IMPERIALISM: A WORLD SYSTEM OF COLONIAL OPPRESSION

(Unknown-yet)
Industrial capitalism developed into monopoly capitalism at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries as a result of further far-reaching changes in the sphere of capitalist production. Whereas the light industries were still predominant in the developed capitalist countries of Europe and North America in the mid-nineteenth century, heavy industry, above all, metallurgy, mechanical engineering, mining and the railways, came to play the main role towards the end of the century. Major scientific discoveries and the invention of the open-hearth and blast-furnace processes, the internal combustion engine, and so on, greatly extended the mechanical facilities of industry, increased the amount of power available per worker, and improved production processes. Since the new high-capacity plant could not really be used at small factories, advanced technology made larger factories better off, enabling them to defy competition from smaller enterprises. Concentration of production and centralisation of capital caused the further concentration of industry in large factories and plants. Free competition was replaced by industrial and banking monopolies, which fused, bringing about the emergence of finance capital.

Domination by the financial oligarchy extended to practically every sphere of bourgeois society; it had control over the state administration, parliament, most political parties and the press, which enabled it to exercise a determining influence on the domestic and foreign policies of even the most apparently democratic states. As Lenin pointed out, ’nowhere is this suppression of the working-class movement accompanied by such ruthless severity as in Switzerland and the USA, and nowhere does the influence of capital in parliament manifest itself as powerfully as in these countries. The power of capital is everything, the stock exchange is everything, while parliament and elections are marionettes, puppets...’.  [85•* 

Under pre-monopoly capitalism, manufactured goods were imported into the colonies, but this was done in an atmosphere of relative ‘freedom’ of trade depending on the economic potential of the home country. The importation of goods drew the colonies into world trade. Nevertheless, this usually had no great impact on local industry.

The transition to the imperialist epoch also marked an entirely new stage in the development of colonialism. Formerly, there had been ’an economic distinction between the colonies and the European peoples—at least, the majority of the latter—the colonies having been drawn into commodity exchange but not into capitalist production. Imperialism changed this,’ Lenin wrote.  [86•*  In the imperialist era, the colonial and semi-colonial population became the immediate object of capitalist exploitation which became increasingly barbarous.

Under imperialism, the significance of the colonies as commodity markets abruptly increased. The colonies also became immensely important as suppliers of raw materials, exclusive possession of whose sources came to be a major. objective of colonial policy. It was considered of such great importance-that colonial powers engaged in a fierce struggle with one another for the possession of those sources.

Another most important feature of intensified colonial expansion in the epoch of imperialism was the interest in the export of capital, which came to play an exceptional part as imperialism matured and developed. The conquest of the colonies held out to the bourgeoisie the enticing prospect of capital investment on exceedingly good terms. ’As long as capitalism remains what it is,’ Lenin wrote, ’surplus capital will be utilised not for the purpose of raising the standard of living of the masses in a given country, for this would mean a decline in profits for the capitalists, but for the purpose of increasing profits by exporting capital abroad to the backward countries. In these backward countries profits are usually high, for capital is scarce, the price of land is relatively low, wages are low, raw materials are cheap.’   [87•* 

The colonisers of the imperialist epoch turned most of the peoples of the globe into the slaves of imperialism, making still deeper inroads into the socio-economic life of those peoples. The entire economic life of the colonies under imperialism came to be subordinated to the main objective of capitalist production, which is to make as much profit as possible, iri every possible way. The exploitation of people as well as of the natural resources of the colonies under imperialism was one of the greatest crimes for which the colonialists are responsible.

From the middle of the 1870s the desire to conquer as many colonies as possible was the chief motive of the foreign policies of the European countries. The years from 1884 to 1900 saw intense colonial expansion. Lenin wrote: ’The scramble for colonies by all the capitalist states at the end of the nineteenth century and particularly since the 1880s is a commonly known fact in the history of diplomacy and of foreign policy,’   [87•** 

This bourgeois colonial expansion was also motivated by bourgeois dread of the mighty upsurge of the organised working-class movement in Europe and North America. The French capitalists, for example, frightened by the Paris Commune of 1871, went out of their way to foment blatant chauvinism and racialism in France. Cecil Rhodes, an exponent of British imperialism, cynically declared that he saw the saving of the bourgeois order in stepping up the pace of colonial conquests.

At the turn of the twentieth century the European colonial possessions in Africa amounted to 90.4 per cent of its territory and up to 56.6 and 98.9 per cent of the territory of Asia and Polynesia respectively. Most of Asia, Africa and America had been colonised by Britain, France, Germany,, the United States, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain and Japan. Between 1876 and 1914, the imperialist powers appropriated an area two and a half times as large as Europe. One of the motives of their 88 colonial policy was the desire to capture strategically important areas in order to maintain the colonial regimes and prepare to repartition the world.

The territorial division of the world among the imperialist powers resulted in the creation of the imperialist colonial system which became an essential part of the capitalist world economy, as well as a bone of contention for the imperialists. Lenin wrote in 1916: ’The system now is a handful of imperialist “Great” Powers (five or six in number), each oppressing other nations: and this oppression is a source for artificially retarding the collapse of capitalism, and artificially supporting opportunism and social-chauvinism in the imperialist nations which dominate the world.’  [88•*  The colonial system also comprised nominally independent but actually semi-colonial countries, namely, China, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Iran. Lenin wrote that imperialism had brought about the colonial oppression and financial strangulation of the vast majority of the world’s population by a handful of ‘advanced’ countries. Again, he observed that ’domination over hundreds of millions of people in the colonies by the European nations was sustained only through constant, incessant, interminable wars, which we Europeans do not regard as wars at all, since all too often they resembled, not wars, but brutal massacres, the wholesale slaughter of unarmed peoples’.  [88•** 

So ended, in fact, the process of drawing the colonies and semi-colonies into the capitalist world economy, a process which had already begun under industrial capitalism. The role assigned to the colonies and dependencies in the international division of labour was purely subordinate. They were to be sources of raw materials and agrarian appendages of the colonial powers.

The changed conditions of world development at the turn of the twentieth century altered the essential content of the national and colonial issues.

Under imperialism, national oppression finally lost its domestic character and assumed a global dimension. The 89 division of the world into oppressor and oppressed nations extended further. Among the oppressed nations at that time were not only the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, but also such European peoples as the Irish, the Poles, the Finns and others. At the same time, Lenin pointed out, ’to a certain degree the workers of the oppressor nations are partners of their own bourgeoisie in plundering the workers (and the mass of the population) of the oppressed nations’.  [89•*  Using the superprofits obtained from the exploitation of the colonies, the bourgeoisie bribed the ’upper sections’ of the proletariat, the so-called labour aristocracy, which became the social support of opportunism in the working-class movement.

Within the industrialised capitalist countries class antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie became still more pronounced. The conflict between the imperialist bourgeoisie and the bulk of the nation intensified. The peasants, the urban petty bourgeoisie, and members of the professions rallied more closely round the working class. The class struggle within capitalist nations intensified while national oppression and racial discrimination worsened, and the notion of national exclusiveness was assiduously disseminated.

The epoch of imperialism also introduced a fundamentally new aspect to the creation of nations. Imperialism created a capitalist world economy into which the backward countries were also drawn. The entire world system of capitalism was objectively ripe for the transition to socialism. Consolidation in the colonial and semicolonial countries rested, above all, on the struggle waged by the mass of the oppressed peoples against the colonial system of imperialism and the international division of labour within the capitalist world economy, which was built up through colonial oppression and the enslavement of peoples under imperialism.

Early in the twentieth century nations continued to form and national movements spread on various continents.

We have already noted that states were built on the 90 single-nation principle in Western Europe. In France, for example, the development of the nation was conducive to the gradual obliteration of ethnic distinctions. Although the population of Brittany, Gascony, Languedoc, Corsica and elsewhere retained some distinctive features, the French language increased in importance as the common language of the nation. The surrender of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany in 1871 engendered a fairly strong mass movement for their return to France. The population of Alsace, which consisted mainly of ethnic Germans, was, nevertheless, strongly opposed to Prussian rule and insisted on the use of French in schools.

German imperialism was particularly aggressive. The German imperialists joined the struggle for world domination when the world had already been basically divided between other capitalist predators. The German monopolies made feverish preparations for war in order to repartition the world under the banner of nationalism and chauvinism. Simultaneously the German SocialDemocratic Party was increasingly pervaded by the spirit of revisionism which found faithful exponents among "the labour aristocracy and the party elite. In the German working-class movement only the left wing—Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Franz Mehring, Clara Zetkin, Wilhelm Pieck and others—spoke out against the ’Cannon Kings’, the big bankers and militarists, against the oppression of other peoples and of the racial minorities in the German Reich, and upheld freedom and democracy.

National movements spread in East European countries, especially under the impact of the 1905-1907 revolution in Russia. It has already been noted that, for a number of reasons, the states that had formed there were multinational. In Russia, Austria-Hungary and Turkey, with their aggregate population of 249 million, the principal nationalities, i.e., Russians in Russia, Germans and Magyars in Austria-Hungary, and Turks in Turkey, accounted for merely 43 per cent of the total. In each of these countries more than half of the population was oppressed by the exploiting elite of the ruling nation.  [90•* 

The non-Russian nationalities in Russia, massed together under the contemptuous designation inorodtsi (the aliens), were oppressed by the tsarist government and the Russian bourgeoisie and landlords fomented ^ enmity between peoples. The simultaneous exercise of different kinds of social and national oppression rendered the class antagonisms inside the country especially acute. All the peoples of Russia desired the abolition of the bourgeois-landlord regime which supported national inequality and oppression, and the social forces which were prepared to undertake the historic tasks of overthrowing the autocracy, were maturing. The tsarist ’prison of nations’ contained not only the working people of non-Russian nationalities, but also" the Russian workers and peasants. The ruthless exploitation of the Russian working class and the oppression and arbitrariness of tsarist rule moved working people of different nationalities to unite round the Russian working class and people.

At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, the centre of the world revolutionary movement shifted to Russia. The Russian bourgeoisdemocratic revolution of 1905-1907, in which the working class played the leading role, had an immense impact on political development in Europe, simultaneously releasing a fresh wave of national liberation movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The consolidation processes there were increasingly linked with popular antiimperialist struggles.

India was the scene of ever-growing popular movements aimed agajnst British colonial rule and the feudal caste system. In the beginning of the twentieth century in Bengal, one of the larger Indian provinces, the capitalist mode of production became predominant. By that time, the Bengali literary language had emerged and the first public associations of a nationalist kind had also appeared. There were similar, .but obviously not identical, developments in other provinces, but in essence such processes in India dragged on for decades.

Dutch colonial oppression helped to preserve precapitalist national relations in Indonesia, by holding back the country’s economic progress and preventing the emergence of major industrial centres, keeping the 92 various nationalities in Indonesia economically isolated. The economy was of a typically colonial, monocultural kind. Nonetheless, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie were emerging. The Indonesian nation gradually began to form, a process made easier by the religious uniformity of the population, of whom over 90 per cent were Moslem. In ruthlessly exploiting Indonesia’s natural and human resources and supporting the most reactionary elements, Dutch imperialism objectively induced the formation of anti-imperialist forces in Indonesia, thus digging its own grave.

Consolidation processes in the Middle East, in Turkey, Iran and Afghanistan, continued to develop while these countries became increasingly enslaved as semi-colonies.

In Turkey under the Sultans the development of ethnic communities was obstructed by religious differences, as not all the people were Moslem. The former were in a better economic position, paid less taxes and enjoyed more rights. At the same time the ideology of Islam ignored national features, thus retarding the development of national self-awareness among the Turks. The nonMoslem inhabitants of Turkey, especially the Greeks and Armenians, were devoted to their faith, which they saw as the expression of their cultural, and hence ethnic, identity.

For a number of reasons bourgeois relations first began to develop in Turkey among the non-Moslem ethnic groups, such as the Greeks, Armenians and Jews, ,and therefore the first bourgeois elements to emerge in Turkey were mainly non-Turkish. This bourgeoisie became stronger especially after the penetration of foreign •capitalists, who relied on and patronised it, turning it into a compradore bourgeoisie. As Turkey became a semicolony of the Western powers, the ethnic development of her peoples was even further crippled. The Turks became an oppressed people, exploited by foreign capitalists while themselves oppressing other peoples in their country, who were more advanced in social, economic and ethnic respects than they were. The feudal system facilitated the growth of Turkish domination over the non-Turkish bourgeoisie. In 1908 the feudal-clerical regime of AbdulHamid was overthrown by a revolution led by the Young 93 Turks. The revolution paved the way for another phase in the formation of the Turkish nation.

The ’latter, which started in the 1830s and 1840s, basically ended during the First World War, when the Turkish national market and industrial bourgeoisie emerged. This caused an aggravation of social and national relations and invoked rivalry between the Turkish and non-Turkish bourgeoisie. The chauvinist policy of the Turkish government greatly strained national relations, leading to the slaughter of Armenians and Aissors and the expulsion of more than a million Greeks. The final consolidation of Turkey as a nation was promoted by the emancipation struggle of 1918-1923 headed by Kemal Atatiirk.

In Iran, the Persians and the Azerbaijanians, who formed the two largest ethnic communities in the country, were the first to develop national self-awareness. Other population groups, especially the nomad and semi-nomad tribes, had not yet been touched by this process. The bourgeois anti-feudal revolution of 1905-1911, which struck a strong blow at the ruling dynasty, limiting the power of the Shahs, was an important landmark in the national development of the peoples of Iran. The revolution roused broad sections of the population to struggle for national independence, democracy and freedom.

Afghanistan underwent a long and difficult process in abolishing the feudal fragmentation of the country, in unifying it, and in establishing a centralised state. The struggle of the Afghan people against the British, who sought to turn the country into a colony, went on for decades. Britain ultimately failed to impose colonial rule on Afghanistan, though it managed to establish control over Afghanistan’s foreign policy.

At the outset of the imperialist epoch many African tribes south of the Sahara had not yet formed as nationalities; they were still at the tribal and protonationality stage. The slow development of the productive forces, the reliance on the natural economy, and the tribal organisation of society were maintained by the colonisers. Many peoples south of the Sahara were still at the stage of transition from pre-class to class society, although class 94 state formations had earlier existed in a number of areas. The people of Egypt, North Africa (Maghrib), Ethiopia, Madagascar, North Sudan, and so on, were at the feudal stage. Ethnic consolidation of related peoples was badly held back as a result of the boundaries which the imperialists had arbitrarily set between their colonial possessions. In some districts capitalist forms developed as more land was planted under cash crops, as mining advanced and urban growth began. This sapped and gradually destroyed the natural economy and feudal customs, promoting national consolidation processes, which were adverse to colonialism and helpful to the national liberation movement.

In most African countries, however, capitalism failed to reach a dominant position. The socio-economic structure of these countries presented a mosaic of social patterns, where changing tribal relations, prevailing feudal relations, and developing primary capitalist relations all coexisted in the framework of increasing oppression on the part of the colonial monopolies. The low level of the productive forces, the poor production facilities, and the policies pursued by colonial administrations acted as a brake on socio-economic change in African society.

Nevertheless, under the influence of commodity production, class differentiation and urban growth, this society gradually acquired new features. Wage labour appeared. This process was rather different in Africa than in Europe, since capitalist production had been imposed on Africa chiefly from outside. In the European countries primary accumulation of capital was accompanied by the pauperisation of the peasants, while in Africa, with its poorly, developed productive forces and rampant colonial exploitation, the larger part of the population was already destitute. Therefore, the connection between capital and labour in Africa was made primarily under extraeconomic compulsion, for example, the imposition of compulsory work for the colonisers, contractual employment, and so on. Capitalist forms of colonial production and social differentiation developed especially in the mining areas and urban centres in South, West and East Africa and in the areas producing crops for export.

In rapaciously plundering Africa without the slightest 95 regard for anything but their own class interests, the imperialists unavoidably furthered the national awakening of the African peoples. The development of capitalism brought about the disintegration of the thousands of small and isolated village communities which had existed everywhere in Africa south of the Sahara in pre-colonial days. The growth of commodity-monetary relations increasingly brought the once isolated villages into contact with each other, and that in itself was enough to reveal the identical nature of the vital interests of the different tribes and nationalities and to underline the need to wipe out the colonial regimes and set up independent states. The Africans were increasingly aware that the cause of their poverty, the high taxes and exorbitant prices, and the arbitrary treatment which they received proceeded from the barbarous nature of the colonial regimes. All this was, in the long run, a factor which hastened the development of the consolidation processes on an antiimperialist basis.

Victorious national liberation revolutions occurred in Latin America as early as the nineteenth century, making a certain amount of independent economic and social development possible there. In this respect, Latin America forged ahead of the Asian and African countries. At the same time, the Latin American republics themselves began increasingly to diverge. This process was attended by a sharp aggravation of social, political and class contradictions. Being situated close to the United States, these countries became dependent in one way or another on US imperialism. The national liberation movement assumed a democratic, anti-feudal and anti-imperialist character.

Such were the circumstances in which the majority of nations in Latin America were formed. Thus, the Brazilian ’nation took shape in a period which started when slavery was abolished (1888) and Brazil was proclaimed a republic (1889). The long period of bourgeois national consolidation in Cuba culminated in the national liberation movement of 1895-1898, which rid the Cubans of the Spanish yoke. The Uruguayan nation took shape towards the turn of the twentieth century, after the emergence of a capitalist market in the country and the appearance of the Uruguayan proletariat on the 96 political scene. In Mexico, a long process of national formation culminated in the revolution of 1910-1917.

Thus, there was a complex and uneven development of the peoples of Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America during the epoch of imperialism. This development was attended by greater internationalisation and interdependence of economic interests and ties, and also witnessed the increasing international influence of the working class. The historical process of consolidation of nations and nationalities acquired a global character, accompanied by all the deep-seated contradictions and cataclysms inherent in imperialism.

 [85•*]   V. I. Lenin, ’The State’, op. tit, Vol. 29, p. 487.

[86•*]   V. I. Lenin, ’The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up’, p. cit, Vol. 22, p. 337.

[87•*]   V. I. Lenin, ’Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism’, cit., Vol. 22, p. 241. 

[87•**]   Ibid., p. 256.

[88•*]   V. I. Lenin, ’The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up’, op. cit., p. 342.

[88•**]   V. I. Lenin, ’War and Revolution’, op. cit., Vol. 24, Moscow, 1974, p. 401.

[89•*]   V. I. Lenin, ’A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism’, op. cit., Vol. 23, p. 56.

[90•*]   The figures are quoted from: V. I. Lenin. ’Statistics and Sociology’, op. cit., Vol. 23, p. 277.