Welcome to the third week of the Imperialism Reading Group! Last week's thread is here.
This is a weekly thread in which we read through books on and related to imperialism and geopolitics. How many chapters or pages we will cover per week will vary based on the density and difficulty of the book, but I'm generally aiming at 30 to 40 pages per week, which should take you about an hour or two.
The first book we are covering is the foundation, the one and only, Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. We will read two chapters per week, meaning that we will finish reading in mid-to-late February. Unless a better suggestion is made, we will then cover Michael Hudson's Super Imperialism, and continue with various books from there.
Every week, I will write a summary of the chapter(s) read, for those who have already read the book and don't wish to reread, can't follow along for various reasons, or for those joining later who want to dive right in to the next book without needing to pick this one up too.
This week, we will be reading Chapter 5: Division Of The World Among Capital Associations and Chapter 6: Division Of The World Among The Great Powers.
Please comment or message me directly if you wish to be pinged for this group.
Chapter 6: Division of the World Among the Great Powers
The characteristic feature of capitalism in Lenin’s time is the end of world partitioning - there are no more “unoccupied” territories for the capitalists to claim. The world can now only be repartitioned. The fact that this coincides with the development of finance capital is not accidental.
Great Britain saw a massive period of colonial expansion from 1860 to 1880, although they continued a lesser (but still significant) rate of expansion for 1880 to 1900. France and Germany, however, saw their most massive rate of expansion from 1880 to 1900, as Africa and Polynesia was being partitioned. Overall, from 1876 to 1914, the six Great Powers (Britain, Russia, France, Germany, America, Japan) went from 40 million to 65 million square kilometers (compared to the mere ~16 million square kilometers of the Great Powers themselves). This growth was, unsurprisingly, uneven; aside from Britain and Russia, four of those Powers had virtually no colonies in 1876, and France gained substantially more than Germany despite their similar land areas (as they started off much richer). Additionally, Russia has had large colonies but nonetheless is still enmeshed in pre-capitalist relations.
During the period of competitive capitalism, in the mid-1800s, British politicians frequently opposed colonial policy and sought for their eventual separation from Britain, regarding them as disadvantageous for Britain’s own development. Once there was major competition for colonies from Europe and America, the value of monopoly was realized simultaneously by the capitalists and the politicians, resulting in a resurgence in nakedly imperialist policy and rhetoric; Lenin quotes Cecil Rhodes, responsible for the Anglo-Boer War, who plainly states that imperialism and resettlement was necessary to prevent civil war inside Britain.
Lenin notes that not all the world has fallen under the dominion of the Great Powers - there exists small states with some colonies (such as the Dutch and their colonies), as well as semi-colonial states like Persia and China, which exist as transitory forms. The battle over these remaining semi-colonial states will be increasingly bitter as the Great Powers seek the last remaining pieces of territory between themselves. There are other forms of state dependence, such as Argentina, in which they are so financially dependent on Britain that they might as well be a colony; or Portugal, which has been a British protectorate for hundreds of years, with Britain receiving privileges and preferential conditions “in return” for protecting Portugal from Spain and France. These arrangements are not new to capitalism, but now form links in the chain of world finance capital.
In a similar way, imperialism and international state competition existed before the Great Powers, but the socio-economic systems behind, say, the Roman Empire and Great Britain are fundamentally different, and there are even major differences in this regard between competitive and monopoly capitalism (as we already saw this chapter with Britain).
Uniquely, we are now in an economic stage in which ALL the sources of raw materials can be controlled and divided up between cartels, and as resources are finite (oil, ore, and soil can and will be depleted), the competition to acquire and hold on to these resources will become increasingly bitter; Lenin notes that timber, leather, and textile materials are rising in price over time, and that the capitalists are trying to match the ever-growing demand for these materials. Bourgeois reformists state that simply by improving agricultural conditions, the supply of raw materials could be increased, but this would require the raising of wages for workers and hence the reduction of profits, which the capitalists would not allow.
As technology advances, the ability of corporations to extract more raw materials from existing sources (or make viable entirely new sources) increases. Hence, corporations strive to seize as much land as possible, regardless of its current worth, in the hopes that resources that could one day be profitable can be found there; the competition between corporations and Great Powers is thus not limited by the apparent worth of the land they are fighting over. These powers grow and harvest what they can with what land they have, to try and put themselves in a better position that their competitors.