Doug Henwood
That was Rosa Luxemburg's line. I like what Solidarity has to say about that:
<http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/255>
> For all these achievements, there were real limits to these
> theories — limits which become especially disenabling today. To
> begin with, the analyses of capital accumulation they advanced had
> considerable flaws. Rosa Luxemburg, for instance, held that
> imperialism was based on the search for new markets outside the
> capitalist world.
>
> Without new external markets for goods, she maintained, capitalism
> would collapse due to chronic overproduction. Not only is there
> very little evidence that newly colonized territories constituted
> important export markets — how could they, given the poverty of the
> colonized? —
^^^^^ CB: Of course, Lenin's thesis in _Imperialism_ is that there is a qualitative transformation from export of goods to the colonies and taking of raw materialis from the colonies ( typical of the older colonialism) to export of capital to the colonies in this period. Export of capital means establishing capitalist relations of production in the colonies ( Capital is a relation ,not a thing. It is a relation between capital and wage-labor.) That means starting to create wage labor/consumers in the colonies. These wage laborers do start to constitute a market that can buy commodities , goods and services. Fast forward to 2007 and there are quite a few wage-laborers/consumers around the world in the former colonies from 1916, even if poorer than the mass of consumers in the imperial centers.
but Luxemburg failed to grasp capitalism’s capacity
> for intensive, as well as extensive, growth.
>
> Put simply, capitalism regularly creates new markets for both
> consumer and capital goods inside the so-called “developed world” —
> whether for fast food or computers. While it is preferable to
> locate markets for both intensive and extensive growth, the
> disappearance of the latter would not spell the death of capitalism.
> 2. There is the possibility that a new periphery can always be created
> by means of war or other forms of disaster.
That's like Naomi Klein's argument, but really - how big are these in economic terms? New Orleans was a horror, but it was an economic blip.
Doug
^^^^^ CB: How about Vietnam and China, coerced by the wars on Korea and Viet Nam ? In the long term, there are many, many New Orleans/Vietnam/Nicaragua/Panamas and varieties of disciplining various colonial regions. This accumulates over the decades. Lots of blips make colonial bubbles. ___________________________________