism, the master race - keeps the profit margins high and staves off social revolution. And it's good for civilization, too.Cecil Rhodes, 1895:
I was in the East End of London yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild speeches, which were just a cry for "bread," "bread," and on my way home I pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism ... My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, ie, in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands for settling the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid a civil war, you must become imperialists.
Joseph Chamberlain, 1896, to the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce:
If we had remained passive ... the largest part of the African continent would have been occupied by our commercial rivals ... Through our colonial policy, as soon as we acquire and develop a territory, we develop it as agents of civilization, for the growth of world trade.
John Stuart Mill:
It can be affirmed, in the present state of the world, that the founding of colonies is the best business in which the capital of an old and rich country can be invested.
Leroy Beaulieu:
It is neither natural nor just that the civilized people of the West should be indefinitely crowded together and stifled in the restricted spaces that were their first homes, that they shoiuld accumulate there the wonders of science, art, and civilization, that they should see, for lack of profitable jobs, the interest rate of capital fall further every day for them, and that they should leave perhaps half the world to small groups of ignorant men, who are powerless, who are truly retarded children, dispersed over boundless territories, or else to decrepit populations without energy and without direction, truly old men incapable of any effort, of any organized and far-seeing action.
Hobson, 1902:
The new imperialism differs from the older, first in substituting for the ambition of a single growing empire the theory and practice of competing empires, each motivated by similar lusts of political aggrandisement and commercial gain, secondly, in the dominance of financial, or investing, over mercantile interests.
Hilferding, 1910:
[The imperialist] observes with a cold and steady eye the medley of peoples and sees his own nation standing over all of them. For him this nation is real; it lives in the ever increasing power and greatness of the state, and its enhancement deserves every ounce of his effort. The subordination of individual interests to a higher general interest, which is a prerequisite for every vital social ideology, is thus achieved; and the state alien to its people is bound together with the nation in unity while the national idea becomes the driving force of politics.
Otto Bauer, 1913:
Imperialism is in fact a means of extending the limits of accumulation.
"You guys realise you're dying for capitalism, right?"