1) TO Ki Khoo: Digest 2237: Message: 9 Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2004; From: kjkhoo at SoftHome.net
Ki khoo asks Perhaps you/Hari/any-other-interested-party could let us know what would constitute "exploited by imperialism" today? Or even more basic, since there are hints here and there that some think that aside from the militaristic imperialism really doesn't cut it as a concept anymore, what would constitute imperialism today?
kj khoo.
& Digest 2238: Message: 4 Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004; From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> replies:
I find Ellen Meiksins Wood pretty convincing in her _Empire of Capital_, which she develops through differentiating the different forms imperialism has taken both prior to capitalism and within it. For one thing, her analysis makes intelligible the support the 'crazies' within the administration have received from 'saner' portions of the u.s. ruling class.
HK: I have not read very much Wood, & certainly must pass on that reply. But to our original question I would have reverted to Lenins work Imperialism, Last Stage..
of what he considered the five features of imperialism. At the risk of pissing everyone off here, these were:
"We must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features: 1) The concentration of production and capital has developed to such a stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; 2) The merging of bank capital with industrial capital and the creation on the basis of this "finance capital", of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitals associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) The territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed." V.I. Lenin: "Imperialism The Highest Stage of Capitalism"; " In Selected Works; Moscow; 1977; p.699-700.
In an attempt to understand something of what is meant by the capitalist calls nowadays by globalization
we did try [naturally & regrettably - as non-economists] to grapple with elements of that. To save the patience of the anti-Leninists here, I will not recite them but simply take the liberty to refer you to that web-paper at: http://www.allianceML.com/ISML/AllianceParisGlobalNatQuest1999.html On the basis of - what is no doubt quite primitive analysis, we concluded that imperialism still existed. ______________________________________________________________
2) To C.G.Estabrook & M.Perelman, starting in Wed, 21 Jan 2004; From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at alexia.lis.uiuc.edu>
Estabrook cites: Noam Chomsky in *Understanding Power* (2002), ed. Mitchell & Schoeffel, p. 257. --CGE]
CGE: Other countries who had their own cotton resources also tried to start on industrial revolutions -- but they didn't get very far, because England has more guns, and stopped them by force. Egypt, for example... The same thing also happened in Britain's earliest "experiment" with these ideas, in what was called Bengal, in India. In fact, Bengal was one of the first places colonized in the eighteenth century, and when Robert Clive [British conqueror] first landed there, he described it as a paradise: Dacca, he said, is just like London, and they in fact referred to it as "the Manchester of India." It was rich and populous, there was high-quality cotton, agriculture, advanced industry, a lot of resources, jute, all sorts of things -- it was in fact comparable to England in its manufacturing level, and really looked like it was going to take off. Well, look at it today: Dacca, "the Manchester of India," is the capital of Bangladesh -- the absolute symbol of disaster. And that's because the British just despoiled the country and destroyed it, by the equivalent of what we would today call "structural adjustment" [i.e. economic policies from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund which expose Third World economies to foreign penetration and control].
In fact, India generally was a real competitor with England: as late as the 1820s, the British were learning advance techniques of steel-making there, India was building ships for the British navy at the time of the Napoleonic Wars [1803-1815], they had a developed textiles industry, they were producing more iron than all of Europe combined -- so the British just proceeded to de-industrialize the country by force and turn it into an impoverished rural society. Was that competition in the "free market"?
On Wed, 21 Jan 2004: michael <michael at ecst.csuchico.edu> documentation.]
MP expostulated that:
Chomsky is wrong! Daca was not the equivalent of Manchester. Some of the lbo-ers from that part of the world are better informed than I am, but Dacca was famous for very fine cloth, not the crude stuff from Manchester. England also snuffed out the Portugese textile industry in the early 18th C._
HK Comment: I cannot see that there is any real disagreement. Both agree that the Indian sub-continents handicrafts production of the handloom weaver was destroyed by the cotton mills of the British to supply a worse product. Marx in most of the passages talking of the destruction of the indigenous industries also talked of the progress therein implied vicious though it all was. Even more impressively, he talks in way that presages the needs of the home based
Manchester industrialists who pushed for the continued restriction of the Indian industries, at Ottawa Imperial Preference conferences in the early 1900s. It was these later restrictions that gave rise to the chafing of the Birlas to some extent at least a strand of Indian national capital
chafing at the imperialist presence. 3) Thursday, 22 Jan 2004; From: Wojtek Sokolowski to "Alexandre Fenelon" invention as I was told by local wine makers). But where is the British
WS: I am pretty certain (I do not have time to look for quotes though), Marx saw British-style capitalism as a force of progress in India, a force that would eventualy dismantle its feudal structures.
HK: My favourite is wehre he cites Goethes West-Ostlicher Divan:
Sollte diese Qual uns qualen, Da sie unsre Lust vermehrt, Hat nicht Myriaden Seelen Timurs Herrschaft aufgezehrt?
[Should this torture then torment us, Since it brings us greater pleasure? Were not thorough the rule of Timru Souls Devoured without measure?
He talks of this in relation to Enlgish interference having placed the spinner in Lnachashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindu sweeper & weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbairabn, semi-civlized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and, to speak the truth, the only social reovluion ever heard of in Asia ; Marx K: The British Rule In India ; article to NY Daily Tribune June 25, 1853.
WS: As far as blaming 'the West/North' for 'exploitation' is concerned - this is a variant of one of the oldest tricks on the books, blaming foreigners for one's own misfortunes and kleptocracies. In the good old US, we have the Japanese, French and foreigner bashing, complete with smashing Japansese cars and electronics, boycotting French wine, and renaming French fries "Freedom fries." Elswehere, there is 'Western/Northern imperialist bashing' - for example in the Soviet bolc countries and China this was advanced to an art form, complete with suggestive posters and catchy labels such as "spit-soilded midgets of Western reactionism" or the 'paper tigers of US imperialism." All on the same ethnocentric assumption that "we" are the fine people and cannot do anything wrong; if 'our' country is in shambles, 'our people' kill each other or 'our' leaders are a bunch of bloody dictators and corrupted kleptocrats, it is only because 'foreigners' made 'us' do that.
HK: Well there is some truth to that. Nonetheless, surely the destruction of the weavers communities in India was a travesty? OF course perhaps like all of history, it was understandable
& thus all judgments should be held and only the silence of what has come to be, should reign. But if critical faculty is able to retained, are we not able to say whether there is or is not a travesty? Now the solutions for the travesty might , or might not, invoke a narrow nationalism above all else. All else, (& I hesitate to say it seeing the trouble I got into last time I uttered the phrase but that was a joke this is not) meaning an obscuring of proletarian internationalism. ----------------------One more reply part to follow---------------------------------