Imperialism is the political expression of the accumulation of capital
in its competitive struggle for what remains still open of the
non-capitalist environment. Still the largest part of the world in terms
of geography, this remaining field for the expansion of capital is yet
insignificant as against the high level of development already attained
by the productive forces of capital; witness the immense masses of
capital accumulated in the old countries which seek an outlet for their
surplus product and strive to capitalise their surplus value, and the
rapid change-over to capitalism of the pre-capitalist civilisations. On
the international stage, then, capital must take appropriate measures.
With the high development of the capitalist countries and their
increasingly severe competition in acquiring non-capitalist areas,
imperialism grows in lawlessness and violence, both in aggression
against the non-capitalist world and in ever more serious conflicts
among the competing capitalist countries. But the more violently,
ruthlessly and thoroughly imperialism brings about the decline of
non-capitalist civilisations, the more rapidly it cuts the very ground
from under the feet of capitalist accumulation. Though imperialism is
the historical method for prolonging the career of capitalism, it is
also a sure means of bringing it to a swift conclusion. This is not to
say that capitalist development must be actually driven to this extreme:
the mere tendency towards imperialism of itself takes forms which make
the final phase of capitalism a period of catastrophe.
Classical economics, in its period of storm and stress, had had high
hopes of a peaceful development of the accumulation of capital and of a
trade and industry which can only prosper in times of peace, evolving
the orthodox Manchester ideology of the harmony of interests among the
world's commercial nations on the one hand, and between capital and
labour on the other. These hopes were apparently justified in Europe by
the short period of Free Trade in the sixties and seventies, which was
based upon the mistaken doctrine of the English Free Traders that the
only theoretical and practical condition for the accumulation of capital
is commodity exchange, that the two are identical. As we have seen,
Ricardo and his whole school identified accumulation and its
reproductive conditions with simple commodity production and the
conditions of simple commodity circulation. This was soon to become even
more obvious in the practices of the common Free Trader. The special
interests of the exporting Lancashire cotton manufacturers in Manchester
determined the entire line of argument of the Cobden League. Their
principal object was to get markets, and it became an article of faith:
'Buy from foreign countries and thus in turn sell our industrial
product, our cotton goods, on the new markets.' Cobden and Bright
demanded Free Trade and cheaper foodstuffs in particular in the interest
of consumption; but the consumer was not the worker who eats the bread,
but the capitalist who consumes labour power.
This teaching never expressed the interests of capitalist accumulation
as a whole. In England herself it was given the lie already in the
forties, when the harmony of interests of the commercial nations in the
East were proclaimed to the sound of gunfire in the Opium Wars which
ultimately, by the annexation of Hongkong, brought about the very
opposite of such harmony, a system of 'spheres of interest'.[416] On the
European Continent, Free Trade in the sixties did not represent the
interests of industrial capital, because the foremost Free Trade
countries of the Continent were still predominantly agrarian with a
comparatively feeble development of industry. Rather, the policy of Free
Trade was implemented as a means for the political reconstruction of the
Central European states. In Germany, under Bismarck and Manteuffel, it
was a peculiarly Prussian lever for ousting Austria from the _Bund_ and
the _Zollverein_ and to set up the new German Empire under Prussian
leadership. Economically speaking, the mainstays of Free Trade were in
this case the interests both of commercial capital, especially in the
Hansa towns to whom international trade was vital, and of agrarian
consumers; among industry proper, it was otherwise. The iron industry
was won over only with difficulty and in exchange for the abolition of
the Rhine tolls. But the cotton industry in Southern Germany remained
irreconcilable and clung to protective tariffs. In France, 'most
favoured nations' clause' agreements, the basis of the Free Trade system
all over Europe, were concluded by Napoleon III without the consent, and
even against the will, of parliament, industrialists and agrarians, who
constituted an absolute majority, being in favour of protective tariffs.
The government of the Second Empire only took the course of commercial
treaties as an emergency measure--Britain accepted it as such--in order
to get round political opposition in France and to establish Free Trade
behind the back of the legislature by international action. The first
principal treaty between England and France simply rode rough-shod over
public opinion in France.[417] Two imperial decrees abolished the old
system of French protective tariffs which had been in force from 1853
to 1862. With scant observance of the formalities they were 'ratified'
in 1863. In Italy, Free Trade was a prop of Cavour's policy, depending
as it did on French support. Under pressure of public opinion, an
inquiry was made in 1870 which revealed that those most intimately
concerned were hostile to the policy of Free Trade. In Russia, finally,
the tendency towards Free Trade in the sixties was but the first step
towards creating a broad basis for commodity economy and industry on a
large scale, coming at the same time as the abolition of serfdom and the
construction of a railway network.[418]
Thus the very inception of an international system of Free Trade shows
it to be just a passing phase in the history of capitalist accumulation,
and it shows up the fallacy of attributing the general reversion to
protective tariffs after the seventies simply to a defensive reaction
against English Free Trade.[419]
Such an explanation is vitiated by the fact that both in Germany and
France the leaders in the reversion to protective tariffs were the
agrarian interests, that the measures were directed not against British
but against American competition, and that not England but Germany
constituted the chief danger to the rising home industry in Russia, and
France to that in Italy. Nor was Britain's monopoly the cause for the
world-wide depression which prevailed since the seventies and induced
the desire for protective tariffs. We must look deeper for the reasons
responsible for the change of front on the question of protective
tariffs. The doctrine of Free Trade with its delusion about the harmony
of interests on the world market corresponded with an outlook which
conceived of everything in terms of commodity exchange. It was abandoned
just as soon as big industrial capital had become sufficiently
established in the principal countries of the European Continent to look
to the conditions for its accumulation. As against the mutual interests
of capitalist countries, these latter bring to the fore the antagonism
engendered by the competitive struggle for the non-capitalist
environment.
When the Free Trade era opened, Eastern Asia was only just being made
accessible by the Chinese wars, and European capital had but begun to
make headway in Egypt. In the eighties the policy of expansion became
ever stronger, together with a policy of protective tariffs. There was
an uninterrupted succession of events during the eighties: the British
occupation of Egypt, Germany's colonial conquests in Africa, the French
occupation of Tunisia together with the Tonkin expedition, Italy's
advances in Assab and Massawa, the Abyssinian war and the creation of a
separate Eritrea, and the English conquests in South Africa. The clash
between Italy and France over the Tunisian sphere of interest was the
characteristic prelude to the Franco-Italian tariff war seven years
later, by which drastic epilogue an end was made to the Free Trade
harmony of interests on the European Continent. To monopolise the
non-capitalist areas at home and abroad became the war-cry of capital,
while the free-trade policy of the 'open door' specifically represented
the peculiar helplessness of non-capitalist countries in the face of
international capital and the natural equilibrium which was aimed at by
its competition in the preliminary stage of the partial or total
occupation of these areas as colonies or spheres of interest. As the
oldest capitalist Empire, England alone could so far remain loyal to
Free Trade, primarily because she had long had immense possessions of
non-capitalist areas as a basis for operations which afforded her almost
unlimited opportunities for capitalist accumulation. Until recently, she
had thus in fact been beyond the competition of other capitalist
countries. These, in turn, universally strove to become self-sufficient
behind a barrier of protective tariffs; yet they buy one another's
commodities and come to depend ever more one upon another for
replenishing their material conditions of reproduction. Indeed,
protective tariffs have by now completely lost their use for technical
development of the productive forces, all too often being the instrument
for the artificial conservation of obsolete productive methods. The
inherent contradictions of an international policy of protective
tariffs, exactly like the dual character of the international loan
system, are just a reflection of the historical antagonism which has
developed between the dual interests of accumulation: expansion, the
realisation and capitalisation of surplus value on the one hand, and, on
the other, an outlook which conceives of everything purely in terms of
commodity exchange.
This fact is evidenced particularly in that the modern system of high
protective tariffs, required by colonial expansion and the increasing
inner tension of the capitalist medium, was also instituted with a view
to increasing armaments. The reversion to protective tariffs was
carried through in Germany as well as in France, Italy, and Russia,
together with, and in the interests of, an expansion of the armed
services, as the basis for the European competition in armaments which
was developing at that time, first on land, and then also at sea.
European Free Trade, with its attendant continental system of infantry,
had been superseded by protective tariffs as the foundation and
supplement of an imperialist system with a strong bias towards naval
power.
Thus capitalist accumulation as a whole, as an actual historical
process, has two different aspects. One concerns the commodity market
and the place where surplus value is produced--the factory, the mine,
the agricultural estate. Regarded in this light, accumulation is a
purely economic process, with its most important phase a transaction
between the capitalist and wage labourer. In both its phases, however,
it is confined to the exchange of equivalents and remains within the
limits of commodity exchange. Here, in form at any rate, peace, property
and equality prevail, and the keen dialectics of scientific analysis
were required to reveal how the right of ownership changes in the course
of accumulation into appropriation of other people's property, how
commodity exchange turns into exploitation and equality becomes
class-rule.
The other aspect of the accumulation of capital concerns the relations
between capitalism and the non-capitalist modes of production which
start making their appearance on the international stage. Its
predominant methods are colonial policy, an international loan system--a
policy of spheres of interest--and war. Force, fraud, oppression,
looting are openly displayed without any attempt at concealment, and it
requires an effort to discover within this tangle of political violence
and contests of power the stern laws of the economic process.
Bourgeois liberal theory takes into account only the former aspect: the
realm of 'peaceful competition', the marvels of technology and pure
commodity exchange; it separates it strictly from the other aspect: the
realm of capital's blustering violence which is regarded as more or less
incidental to foreign policy and quite independent of the economic
sphere of capital.
In reality, political power is nothing but a vehicle for the economic
process. The conditions for the reproduction of capital provide the
organic link between these two aspects of the accumulation of capital.
The historical career of capitalism can only be appreciated by taking
them together. 'Sweating blood and filth with every pore from head to
toe' characterises not only the birth of capital but also its progress
in the world at every step, and thus capitalism prepares its own
downfall under ever more violent contortions and convulsions.