Part 1 of With a few exceptions, colonialism is over: Postmodernist idiocy, neodevelopmentalist fantasy, and the past and present of capitalism-imperialism

By Kenny Lake

While the division of humanity into classes first took place within local communities, in the form of women being subjected to the patriarchal authority of property-owning men, over time it developed in complexity internally, beyond early patriarchy, and expanded externally, extending geographically beyond class-divided locales through the subjugation of neighboring groups of people. Moreover, since some groups of people did not embark on the path of class division, and those that did did so at different times and to different degrees, some local dominant classes amassed greater wealth and (proto-)state-building capacity than others through their exploitation of subordinated classes and domination over neighboring communities—an early process of uneven development. It is that uneven development that created the basis for empires, in which a power center where class divisions had developed further than its environs in turn subjugated surrounding and increasingly distant communities by virtue of its superior state capacity, especially its military. That superior state capacity rested on a division of labor in which the pillage and exploitation of subordinated peoples and classes was used to sustain sections of people devoted to war-making and other necessities of empire.

Before the rise of capitalism, empires existed on most continents of the planet and took a wide variety of forms in how the empire’s power center dominated its periphery. The most basic form, and probably the usual first step in building an empire, was simple pillage, wherein one group of people robs another through force. A more complex form requiring, and giving impetus to, greater state capacity is tribute, wherein surplus production is extracted from imperial subjects by the central power. Empires of tribute require territorial control, whether directly by the center, through a hierarchical system of intermediaries, or by way of the threat of force. And they have an internal impetus for territorial expansion, as more territory means more tribute means more means to finance state- and war-making capacity means more capacity to conquer more territory means…back around the upward spiral.¹ Trade constitutes another form of empire building, in which a commercial center extracts wealth and surplus production from its peripheries through imposing, by military and other means, control over trade routes.²

Pillage, tribute, and trade all played crucial roles in the development of capitalism and continue as means of capital accumulation into the present. What Marx called “primitive accumulation,” where the bourgeoisie plunders resources and which several prominent Marxist political economists have shown to be an ongoing process rather than just capitalism’s original sin, is mostly a form of pillage serving capital accumulation. As described above, extracting tribute through territorial expansion creates a compulsive logic with similarities to, and eventually feeding into, the “expand or die” logic of capital, and control over territory provides a crucial condition for capital accumulation. Trade imposes the commodity form on the locales that it involves in relations of commerce by bringing them into the buying and selling of commodities on the (regional or world) market, a process which, over time, extends the commodity form deeper and fuller into the internal economic life of those locales.³

Yet the nature of pillage, tribute, territorial expansion, and trade began to change around the year 1500 as they all became tied to—and increasingly dominated by the logic of—processes of capital accumulation in the centers of rising capitalism in Europe. They no longer served only to fund the lavish lifestyles of the ruling classes, a specialized division of labor, and the state (especially military) that protected and extended the empire’s rule, but also to create capital used for profit-making activities, including but not limited to production. As longstanding logics of empire came to be dominated by the logic of capital accumulation, they became increasingly global in scope. Whereas the reach of pre-capitalist empires was more regional than global, the infamous boast of the nineteenth-century British empire that the sun never set on its imperial domain betrays the global reach of its pillage, tribute extraction, labor exploitation, and trade routes.

Since we are concerned here with the history of global capitalism, we will not delve further into the functioning of pre-capitalist empires, except for the following points of historical interest and relevant precedents. First, it is worth noting that the lands bordering the eastern Mediterranean Sea gave rise to a number of important empires—such as Kemet (Ancient Egypt), Ancient Greece, and Ancient Rome—from which ideas, technologies, and forms of social organization spread, including but not only to Europe. While avoiding the shiny but worthless theoretical diamond of geographical determinism, we must admit that these lands’ place at or near the crossroads of three continents meant that, whatever internal and external reasons for the rise of empires on them, they had a greater impact on world history than empires in other parts of the world. Second, and related to that last point, the Arabian Peninsula and later the Italian Peninsula were important centers of trade empires, with Islam as a religion developing social conventions inspired by and in turn conditioning the interactions necessary for conducting trade.⁴ Third, and most directly related to our object of inquiry, Ancient Rome set the direct precedent for European feudalism, out of which capitalism emerged and, in its final days, the Roman empire created European feudalism’s most important ideological state apparatus, the Catholic Church.⁵

As Ellen Wood pointed out, the Roman empire started as a republic of “a self-governing aristocracy of landowners” and expanded “by mobilizing, and even creating, landed aristocracies as an instrument of empire.” The expansion of the Roman empire established aristocratic landownership as the dominant form of class rule as Roman soldiers looted and colonized their way through Europe, with territorial expansion providing an ongoing means of exacting tribute for Rome. That territorial expansion led to overextension of an empire “fragmented by aristocracies based on large landed estates.” After the fall of the Roman empire, the feudal system it established in Europe continued as “parcellized power based on property, with political and economic power united in a feudal lordship dominating and exploiting the dependent peasantry without the support of a strong central state.”⁶ The subsequent centuries of war between various power centers in Europe can largely be explained as the result of that parcellization of power and the drive by various feudal rulers to (re)establish a strong central state and expand their ability to exact tribute over a wider territory, a drive that was then extended beyond Europe during its so-called Renaissance.⁷ 1500 is a nice round number we can use as a convenient date around which European global conquest with capital accumulation as its core driver got started, so long as we recognize that its convenience papers over the importance of prior precipitating events.

The Catholic Church was created by Rome as an ideological counterweight to the fragmentation of its empire, as a way to bring its imperial subjects under its hegemony. As Wood summarized, “to play that imperial role, the Christian religion…had to be transformed from a radical Jewish sect, which opposed the temporal authority of the Empire, into a doctrine amenable to, and even encouraging, imperial obedience.”⁸ After the fall of the Roman empire in 476, the Catholic Church proved to be its great lasting institution, and the feudal ruling classes of Europe, all the way until English King Henry VIII, continued to use it as their chief ideological state apparatus. In doing so, they consolidated Catholicism as the ruling, universalizing ideology within their continent and the “we” that defined Europeans against outsiders and rivals, most immediately the Muslim Ottoman Empire. In addition, the Catholic Church mercilessly stamped out what communalism remained in Europe, along with the “pagan” ideologies bound up with communalist social organization.

Capitalism ultimately required a rupture with Catholicism, as the Church and its ideology became a fetter on capital accumulation. This rupture began, ideologically, with the Reformation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that resulted in Protestant churches, continued with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, was punctuated politically by events like Henry VIII’s break with the Catholic Church, the Peace of Westphalia, and the French Revolution, and was consolidated by the bourgeois-democratic separation of church and state. But that was a lengthy process, and early on, capitalism’s rise relied on a symbiosis between the logic of capital accumulation and Catholic universalism—what could be called crusader capitalism.

Crusader capitalism

Unlike the aristocracy living lavish in their manors by virtue of their ownership of land, in the growing towns of feudal Europe, the rising bourgeoisie turned a profit through investing capital in production, trade, and as finance for feudal state-building—as proto-manufacturers, merchants, and bankers. Since land and capital are inanimate objects, both require human labor to become wealth-generating, and that was the role played by the exploited classes in the process, whether peasant or proletarian. Production in a proto-capitalist form involved the direct exploitation of wage labor, but was not the principal means of capital accumulation for the early bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, it did reach enough significance in some Italian city-states by the fourteenth century to create a class of clothworkers in Florence that rose in rebellion in 1378 and briefly seized state power in what might be called, with apologies to WEB Du Bois, the first dictatorship of the proletariat in history.⁹

Trade was the principal form of capital accumulation for the rising bourgeoisie and turned a profit mainly through the indirect exploitation of labor, by transporting things that had been produced in, or extracted from, one place to another, where they were sold on the market, decisively turning those things into commodities in the process. “Vulgar Marxists”—people who bastardize Marx’s economic theories due to their own ineptitude, opportunism, or both—have often treated trade as entirely separate from production. Yet in reality trade itself is a form of production, as it produces a change in location and requires the production of ships, storage facilities, marketplaces, etc.¹⁰ Nevertheless, trade turns a profit principally through selling a commodity that was produced prior to its purchase by the trader.

At the beginning of the European Renaissance (or, more specifically, during its early start in fourteenth-century Italy, the so-called trecento), several northern Italian city-states emerged as power centers of the trade (or mercantile) bourgeoisie. From their strategic location overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, the Italian mercantile bourgeoisie sought command over trade routes in the Mediterranean and between Europe and Asia. On the basis of their capital accumulation through trade, these northern Italian bourgeoisies came to command considerable political power, establishing (more or less) bourgeois-democratic forms of government in small republics centered around commercial cities such as Venice and Genoa. In their conquest of political power, they had the advantage, unlike other European merchant towns, of not being under the thumb of a powerful feudal ruler, and commanding trade routes helped them to develop their war-making capabilities, which in turn were used to defend their class rule at home. Nevertheless, these early bourgeois states remained too small to develop robust internal processes of capital accumulation (or) to challenge the larger feudal empires in Europe for class hegemony, instead having to rely on them for protection. With the aristocracy still the dominant class in Europe, many of these rising northern Italian bourgeoisies, in Venice for example, wound up seeking to become new aristocracies, parking their wealth in land and aristocratic opulence. The bourgeoisie in Genoa, however, never became a landed aristocracy, a fact which freed it—and compelled it—to align with foreign feudal rulers.¹¹

It was capitalist competition for dominance over trade routes, between the Venetian and Genoese bourgeoisies, that caused the Genoese bourgeoisie, some of whom had become an expat class of financiers and traders, to get together with the Iberian feudal ruling classes and birth crusader capitalism, the progeny that proliferated the process of capital accumulation around the world. The Venetian bourgeoisie had come to dominate Mediterranean trade in the fifteenth century, so the Genoese bourgeoisie sought to find a geographic way around the Mediterranean to capture goods and resources from Asia and sell them back in Europe for a profit. Furthermore, through trade, they and other merchant capitalists had accumulated surplus capital which needed to be invested somewhere in order to turn a profit, and financing the overseas ventures of Iberian feudal empire proved a lucrative investment. While the rising (Genoese) bourgeoisie profited, far more than the Iberian feudal rulers, from these overseas ventures, they needed the greater state (especially military) capabilities of the Spanish empire for overseas conquest.¹² That symbiosis is symbolically represented by the Genoese Christopher Columbus getting the sponsorship and blessing of Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand II, whose marriage brought together the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon into a unified Spanish empire, to seek out a new trade route west to Asia, which instead began Spain’s conquest of the Americas in 1492.

While the Genoese bourgeoisie was motivated by capital accumulation through trade and finance, the Spanish empire’s economic logic was pillage of other empires and tribute based on territorial conquest. But Spain had an ideological imperative entangled with the economic one, namely the Catholic crusader spirit with which it had, also in 1492, expelled 150,000 Jews from its home territory and conquered Granada, the latter signaling the belated end of colonization of the Iberian peninsula by the Moors (Muslims from North Africa). With papal blessing, the Spanish monarchy, then officially the political head of the Holy Roman Empire, extended the crusader spirit to its conquest of the Americas, rationalizing brutality and pillage as a holy right and duty bestowed upon it by the Catholic Church.¹³ Without those Godly convictions, the more earthly considerations of capital accumulation might have prevented the conquest of the Americas to go the distance, literally and metaphorically, as the return on investment could take time and the military and state expenditure was extensive. As Arrighi put it, the “spirit of the crusade was an excellent guarantee that Iberian expansion in uncharted waters would proceed unencumbered by constant calculations of pecuniary costs and benefits.”¹⁴

What flowed from the logic of capital accumulation, feudal territorial acquisition, and crusader conquest spread from Spain to the Americas was nothing short of genocidal, from the initial military campaigns to the spread of disease to the exploitation of Indigenous labor in mines. Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of Pillage of a Continent is probably the best starting point to understand this brutal history¹⁵; for our purposes, let us point to some of its driving features. First, after the initial plunder of the Caribbean, the Spanish monarchy set its sights on the Aztec, Inca, and (remnants of) the Maya empires, as they had accumulated wealth, especially in the form of gold and silver, that could be stolen and brought back to Spain. With the military advantages of ironwork and guns, conquistadors Cortés and Pizarro led their armies in an expropriation of empires by the Spanish empire. From there, European conquest spread to the rest of the Indigenous population of South and Central America and was consolidated in the Caribbean, with the mining of gold and silver and the extraction of other resources as the first order of business. The Indigenous peoples, most of whom lived in communal societies and did not have states capable of defending against the well-armed colonizers, were brutally exploited in the mines. Between being worked to death, the violence of conquest, and the spread of disease, 95% of the Indigenous population of what became Latin America was killed by the mid-1600s, and European colonizers began importing slave laborers to make up for the labor shortage that their genocide had caused, especially as they turned from mines to plantations (the subject of the next section).¹⁶

The gold (and silver) that was pillaged and extracted from the Americas by European colonizers had a dual role. It served aristocratic opulence—the flaunting of wealth that was crucial to performative displays of royal power—and the treasure hording habits of feudal rulers. And it served as means of payment in world trade—as capital for the mercantile bourgeoisie—and as finance capital to fund state, especially military, expenditure. Given the vast amount of gold and silver looted from Latin America by European colonizers, it cannot be understated how crucial this capital accumulation by pillage and extraction was in accumulating capital for the expansion of trade, as it provided means of payment for goods and resources from Asia that were then shipped away to be sold for a profit. When you also consider how looted gold and silver funded later industrial production by European capitalist-imperialist powers, any notion of capitalism as a mode of production developed mainly by way of processes internal to Europe does not survive historical scrutiny.¹⁷

The dual role of gold reveals much about why the component parts of crusader capitalism—feudal empire expansion, crusader conquest, colonization, and capital accumulation for trade and finance—came together when they did, and also points us to how capital came to conquer the conquistadors. But to fully understand the decline of the feudal Spanish empire and the rise of the bourgeoisie, we will need to also examine the creation of an old and a new type of feudalism in the Americas. Before we go there, a few words are in order about what the preceding analysis has shown.

First, while capital accumulation was one crucial lever behind the pillage of the Americas, it was not the only one, and any historical account of the rise of capitalism needs to deal with concrete conditions, the rising bourgeoisie’s collaboration and contention with feudal rulers in Europe, and the role of ideology in the process (in this case Catholicism). A purely economic analysis will fail to comprehend the shifting relations of classes and the ideological struggles involved in the ascendance of capitalism. Second, the Italian mercantile bourgeoisie’s role in the process tells us that world trade, finance, and the pillage and exploitation of non-European lands and peoples played at least as important a role in the rise of the bourgeoisie to global hegemony as did later industrial production and the creation of an exploited proletariat in Europe.

Third, crusader capitalism’s conquest of the Americas aligned Europe’s feudal aristocracies, then the dominant classes there, with the rising bourgeoisie in Europe against the entire population of the Americas, and enlisted a number of subalterns (junior partners) in that conquest, including soldiers, missionaries, and, increasingly over time, settlers. During that conquest, most Europeans were impoverished peasants, whose class interests lay in overthrowing their own ruling class, the aristocracy. From the standpoint of upholding sovereignty and self-determination, the Spanish Crown was the belligerent party in its expropriation of empires in the Americas and deserves every moral and political condemnation possible. But these facts should not obfuscate the fundamental, aristocratic and bourgeois, class interests driving European conquest, without letting subalterns off the hook or examining their class interests as well. Nor should they lead us to a postmodernist flattening of distinctions among Indigenous people in the Americas at the time, which all too often winds up in patronizing, uncritical celebration of an idealized concept of “Indigeneity” against a simplistic, unmaterialist idea of evil Europeans.

An understanding of the differences between Indigenous cultures in the Americas around 1500 in fact will lead us away from not only postmodernist nonsense, but also any nonsensical “vulgar Marxist” justifications of European colonialism as ultimately “historically progressive.” As anthropologist Jason Hickel points out,

Citizens of the Aztec, Inca and Maya civilisations were not much better off than Europeans in terms of life expectancy… But archaeological records show that people in the forager-farmer communities that lived outside these early states were a good deal better off, with life expectancies around 50 per cent longer. They were healthier, stronger, taller and better nourished than their more “civilised” counterparts in South America—and, indeed, in Europe… There were no powerful aristocrats or landlords around to force them to work, or to skim their yields for profit… In the Americas of the 15^th century, such communities were the norm, at an incidence of probably around 80 per cent, while settled agricultural states were the exception.¹⁸

So while we can uphold any and all Indigenous resistance to European colonization, that does not mean we need to extol the few Indigenous societies organized into empires in order to rightfully condemn the Spanish empire that expropriated them. From the communist standpoint, the more communal and less class-divided an Indigenous culture was, the more it is a model for the future we are fighting for.¹⁹

Feudalism of a new type

The word “colonization” increasingly appeared in the last paragraphs of the previous section, and since there is perhaps no word more maligned with misuse and obfuscation by postmodernists, we will need to concretely explain the different forms of colonization over capitalism’s history as they enter our narrative. A most basic political definition of colonization would be an empire’s takeover of lands outside its home territory, with varying degrees of population transfer from the empire’s power center to its colonies in order to govern them, but colonization has taken myriad forms and was a practice of empires around the world long before capitalism (the aforementioned colonization of the Iberian Peninsula by the Moors, for example). Going from pillage—as in Spain’s destruction and expropriation of the Inca and Aztec empires—to exacting tribute in an ongoing way requires the exercise of territorial control. That control in turn requires some form or another of colonization, with the empire sending subordinates to administer the colony and/or recruiting such subordinates from among the colonized people.

To that end, Spain (and to a lesser extent Portugal) set up a system of colonial administration in the Americas that imposed its feudal rule on the Indigenous people. That system installed a landed aristocracy, who exploited the Indigenous population on their latifundia (a feudal estate) and ruled over them as vassals for the Spanish empire. In opposition to postmodernist obfuscation, it is important to make a class analysis that distinguishes conquistadors-turned-new-aristocrats from settlers, who generally entered the picture at a later date and carried out colonial land takeover in specific parts of the Americas, such as the northern of England’s thirteen colonies, and became independent producers and property owners (usually farmers) rather than feudal landowners of large estates. In contrast to settlers, the latifundia aristocracy was a class of overlords directly exploiting Indigenous and other laborers and constituting them as peasants in the process, and relying on subaltern junior partners, including missionaries, to extend and fortify their political power.²⁰

The extension of European feudal relations of ownership, exploitation, agricultural production, and political authority to the Americas created several contradictions for the Spanish crown. It spread the Romanesque feudal parcellization of land and political power, albeit tied to the Spanish central state, and the Spanish crown’s geographic distance from the Americas forced it to grant a degree of independence to its vassals, who in turn eventually asserted and fought for independence from Spain.²¹ The latifundia system itself was not an engine of dynamic development of the productive forces, as it spread archaic feudal relations and served, besides its local feudal rulers, not the development of an internal market but the profit-making and treasure-hording of the European bourgeoisie and feudal rulers, respectively. Indeed, where there was dynamism in the latifundia system, as well as in the regime of resource extraction that began with expropriation by conquistadors and continued with the mines, was in how it served capital accumulation in Europe.²²

That dynamism took shape in the profit-making of the financiers of colonial extraction over the growing indebtedness of the Spanish crown, the creation of plantation agriculture, and the slave trade that furnished captive laborers for the plantation system. One of Columbus’s “discoveries” was that the Caribbean could grow crops such as sugar cane in abundance that Europe could not owing to its climate. After mining, plantation agriculture proved the great profit-maker in the tropical and semi-tropical regions of the Americas, with the Portuguese pioneering it in Brazil. Not only could the cash crops grown on the plantations be sold in Europe either as exotic consumer items or as raw materials for production, but they could also be added to the commodities that the European merchant bourgeoisie could sell globally, giving them greater leverage over world trade. The plantation system never served internal development in Latin America itself, where monoculture depleted the soil and where producing cash crops for the world market consolidated relations of dependency and imperialist domination that persist to this day.²³

But for European imperialism, the plantation system had a double dynamism, with the profits from its produce joined by profits from the slave trade. Since plantations were labor intensive, feudal Europe did not have a sufficient surplus population to export as plantation laborers, and crusader capitalism had depleted the Indigenous population of the Americas through genocide, there was only one available alternative source of laborers: Africa. When, in 1492, Spanish ships went west in search of Asian trade and instead stumbled on the Americas, the lesser Iberian empire, Portugal, was continuing its quest to navigate a trade route around Africa to Asia, setting up forts and trade outposts along the African coast in the process. With the rise of the plantation economy, that trade route infrastructure became the basis for kidnapping and purchasing Africans to be shipped to the Americas and sold as slaves to be exploited on the plantations. As the plantation economy itself expanded, dominating the Caribbean, parts of South and Central America, and the Southern colonies of what became the United States, the trafficking in African slaves was an increasingly profitable venture in its own right, with monarchs, finance capitalists, and traders all getting in on the action. As a junior imperialist, Portugal proved unable to fulfill demand, and the superior shipping capacity and finance capital of the Dutch and then the British empires stepped into the breach, with the Portuguese relegated to the role of middle men managing slaving posts on the African coast.²⁴

With approximately 12–15 million slaves stolen from Africa and the labor of those who survived the voyage and their descendants used to enrich local plantation owners and the ruling classes in Europe, the contribution of the Atlantic slave trade and slave labor to capital accumulation was enormous.²⁵ Furthermore, just as the pillage of Latin America and the latifundia system created on its land set in motion Latin America’s impoverishment and underdevelopment, the slave trade wreaked havoc on Africa. It distorted and destroyed existing social organization, depleted the population, and set the continent up for centuries of foreign imperialist domination, as documented in Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972).²⁶

Whereas the latifundia system was the extension of feudalism of an old type, with the geographic distance of an ocean between central state and vassals being the only substantial new development, the plantation slavery that arose on the basis of that ownership system in parts of the Americas was feudalism of a new type. On the plantations, aristocratic land ownership was joined by a more capitalist logic of purchasing means of production to work the land, which explains why those “means of production”—slaves from Africa—were treated more like machines than people. “New World” plantations substituted feudal obligations between lord and exploited peasant with a more naked relation of exploitation between master and slave. On the one hand, that relation was a throwback to the slave societies that predated European feudalism. On the other hand, it was a new type of slavery serving world trade and capital accumulation. With the “expand or die” logic of capital accumulation pushing plantations to maximize profits, slavery in the Americas reached new heights of brutality, treating Africans and their descendants not as people, but as mere means of production. The logic of white supremacy arose to serve and justify the logic of capital accumulation, even as its enshrinement in the ideological state apparatuses of feudalism of a new type gave white supremacist logic its own dynamism that later took part in forging the descendants of African slaves into oppressed nations in the Americas.²⁷

Plantation slavery in the Americas was also feudalism of a new type because its agricultural production was not principally aimed at creating subsistence for the local population and surplus taken as tribute to sustain and enrich the local aristocracy. The produce of plantations was instead made for sale on the world market—it was the direct production of commodities—sale which the European bourgeoisie and the monarchs they aligned with, who had command over the world market, profited more from than did the plantation aristocracy. Given the dependence of the plantations on the world market, they were ruled by the anarchy of (capitalist) commodity production even more than they were by the local aristocracy. Whether they could sell their products, and what price they could sell their products for, depended entirely on the demand for sugar, cotton, tobacco, etc. on the world market, whether for use as raw materials in European industry, consumption items for the European population, or commodities to trade for slaves in Africa or commodities in Asia. That demand fluctuated for all sorts of reasons and was sometimes disrupted by wars, so plantations could be exceptionally profitable one year and face ruin the next. Furthermore, plantations producing the same commodity, no matter how far away they were from one another, were objectively in competition with one another, with whichever plantation could produce the commodity in question cheaper winning out over others. That (capitalist) competition became a motive force for the brutal exploitation of slaves, as the more labor that could be extracted from slaves, the more a plantation had a leg up in its objective competition with other plantations. For those reasons, feudalism of a new type in the Americas—the slave plantation economy—was the first (regionally dominant) mode of production that was overwhelmingly beholden to capitalist logic of commodity exchange on the world market, and the anarchy of production and brutal exploitation that results from that logic.

One final contradiction set in motion by Spanish colonization of the Americas merits our attention before we continue with our history of capitalism in global conquest. Competition between European feudal empires had, for centuries, centered on the acquisition of territory and the strengthening of central states by way of their ability to extract surplus and resources from their acquisition of territory, leading to bloody wars, one after another. Spanish colonization of the Americas heightened that competition by broadening the possibilities for territorial expansion, especially as the Americas proved prime sources for the most coveted form of tribute extraction, namely gold. Consequently, rival European empires were compelled to get in on the action so as not to let Spain consolidate its initial advantage. To that end, they set up their own colonies in the Americas and waged wars with one another, and with Spain, over American, rather than just European, territory, often in the indirect form of battles for naval supremacy (with the 1588 English defeat of the Spanish armada as one prime example).

That (feudal) competition for territory was joined by and intertwined with a capitalist competition for profit-making capabilities and domination of trade, especially in relation to the slave trade and plantation agriculture. In the long run, capitalist competition overtook feudal competition, with direct colonial dominion only securing the position of top imperialist power for those empires that could effectively use it for purposes of capital accumulation. In that respect, the Spanish crown’s spread of its archaic feudal system to the Americas and its dependence on finance capital, personified by foreign bourgeois bankers, to fund its overseas ventures undermined its ability to reap the benefits of its vast colonial dominion—its territorial expansion—in the Americas, with other imperialists better able to extract profit from Spain’s colonies and soon overtake its imperial power.

The Dutch clutch world trade

Raining on Spain’s imperial parade and overtaking its early-sixteenth-century lead in global conquest was the Dutch bourgeoisie, who, rather than playing Spain’s game of (feudal) territorial expansion, “perfected commercial imperialism, the principal object of which was not tribute, land, gold or even subject labour…but supremacy in trade.”²⁸ They did so in part by extracting profit and accumulating capital out of the territory conquered and trade routes generated by Portugal, with that capital accumulation eventually combining with superior state capacity to directly challenge Spanish imperial supremacy. In addition to Dutch shipping companies quickly coming to command the Atlantic slave trade, Dutch capital got in on the plantation economy in the Americas. Not only did Dutch capital finance sugar plantations in Brazil, but it also commanded sugar’s route to European consumption. Dutch ships took the raw sugar that landed in Lisbon to the Netherlands, where it was refined in Dutch production facilities, and then Dutch capitalists sold it on the world market, cutting the Portuguese who ruled Brazil short on profits from their plantations’ produce.²⁹

What the Dutch did in Indian Ocean trade, however, went beyond undercutting archaic Iberian feudal empire with capitalist competition. Established trade routes in the Indian Ocean date back many centuries before European conquest and were commanded by trade empires, especially centered in the Arabian Peninsula, who could rely on the industrious production of several established empires, especially in Asia, for a steady stream of goods. Since Portugal, rather than Spain, found a shipping route to Asia via sailing around Africa, it was the lesser Iberian empire that brought crusader conquest to Asia. But Portugal got overextended both territorially and financially, and the Dutch were able to overtake Portuguese imperialism in the “East Indies” and further extend a conquest that became far more capitalist in character than the crusader Portuguese ever could.³⁰

As Giovanni Arrighi summed up, in the the “East Indies,”

the record of Dutch brutality in enslaving the indigenous (literally and metaphorically) or in depriving them of their means of livelihood, and in using violence to break their resistance to the policies of the [Dutch East India] Company, matched or even surpassed the already abysmal standards established by the crusading Iberians through the extra-European world. But this brutality was wholly internal to a business logic of action and buttressed, instead of undermining, profitability.³¹

Arrighi went on to explain that the Dutch, in contrast to Iberian imperialism, had

an obsession with profit and “economizing,” rather than with crusade; a systematic avoidance of military involvements and territorial acquisitions that had no direct or indirect justification in the “maximization” of profit; and an equally systematic involvement in whatever activity (diplomatic, military, administration, etc.) seemed best suited to seize and retain control over the most strategic supplies of Indian Ocean trade.³²

While the Dutch came to command a territorial empire in order to fulfill that obsession, unlike the Iberians, their colonial dominion always served their own capital accumulation.³³ Amsterdam went from a center of northern Europe’s sea trade to the “central warehouse of world commerce,” and, on the basis of domination over world trade, “the central money and capital market of the European world economy.”³⁴ The Dutch bourgeoisie stayed focused on trade and finance and remained relatively detached from production, except for production geared towards trade (ship-building, for example) or other imperial necessities. But by virtue of its commanding position of world trade and finance, the Dutch bourgeoisie could easily learn new production techniques and quickly develop industries necessary to maintain its hegemonic position.³⁵

Under Dutch hegemony, world trade became truly world trade, with Europe as its imperial center spreading (capitalist) commodity relations around the world from which European ruling classes were the overwhelmingly prime beneficiaries in profit and capital accumulation. Conventional “vulgar Marxist” wisdom holds that supremacy in production is the basis for bourgeois power, with superior means of production and wage labor exploitation of the proletariat as the key levers for imperialist domination. Those certainly became important levers at a later date than our historical narrative has yet reached. But in reality, the rising bourgeoisie in Europe had no superiority in the field of production or even, for the most part, in technology. Empires on other continents had significant achievements in technology and production, from Benin bronze-working to Aztec floating agriculture, that surpassed those in Europe. Around 1500, Europe only accounted for 15% of global gross domestic production, while “China and India together controlled 65 per cent of the world economy.”³⁶ Europe had a few specific advantages in technology and production, namely guns and ship-building for oceanic travel, and a lot of experience in warfare, the latter a horror for the people of feudal Europe but becoming an advantage for the European ruling classes in global conquest (and in turn a horror for the people of the world). It was only by wielding those advantages for the purposes of pillage, extraction, and trade-route domination that guns and ship-building, along with subsequent additional advantages, became and were increasingly produced to become superior means of imperialist domination.

What the Dutch did that led to imperial advantage had less to do with production than it did with organization, along political, military, and economic lines, that allowed the Dutch bourgeoisie to reap the benefits of production in disparate parts of the world. In regard to economic organization, in addition to building an infrastructure for global trade, the Dutch bourgeoisie expanded “its control over money capital and the international credit system.”³⁷ As capital accumulates, the bourgeoisie must find ways for that capital to turn a profit, or face defeat in competition with other capitals that manage to turn more profit. When the bourgeoisie acquires more capital than it can put into profit-making ventures, that sparks a crisis of overaccumulation, and the capital previously accumulated risks devaluation if it cannot be put to profitable use. The Dutch bourgeoisie took the capital it accumulated through trade and turned it into finance capital, whereby it financed, from a distance (both literally, outside its home market, and metaphorically), whatever economic activities were likely to be most profitable and, in return, received a share of the profit even though it had no role in the profit-generating activities other than financing them. On top of turning trade capital into finance capital, the Dutch bourgeoisie also established Amsterdam as the seventeenth-century center of finance and credit, with the first “stock market in permanent session.”³⁸ In doing so, they compelled the bourgeoisies and governments of other European countries to conduct financial transactions through the Netherlands, maintaining a monetary and financial advantage over them as a result.

A crucial innovation in economic organization that was part of the Dutch bourgeoisie’s rise to command over trade and finance in the seventeenth century was the chartered joint-stock company. Created in 1602, the Dutch East India Company was given a monopoly over Dutch trade in Asia. To enforce its trade monopoly and extractive activities, including the establishment of plantations in what is today Indonesia, it functioned like an imperial state, with considerable military capabilities of its own. The Dutch East India Company is an example of monopoly capitalism of an early type, requiring a large concentration of capital to finance global conquest and strong state support for its monopoly, and functioning much like an imperial government itself. To amass that large concentration of capital, it relied on selling shares on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, and in turn paid handsome dividends, dripping with the blood of imperialist conquest and exploitation, to its investors.

Politically, the Dutch empire was built on the establishment of bourgeois-democracy in the United Provinces of (what is today) the Netherlands. Dutch republican government was established after an eighty-year struggle for independence from Spain and built by opposing Papal authority and archaic Catholicism with Protestant ideological state apparatuses and bourgeois ideology in command. Unlike the Genoese, the Dutch bourgeoisie was not a junior partner of a feudal empire, but an assertive class in command of its own republic who made alliances with emerging European dynastic states to contend with Rome and Spain. Strategically, the Dutch played their enemies and rivals against each other, letting them fight land battles while the Dutch dominated the seas, and world trade, through the superiority of their naval power.³⁹

Whereas other bourgeoisies were held back by the feudal structures on which they still depended, the Dutch bourgeoisie advanced its interests and became a champion of the national aspirations of bourgeoisies throughout Europe on the basis of its bourgeois-democratic governance. (Notably, bourgeois-democratic ideology and political structures at home did not lessen Dutch imperialist brutality abroad.) The Dutch exerted their innovations in political organization on Europe more generally, redefining relations between states in ways that benefited bourgeois power, trade enforced by naval power, and capital accumulation over papal and feudal authority. These innovations were consolidated with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia that recognized state sovereignty in Europe to the benefit of emerging dynastic kingdoms, many of them Protestant, and cut down on Catholic Church power and the related favored imperial status of whatever monarchy held the title of Holy Roman Empire (though that title continued to be claimed by the House of Habsburg).⁴⁰

In military organization, in addition to Dutch naval power protecting its dominance in world trade was the Dutch rediscovery of Roman military techniques, including more efficient siege warfare that minimized casualties and was based on increased discipline achieved through marching and drilling. On the basis of these techniques, together with standardization of loading and firing guns, dividing the army “into smaller tactical units,” and other innovations, the seventeenth-century Dutch military could contend with Spain’s despite the latter’s larger home territory from which to draw soldiers.⁴¹ On top of organizational innovations was the fact that Dutch capital was invested in “war-making and state-making activities” to a great extent, giving surplus capital a crucial outlet and a means to avoid a crisis of overaccumulation, with the greater war- and state-making activities thereby created in turn generating more favorable conditions for capital accumulation.⁴²

This last point problematizes notions of capital accumulation as the domain of a (private) bourgeois class, separated from the (public) domain of state power. As Giovanni Arrighi summed up, “the commercialization of war and an incessant armament race have characterized the Western path of capitalist development from its earliest beginnings in the Italian city-states” all the way up to the present.⁴³ Whether to call it state capital or not, state funds have long been used to finance the production of military might, from feudal to bourgeois states, and (private) surplus capital has long been used to finance state-building and war-making ventures. While war and arms production are the greatest nexus of capital accumulation and state power, other state functions can also take on, or give impetus to, logics of capital accumulation.

Our historical narrative of capitalism in global conquest has pointed out a few different types of capital thus far: state capital (or the nexus between state-building and capital accumulation), finance capital (which was explained above), production capital, and trade capital. Each is distinguished by what particular process of capital accumulation it sets in motion and profits from. Trade capital sets in motion the exchange of commodities by purchasing commodities, transporting them to a marketplace for sale, which requires producing a change in location of those commodities and the conditions required for selling them (e.g., a marketplace, a warehouse to store them), and selling them to realize a profit. Trade capital in its earliest forms has been referred to as merchant capital; I adopt the term trade capital both as a more overarching descriptor and to give emphasis to the larger dimensions of world trade that it centered after 1500. Related to trade capital is commercial capital, though the latter term is often used in conjunction with the retail industry that has vastly expanded over the last century (think shopping malls or Amazon.com).

Production capital is used to directly set a process of production in motion by paying for labor and purchasing (or becoming fixed in) means of production, infrastructure for production, and land to produce on. It includes industrial capital (production capital used specifically for industrial production), but could also include capital that sets in motion non-industrial production (purchasing slaves to put to work on plantations, for example). Ultimately, all capital relies on production to make a profit, but production capital does so directly, while other forms of capital, such as trade and finance, do so more indirectly, at a distance from production. During the early stages of the history of capital accumulation led by the Italian and then Dutch bourgeoisies, production capital was its least important form, with trade, state, and finance capital playing far more important roles in spreading capitalist relations and developing the class power of the bourgeoisie. In those early stages, trade and finance capital attached themselves to, and extracted profit from, feudal and other pre-capitalist modes of production as well as pillage and resource extraction. Fully capitalist production did not get underway until later, a subject we shall turn to soon in relation to British imperialism snatching the Dutch clutch on world trade.

Before we separate the English from the Dutch, a theoretical aside on Giovanni Arrighi’s concept of cycles of accumulation is in order. Arrighi identified four large-scale accumulation cycles in capitalism’s history, each with its own dominant bourgeoisie: the Italian (especially Genoese) in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Dutch in the seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries, the British overtaking the Dutch in the eighteenth century and remaining hegemonic until the early twentieth century, and the US taking charge after World War II, with its cycle of accumulation in decline in recent decades. There is much to admire in Arrighi’s work, especially in how it puts capital accumulation in its concrete historical context and attends to not just the economic but also the political, military, and organizational dimensions involved with capital accumulation and imperialist rivalry. Where Arrighi’s theory of cycles of accumulation runs into potentially determinist territory is in his identification of a pattern in each successive cycle, where the then world hegemonic bourgeoisie turns (away from production) to finance, a move which simultaneously signals that bourgeoisie’s triumph and coming decline.

So far, history has shown the validity of the pattern Arrighi described, as, for example, when the Dutch bourgeoisie made the decisive switch to finance around 1740 and subsequently lost global hegemony to the Brits.⁴⁴ But historical precedent does not mean inevitability, and Arrighi himself avoided inevitablist logic, documenting the subjective agency of the bourgeoisie in how it responds to crises of overaccumulation and overproduction and imperialist rivalry. In any event, as we seek to understand processes of capital accumulation in the past and present in order to forcibly bring all cycles of capital accumulation to an end through world proletarian revolution, we will need to analyze what role different forms of capital play within the accumulation process and what they set in motion—the objective conditions on which we communists make our subjective interventions.

“Separate the English from the Dutch”

Bourgeois-democracy in the Netherlands aided in making capital accumulation the principal driver of European global conquest, in contrast to the feudal and crusader motives of the Iberian empires that the Dutch displaced as hegemonic imperialist power. However, a republic on a small territory with a small population had objective and subjective disadvantages in comparison to some of its competitors, especially when it came to establishing territorial rule through colonization of faraway lands. Dynastic kingdoms with a strong central state apparatus that ruled over a sizable population in a large territory with strongly guarded borders—favorable conditions for the development of a home market—proved better equipped than the Dutch republic to lead the imperialist way as territory came to displace (or became necessary to maintain) trade as the lever of imperial advantage. Those kingdoms, rather than parcellized feudalism or Holy Roman Empires, also proved the best shell, in Europe, for incubating the distinctly bourgeois form of political-social-territorial organization: the nation-state.

It is an irony of history that the bourgeoisie’s ascendance to power depended on monarchies with the authority to curtail the power of the aristocracy, challenge the Catholic Church, and pave the way for bourgeois-democracy. That irony is perhaps best evident in the Enlightenment reforms decreed from above by none other than the House of Habsburg in the late-eighteenth-century Austrian empire, which abolished the monasteries and had aristocrats sweeping the streets of Vienna when they broke the law.⁴⁵ In the context of European history, however, these were monarchies of a new type (House of Habsburg notwithstanding). Unlike European conquerors from King Charlemagne on who sought to a establish a new (Holy) Roman Empire, these monarchies of a new type came to be motivated, objectively and sometimes subjectively, by creating the optimal conditions for capital accumulation in their sovereign domain. Nowhere was this more the case than England, which combined the objective advantages of being a sizable island isolated from conflicts on continental Europe by sea with subjective actions—of both the the knee-jerk reaction and farsighted variety—by the English monarchy that paved the way for its imperial hegemony.

King Henry VIII paved the way in the knee-jerk reaction way, breaking from the Catholic Church in the first half of the sixteenth century in order to divorce and remarry with the hope of having a male heir. Beneath the surface, but very real, personal conflict between British Crown and Catholic Pope over royal marriage was a political conflict between dynastic kingdom of a new type and old Catholic empire, and Henry’s tantrum led to the displacement of Catholic authority from England and its replacement by Protestant ideological state apparatuses more amenable to bourgeois class interests. It was (one of) Henry’s female heir(s), Queen Elizabeth I (the first #girlboss?), who decisively resolved that conflict in the English Crown’s favor, consolidating the Church of England while reigning in the chaos of Catholic vs. Protestant violence with the Elizabethan Settlement.

Political stability under Elizabeth I provided the conditions for farsighted economic and military policy. In the late sixteenth century, Elizabeth I and her team of advisors led England to avoid land wars with Spain and France while building up British naval prowess, which was used to defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588 and challenge Dutch dominance of the seas. They also started the English tradition of “sound money.” paying off royal debts, building up government finances rather than just hoarding treasure, and stabilizing England’s currency (the pound), in part by way of loot stolen from Spain. Elizabethan financial policy meant that unlike Spain or Portugal, the British empire was not in debt, and put itself in the position to finance more far-reaching imperial ventures, including joint-stock companies, and establish the Royal Exchange, which later challenged Dutch financial supremacy.⁴⁶

The rising British empire had the competitive advantage of a latecomer, learning from Iberian and Dutch imperialist techniques and inserting itself into their networks of trade and colonization.⁴⁷ Even as Iberian empires remained the colonial powers over South and Central America, the British bourgeoisie dominated (and reaped profits from) trade with, and surplus production and resource extraction from, the American colonies of Spain and Portugal.⁴⁸ The latter even became “a de facto British protectorate,” consecrated by English King Charles II’s 1662 marriage to Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza after a lengthy struggle against Spain, which in effect put Portuguese colonies in British hands.⁴⁹

From the Dutch, the British clutched the slave trade. Where they went beyond the Dutch was in making the slave trade part of a closed internal network of trade and production with British capital at its center. What historians have labeled the triangular trade brought kidnapped Africans to plantations in the Americas, the fruits of production by those Africans laboring as slaves on those plantations in the Americas to England and Europe, and English goods, often manufactured from raw materials produced on the plantations, to Africa to trade for slaves and to the Americas to sell for profit. Whereas the Dutch never managed to consolidate colonial control in the Americas, the British internalized the profits from slavery by setting up their own slave-plantation colonies in the seventeenth century, contesting Spanish control of the Caribbean and establishing colonies in the South of what is now the United States.⁵⁰ The epitome of the British empire’s maximization of profit from both the slave trade and the plantation production it served is the island of Jamaica, which, under British rule, was both a way station for slaves that were exported to other parts of the Americas and a host of sugar plantations where slaves were sent to labor.

In what is now the US South, British colonization went beyond Dutch conquest around the world in that its primary goal was not trading posts but inland territorial expansion, and differed from Iberian imperialism by being driven explicitly by the search for profits from production.⁵¹ In the first colonies of Virginia and Maryland, the British Crown and the colonial companies it sponsored adjusted their “original plan for a diversified commercial economy” when they discovered that a more profitable venture was “the production of a single, marketable crop, tobacco.” Fulfilling the profit motive “required not only sizable landholdings and the dispossession of indigenous people but an intensively exploited labour force,” and hence slavery came to what is now the US South and gave even greater impetus to the slave trade that had been established in the prior century, and more profits for the British empire that dominated the slave trade.⁵²

The British empire’s overseas inland expansion and territorial control came in the form not just of American slave-plantation colonies, but also settler-colonialism in North America, Australia, and New Zealand, and administrative colonialism in the Indian subcontinent. The former we shall return to after a detour analyzing the internal changes in England that gave impetus to settlers. The latter is another example of where the British went beyond the Dutch to maximize profit from trade and production and, consequently, required a more all-encompassing system of colonial administration, which set the precedent for the later period of high colonialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In the art of colonial administration over peasant producers, England had the competitive advantage of its experience colonizing nearby Ireland.

In India, European imperialism confronted a substantially populated territory with a high level of agricultural and handicraft production whose impressive output had been sought after for centuries in well-established trade routes and relations. Moreover, there was a central power in India, the Mughal Empire. Getting gold and silver through pillage and mining in the Americas was the first step to gaining an advantage in trade with India, but turning that advantage into domination required methods beyond what the Portuguese and Dutch trading outposts were capable of, and the Iberian method of pillage followed by feudal parcellization did not fit the context. The British turned to the capitalist organizational innovation, pioneered by the Dutch, of trade monopoly capitalism by way of chartered joint-stock company, and developed the British East India Company, whose first objective was to wrench favorable terms for conducting trade on the Indian subcontinent. The Company did not outright expropriate the Mughal Empire, but divided and weakened it while keeping it as a political form, now serving British bourgeois interests, all the way up until the 1857 anticolonial revolt in which the Mughal emperor sided with the Indian masses against British imperialism, a crime for which there was no forgiveness. During the eighteenth century, the British East India Company wrenched free trade agreements out of the Mughal Empire that allowed it to dump goods in India while appropriating goods from India “duty free,” setting up conditions of unequal exchange.⁵³

Like its Dutch counterpart, the British East India Company developed means for making war, enforcing its monopoly, and extracting wealth and surplus, consolidating its conquest of the Indian subcontinent in the mid-eighteenth century and displacing rival European imperialists from its “sphere of influence.” Along the way and in order to consolidate its trade monopoly, it destroyed India’s modes of industrious production and impressive agriculture, forcing the subcontinent into a relation of dependency on British produced goods and turning it into a supplier of raw materials and cash crops rather than a potential competitor with British industry and agriculture. Where the British went beyond the Dutch was in establishing a complex system of administration and infrastructure to ensure that production in India served British imperialism, and in making India pay for the costs of imperial administration, in India and elsewhere. On the latter, the British East India Company enforced wide-reaching taxation on the Indian population that led to poverty and starvation, and recruited members of that population into a subaltern army of Indian soldiers serving British imperial rule in India and used to fight for British imperial interests around the world, including putting down anticolonial revolts. On the former, the British East India Company destroyed existing land use and ownership arrangements and established a feudal system with landlords it created in charge and moneylenders squeezing impoverished peasants. That feudal system, which included a plantation economy in southern India, served foreign capital accumulation, focusing on producing cash crops and raw materials for export rather than subsistence for the Indian population or surplus production for an Indian home market. Roads and later railways built in colonial India likewise served not the home market but export abroad and British capital accumulation.⁵⁴

In these and other ways, such as destroying longstanding cultural traditions and imposing British education and values, the British East India Company established a far more totalizing form of colonialism on a well-populated territory than the Iberians or Dutch had done. While British imperialism caused famines and carried out massacres in India, it did not seek to eliminate or remove the population, nor did it need to replenish it with slaves from Africa. Instead, it exploited the Indian masses in feudal modes of production that served British capital accumulation while leaving other imperialist powers largely out of the profits, even going on to develop monetary policies that used British-controlled currency to dominate, and squeeze more profit from, financial transactions in and with its Indian colony.⁵⁵ In doing so, the British managed to synthesize old (feudal, territorial) and new (capitalist) methods of empire into a system of administrative colonialism in India that was a far more efficient vehicle for tribute and extraction than what any other imperialist had achieved up to that point. In combination with domination of the slave trade and slave-plantation colonies in the Americas, administrative colonialism in India gave the British bourgeoisie the material basis to overtake the Dutch.⁵⁶ These three means of capital accumulation also provided the material basis for industrialization and the hegemony of capitalist relations of production in England itself, which in turn transformed the British colonial relationship with India. So we must now take a detour back to England in order to understand the subsequent path of British imperialism.

Capitalism becomes a mode of production

Our narrative of capitalism in global conquest has reached well into the eighteenth century, but has made little mention of changes in the means of production thus far. Instead, we have focused on methods of conquest and organization and analyzed how various (mostly feudal) modes of production came to be dominated by commodity relations and the logic of capital accumulation, often from the distance of trade and finance. If we are to understand capitalism as a totalizing system that has come to dominate the entire world, we need to analyze the various historical threads that were woven together into that global system. It is in the power center of the British empire that internally capitalist relations of production and industrial means of production emerged and gave direction to the motion of capital in global conquest. Since that process has been well analyzed elsewhere, most magisterially in Karl Marx’s Capital vol. 1, we will only briefly summarize it here in order to bring it into synthesis with the insights of historians and political economists whose emphasis is on the global scope of the rise of capitalism.

In England, capitalist relations of production began in agriculture by way of the enclosure movement. Peasants, as a class, have access to land, whether in the form of a small plot owned by themselves, a landlord’s estate which the peasants are provided with access to provided they provide a portion of their produce to the landlord, or commons, which are not the property of any individual but can be accessed by anyone living in their vicinity. Peasants use the land they have access to to produce their subsistence, and it was in the feudal aristocracy’s class interests to maintain the peasants’ land access so that the aristocracy could exact tribute from peasants and so that the peasant class on whose labor the aristocracy depended could reproduce itself rather than starve to death.

But beginning in the fifteenth century, English landlords found reasons to deny peasants access to land. The land could be more profitably used to graze sheep, whose wool could be sold on the market, or could be leased out to the most productive producers, who paid the landlord rent. Selling wool on the market or renting land out were both forms of commodity relations and generated capital accumulation, and once the landlords got started, the expansionist logic of capital accumulation compelled them to grab up ever more land. To that end, they expelled peasants from what land they owned, kicked them off aristocracy-owned land, and denied them access to the commons in a process of enclosure in which the English countryside became the private property of a less aristocratic and more capitalist landlord class. King Henry VIII’s personal revolt against the Catholic Church aided enclosure by adding Church-owned lands to those being enclosed upon by private landlords.

Out of the process of enclosure, which saw violent takeovers of peasant lands and livelihoods and violent peasant rebellions against enclosure, a triangular class relationship in English agriculture emerged. The landlords became rentiers, collecting rent on their massive landholdings from an emerging agrarian bourgeoisie who rented that land to produce for sale on the market by exploiting agricultural proletarians working for wages rather than producing subsistence for themselves and tribute for their landlords. With the profit motive in command of the agricultural bourgeoisie and rentier class, there was a strong impetus to boost agricultural production by developing more efficient methods, applying new technologies, and more viciously exploiting labor. As Silvia Federici has explained, the latter required new forms of patriarchal control over women’s bodies to ensure the reproduction of the proletarian class and to dispossess women of means to resist or live outside of the logic of capital accumulation, resulting in vicious patriarchal violence on a massive scale, including the witch hunts that brutally murdered hundreds of thousands of mostly lower class women.⁵⁷

The process that transformed English agriculture to a capitalist mode of production took several centuries and affected, and required, a shift in class relations among the ruling classes. While the English monarchy was more forward-thinking in embracing the logic of capital accumulation than other European monarchies, on its home turf it resisted the winds of change and sought to maintain the old feudal land property relations, including peasant access to land. The (becoming capitalist) landlord class became locked in struggle with the English Crown, and that struggle boiled over into civil war in the 1640s and the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688. In these struggles, the landlord class emerged victorious and consolidated control over Parliament, using this bourgeois-democratic form to exert its class interests over the monarchy, increase its landholdings, and further expel peasants from their land. Alongside these struggles was an ideological shift that elevated the “right of propertied subjects to pursue wealth…not just above the right of government of rulers, but also above the age-old right to a livelihood of the propertyless masses.”⁵⁸

Without access to land, peasants had no way to provide themselves with means of subsistence. They turned into a landless, propertyless class—the proletariat—that could only survive by working for wages and who were compelled to purchase their means of subsistence as commodities on the market, becoming a consumer base for capitalist production, albeit an impoverished one. Some found work in agriculture, while others flocked to the growing towns in search of employment. Just like in the English countryside, a change in mode of production took place in the towns, fueled by the arrival of propertyless former peasants. Handicraft industry, relying on individual artisans making finished products by virtue of their individual craftsmanship, was giving way to machine-based industrial production, in which a workshop, and later large factories, housed the most technically efficient means of production that used the unskilled labor of a growing mass of workers in increasingly collective rather than individual processes of production.

Just like agricultural production in the post-enclosure countryside, English industrial production was based on a property relation in which the emerging urban bourgeoisie owned the workshops and means of production and employed proletarians who produced surplus value while being paid wages that only met their subsistence, if that. As English industry and the proletariat it employed grew, towns became cities where the masses lived in slums and squalor. The urban industrial bourgeoisie joined the rural rentiers and agricultural capitalists among England’s ruling classes, with their interests represented in Parliament. The urban proletariat had no political power, with the guilds that had previously protected artisan craftsmen undermined by the new mode and means of production and broken up.

Pulling back the lens from the internal class relations of English industry to the broader development of capitalism in global conquest reveals how the very development of English industry depended on imperialist plunder and extraction. In addition to proletarians, industry required inventions and technical innovations to create the means of production on which proletarians worked. The profits of the slave trade and colonial extraction gave the English bourgeoisie the freedom to fund inventions and the supposed geniuses who made them, literally financing innovations such as Watt’s steam engine. Every class-divided society’s division of labor depends on exploitation and plunder, but the scale of the British empire’s global exploitation enabled it to develop a far more complex division of labor than any previous society, with a growing number of people in England devoted to scientific discovery and invention, which was necessary for the development of industrial production.

Beyond the ranks of scientists, inventors, and technicians, English industrial production itself depended on a global division of labor established by European imperialism. This is evident in the first great industry in England, textiles, whose principal raw material was cotton. That cotton was picked by slaves in the Americas and peasants in India and other British colonies, with the British bourgeoisie able to acquire it cheaply due to imperialist domination. With so much cotton available, the English textile industry became an early site of technical innovation, developing means of production that could more efficiently exploit the labor of proletarians in the production process that turned raw materials into commodities for sale. And the commodities produced, ever more efficiently, by the textile industry in England in turn gave the British bourgeoisie ever greater domination over world trade, as its products could be sold for a cheaper price than textiles produced anywhere else.

Through a process set in motion in the fifteenth century and lasting several centuries, capitalism became a mode of production in England, creating new classes and new class relationships and demanding new means of production, the development of which in turn provided the material basis for the further entrenchment of capitalism as a mode of production. The domination of the capitalist mode and industrial means of production within England joined with and transformed the British empire’s external domination of trade and territory to fuel and fortify its position as hegemonic imperialist power from the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. Imperialism became less tied to feudal logic and more directly driven by the logic of capital accumulation. In much of the territory around the world colonized by British imperialism, that logic demanded maintaining, or even creating, feudal relations of production that benefited British capital accumulation. But in other places, colonization resulted, more directly and rapidly, in the reproduction of capitalist relations of production and the classes generated by them.

Settlers and the new nations they created

As described above, the development of capitalism as a mode of production in England displaced peasants from their land and increasingly made some classes, such as independent artisans, obsolete. The result was a growing surplus population, which the ruling classes subjected to repressive measures, like vagrancy laws, to keep in check. Capitalism depended on the existence of a surplus population as a reserve army of laborers to put to work when it required them during boom cycles and to exert downward pressure on wages when it did not need their labor and instead made them objective competition for the laborers who were employed. The capitalist mode of production also perpetually added to the surplus population by making use of new means of production that made more efficient use of labor by requiring less laborers to produce the same amount of surplus. The problem the English bourgeoisie began to face as a result was a growing surplus population with strong motive for rebellion that its repressive measures might not be able to contain.

One solution was to give members of this surplus population the option of emigrating overseas, to British colonies, which was especially enticing if they were promised the opportunity to become not proletarians or peasants, but independent producers and property owners. The prospect of land ownership was especially attractive given that enclosure prevented that possibility in England, whereas colonial land theft in the Americas made it easily attainable. Emigration was also enticing for Europeans looking to escape persecution and repression in the often violent religious conflicts that wracked Europe, which were sparked by changes in class relations and power struggles between dynastic kingdoms and the Catholic Church and the empires it aligned with. Whether their motives were economic or religious, settlers became a growing force within European colonization. Waves of capitalist crisis and imperialism-induced starvation, such as the so-called potato famine in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, created additional impetus for the destitute and starving to become settlers, and the European ruling classes directed waves of settlers to those colonies where their class interests would be best served by settler-colonialism.

Settlers had long been part of the European conquest of the non-European world, but came to much greater prominence as the British empire vied for hegemony. As the Dutch bourgeoisie built its trade empire around the coast of Africa to the “East Indies,” Dutch settlers embarked in what is today South Africa, where they came to be called Boers. But because the British bourgeoisie was ahead of other European rulers in producing a surplus population on its home turf, it required settler-colonialism as a pressure valve to stabilize its home market far more than any other contemporary European power.⁵⁹ So the British established settler-colonies in North America, Australia, and New Zealand and, in a lengthy struggle not settled until the Second Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902, took over the Dutch settler-colony that became South Africa. These settler-colonies in turn became important markets for English goods, given they developed a sizeable consumer base, and outposts for spreading the capitalist mode of production under European leadership. Furthermore, settler-colonies spread the territorial dominion and reach of the British empire by unleashing the (reactionary) initiative of settlers themselves rather than relying on the administrative capacity of the empire’s rulers. Not surprisingly given all the imperialist benefits, other European imperialist powers also turned to settler-colonialism, most notably France in North America and North Africa.

To comprehend the reactionary initiative of settlers, it is helpful to delineate the class interests and accompanying motivations and ideology of settlers from conquistadors-turned-aristocratic-overlords, plantation owners, and trade monopoly capitalism administrators. As philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò explains, in the colonies that became “the United States, Australia, and South Africa,” “the colonists (settlers) were not interested in administering the aboriginal inhabitants; they wanted the latter cleared from the land for their convenience.”⁶⁰ That made settlers no less genocidal against Indigenous populations than other agents of European colonization, and gave European imperialism a growing reactionary social base in its colonies whose existence brought them directly in conflict with Indigenous people and whose class interests were in expelling Indigenous people from their land by whatever means necessary. Furthermore, rather than simply carrying out the orders of their mother country, settlers were self-driven to spread colonialism deeper inland and expelled more Indigenous people from their land as they did so. But they did not turn Indigenous people into laborers working for settlers, nor did they rely on slaves kidnapped from Africa to work their stolen land, for the most part.⁶¹

Instead, settlers set themselves up as independent farmers on stolen land or as artisans and petty proprietors in towns built on stolen land—the idyllic New England life of American historical fantasy. In reality, the colonies of New England did distinguish themselves from British colonies to the south of them and in the Caribbean by producing grain rather than cash crops on slave plantations, fulfilling their subsistence needs independent of the world market and building up a self-sustaining internal market over time. In doing so, “they retained a greater economic independence from the imperial homeland.” By virtue of “not having been drawn to the colonies mainly by investors seeking massive profits [through plantations], they were not so bound to the propertied classes, landlords and merchants at home.”⁶²

That independence highlights other important characteristics of settlers: an ideology of rugged (capitalist) individualism coupled with greater class mobility. The latter was made possible by the geographic and social distance of settler-colonies from (still somewhat) feudal Europe, where the weight of tradition held back the possibility of moving up the class ladder through individual (capitalist) success. The former drew on philosophical rationalizations for capitalism and colonialism that were being produced especially in England. Those rationalizations explained the acquisition of wealth as individual achievement and as the result of “improving” the land (and sometimes the people who inhabited it too by “civilizing” them). Capitalist individualism as guiding philosophy was taken to its greatest heights in the colonies that became the United States.⁶³

The class nature of settlers as independent producers and the relative independence of settler-colonies conditioned by their class base set in motion a contradictory relationship between mother country and settler-colony. Both mother country and settlers were united as oppressive forces against the Indigenous peoples whose land they colonized, but whereas mother country might be interested in trade (on advantageous terms) with, and labor exploitation of, the Indigenous populations, settlers did not advance their class interests principally though commodity exchange with the Indigenous, but by displacing them, including with further territorial expansion. That difference created a tension within the relationship between settlers and mother country, in which the former generally pushed the colonial relationship with Indigenous people in more genocidal directions or ruled over them in more brutal ways than the latter necessarily desired. This tension continued all the way up through the end of British colonialism, with settlers in southern Africa building apartheid states and refusing the British bourgeoisie’s moves in the direction of African independence.

Another tension was over the development of an internal home market in the settler-colony. As settlers advanced their own class power as independent producers, taxation by and disadvante\ageous terms of commodity exchange with their mother country became a fetter on their class aspirations. That tension became sharpest in the thirteen British colonies that became the United States, where a united front of settlers-turned-established-independent-producers and slave-owner-plantation-new-aristocrats fought for and won independence from Britain in what was the most reactionary “revolution” in history. Other British settler-colonies resolved this tension more peacefully, but all of them eventually made the move from settler-colony to new and independent nation-state. That fact points us to the transitory nature of settlers as a class. After expelling the Indigenous population and establishing themselves on their land, especially over generations, they are no longer functionally settlers, but settled members of a new nation-in-formation increasingly differentiated by what class positions they come to occupy rather than united in their concern with taking ownership over land in the settler-colony in antagonism with the Indigenous population.

Even as the new nations that were formed out of settler-colonies asserted their independence from the British Crown, they remained useful assets for British imperialism. They maintained economic links with England, links which moved from colonial dependency and unequal exchange to mutually beneficial trade and division of labor in production and resource extraction. They sided with Britain against anti-imperialist revolt and in imperial rivalry, with the US coming to Britain’s rescue in the two world wars of the twentieth century and the US and Australia playing central roles fighting imperial Japan in the Pacific theater of World War II. Indeed, it is Britain and its former settler-colonies that constitute the dominant imperialist bloc in the world today, what the (New) Communist Party of Canada has dubbed the Anglo-American Imperialist Alliance (AAIA), with the US having supplanted Britain as hegemonic power. Beyond the mutual economic interests and longstanding political alliances are the common cultural roots of the core countries of the AAIA bloc, cultural roots that spread out through settler-colonialism even as they branched out into distinct national cultures.

Becoming abolitionists

By the mid-nineteenth century, the British empire’s vast territorial control around the world was increasingly being used to extract resources to serve as raw materials in a particular form of capital accumulation in its home base. That process of accumulation was one where industrial (production) capital put wage-laborers to work in collective labor processes using the latest and most efficient machines in factories to turn raw materials into commodities for sale on the market. In exploiting those wage-laborers, who constituted the leading edge of the new proletarian class in the nineteenth century, industrial capital reproduced fully capitalist relations of production where it directly purchased labor power as a commodity and only paid the providers of labor power what they needed to survive. To be “free” to sell its labor power, the proletariat had to be free from any obligations to a master and untethered to the land. By insisting on that “freedom” for the proletariat, the rise to prominence of industrial capital consolidated the process of making capitalism a mode of production in England. It created a mass of proletarian wage-laborers in England and gave impetus to the spread of wage-labor relations elsewhere.

The spread of wage-relations outside the British empire’s home market was crucial to solving a problem generated by industrial capital’s mode of accumulation. As industrial capital set in motion the production of an exponentially increasing volume of products, it in turn faced the need to sell those products in order to realize a profit. And since realizing that profit was contingent on extracting surplus value from the labor of proletarians—paying them far below the value of the commodities their labor had produced—industrial capitalists needed a consumer base to sell their products to beyond the proletarian class they created, whose wages did not allow them to purchase the entirety of the fruits of their labor. Otherwise, the motion of industrial capital would give rise to a crisis of overproduction, wherein its products could not be sold and would go to waste, and—what is of concern to the bourgeoisie—would fail to realize a profit. A readymade solution created by capitalism in global conquest was to offload industrially-produced commodities onto a captive consumer base in the markets it created outside of Europe through colonization.

Due to Britain’s command of Atlantic Ocean trade routes, an easily accessible potential consumer base for British manufactured goods lay in the Americas. But the persistence of slavery in the Americas meant large numbers of laborers who could not be direct consumers of British commodities because they were not paid in wages. It was with markets in mind that the British bourgeoisie became abolitionists, as the class interests of industrial capitalists dictated that slavery be abolished so that wage-labor become the dominant form of labor in the Americas. In fact, industrial capital had become such an important lever of capital accumulation for the British ruling classes that they were willing to abolish other lucrative forms of capital accumulation in order to fully unfetter the industrial one. To that end, they outlawed the slave trade in 1807, formerly a great source of profit for the British empire, and used their dominance of Atlantic trade routes to attack ships that continued transporting kidnapped Africans to the Americas in defiance of British bourgeois class interests. It would take until the 1830s for Britain to abolish slavery in its colonies, and with compensation for the slave-owners for the loss of their “property.”⁶⁴

If the reader will permit me a brief, perhaps gratuitous, aside, the difference between the British bourgeoisie becoming abolitionists and today’s postmodernist Leftists doing so in relation to prisons and police is telling. Today’s so-called abolitionists share with the nineteenth-century British abolitionist bourgeoisie the concern for securing markets. But whereas the British bourgeoisie’s horizon was world trade, today’s abolitionists are far more narrowly concerned with finding niches in academic publishing, nonprofit activist organizations, and insular Leftist (social) media. Moreover, the British bourgeoisie was serious about ending slavery and took concrete action to do so, whereas today’s abolitionists are entirely full of shit and have taken no action, nor put forward any political program, capable of abolishing police or prisons. Yes, I just said that the nineteenth-century British bourgeoisie, for all its monstrous crimes, at least performed one historically progressive task, whereas today’s abolitionists cannot claim, nor will they ever be able to claim, any such achievement.

Aside over: Abolishing slavery was part of a bigger move by the British bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century to secure larger consumer markets and unfettered access to raw materials for industrial capital accumulation in its home market, which required a restructuring of interstate relationships in Europe and a change in the forms of European imperialist domination of the non-European world. Protection of its home market and trade monopolies abroad had previously served British capital accumulation best, allowing British agriculture and industry to develop without external competition while denying European rivals easy access to its markets, at home and abroad. But with industrial capital in command of the most powerful empire yet created in human history, the British bourgeoisie needed to allow raw materials and commodities into its home market at an ever greater volume to fuel the factories and feed the population at home. And since, to increase capital accumulation, industrial capital perpetually improved its means of production and produced more goods, it needed to be able to unload an exponentially increasing volume of surplus goods everywhere it could. So the British bourgeoisie turned from protectionism to free trade and sought to spread the latter around the world, confident that its head start on industrial production would give it competitive advantage in the free trade of commodities on the world market given the volume of goods it had to sell and the lower price of those goods due to ever more efficient means of production. That confidence was boosted by British military superiority, which itself was buttressed by industrial production of weaponry, and a greater colonial empire than any of its rivals.

The British bourgeoisie’s quest for free trade was aided, and in turn pushed ahead, changes in European interstate relations and internal class power. Napoleon’s attempt to build a new empire out of the French Revolution upended the interstate relations established by the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Britain allowed the continental European powers to fight the French armies before swooping in at the end of the Napoleonic Wars to ensure that Napoleon’s defeat would benefit British empire. One great beneficiary of the Napoleonic wars was industrial capital and its nexus with state power, as states at war needed, and financed, armament production, with Britain ahead of the pack.⁶⁵ The 1814–15 Congress of Vienna that followed Napoleon’s defeat had contradictory effects. On the one hand, it established a new interstate system that minimized conflict between European states and thus created more favorable conditions for free trade. On the other hand, it fortified monarchies against the rising revolutionary tide of bourgeois-democratic movements that the 1789 French Revolution had started.

As the British bourgeoisie turned to free trade, its class interests increasingly lay with the spread of bourgeois-democracy against absolute monarchy and the remaining power of the aristocracy in Europe (a different policy than the one it applied to its settler-colonies, including its attempted suppression of the independence and bourgeois-democracy demanded by one of its settler-colonies that resulted in the 1776 American Revolution). Absolute monarchies, after all, tended to be deeply vested in protectionism. Against those absolute monarchies were waves of revolutionary upheavals from 1776 to 1848, whose protagonists were, as Giovanni Arrighi put it, primarily “communities of property-holders, whose main concern was with the monetary value of their assets rather than with the autonomous power of their rulers.”⁶⁶ As the British bourgeoisie turned to free trade, they came to champion the interests of property owners in revolt who would be less burdened by taxation and tariffs without the rule of absolute monarchies, and whose class aspirations made them view contemporary England as their potential future bourgeois paradise. So it was that bourgeois-democratic revolutions and national unification movements under bourgeois leadership in nineteenth-century Europe boosted the global hegemony of the British bourgeoisie and gave it more access to markets for purposes of industrial capital accumulation.

In England itself, the bourgeoisie created the political conditions for free trade, at home and abroad, in a series of laws passed in the 1830s and 40s. The 1834 Poor Law put market imperatives in command of wages. Peel’s Bank Act of 1844 established monetary regulation and the gold standard, tying currency to gold, which could in turn be relied on in world trade. And the 1846 Corn Law opened the British empire’s home market up “to the supply of grain from the entire world.”⁶⁷ Beyond this series of laws, “from the mid-1840s to 1931, Britain unilaterally kept its domestic market open to the products of the whole world.”⁶⁸

All of the British bourgeoisie’s political decisions described above, from becoming abolitionists to resolving European conflicts in its favor to championing bourgeois-democratic revolutions to turning to free trade, were expressions of both the objective class interests and the subjective agency of the British bourgeoisie. The specific accumulation process of industrial capital created new necessities for the bourgeoisie, as did shifts in power relations among its European rivals and revolts in European colonies. How the British bourgeoisie responded to those necessities was not pre-ordained by God or the means of production, as idealists of the Christian and mechanical materialist, vulgar Marxist variety would have it. The British bourgeoisie maintained its global hegemony by making decisions that successfully advanced its class interests, with Queen Victoria proving to be a royal steward of British imperialism on par with her sixteenth-century #girlboss predecessor, Queen Elizabeth I. Had the British ruling classes made bad decisions or failed to adjust to new realities, they likely would have lost global hegemony far sooner than the mid-twentieth century. And British colonial dominion also required changes in policy—political decisions—to advance British bourgeois class interests in the face of new necessities.

British imperialism’s turn to free trade allowed its remaining settler-colonies greater room to develop into independent nations, while the one that had already won independence, the United States, increasingly turned to protectionism to secure its home market and build up its production capacity. In Britain’s administrative colony on the Indian subcontinent, free trade imperialism required not the end of colonialism and the freeing of the Indian masses, but the freeing of British industrial capital to sell its goods unfettered by trade monopoly capitalism. To that end, the British East India Company was stripped of its monopoly on Indian trade in 1813, and then, after the 1857 anticolonial revolt, dismantled and replaced with direct colonial administration by the British government—the so-called British Raj. Under the Raj, the productive capacity of India was further destroyed by flooding its market with British manufactured goods, whose cheap prices put Indian producers out of business and thereby ensured that Indian raw materials were completely diverted to British industrial capital accumulation, given they had nowhere to go in India. (Diverting Indian raw materials to England also, in turn, deprived Indian producers of raw materials to work with—as Marx taught us, causes become effects and effects become causes.) Forcing the Indian economy into resource extraction and raw material production without adequate subsistence agriculture, let alone industry, for the benefit of British capital accumulation left the Indian masses not only impoverished, but highly susceptible to fluctuations in the market and without a backup plan in case of a ruined harvest. A drop in prices paid for Indian exports, or having no exports to sell due to a bad harvest, could easily foment famine among peasants left without money to pay for their own subsistence, which they no longer produced themselves.⁶⁹

With free trade imperialism, the chartered joint-stock company, the organizational form of early trade monopoly capitalism, increasingly became obsolete, and its administrative powers were taken over by the imperialist state to ensure equal access to the colonial market by the imperial center’s industrial capitalists. As Arrighi summed up,

joint-stock chartered companies were business organizations empowered by European governments to exercise in the extra-European world state- and war-making functions, both as ends in themselves and as means of commercial expansion. As long as the companies performed these functions more efficiently than the governments themselves could, they were granted trading privileges and protection more or less commensurate to the usefulness of their services. But as soon as they no longer did, the companies were deprived of their privileges, and their state- and war-making functions were taken over by the metropolitan governments themselves.⁷⁰

Also increasingly obsolete in the nineteenth century was Iberian colonial dominion in Latin America. Britain was already doing more trade with the American colonies of Spain and Portugal than their “mother countries” were when the local ruling classes of those colonies decided to fight for their independence from Iberian empire. With its new policy of free trade, the British bourgeoisie viewed these independence movements as an opportunity to remove the obstacle of old colonialism beholden to feudal, Catholic crusader imperialism, and made sure Spain did not get broader European assistance in its struggle to hold onto its colonies, or get replaced by another European colonial power, by insisting on a policy of non-intervention. Moreover, even as the latifundia landowners who remained the dominant class in newly independent Latin American nations were all too eager to come under the wing of foreign capital, Britain did not seek to recolonize Latin America for itself. Instead, it enforced free trade in Latin America, ensuring that with independence came a steady flow of British manufactured goods and, flowing back to England, raw materials to feed British industrial capital.⁷¹

The result was dependency and foreign domination in new forms. In Mexico, the budding textile industry was ruined by an influx of cheap British-manufactured textiles. In Argentina, where cattle ranchers were the dominant class, instead of being used to develop national industry, the flow of agricultural production went from provinces to port to transport for the benefit of British capital accumulation. When Paraguay used independence for internal development of its production capacities and home market, made possible by a strong central state apparatus asserting national (bourgeois) aspirations, British imperialism sponsored a triple alliance of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay to invade Paraguay, overthrow its government, subject its population to genocidal violence, plunder the wealth it had generated, and bring it back under imperialist domination. British imperialism’s free-trade subordination of “independent” Latin America set the precedent for and was later supplanted by US imperialism. But in the nineteenth century, British imperialism was still dominant, and in addition to capital accumulation through opening up markets to free trade, British loans to capital-strapped former Iberian colonies left independent Latin America in debt to British finance capital, which engorged itself on Latin American debt service payments.⁷²

British imperialism in Latin America points towards a new mode of foreign domination developed under free trade imperialism in the nineteenth century, namely semi-colonialism. China’s subjugation by European imperialism in the nineteenth century is perhaps the paradigmatic example of semi-colonialism, which is distinguished from administrative colonialism in India by not relying principally on direct territorial control, but instead on weakened, divided, and subordinated local ruling classes and market domination by (often direct) control over ports and trade. In China, Britain and other European imperialist powers worked to weaken the central Chinese imperial state, in the process fueling fights over parcellized territory among feudal warlords, who were easier to subordinate to foreign domination than the central Chinese state. In coastal cities, European imperialists wrenched “concessions” that were under direct European control and used to dominate trade. Unlike in India, however, British imperialism refrained from attempting administrative colonialism in China because the specific conditions made semi-colonialism a more appropriate form of foreign domination for profit maximization.

To subjugate China under semi-colonialism, Britain ignominiously waged the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century to force China to open its market to opium grown in Britain’s Indian colony, leading to widespread opium addiction in China and massive profit for British opium peddlers. Considering the crucial role of military means to open Chinese markets and gain competitive advantage over Chinese producers, Giovanni Arrighi offered an important corrective to Marx’s poetic description of the cheap prices of British-manufactured commodities as the heavy artillery battering down Chinese protectionist walls: “Insofar as China is concerned, actual military force, rather than the metaphorical artillery of cheap commodities, was the key to the subjugation of East to West.”⁷³

Arrighi’s corrective points us to the fact that free trade imperialism did not mean less use of force by the imperialist powers to ensure domination of subjugated markets, which remains true of free trade regimes into the present. And as example after example above demonstrated, free trade was established and fortified by state intervention rather than by state power staying out of the economy. However, free trade imperialism did make commodity exchange, the anarchy of capitalist production, and the logic of capital accumulation even more compulsory forces on humanity than they were before industrial capital rose to prominence. As Arrighi put it, free trade imperialism “established the principle that the laws operating within and between states were subject to the higher authority of a new, metaphysical entity—a world market ruled by its own ‘laws’—allegedly endowed with supernatural powers greater than anything pope and emperor had ever mastered in the medieval system of rule.”⁷⁴

The British turn to free trade imperialism also shows us how the relative weight of different modes of capital accumulation within the capitalist system as a whole has wide-reaching effects. Prior to the nineteenth century, trade and finance capital were the dominant modes of capital accumulation on a global scale. They co-existed with pillage and feudal tribute, attached themselves to war- and state-making, and fed off of feudal modes of production. Industrial capital joined the feeding frenzy, but poured the plunder into production processes centered (or finalized) in the imperial home market. It spread fully capitalist relations of production, as “the accumulation of capital came to be based on capitalist enterprises that were heavily involved in the organization and rationalization of productive processes.”⁷⁵

Industrial capital developed an insatiable appetite for raw materials and, after digesting them, projectile-vomited its products around the world. The speed with which it took in raw materials for production and spit out commodities for sale was increased by virtue of the industrialization of transportation in the nineteenth century, wherein “railways and steamships forged the globe into a single interacting economy as never before.”⁷⁶ Capitalism became a far more totalizing, global system through the ascendance of industrial capital and the transition to free trade.

Capitalism’s totalizing nature transformed all aspects of life in industrializing England and then radiated those changes throughout the British empire and beyond. One telling example is the subjugation of women in Victorian England to a new, capitalist form of patriarchy that had been in ascendance since the enclosure movement.⁷⁷ The consolidation of capitalism as a mode of production in nineteenth-century England meant that women were denied access to the commons, deprived of escape routes to forms of social organization beyond patriarchal control, and “free” from feudal obligations (in the positive and negative sense)—“free” to sell their labor on the market. In that “freedom,” women were relegated to the lowest-paid positions in industrial production, and “free” to sell access to their bodies as prostitutes when the sex trade swelled with the commodification of social life. That very modern capitalist “freedom” co-existed with a new form of patriarchal control, as women of all classes were in effect enslaved to the bourgeois family as housewives and breeders.

The bourgeois family unit differed in several important ways from the feudal family. Under capitalism as a mode of production, wages are paid to those who produce surplus value in the production process. The tasks of reproduction—birthing, raising, and educating children, household tasks such as cooking and cleaning, taking care of people when they are sick, etc.—do not directly produce surplus value (though they are crucial to enabling the production of surplus value), so the bourgeoisie (rightfully within the logic of capital accumulation) considers them outside its responsibility and thus undeserving of wages. Consequently, the tasks of reproduction must be taken up by the state, where it is socially necessary (the development of public education, for example), and by the family, where it is individually necessary. Due to centuries of patriarchy and nineteenth-century industrial capital’s privileging of male workers, reproductive tasks in the private, family domain became the responsibility of women, whether or not individual women wanted them to be.

In addition to fulfilling tasks of reproduction, the family was also the basic unit of property ownership under capitalism, with the husband and father appointed as its head and women and children as his subordinates. The family and patriarchal authority had also played this role in feudal and other modes of production, but they were given a new content under capitalism. In capitalist society, “the household” became a unit of financial accounting and a means of spreading capitalist property relations into all of social life, including by making it the task of husbands and fathers to enforce those property relations in the family. That task of patriarchal authority bestowed upon all men by capitalist relations of production in turn served to foster social stability on a reactionary basis.

The breakdown of social obligations with the end of feudalism and the ensuing social war for survival among the masses created by having to rely on commodity relations for means of subsistence caused a great fraying of the social fabric. Victorian England needed a counterweight to the fraying of the social fabric in order to prevent the social war among the masses from spinning out of control, which explains the propagation of rigid Victorian morality in the nineteenth century that repressed women in all social domains, including sexuality. The family became the basic social unit for enforcing that morality and preserving social stability, through the patriarchal authority of men. Only with the stability of the family could Victorian morality sit side-by-side, albeit uncomfortably, with the exploitation of proletarian women’s labor in wage-work and the exploitation of women’s bodies in prostitution.

As the British empire spread capitalist relations of production around the world (or tied humanity to capitalist relations of production) through free trade and colonialism, it also spread the bourgeois family and all the patriarchy bound up with it, as well as the commodification of women’s bodies in the sex trade. In this and other ways outlined above, the motions of capital in the nineteenth century radically changed the global social landscape. These motions of capital also created new questions for the bourgeoisie to resolve: how to use Africa for capital accumulation after the end of the slave trade, how other (and aspiring) imperialist powers would try to catch up with Britain’s lead and how Britain would try and maintain it, and how industrial capital would continue its upward spiral of accumulation.

High colonialism

England’s head start at industrialization imposed itself as a compulsory force of competition on the rest of Europe and beyond. Not only did the ascendance of industrial capital in England mean a greater productive output and transportation infrastructure, but it also gave the British empire tremendous advantage in war, as British industries could pump out the latest weaponry faster and at a higher volume than anywhere else. Steel, which overtook iron as the industrial metal of choice in the second half of the nineteenth century with the development of the Bessemer process, became a central ingredient in both transportation networks (railways, ships) and armaments. Consequently, steel output became an important indicator of bourgeois power, hence the attention it receives in Marxist analysis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (in Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, for example).

Especially given the military implications of industrialization, other European powers rushed to catch up with England’s lead and did not have the luxury of letting the process that led to industrialization play out over centuries through a change in agrarian class relations eventually giving rise to an urban proletariat. As Ellen Wood described, even before the second half of the nineteenth century, “French industrialization, encouraged by the state, responded to the demands of war, vastly increasing the production of military goods and promoting industries…on which that production depended.”⁷⁸ Like England, France had a strong central state with a unified territory, and its state continued to play a driving role in industrialization throughout the nineteenth century, creating a capitalist mode of production that was more monopolistic in nature while failing to undergo the level of agrarian revolution that took place across the English Channel (hence the persistence of a conservative French peasantry that Marx constantly complained about).

In other parts of Europe, England’s industrial lead gave additional impetus to the drive for national unification, as a unified home market was one important condition for the ascendance of industrial capital. Germany was the greatest success story in this respect, and, like in France, industrialization in Bismarck’s Germany was strongly motivated by military ambitions and achieved with strong state involvement. To protect Germany’s newly unified home market, the German state implemented staunch protectionist measures, a counterweight to the British empire’s free trade imperialism.⁷⁹ Beyond Germany, the ascendance of industrial capital gave further motive for the establishment of the nation-state, with a unified home market, as the overwhelmingly dominant form of political-territorial organization in Europe by the end of the nineteenth century, and bolstered nationalism as a key component of bourgeois ideology.

Outside Western Europe, a few other countries pursued industrialization, most notably Russia, Japan, and the United States. Protectionism proved key to the US’s ability to industrialize, though the state did not play a direct role in amassing industrial capital there like it did in Germany and France. In Japan, industrialization was made possible politically by the Meiji Restoration that began in 1868 and established a central state power committed to supporting industrial capital. The resulting combination of a strong industrial base and state apparatus enabled Japan to win wars with China (1894–95) and Russia (1904–5) and start to compete with Britain for imperialist domination in East Asia.⁸⁰

In every instance of industrializing after England, the truncated process relied on quickly concentrating capital so that it could command the most advanced means of production, the labor power of rapidly constituted masses of proletarians, and large amounts of raw materials. Furthermore, by the late nineteenth century, the production of means of production and transportation systems was necessary to compete with the British empire, and required considerable concentration of capital. The market for them was not a home consumer market, which newly industrializing powers did not have centuries to create like in England anyway, but other industrial capitalists and the state. For these reasons, industrial capital in England’s competitors took a monopoly form, with vast concentrations of capital in the hands of a few enterprises, far earlier in their (later) development of capitalism as a mode of production than it did in England.

Industrial capital, however, can only self-expand so much and so fast through its exploitation of labor and selling of its products, even with the benefit of unequal exchange created by European imperialism. Merging individual industrial capitals into larger blocs of capital is one means to overcome that problem, but to accelerate concentration, an injection of capital from outside industrial capital’s accumulation process is often required. That explains why in France, Germany, and elsewhere, the state got involved, using feudal treasury, tax revenue, and imperial plunder to finance industry. It also explains the rise of a a non-state form of monopoly capital in the late nineteenth century, namely the merging of finance (specifically bank) and industrial capital.

Money performs no function other than projecting status when it is not being used to purchase commodities. Banks take stationary money from different sources and get it moving by turning it into finance capital: investing that money in a specific capital accumulation process in exchange for a share of the profits from that process alongside the return of the original investment. In this way, finance capital enables other capitals to scale up their operations; in the case of industrial capital, giving it the liquid capital to purchase more productive means of production, more raw materials, and more labor power. Due to the compulsion of capitalist competition and the need for large concentrations of capital to produce newly possible industrial goods in the late nineteenth century, industrial capital turned to banks as a source of finance capital, and finance and industrial capital often became intertwined in large monopolies, with finance exerting increasing control over industrial capital. This was especially necessary in industries that required vast concentrations of capital, such as railroad construction. The bourgeois state permitted, and in some countries was directly involved in, the merging of finance and industrial capital into a new form of monopoly capital for two reasons: (1) By the late nineteenth century, imperial rivalry required a firm industrial base that could produce modern weaponry on a vast scale, which was most quickly achieved with monopolies. (2) States in industrial(izing) countries had been radically transformed in the second half of the nineteenth century (the Meiji Restoration, the abolition of serfdom in Russia, the US Civil War, German unification, etc.) for the explicit purpose of serving industrial capital accumulation.

The British bourgeoisie’s rivals coveted not only its industrial prowess, but also its colonial possessions and command over world trade, in large part because industrial capital in its monopoly form required greater access to raw materials and external markets for its products. Furthermore, as the monopoly form gave rise to massive concentrations of capital, to avoid a crisis of overaccumulation in which that capital could not be profitably invested and so faced devaluation, monopoly capital required places and processes to invest in outside the factories it commanded in its home market. Consequently, the ascendance of industrial capital beyond England and its consolidation (through state involvement and merging with finance capital) into a monopoly form gave rise to the period of high colonialism from the late-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries. During this period, the established industrial powers colluded and competed with each other for control over foreign territories that they directly administered politically, extracted resources from, exploited labor in, and used as external markets for their manufactured goods. High colonialism distinguished itself from previous eras of colonialism in that all colonies became directly tied to industrial production in the imperialist centers.

As in industrialization, the British bourgeoisie had a head start advantage at the beginning of high colonialism. The British empire had already perfected administrative colonialism in India as a form of totalizing territorial control, paid for by taxation of colonized subjects, who were in turn exploited as cash-crop peasants and whose land was used for resource extraction, all in service of British capital accumulation. Furthermore, the British empire’s command over world trade and superior naval power put it in position to extend its imperial power inland.

Britain’s competitors quickly learned from British imperialist techniques, and the ascendance of industrial capital compelled them to establish, through conquest, administrative colonies of their own. Industrialization itself strengthened the prospects for colonial conquest, with new military technologies such as the machine gun able to be mass produced on a grand scale. Latin America was mostly off limits to administrative colonialism, as it was firmly under British and US imperialist dominance under a regime of free trade imperialism, though the US did put Cuba and Puerto Rico under its colonial control, along with the Philippines and Guam, by seizing them from Spain in the 1898 Spanish-American War. Parts of Asia that were not yet firmly under British rule (as in India) or other well-established forms of imperial domination (as in semi-colonialism in China) were “up for grabs,” and Britain’s rivals took over whatever colonial possessions they could—the French in Vietnam, the Japanese in Korea, etc.. But it was Africa that became the prime target of high colonialism.

With the abolition of the slave trade and the rise of industrial capital, the European bourgeoisie began to look at Africa as a place to exploit labor and from which to extract raw materials. As Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò reminds us against postmodernist historical narratives, prior to the late-nineteenth century, colonization was not the principal form of European imperialism in Africa, and European imperialism did not have the strength to colonize Africa before the period of high colonialism. Napoleon’s attempt at empire had included an excursion in North Africa, but it was not until 1830 that the French began their successful conquest of Algeria. Portuguese trading and slaving outposts had been established on the coasts around the African continent for centuries, but Portuguese colonial dominion beyond those outposts was neither extensive nor uncontested. Dutch settler-colonialism was well established in a part of southern Africa, but by no means were the Dutch, or the British who took charge, in control of the entire region before the nineteenth century (and the British attempt to establish control met fierce resistance, with Zulu military strategic brilliance handing defeats to well-armed British soldiers). Over the course of the nineteenth century, Europeans began to use footholds on the African coast to explore, and extend their reach into, the interior. Then, in the late nineteenth century, those initial forays gave way to a fevered push to carve up Africa into colonial domains, with the competition for colonies mediated—among European rulers with no African participation—at the 1884–85 Berlin Conference.⁸¹

Administrative colonies in Africa were highly profitable ventures that allowed European industrial capital to gorge itself on raw materials extracted and produced by African labor and underpaid for by way of unequal exchange. The mines that supplied the metals for European factories proved the most profitable form of exploitation, but profits from plantations were also high. Beyond specific enterprises in which European capital was invested and that were directly overseen by colonial overlords, much of the African population was (indirectly) exploited by European capital as independent peasants growing cash crops for export to Europe. Those African independent peasants often had little or no direct contact with European colonizers, selling their produce to (usually Arab or Indian) middlemen who also indebted African peasants through usury. But the middlemen took a much smaller portion of the profit than did the monopoly bourgeoisie in Europe, and the African cash-crop peasant became bound to the world market, whose anarchic motion determined the demand for and price of the cash crops. African agriculture was ruined in the process, with monoculture replacing diversified farming for subsistence and the home market, resulting in soil depletion and famines.⁸²

While the ascendance of industrial capital to a monopoly form resulted in the export of capital from Europe to its colonies (capital that was accumulated through imperialist exploitation in the first place), that capital was used for purposes of extraction from, rather than the development of industry and a home market within, Africa. Where railroads and other transportation systems were built, they served to bring raw materials to the coast for export to Europe. As Walter Rodney described, the “pattern of appropriation of surplus in East Africa was easy to follow, in that there was centralization of the extractive mechanisms in Nairobi and the port of Mombasa,”⁸³ and this example points to a broader pattern throughout Africa.

Enforcing exploitation and extraction was a colonial administration that not only denied Africans sovereignty, but also blocked the development of an African bourgeoisie and refused to give the African population training and education beyond what was necessary for a large mass of manual laborers and a small sliver of administrators and skilled workers. On that small sliver of subalterns, they imposed European culture and values, separating them from the African masses. The colonial administration also imposed capitalist patriarchy on African women and failed to take care of the health and well-being of the African population, even as they forced the African masses to pay for colonial administration through taxation, just like the British had in India.⁸⁴ While the logic of capital accumulation suggested that administrative colonialism was the best form to exploit Africa as a whole after the end of the slave trade, the ideology of white supremacy fostered by the latter had no small role in the choice of form. As Rodney explained,

Pervasive and vicious racism was present in imperialism as a variant independent of the economic rationality that initially gave birth to racism. It was economics that determined that Europe should invest in Africa and control the continent’s raw materials and labor. It was racism which confirmed the decision that the form of control should be direct colonial control.⁸⁵

White supremacist ideology also joined with capitalist logic in the intensity and brutality of exploitation of the African masses. Perhaps the most glaringly grotesque indication of that brutal exploitation are the pictures of people, including children, in the Belgian Congo with severed hands—the result of punishment doled out by Belgium without restraint when its African colonial subjects did not meet their quotas for rubber collection.⁸⁶ Apparently the profits of rubber factories depended on severed limbs in Africa. Beyond specific atrocities, the super-exploitation of the African masses under colonialism, wherein they were paid below what they needed to survive, depended on the fact that Africans engaged in the cash economy relied on subsistence agriculture, either by themselves or by members of their family, to feed them. In this respect, colonialism joined the bourgeois family as a form the bourgeoisie used to offload the tasks of reproduction onto unpaid laborers, especially women.

Carving Africa into the administrative colonies of different European powers was the result of competition between different, nationally based, blocs of capital. Britain maintained its imperialist advantage, possessing the greatest colonial dominion during the period of high colonialism, with France, drawing on its well-established central state power and experience in empire building, winning second place. However, other industrial powers got in on the colonization of Africa, including newly unified Germany in East Africa, tiny Belgium taking over a vast stretch of territory (the “Belgian Congo”), and the US running Liberia as a colony in all but name. Portugal, despite failing to develop a solid industrial base, became a significant colonial power in Africa due to its centuries of imperialist experience on the continent. Political settlements of colonial divisions, such as the aforementioned 1884–85 Berlin Conference, temporarily blunted imperial rivalry, though it was bound to come to the surface again, especially as imbalances among imperialist powers between their industrial power and capital accumulation, on the one hand, and their colonial possessions, on the other, grew.

Before we turn to the explosive consequences of competition over colonies, let us explore the reasons for collusion among European imperialists in their colonial conquest of Africa. Following the British empire’s establishment of free trade imperialism in the nineteenth century, the period of high colonialism allowed different blocs of capital access to colonies which their national home base did not control politically, in contrast to trade monopoly capitalism of the chartered joint-stock company era. So, for example, German capital operated in British colonies and German shipping companies transported raw materials from British colonies to German and other factories, albeit paying the British colonial administration for its job of securing the colony and subduing its population. Portugal could only hold onto its colonies by allowing non-Portuguese capital access to them. As Rodney noted, “Portugal had two large political colonies in Southern Africa, but economically Mozambique and Angola were divided among several capitalist powers, which were invited by the Portuguese government, because Portuguese capitalists were too weak to handle those vast territories.”⁸⁷

Sharing the economic spoils of one another’s colonies further united the international bourgeoisie (still centered in Europe but with strong contingents in the US and Japan by this point) in universal bourgeois interest in subjugating entire continents and regions to imperialist domination and exploitation. It was this universal interest that united the international bourgeoisie in repressing anticolonial revolt, with imperialist powers rarely encouraging revolt by the colonial subjects of their rivals in order to gain competitive advantage over them during the heyday of high colonialism. This “gentleman’s agreement” among imperialists was in turn supported by the production of ideological rationales for administrative colonialism that promoted bourgeois class power as spreading civilization against the supposed savagery of the colonized world, with white supremacy at the top of those rationales, having overtaken but not ousted Christianity.

The universal interest of the international bourgeoisie in imperialist domination was spread to various subalterns by the form of administrative colonialism, as that form required the participation of substantial numbers of administrators, soldiers, and other personnel from the imperialist countries and brought along missionaries and others who attached themselves to administrative colonialism. Furthermore, administrative colonialism did not preclude settler-colonialism, even as the latter was not the principal form of European colonialism in Africa and differed substantially from settler-colonialism in North America, Australia, and New Zealand.⁸⁸ Like in those places, where European settlers became a significant presence, especially in North, Southern, and to a lesser extend West and East Africa, they became a reactionary social base in support of colonialism, with few exceptions. Through links with their mother countries, settlers, colonial officials, soldiers, missionaries, and others spread the ideological rationalizations of colonialism back to their home populations, only rarely breaking ranks to oppose colonialism’s atrocities.

To further spread its universal interest in imperialist domination to its home population and displace its antagonism with the proletariat it exploited at home, the imperialist bourgeoisie decided to share a portion of the spoils of imperialism with its home population during the period of high colonialism. The intensity of exploitation in Africa, Asia, and Latin America gave the imperialist bourgeoisie the material basis to do so. It was revolts by the proletariat in the imperialist countries, from militant labor movements to the brief seizure of power by the Parisian proletariat in 1871, that compelled the bourgeoisie to make the subjective decision to spread the spoils of imperialism. Doing so gave at least a portion of the working class in the imperialist countries a material stake in colonialism. As Lenin analyzed, the seal of parasitism was stamped on imperialist society as a whole, and a split emerged in the working class between a privileged section, sharing in the spoils of imperialism, and an exploited, lower and deeper section whose class interests remained firmly with the exploited and oppressed of the world. In addition to the split in the working class, the petty-bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries was expanded during the period of high colonialism and came to expect the ability to enjoy their share in the profits of imperialism. In these ways, high colonialism deepened and consolidated the division of the world between a handful of imperialist countries and a larger mass of colonies and oppressed nations and sharpened the antagonism between the former and the latter. During high colonialism, that larger mass of colonies and oppressed nations came to include virtually all of Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

High colonialism comes crashing down

High colonialism was in some ways a triumph and consolidation of the process of capitalism in global conquest that got its start around 1500. Over the historical arc from 1500 to the late nineteenth century, the accumulation of capital went from being one among several motive forces for European global conquest to the overwhelmingly principal one. European imperialism, joined by the US and Japan, came to dominate over virtually the entire planet and its people. And capitalism evolved into an all-encompassing mode of production, with industrial production commanding the socialized labor of an exploited proletariat in the imperial centers and using the raw materials created by peasant production and extractive industry around the world.

Yet the capitalist triumph that was high colonialism was short-lived from a historical standpoint, as its consolidation created new contradictions and sharpened existing ones. The subjugation of Africa and much of Asia under colonial rule meant that all of imperialism’s colonial subjects were in antagonistic contradiction with colonial rule. Administrative colonialism was a cumbersome form of rule, requiring lots of attention from the imperialist bourgeoisie and deployment of personnel from the imperial centers to play both administrative and repressive roles. To lighten its load, the imperialist bourgeoisie drew a small portion of its colonial subjects into colonial administration, but in doing so created an educated elite whose bourgeois aspirations were thwarted by the colonial system, giving them an impetus to align with the broader mass of exploited workers and peasants whose life conditions cried out for the immediate overthrow of the colonial system. Repression, no matter how brutal, and co-optation, no matter how sophisticated, could never eliminate the fundamental antagonism between imperialists and colonized, and sure enough the colonized rose up in rebellion whenever they got the opportunity.

Opportunities for such rebellion increased and became more favorable as contradictions between the imperialist powers heightened. At the beginning of high colonialism, inter-imperialist rivalry was blunted by mutual interest in subjugating Africa and Asia, an initial division of Africa and Asia into colonies in proportion to the capital and industrial prowess of the different imperialist powers, and the permissive attitude towards the operation of different nationally-based blocs of capital across colonial boundaries. The latter was cultivated by the British bourgeoisie in its role as lead imperialist power as an extension of its free trade imperialism.

However, competition began to overtake collusion among imperialists in the early twentieth century as industrial capital accumulation in nationally-based blocs grew increasingly out of sync with the colonial possessions corresponding to those nationally-based blocs. Germany and Japan were then still tailing Britain in industrial output and capital accumulation, but had made quick strides in the preceding decades that shortened Britain’s lead. According to the logic of industrial capital accumulation, they needed more colonies than they possessed to ensure a flow of required raw materials to their factories, export surplus capital, and secure a larger external market to offload their goods. Otherwise, the German and Japanese bourgeoisies would face a crisis of both overaccumulation (of capital) and overproduction (of manufactured goods). Since, as Lenin pointed out in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, the world was completely divided into colonies and spheres of influence by the early twentieth century, only redivision was possible.⁸⁹ And since redivision was not covered under the imperialist bourgeoisie’s gentleman’s agreement for colonial division (at the 1884–85 Berlin conference, for example), Germany, Japan, and Britain’s other competitors could only acquire more colonies through war.

World War I broke out in 1914 as a violent competition for redivision of the world’s colonies, but principally by way of attempts to break the military superiority of imperial rivals rather than direct grabs of their colonies. The imperialist bourgeoisie’s bribery of its home populace with the spoils of imperialism paid off dividends, as they were able to rally much of their home populations to support, and fight for, their national bourgeoisie in inter-imperialist war. The treachery of the Second International, a largely European organization of supposedly socialist parties, aided the imperialist bourgeoisie by rallying the European proletariat behind their national bourgeoisie’s imperialist interests in World War I. Yet the patriotic fervor could not cover over the impending devastation caused by virtue of World War I being the first global conflict fought with armaments produced by capitalism as an industrial mode of production.

Besides the approximately twenty million deaths, World War I shook the capitalist order in profound ways. The wave of patriotism in 1914 gave way to rebellion by the proletariat in much of Europe as the reality of death and devastation caused by industrially-armed warfare came home to roost. After Lenin’s Bolshevik Party in Russia—which did not go down the path of betrayal with the Second International and instead refused to make peace with their bourgeoisie in 1914—seized on the rebellious mood to overthrow the Russian bourgeoisie and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1917, the international bourgeoisie became eager to return to a state of collusion. They signed peace agreements among themselves and sent their armies to overthrow the new socialist state formed out of the Russian Empire. That state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), endured and defeated the counterrevolutionary intervention and took its territory and people outside the logic of capital accumulation. In doing so, the USSR kindled the flames of revolution around the world by showing the path out of capitalist exploitation and imperialist subjugation. The Russian Revolution and the USSR it went on to establish were predicated on an insistence on the right to self-determination for all nations and a principled and thoroughgoing opposition to imperialism, and as such inspired anticolonial revolt and popularized communist ideology and politics around the world, including in colonies and oppressed nations.

Aside from the threat posed by the proletarian seizure of power in what was the Russian empire, the fight among imperialists that was World War I also came to an end by way of the “Allies,” led by Britain and belatedly joined by the US, handing a defeat to their competitors. Germany’s bid to knock down Britain failed, the former lost its colonial possessions in East Africa to the latter, and the colonial order remained more or less as it was before 1914. But the balance of power shifted, with the US advancing its position in the imperial order by sitting out the war at its start, helping finance the Allies’ effort, and then coming to the rescue of Britain and France in order to ensure the war was ended on terms favorable to the US bourgeoisie. Those terms included forcing Britain and France to pay back the US for wartime loans, which in turn compelled them to force Germany to pay reparations, opening up a huge capital flow from Europe to the US while giving impetus to revanchist nationalism in Germany.⁹⁰ In the 1920s, the US bourgeoisie grew stronger—commanding more capital and gaining greater leverage in world finance, with Wall Street beginning to compete with the City of London for the position of global center of finance capital—at the expense of European imperialism. The latter’s post-World War I weaker command of global finance ultimately if not immediately undercut its grip on colonies.

The merging of industrial and bank capital in the late nineteenth century had put finance capital in an increasingly commanding position within processes of capital accumulation. Cycles of boom ended by crisis, of overaccumulation and/or overproduction, became more and more systematic with the rise to prominence of industrial capital, and it was the task of finance and government financial policy to navigate a way out of each crisis. In addition, the ascendance of industrial capital gave rise to a tendency for the rate of profit to fall, as increasingly more productive means of production required less labor to produce the same amount of products and hence extracted less surplus value from the labor process, which was industrial capital’s means of self-expansion. Ahead of the rest of the pack in industrial production and in experiencing cycles of boom followed by crisis, the British bourgeoisie increasingly turned to finance capital as its main mode of accumulation. After the 1890s crisis, “surplus capital found a new outlet in an increasing range of speculative activities which promised an easy and privileged access to the assets and future revenues of the governments engaged in competitive struggle.”⁹¹ On the one hand, the move to finance allowed the British bourgeoisie to maintain its hegemonic position, as finance capital occupies the position of commanding heights of global capitalism. On the other hand, that move undercut the British bourgeoisie’s industrial lead, giving room for its competitors to catch up.

World War I interrupted the tendencies described above, wiping out unproductive capital along with twenty million souls and clearing the ground—quite literally—for a new cycle of industrial production to rebuild wartorn Europe. But those tendencies reasserted themselves in the 1920s, the “roaring” decade that exemplified the dynamic in which “surplus capital tended to flow into speculation and into conspicuous consumption.”⁹² That speculation joined with selling stocks on credit as causal factors in the stock market crash in 1929 that set off the Great Depression. A great devaluation of capital was followed by a period in which industrial capital, in most imperialist countries, failed to play its dynamic role in expanding production and accumulating capital through exploiting (and employing) proletarians, creating large surplus populations of the unemployed. In addition to industrial capital’s failure was finance’s. The system of global finance centered in London neglected to take responsibility to stabilize conditions for capital accumulation, with the British bourgeoisie even reneging on its responsibility for global monetary stability by suspending the British pound’s gold convertibility in 1931. The US bourgeoisie in the 1930s was unable and/or unwilling to take responsibility for stabilizing the global financial and monetary system, so the crisis deepened.⁹³

While continued colonial exploitation buttressed bourgeois power during the 1930s crisis, the ruin of the home market through mass impoverishment in the imperial centers begged the question of how industrial capital would find a stable consumer of its products. Germany and Japan found an answer: the state. Both used the 1930s to rebound from the outcome of World War I, building their military power in order to overtake Britain’s imperial dominance in East Asia, in the case of Japan, and attempt to knock down European competitors, annex European territory and capture European colonies, and subjugate and pillage the Soviet Union, in the case of Germany. Building their military power required that the German and Japanese states buy up armaments and other industrially-produced military necessities, which restored German and Japanese industrial capital’s dynamism.⁹⁴ Other imperialist powers were late to this solution, forced into it by German and Japanese war moves, but war production funded by the state proved the way out of the 1930s crisis in all cases. The Soviet Union remained largely immune from the effects of the 1930s crisis of capitalism because its economy followed social planning in service of human needs and development rather than the logic of capital accumulation. It did, however, have to turn to prioritizing production for military purposes to prepare to fight off German invasion, which undoubtedly had negative effects on Soviet economic planning.

The capitalist crisis of the 1930s and rising inter-imperialist rivalry resulted in the outbreak of World War II by the decade’s end, a war which which took the scale of death (up to sixty million) and destruction (cities flattened by aerial bombardment) to greater heights than the previous global conflagration. Greater advances in technology and industrial output meant greater means of mass killing, from the German industrial efficiency that slaughtered six million in concentration camps to the US scientific and technological breakthrough that led to nuclear bombs being dropped on Japanese cities. Aside from industrial production of tanks, planes, machine guns, bombs, and naval ships, another reason for brutality was the ideology and practices of colonialism, which were brought home to Europe and taken up by Japan in its colonial conquests of China, Korea, and elsewhere in its successful drive to displace British imperial power in East Asia.⁹⁵

The colonies were drawn into World War II to a much greater degree than in the prior world war. Aside from Japan seizing colonies in Asia and sparking wars of resistance in them while also drawing the US and Australia into the fight over colonies in the Pacific, fighting between European imperialists extended to their colonies in Africa and West Asia. European imperialists, especially Britain and France, recruited a portion of their colonial subjects as soldiers to replenish the ranks of their own militaries, even sending some to fight in Europe. In these and other ways, the involvement of the colonies in WWII gave colonial subjects military experience, a larger consciousness of the workings of the imperialist system, and a sense of European imperialism’s weaknesses.

The expense and material needs of the war effort compelled the imperialist bourgeoisie to deepen its exploitation of the colonies, resulting in atrocities such as the Bengal famine of 1943–44, wherein three million of Britain’s colonial subjects in India perished because the grain they produced was exported to serve the war effort while the price of British goods sold to them was inflated to increase British profits.⁹⁶ Atrocities like the Bengal famine and the overall way in which imperialism squeezed the colonies to sustain the war intensified the antagonism between imperialism and colonies. At the same time, the Soviet Union’s involvement in WWII popularized a communist way out of capitalist and colonial hell, as did the vanguard role of communists in fighting Japanese imperialism in Asia and fascists in Europe. By the end of WWII, there was increased consciousness, fighting capacity, and anticolonial rage among the masses in the colonies, the subjective conditions necessary for liberation movements.

Added to those subjective conditions were favorable objective conditions: the weakened state of European and Japanese imperialism at the end of WWII and the growth of the socialist camp through the addition of Eastern Europe and then China to it. By the 1950s, large swaths of territory and one-third of the world’s population were outside the logic of capital accumulation and offered revolutionary hope to the growing tide of anticolonial revolt. Meanwhile, the weakening of European and Japanese imperialism meant the inability of imperialism to maintain administrative colonialism as a form of rule.

As explained above, administrative colonialism is a cumbersome form of rule requiring significant attention and personnel from the imperialist center. At the end of WWII, Europe’s population was depleted, many of its cities were in rubble, and it had to turn to the US for capital to rebuild. The US had pushed the outcome of WWII in this direction by doing as it had in WWI, waiting to decisively enter the European theater of war until its competitors had weakened each other, making a mad dash for Berlin only when the Soviet Union’s counteroffensive against Germany was proving victorious. Germany’s surrender meant it gave up on any aspirations to gain colonial holdings, but even the victors’ ability to hold on to theirs was shaky. The hegemonic position of British imperialism was decisively undermined by the war, and the British bourgeoisie accepted its fate as a junior partner of US imperialism, allowing Britain to gradually relinquish its colonial holdings with the assurance that the US would watch over them and ensure the continued conditions for imperialist exploitation. That explains why British colonialism ended with greater grace and through a more peaceful transition than did French, which was allied with US imperialism but not part of the same imperial bloc exactly.

The point here is not that any colonial power simply gave up their colonies—some held on them with a death grip—but that after WWII, they did not possess the political, military, or economic power to keep them in the face of the growing tide of anticolonial revolt. How they finally lost them depended on a number of factors, and that the weakest among them—Portugal—held on the longest and with the most brutal repression suggests desperation rather than strength. For administrative colonialism to have continued after WWII, it would have required US imperialism to take responsibility for propping up the colonial system as a whole, and short of that, even in the specific places the US sought to prop up more or less old-style colonial rule (Vietnam, for example), it failed. By objective necessity and subjective decision on the part of the US bourgeoisie, the “new imperialism that would eventually emerge from the wreckage of the old would no longer be a relationship between imperial masters and colonial subjects but a complex interaction between more-or-less sovereign states,” as Ellen Wood described it.⁹⁷ Complex as it may be, what has held it together under the logic of capital accumulation is the hegemony of US imperialism, the establishment of which is the subject of part two of our narrative.

Interludes

The preceding historical analysis of capitalism in global conquest has suggested two theoretical conclusions: (1) Marxist methods of analysis remain largely correct, but need some modification to more accurately comprehend the historical development of capitalism, a task which “vulgar Marxism” of any variety is entirely incapable of; and (2) postmodernist methods of analysis are overwhelmingly incapable of understanding the reasons for and class interests behind all exploitation and oppression over capitalism’s five centuries, and need to be firmly rejected if we are to understand the historical development of capitalism so that we can end that chapter of human history and start a new one. The following interludes step outside of our historical narrative to draw out those theoretical conclusions more explicitly. The scornful tone toward postmodernism in these interludes is appropriate given the reactionary ends, opportunist obfuscation, and intellectual bankruptcy that characterizes postmodernism and postmodernists.

Marxism is right, but…

In defense of theoretical abstraction, and of a European revolutionary focusing on revolution in Europe

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.

-Karl Marx, Capital vol. 1

As the above quote demonstrates, Karl Marx had a crystal-clear understanding of how the bourgeoisie accumulated its (initial) capital. Yet the theoretical exposition of capitalism as a mode of production from which this quote is taken draws its empirical evidence mostly from the economic workings of nineteenth-century England rather than the global scope of the empire that England was at the center of. As Ellen Wood put it, Marx made his analysis “on the premise that capitalism was still a fairly local phenomenon,” and “he explicated the systematic logic of capitalism by examining it as a self-enclosed system, abstracted from the surrounding, largely non-capitalist world.”⁹⁸

Some have criticized Marx for doing so, even going to far as to call him Eurocentric. But in the context of his contemporary reality, I believe Marx was entirely correct to focus his theoretical work on understanding capitalism as a mode of production in Europe for two reasons: (1) It was in capitalism’s “purest,” most developed form that the radically new relations of production created by the the logic of capital accumulation could be most easily and decisively understood and taken to the level of theoretical abstraction. (2) As a revolutionary living in Europe, Marx’s political focus was rightfully on making revolution in Europe, so he sought to understand the objective conditions on which revolution there would have to be made, looked for the social force in Europe that could make revolution, and searched for the opportunities that it could seize on to do so.

Our historical narrative has shown that the bourgeoisie relied on a wide variety of means to accumulate capital. But it was only with the consolidation of capitalism as a mode of production in England that purely capitalist relations, wherein labor power itself became a commodity to be sold by members of one class (the proletariat) to another, principally and directly defined the relations of production, and where the latter came to depend on the use of industrial means of production that required directly socialized labor processes. Outside of directly capitalist relations of exploitation, the bourgeoisie profited from other kinds of relations of exploitation—from pillage to slavery to peasant production—but at a distance by way of trade and finance capital. They imposed the commodity form far and wide through trade relations, but not necessarily on the labor processes that produced the items bought and sold in trade or stolen through pillage.

It was in England that the bourgeoisie first imposed, throughout society, the commodity form on the labor process itself and put capital accumulation directly in command of production. For that reason, English industry was the best window into capitalism as a mode of production. Marx’s Capital, however, is not principally a description of English industry, but a theoretical abstraction that presents an idealized form of the capitalist mode of production based on the reality of English industry, which explains its profound theoretical value. It is precisely because it is a work of theoretical abstraction that its theories can be productively used so effectively to understand capitalism outside of England in its various manifestations. Many of Marx’s contemporaries described (the horrors of) industrial capitalism, but it was Marx’s analysis that explained its inner workings. Within those inner workings, Marx identified a class—the industrial proletariat—in direct antagonistic conflict with the bourgeoisie by way of the exploitation of the former by the latter. Furthermore, Marx showed that the industrial proletariat, by virtue of the socialized labor processes it worked in, could take hold of the industrial means of production and put them under social ownership in correspondence with the collective labor processes they required to function, and bring an end to the anarchy of capitalist production, which resulted in one crisis after another, through social planning—in other words, lead the socialist transition to communism.

As a revolutionary in Europe who had been on the barricades in 1848 and refused to give up in the face of the defeats of the 1848 revolutions, getting a deeper understanding of the revolutionary class in nineteenth-century Europe and its revolutionary potential was the logical thing to do.⁹⁹ In the absence of strong proletarian revolutionary organizations and in the context of the lull in revolutionary activity after 1848, it made sense for Marx to focus on theoretical work—theoretical work which has proven invaluable to subsequent generations of revolutionaries up until the present. Since Marx, all great revolutionary leaders have had to answer the question of what class(es) constituted the social base for revolution, and their answers have differed based on concrete conditions—the lower and deeper sections of the proletariat in 1917 Russia, poor peasants in 1930s China, cash-crop peasants in 1960s Guinea-Bissau, Quechua peasants and rural-to-urban-migrants-become-slum-dwellers in 1980s Peru, Adivasis in some regions of 2000s India, etc. Our historical narrative has shown the breadth of classes and peoples that have been brought into antagonistic conflict with the processes of capital accumulation—from the Indigenous in the Americas facing European conquest to the Africans kidnapped and put to work as slaves on plantations in the Americas to the colonized around the world. Marx certainly recognized those antagonisms, and his recognition of the industrial proletariat as the leading revolutionary force in late-nineteenth-century Europe need not be considered in conflict with the revolutionary potential of other classes and additional sections of the proletariat, despite all Trotskyite idiocy to the contrary, nor does it mean we must pigeonhole the potential for socialism into some requisite level of socialized production.

Marx’s theoretical and strategic focuses were defined by his geographical and temporal position, but his intellectual curiosity was characterized by a tremendous broadness of mind. Especially when taking account not just of the writings he published during his lifetime, but also of his notes and letters, Marx’s written record demonstrates an enthusiastic intellectual engagement with the latest scientific theories and discoveries, the relation between ecology and production, and the history and culture of peoples around the world. On the latter, he was certainly limited by the lack of available knowledge due to European imperialism’s disparagement of the cultures, histories, and philosophies of the people it colonized. You can, and plenty of postmodernists have, taken Marx’s intellectual engagement with that available knowledge as signs of Eurocentrism in Marx’s thinking, but if Marx was Eurocentric, he was the least Eurocentric European intellectual of the nineteenth century. Indeed, Marx’s suggestion of an “Asiatic mode of production” that did not fit into his analysis of successive modes of production can be taken as his own self-awareness that he did not fully understand the economic history of the Indian subcontinent and that his historical analysis of modes of production may not be applicable outside of European history. A common problem in postmodernist interpretations of (or attacks on) Marx is distorting the meaning of his writings by presuming them to be moral judgments rather than attempts at materialist analysis.

In addition to the unavailability of information and the distortions of what postmodernists would call colonial knowledge production, Marx was also limited by the fact that in his time, an international communist movement had yet to extend much beyond Europe. It was not until the Third International (or Comintern), formed in the years after the 1917 Russian October Revolution, that an organizational form existed to bring the knowledge and experience of communists in the colonies and oppressed nations together with that of communists in the centers of imperialism. And it would take Mao and the Chinese Communist Party to forge a communist strategy for realizing the revolutionary potential of the peasantry in the oppressed nations and the antagonism between the colonies and oppressed nations, on the one hand, and imperialism, on the other. The point here is to recognize the historical limitations of revolutionaries who do not have access to the breadth of knowledge and experience that could only come through the global spread of the international communist movement and the creation of organizational forms that correspond to, consolidate, and further that global spread. Marx strained against those historical limitations in ways that we should all seek to emulate.

Since Marx’s time, the scope of Marxist analysis of capitalism has become far more global. In the early- to mid-twentieth century, genuine communists engaged in making revolution were involved in that analysis, with Lenin’s theory of imperialism during the period of high colonialism and Mao’s strategic approach of new-democratic revolution for semi-feudal countries dominated by imperialism as great theoretical breakthroughs. However, genuine communists never found the time or felt it important to extend, in a systematic way, a more global understanding of capitalism back in time to capitalism’s beginnings, and dogmatism, mechanical materialism, and the quantitative decline of genuine communists over the last few decades have resulted in a dearth of dialectical historical analysis produced by communists in recent years. The gap has been filled in recent decades¹⁰⁰ by, at best, academic Marxists engaged in genuine research but at a distance, or divorced, from revolutionary activity under communist leadership, and, at worst, by opportunists who use Marx’s historical limitations to refute the profound revolutionary wisdom of his theoretical work. An example of the latter can be found in chapter seven of Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present by Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik. In that chapter, titled “The Myth of the Agricultural Revolution,” the authors, who align with revisionism against revolution in their country, attempt to pull an anticolonial “gotcha” on Marx by showing that the agrarian revolution in England did not substantially increase grain production, and England relied on the grain production of its colonies. This historical correction of Marx by Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik betrays their obsession with production output and misses the reason Marx considered the English agrarian revolution of such great significance: the radical change in the relations of production that it entailed.¹⁰¹

My purpose, in the preceding historical narrative of capitalism in global conquest, has been to bring together the historical analysis of those who have filled the gap left by Marx with Marx’s revolutionary method and perspective, all with an eye towards the strategic implications of the resulting historical narrative. While some correctives to Marx’s theoretical work prove necessary in the process of re-examining capitalism’s history, those correctives in no way diminish the revolutionary truths that Marx articulated or the relevance of his dialectical method. Nor do they suggest that Marx’s historical analysis was reductive or determinist. On the contrary, when Marx analyzed specific historical events, he moved away from the level of theoretical abstraction that was necessary in Capital to pay close attention to the ways that various classes responded to and shaped historical events, as is evident in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, for example.¹⁰² Discarding or denigrating Marx’s analysis because it focused on capitalism in its purest form at the time, as a mode of production in nineteenth-century England, especially for the opportunist purpose of performative anticolonial “gotchas,” will only result in limiting our ability to understand capitalism’s history and contemporary functioning, an understanding we need so that we can overthrow capitalism in the present.

Imperialism, a terminalogical problem

Marx passed away on the eve of high colonialism, so it fell to the next generation of communists to analyze the international implications of the ascendance of industrial capital. Doing so was not just a matter of solid research guided by materialist dialectics, but also required a correct and firm stand with the oppressed and exploited masses in the colonies and oppressed nations. Since most of the leaders of the Second International did not take such a stand, they were incapable of the task. Consequently, it fell to Lenin to synthesize, from the prism of the communist world outlook, existing economic research with a firm anti-imperialist stand, and the result was Lenin’s 1917 Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.

As an analysis of the period of high colonialism and its main features, Lenin’s Imperialism holds up exceptionally well, and more than that provides a crucial theoretical foundation for understanding capitalism’s subsequent development. However, in the way Lenin presents “monopoly capitalism” as a higher, imperialist, and final stage of capitalism leaves us with a terminalogical problem looking back and forward from the period of high colonialism. As our historical narrative has demonstrated, from its beginnings, capitalism was involved in global conquest and imperialist domination, by European powers, of the Americas, Africa, and Asia (in more or less chronological order by when European conquest began). In those beginnings, capital accumulation was one motive among others for imperialist domination, though an increasingly dominant one. With high colonialism, capital accumulation decisively displaced feudal and crusader motives and made Europe’s colonies directly serve industrial production and industrial capital accumulation, making the colonies appendages to capitalism as a mode of production.

Lenin’s treatment of high colonialism as capitalism becoming imperialism, rather than as a change in how capital accumulation shaped the global economy, likely flows from the Marxist concept of stages of development (from slave society to feudalism to capitalism to imperialism) that had become conventional wisdom in the Second International. Lenin’s identification of change from free competition to monopolies correctly describes the move from free trade imperialism by the British empire to the period of high colonialism with blocs of industrial capital merging together, and merging with finance capital, into large monopolies centered in different imperialist countries that were in competition with one another. However, Lenin’s Imperialism treats monopolies as an evolution from prior capitalist development—something more or less accurate when describing the internal development of capitalism as a mode of production in England, but not so accurate when describing other countries (Germany, France, Japan, etc.), nor when considering prior trade monopoly capitalism of the joint-stock company variety. Moreover, Lenin’s Imperialism does not address the role of finance capital in previous historical periods of capitalism’s development, which was fine for its purposes, but inadequate for understanding capital accumulation before the period of high colonialism.

These analytical weaknesses posed no substantial problems for understanding and acting on the objective conditions of the high colonialism period. However, since that period has passed, it is necessary to properly historicize it by pulling the lens back. The fact that high colonialism has passed means that it was not the highest or terminal stage of capitalism, but unfortunately one more phase in the arc of capitalism’s history. Lenin’s Imperialism tended to take monopoly capitalism in Germany, with its horizontal integration of firms, as its paradigm for analysis, but Germany lost World War II and the US model of monopolies, based more on vertical than horizontal integration, is what came to prominence. Looking further ahead, colonialism ended as the principal form for imperialist domination, industrial production spread to many of the oppressed nations, but on terms that kept capital accumulation centered in the imperialist powers, and finance capital came to even greater dominance and developed new, and ever more speculative, mechanisms for accumulation. These and other changes will be analyzed in parts two and three; the point here is that while Lenin’s Imperialism offers us a foundation for understanding them, it could not predict the future. Lenin can only be faulted for his revolutionary optimism that capitalism would be overthrown the world over before it moved on from its high colonialism period.

The understandable inability of Lenin’s Imperialism to deepen our understanding of capitalism’s history before high colonialism, let alone predict how it would develop over the subsequent century, poses problems not so much with Lenin’s theoretical contributions, but for us to figure out. In terms of historical analysis, we must insist that there was no point in its development in which capitalism was not also, or at least tied to, imperialism, but the way it was changed over time. That insistence in turn forces us to consider questions of terminology. Given the continued denial or obfuscation, by some who call themselves communists, socialists, or Marxists, of the basic division of the world between imperialist countries and oppressed nations at the heart of capitalism, genuine communists have felt the need to call the system we seek to overthrow capitalism-imperialism. Besides its inelegance, the problem with this terminology is that it treats imperialism as a specific stage in capitalism’s development that began towards the end of the nineteenth century and has continued up until the present, which is at best only true when speaking of capitalism specifically as a mode of industrial production.

One solution to our terminological problem would be to drop “-imperialism” as a qualifier connoting a specific stage and treat capitalism as a totalizing system, motivated by the accumulation of capital, that always included imperialist domination, not as a specific policy or as a choice by some capitalists, but baked into capitalism’s basic functioning. That solution would also help answer why we do not add other qualifiers to the word capitalism—we do not call it “patriarchal capitalism” because there is no non-patriarchal capitalism, and we do not call it “racial capitalism” because there is no capitalism that has not oppressed whole nations and peoples. However, the problem with changing terminology is that it requires a consensus on the meaning of words and choices of terminology, something that we cannot simply declare into being (as much as postmodernists arrogantly like to do so). So the term capitalism-imperialism will likely remain our moniker for the monster we seek to slay, but perhaps we can begin to advance a common understanding of capitalism as a system founded on global conquest and developed through continued imperialist domination in changing forms, and eventually end the need for the inelegant term we are currently stuck with to distinguish ourselves from opportunists.

Postmodernism is dumb and Leftists are morons

The logic of capital accumulation, a totalizing meta-narrative to uphold

If we are to understand capitalism as a totalizing system, then we require a totalizing meta-narrative of its history that demonstrates how the logic of capital accumulation informs all of social life, i.e., what you have been reading up to this point. Without that, we will be forced to find other explanations, devoid of materialist logic, for the last five centuries of exploitation and oppression: greed, human nature, religion, some inherent evil in Europeans, etc. Most of those explanations touch on, and in some cases help identify, real aspects of that history, or at the very least the ideas and beliefs that were part of shaping that history. But none get at the primary material relations driving that history. Worse yet, those explanations leave us with no means to bring exploitation and oppression to an end, forcing us to resign ourselves to the rule of capital and the bourgeois class, perhaps with some self-righteous indignation but without a revolutionary solution. In short, idealist explanations of the history of exploitation and oppression lead us to capitulation.

Over the last several decades, postmodernist philosophy and politics have become the primary rationale for that capitulation. Postmodernism’s purported rejection of totalizing meta-narratives—which hypocritically fails to acknowledge the ways that postmodernism itself has become a totalizing meta-narrative—is above all a rejection of the communist understanding that the logic of capital accumulation is at the heart of all exploitation and oppression today, and has been, more or less, for centuries. Postmodernists have set themselves to work on analyzing various institutions and ideas that play a role in exploitation and oppression. French philosopher Michel Foucault provided the paradigm for this approach, writing books analyzing the history of sexuality, mental hospitals, and prisons, among other things, and the history of the discourses which rationalized those and other institutions and practices. Foucault did so with some small degree of reference to the ways these institutions, practices, and discourses were tied to capital accumulation, an approach which the postmodernists who have followed in his wake have largely dropped.

In any event, to whatever degree postmodernists connect the institutions, practices, and discourses they analyze to the logic of capital accumulation, they do so while rejecting treating capitalism as a totalizing system that shapes all of the institutions, practices, and discourses in question, even when they use the word “systematic” to talk about oppression. Furthermore, postmodernist logic joins centuries of bourgeois thinking in disconnecting various spheres of social life into discrete, separate spheres rather than seeing the interconnectedness of social life—the social totality—just as bourgeois science has separated the natural world into disconnected realms and by different fields of scientific inquiry. Not surprisingly, postmodernism has resulted in extreme forms of philosophical relativism, individualism, and identity politics, in opposition to any and all universalist revolutionary politics.

Where the postmodernists have a point is that all aspects of social life have their own particular features that are not reducible to the logic of capital accumulation, and while capital accumulation became the dominant logic shaping social life over the last five centuries, it joined with—in collaboration, contention, and transformation—other logics, some that predated capitalism and some that arose under it. If we ignore those particular features and other logics, we will turn an accurate totalizing meta-narrative into reductionist, dogmatic logic and fail to understand concrete conditions, and even our understanding of the general, overarching logic of capital accumulation will become faulty. But if, like the postmodernists, we lose sight of the general in our analysis of the particulars, we will not understand the dynamics at work within those particulars and how they connect to the general. Politically, we will wind up attempting to change, or “abolish,” specific institutions and ideas while failing to vanquish the totalizing system they are a part of. We will be trying to change people’s “carceral thinking,” overturn “anti-blackness,” “abolish” police or prisons, “decolonize” this or that institution or way of thinking, etc., without overthrowing the system behind, and that ties together, all exploitation and oppression, and we will fail in our particular goals as a result.

A common postmodernist criticism of the communist meta-narrative is that it denies human agency by presenting capitalism as a totalizing system in which people are dominated by the relations of production. This criticism is principally a cover for postmodernists’ rejection of the greatest exercise of human agency—making revolution, overthrowing capitalism, and choosing to create new relations of production devoid of exploitation—but postmodernists present that rejection as a positive recognition of the (real and imagined) wiggle room people have within our present relations of production. Secondarily, the postmodernists are picking up on the ways that Marx’s brilliant insights into how, under capitalist relations of production and commodity exchange, the logic of capital accumulation and the anarchy of production it creates, as well as the very means of production themselves, dominate over people have often been treated mechanically by many so-called Marxists. Those vulgar Marxists fail to differentiate between Marx’s penchant for metaphors and the realities those metaphors describe, and between Marx’s works of theoretical abstraction (Capital, for example) and historical analysis (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, for example). A necessary corrective that serious communists must make, not to Marx but to the ill effects of mechanical “Marxism,” is to imbue our historical and contemporary analysis with attention to the role of decisions—by individuals, governments, classes, etc.—in addition to and in interaction with the more impersonal motions of capital, as I have tried to do in the preceding pages.

The challenge we face, in the work of historical analysis guided by communist principles, is to show how the relations of production have shaped human history without reducing that history to a mechanical reflection of those relations of production. Meeting this challenge will require a totalizing meta-narrative that can bring together specific analyses of particulars with the general, overarching forces at work. Where we need to go deeply into a particular, the general can be present in the background without the need for its intrusive articulation. Where we are bringing together many particulars, we should be able to demonstrate how the different threads are, or get, bound together without losing sight of the specificity of each thread. At both these tasks, Marx, and the communist method of materialist dialectics, have proven far superior to postmodernist approaches.

Settlers is an original sin narrative

When it comes to the question of settlers, postmodernists and Leftists of the last couple decades have, with great fervor, insisted on separating the particular (settlers) from the general (capitalism) and elevating the former over the latter as the driving force of exploitation and oppression. As the preceding analysis argued, settlers served a specific purpose within capitalism’s history: relieving Europe of surplus populations and religious and political conflict, spreading capitalist property relations beyond Europe, and taking reactionary initiative against Indigenous populations.¹⁰³ To the extent they are a class, settlers are a class in transition: their class interests are to remove Indigenous populations from colonized land and set themselves up as property owners and independent producers. Once they have succeeded in those endeavors, they become settled, and where dominant, they have established new nation-states in their image.

Those new nation-states are certainly stamped with the genocidal history of settler-colonialism, and have constituted the remaining Indigenous populations as oppressed nations and/or nationalities.¹⁰⁴ But with the consolidation of new nation-states out of settler-colonies, new arrivals to those nation-states are no longer settlers in any materialist class analysis sense. They are slotted into various positions within the class structure of those nation-states, from proletarian to bourgeois. That is not to say any of that is fair, nor that those new arrivals do not benefit materially from the history of settler-colonialism. But when it comes to the strategic question of how to make revolution, what matters is the class position they come to occupy in the nation-state they become a part of.

Instead of seeking to answer that strategic question, postmodernists and Leftists have sought a performative moral high ground, deploying the label “settlers” not to make a materialist analysis, but to justify their own capitulation to capitalist rule. One particular expression of this capitulation is the small, cultish following around J Sakai’s 1983 book Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern. Sakai’s book presents a litany of real examples of how white workers have betrayed oppressed nations to make his case for their reactionary nature. The trouble with his method is that you can also find counter-examples where white workers joined with proletarians of oppressed nations and nationalities in class struggle against the bourgeoisie and in support of the liberation struggles of oppressed nations and nationalities. On balance, the former examples will be greater in number than the latter examples unless a revolutionary movement gains enough strength to challenge bourgeois rule, including the dominance of oppressor nations in multinational nation-states. Whatever Sakai’s intent, the people who embrace the analysis of his book have adamantly rejected taking responsibility for building such a revolutionary movement.

Beyond just Sakai’s readers, postmodernist Leftists in general have embraced the concept of “settlers” as an original sin narrative, treating the descendants of settlers like Christian fundamentalists treat humanity as irredeemably corrupted by Eve’s eating of the apple. Whereas Christian fundamentalists offer corrupted humanity salvation in the afterlife so long as they repent for their sins, postmodernist Leftists offer themselves salvation with land acknowledgments, checking their privilege, and railing against settlers in the present-tense (even if, by their internal logic, they themselves are settlers). They offer no salvation for the masses, including the Indigenous oppressed nations, because they insist, objectively but often also subjectively, that revolution is impossible given the scourge of settlers.

A whole slew of capitulationist political positions dripping with more-radical-than-thou arrogance have emerged on the basis of the postmodernist original sin narrative about settlers. One telling example is the postmodernist position on Chicanos. For several generations, revolutionaries of various ideological persuasions considered Chicanos in the US to be an oppressed nation or nationality. How they understood that varied considerably, but they all acknowledged the unjust nature of the US’s 1840s war of aggression against Mexico, by which the US stole what are now its southwestern states and subjugated the people living there to its rule, and the ongoing forms of oppression and discrimination faced by Chicanos in the US since then. In recent years, postmodernists have reversed this understanding and decided that Chicanos are settlers deserving of condemnation, not an oppressed people whose own struggle against oppression can be part of a larger struggle to overthrow US imperialism. The postmodernists take the real complexities of Chicanos as a diverse social formation, which includes people whose ancestors stole land inhabited by Indigenous people and made it their property, to flatten Chicanos as a whole into evil settlers. My only question is: would “land back” mean subjecting Chicanos to forced DNA tests to determine their percentage of Indigenous ancestry and then shipping them off (to Spain?) if that percentage is below 50%?

That question highlights the fact that while postmodernists have made condemnations of settlers one of their favorite games, they have miserably failed to put forward any political program to end the exploitation and oppression of Indigenous people as it is in the present. The problem with “land back” as a generalized slogan (rather than a demand in relation to specific land claims) is not “oh no, where will all the white people go?,” but that no one using the slogan has put forward a plan and program for how to achieve it. For, say, a teenager on the rez to do so is no problem, or only the problem of naivete, and, if it did not lead them in the direction of postmodernism, it could play a productive role in articulating their righteous indignation and pushing them to think about how to do something revolutionary with that indignation. But for, say, a person with a professorship, a popular Leftist podcast, and a publishing deal with Verso Press to do so becomes posturing for personal gain—opportunism.

The bourgeoisie is never going to grant land back because doing so would conflict with their fundamental class interests. The only way to achieve “land back” is through the armed struggle to overthrow bourgeois rule, and that is something no postmodernist advocate of “land back” is talking about in any serious way. In that respect, “land back” joins with “Black lives matter” as an appeal to the woke white petty-bourgeoisie for sympathy, financial support, and medals in the Oppression Olympics, making the purveyors of these slogans far less radical than Martin Luther King Jr., who made clear that the Civil Rights Movement could not base its politics on what liberal whites would like.¹⁰⁵

The postmodernist position on the settler question reveals the link between the ideological stand of capitulation and the postmodernist analytical rejection of the logic of capital accumulation as a totalizing meta-narrative for understanding exploitation and oppression. Which of the two came first is a question for psychological speculation. Either way, the latter serves to obfuscate the former, and postmodernists only distinguish themselves from those who capitulated in the past by painting their capitulationist logic as a radical stand morally superior to making revolution. Meanwhile, the logic of capital accumulation continues to shape our world…

1Giovanni Arrighi theorized the relationship between territorial expansion and capital expansion in The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (Verso, 2010 [1994]), 34–35 (and throughout the book).

2Ellen Wood theorized and gave historical examples of the “empire of commerce” in chapter three of Empire of Capital (Verso, 2003).

3Friedrich Engels argued that while the commodity form originated in local forms of exchange, external forms of exchange are ultimately what made the commodity form dominant within local communities. See Anti-Dühring (Foreign Languages Press, 1976), 206. Some “Marxist” political economists have used this historical fact to argue that more localized commodity exchange poses no problems for socialism, exactly because their conception of socialism is not a transition to communism but rather a more socially restrained form of capitalism. For example, in Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present (Monthly Review Press, 2021), 327–28, Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik make the absurd argument that not all production for the market constitutes commodity production to advocate for the unrestrained persistence of commodity production by petty producers under socialism, in opposition to Maoist China’s methods of step-by-step eliminating commodity production and, with it, individual petty-producers as a class.

4Wood, 49–50.

5Understanding Ancient Rome as setting the precedent for European feudalism can help rupture with the historical determinist concept of “stages of development” that all too often defines “Marxist” ideas about historical “progress.” Other empires in other parts of the world had their own particularities, and set precedents for other forms of social organization.

6Wood, 28, 31–32, 36, 38.

7I mean that in part as a rebuke to the trend of postmodernist historical “gotcha” that contrasts the constant war between European feudal powers with the more peaceful existence of contemporary empires on other continents, which can be explained by the stronger central state of those empires. From the standpoint of the subjects of those empires, there is nothing to celebrate about their more peaceful subjugation. As a point of dialectical historical analysis, it is worth noting that while the constant state of war in Europe made its feudal empires weaker than contemporary empires on other continents, it also strengthened their war-making capabilities, which were subsequently used to subjugate the more “peaceful” empires outside of Europe.

8Wood, 34–36; quote on 35.

9Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 103–5. The proto-bourgeoisie’s response to this so-called revolt of the Ciompi could also be considered, with apologies to the (new) Italian Communist Party, the first bourgeois regime of preventive counterrevolution, with the proto-bourgeoisie taking advantage of another possible historical first (with apologies to Lenin)—a split in the Florentine working class between an upper privileged stratum and a lower exploited section. The subsequent turn to conspicuous consumption by the Florentine bourgeoisie-turned-nouveaux-aristocracy was in part a deepening of their regime of preventive counterrevolution, funding the art of the European Renaissance as a means of legitimizing their rule.
Another contender for the title of first dictatorship of the proletariat is the uprising of weavers in Ghent in 1378, as pointed out by Silvia Federici in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2014 [2004]).

10Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 182.

11Wood, 54; Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 38–41, 89–129, 131, 187. To be clear, when I write “Italian bourgeoisies,” I am referring to a class in (or from) a region of Europe, not a national bourgeoisie of an Italian nation, as it took until 1871 to fully unify Italy into a nation-state with a unified home market.

12Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 41; Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing (Verso, 2007), 237.

13Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of Pillage of a Continent (Monthly Review Press, 1997 [1971]), 12; Wood, 37–43; Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 120–25.

14Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 125.

15I trust that the intelligent, line-discerning reader of Galeano’s overall excellent book will be able to resist the literary seduction of its beautifully written, metaphor laden, poetic passage that extols sugar-plantation “socialism” in Cuba while denigrating, by insinuation, the shining but step-by-step path of agrarian revolution in Maoist China.

16Galeano, 11–58; Jason Hickel, The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets (Norton, 2018), 66–70.

17Hickel, 68 states that by the early 1800s, 100 million kilograms of silver had been taken from Latin America.

18Ibid., 64.

19It is quite understandable why oppressed people have sought to refute claims of European superiority by pointing to the technological, economic, political, and other achievements of empires on the lands of their ancestors. Furthermore, given how the achievements of non-European empires have been buried by Eurocentric historical narratives, there is a need to bring them to light. However, pointing to those achievements in an effort to refute supposed European superiority over uncivilized savages in the rest of the world accepts the terms of argument on which claims of European superiority have been made, namely, who had the better empire. In practice, Europe won that argument, for, as Marx put it, between equal rights (or in this case extolations of empire), force decides.

20Galeano, 130–33.

21Wood, 42.

22Galeano, 23, 29–31.

23Galeano, 58–61; Wood, 104.

24Galeano, 78–83; Wood, 103–4.

25Hickel, 70–71. See also Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (originally published in 1944); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, chapter 3 (Black Classic Press, 2011 [1972]); and Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 103–5.

26See especially chapter 4 of Rodney’s book.

27Rodney, 88–89, made a similar, materialist argument about the impetus for the ideology of white supremacy, as do Karen Fields and Barbara Fields in Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (Verso, 2012).

28Wood, 68.

29Galeano, 61–62.

30Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 157–58.

31Ibid., 159.

32Ibid., 159.

33Ibid., 160.

34Ibid., 142.

35Ibid., 202; Wood, 65–66.

36Hickel, 65. Gold and silver plundered from the Americas was a crucial means by which the European mercantile bourgeoisie purchased the fruits of industrious production in China and India and in turn sold them in Europe or elsewhere for a profit.

37Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, 239.

38Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 244–45.

39Ibid., 46, 208.

40Ibid., 47–48.

41Ibid., 47.

42Ibid., 138.

43Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, 266.

44Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 146.

45The irony of kingdoms establishing the conditions for capital accumulation, nation-state formation, and bourgeois-democracy is more an irony of perception than reality. As our narrative has and will continue to show, central state involvement and intervention has always been crucial to the functioning of capitalism and bourgeois-democracy, even as their ideologues might often claim otherwise. Indeed, the best of bourgeois-democratic reforms have relied on the most authoritarian of measures by central state apparatuses. Examples of this fact abound in the history of the United States: federal troops defeating the Confederacy to abolish slavery and then being stationed in the South to ensure democratic rights for former slaves during Reconstruction (rights which were stripped away after those federal troops left); the US Supreme Court decreeing an end to segregation in education in 1954 and then federal troops being used to enforce that decree; or more recently, Governor Andrew Cuomo forcing through gay marriage as New York state law through top-down means.

46Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 188–95, 215.

47Ibid., 49.

48Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, 173–75.

49Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 203.

50Ibid., 204.

51Ibid., 204.

52Wood, 103–4.

53A number of Marxist political economists, with Samir Amin at the top of the list, have explained the concept of unequal exchange between imperialist countries and colonies and oppressed nations and identified the mechanisms through which it took place. For our purposes, what matters more than the specific mechanisms of value transfer involved in unequal exchange is the fact that unequal exchange is made possible by, and in turn deepens, the division of the world into imperialist and oppressed nations that rests on the military power of the former over the latter. In other words, the various economic mechanisms of unequal exchange would not be possible without military dominance; between exchange of commodities in world trade, force decides.

54Historical accounts of the British East India Company include Ramkrishna Mukherjee, The Rise and Fall of the East India Company (Monthly Review Press, 1974); Philip Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Soveriegnty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford University Press, 2011); and Wood, 110–17. A more recent, and rather comprehensive, account of how the British empire was built is the aptly titled Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Eskins (Alfred A Knopf, 2022).

55On British control over currency used in, and in trade with, colonial India, see Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism, 138–44.

56Arrighi analyzed a “new synthesis of capitalism and territorialism brought into being by French and British mercantilism in the eighteenth century” in The Long Twentieth Century, 50.

57See especially the fourth chapter of Federici’s Caliban and the Witch. Federici is correct to point out that the subjugation of women during the rise of capitalism was not a remnant of feudal relations, but a new, capitalist, form of patriarchy that transformed and intensified the oppression of women. Federici’s work not only points out an important blind spot in Marxist accounts of the rise of capitalism, but also casts doubt (to put it mildly) on notions of the rise of capitalism as historical progress over feudalism when it comes to women’s position in society.

58Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 65.

59Wood, 73.

60Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously (Hurst and Company, 2022), 36. A note for clarity: there are two published, contemporary philosophers with the name Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò. The one quoted here and throughout this work is the slightly older, non-postmodernist one.

61The latter aspect gets more complicated when we look at the history of what became the southern United States, especially as that settler-colony-turned-nation-state expanded west and settler and plantation expansion combined, which pushed a contradiction between two modes of production embedded in the founding of the US further towards civil war.

62Wood, 107.

63The ideological component of capitalism and colonialism as it was articulated by philosophers of this time is an important part of the history of capitalism in global conquest, but would take us too far outside of the present narrative to merit more attention. One good starting point for undertanding that ideological component is CB Macpherson’s The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Clarendon Press, 1962). Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, especially its third chapter, is another important exposition of the ideological side of the rise of capitalism in global conquest, particularly Mechanical Philosophy.

64Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, 82.

65Ibid., 242.

66Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 57.

67Ibid., 265.

68Ibid., 56.

69Wood, 110–14; Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism, 226. On famines, see Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (Verso, 2000).

70Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 258.

71Galeano, chapter 4; Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, 242.

72Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, 173–99.

73Ibid., 77.

74Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 56.

75Ibid., 182.

76Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, 244.

77In addition to Marx and Engels’ vivid descriptions of gender relations in nineteenth-century capitalist society, much of what follows draws on the theoretical work of Sylvia Federici, though her landmark study Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation focuses on the early stages of capitalism’s development as a mode of production rather than its consolidated form in Victorian England.

78Wood, 121.

79Wood, 123–24; Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 273–75.

80Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, 342–43.

81Táíwò, 141.

82Rodney, 152–57, 234–35.

83Ibid., 157.

84Ibid., chapter 6.

85Ibid., 141.

86A harrowing account of the brutality of Belgian colonialism in the Congo can be found in Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Houghton Mifflin, 1999).

87Rodney, 191.

88Those differences vary from one colony to another and are too complicated to sufficiently explain here, but briefly: European settlers in Africa never became a majority population in any colony, though a sizeable minority in a few places. With the exception of the Boers, they largely came after industrial production was established in Europe. While some came to start their own independent farms on stolen land and become independent producers, others entered into the class structure of administrative colonialism, working various positions (taxi drivers in Luanda, for example). In some instances, such as the mining industry, the line between colonial overlords and settlers might be blurry. In any event, a historical materialist analysis of Europeans in Africa during high colonialism would require making a class analysis of their specific role while firmly recognizing that the principal contradiction in Africa at the time was between the African masses and European imperialism.

89A notable exception in Africa was Ethiopia, which was never successfully subjugated under European colonial rule owing to its strong state apparatus established over centuries. Italy, a latecomer to high colonialism, tried but failed to colonize Ethiopia in the 1930s, demonstrating the desperation of a third-rate imperialist to get in on colonial exploitation to feed its also third-rate industrial development.

90Radhika Desai, Geopolitical Economy After US Hegemony, Globalization, and Empire (Pluto Press, 2013), 78–79.

91Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 177.

92Ibid., 184.

93Ibid., 280–83.

94Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism, 306.

95On Japan’s drive to overtake British imperialism in East Asia, see Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing, 342–43 and Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism, 176.

96Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, Capital and Imperialism, chapter 13.

97Wood, 129.

98Ibid., 125. Where I would refine Wood’s summation is in her use of the word “capitalism” rather than “capitalism as a mode of production.”

99A question to postmodernists: should Marx have instead sought to dictate strategy for anticolonial movements outside Europe?

100With that phrase, I am not including, in what follows it, revolutionary intellectuals from, or who emerged during, the 1960s, such as Walter Rodney, who may not have had clarity on the key dividing line between Soviet revisionism and Maoist China, but who embraced revolutionary movements and contributed important historical research.

101Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik certainly recognize that change in the relations of production, but, like all revisionists, they cannot help but downplay the relations of production.

102Giovanni makes a similar point in Adam Smith in Beijing, 74, footnote 2.

103Today in Palestine, Israeli settlers serve a modified for the specific circumstances but no less reactionary purpose, as explained in the Introduction.

104With the ambiguous phrase “nations and/or nationalities,” I am purposely avoiding making a more conclusive analysis of the state of Indigenous peoples in settler-colonies turned nation-states today, both because it varies from country to country and because a more conclusive analysis would require collective work of social investigation and research, not my individual judgment based on my own limited knowledge.

105See Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” for an articulation of his position on this matter, and contrast it with the postmodernist politics of today.