Imperialism is the political expression of the process of the accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle over the unspoiled remainder of the non-capitalist world environment. Geographically, this environment still comprises huge areas of the earth’s surface. However, this remaining field for the expansion of capital appears as an ever-diminishing residue taking into account both the enormous mass of already accumulated capital in the old capitalist countries, which is vying for markets for its surplus product as well as for opportunities to capitalize its surplus value, and the rate at which areas of precapitalist civilization are transformed into capitalist ones—in other words, given the high level of development of the productive forces of capital that has already been achieved. The international behavior of capital on the world stage is shaped accordingly. Imperialism’s force and the violence exerted by it—both in its aggressive action toward the noncapitalist world and in the sharpening antagonisms between the competing capitalist countries—are heightened in tandem with the development of the capitalist countries and the increasingly fierce competition between them to acquire noncapitalist areas. Yet the more violently, forcefully, and thoroughly imperialism brings about the decline of noncapitalist civilizations, the more rapidly it removes the very basis for the accumulation of capital. As much as imperialism is a historical method to prolong the existence of capital, objectively it is at the same time the surest way to bring this existence to the swiftest conclusion. This does not mean that this endpoint has literally to be reached. The tendency toward this terminal point of capitalist development manifests itself in forms that configure the final phase of capitalism as a period of catastrophes.
Hopes for a peaceful development of capital accumulation, for “trade and industry, which can only flourish in peace,” and the whole semi-official Manchester ideology of a harmony of interests between the trading nations of the world—the other side of the harmony of interests between capital and labor—derive from the Sturm und Drang period of classical economics; such hopes seemed to be validated in practice during the brief era of free trade in Europe in the 1860s and 1870s. The foundation on which these hopes are based is the false doctrine of the British free trade school that commodity exchange is the only presupposition of, and condition for, the accumulation of capital, and that the latter is identical with the commodity economy. As has been shown, the whole Ricardian school identified the accumulation of capital and the conditions for its reproduction with simple commodity production and the conditions for simple circulation. This was subsequently to become even more evident in the practice of the free trader vulgaris. The whole argument of the Cobden League* was tailored to the particular interests of the exporting cotton-manufacturers of Lancashire. Their main focus was to gain access to new markets, and their article of faith can be stated as follows: “we must purchase from abroad, so that we can find buyers to whom we can sell our industrial products—i.e. our cotton textiles.” The consumer in whose name [Richard] Cobden and [John] Bright made demands for free trade, and above all for cheaper food, was not the worker (a consumer of bread), but the capitalist (a consumer of labor-power).
This gospel never constituted the true expression of the interests of capital accumulation as a whole. In the U.K. itself, it had already been given the lie in the 1840s, when the harmony of interests of trading nations was proclaimed to the thunder of cannons in the Opium Wars in the Far East; with the annexation of Hong Kong, this doctrine turned into its opposite, that of the system of “spheres of interest.”357 On the European continent, the free trade of the 1860s did not represent the interests of industrial capital, because the leading free trade nations there were still at that time predominantly agrarian countries, in which the development of large-scale industry was still relatively feeble. The free trade system was instead implemented as a measure to facilitate the political constitution of the central European states. Under the policy of [Otto Teodor von] Manteuffel and [Otto von] Bismarck in Germany, it represented a specifically Prussian means in order to force Austria out of the German Confederation and the Customs Union, and to constitute the new German Empire under Prussian leadership.† From an economic point of view, free trade here was only in the interests of commercial capital, especially that of the Hanseatic cities, oriented as they were toward international trade, and in those of agrarian consumers; as far as German states’ own industry was concerned, the iron industry was only won over with great difficulty to the idea of conceding the abolition of the Rhine tolls for the sake of free trade, whereas the southern German cotton industry remained resolutely opposed, and demanded the retention of protective tariffs. In France, the most favored nation treaties, which laid the foundations for the free trade system in the whole of Europe, were concluded by Napoleon III without the consent, and even against the will, of the firm majority in parliament, which was composed of industrialists and landowners, and was in favor of retaining protective tariffs. The government of the [French] Second Empire only resorted to the free trade treaties themselves as an expedient, with the acquiescence of the U.K., in order to circumvent the opposition of the French parliament and to impose free trade behind the back of the legislature via the international route. The first constitutive treaty between France and the U.K. was simply presented to French public opinion as a fait accompli.358 Between 1853 and 1862, the previous system of protective tariffs was dismantled by 32 separate imperial decrees, which were then rubber-stamped en masse by the legislature in 1863, with scant regard for the formal process. In Italy, the dependence of [Camilio Benso] Cavour’s policy* on French backing dictated the adoption of a free trade agenda. In 1870, an inquiry opened under the pressure of public opinion revealed the lack of support for the free trade policy among interested groups. Finally, in Russia, the trend toward free trade in the 1860s was initially a mere preliminary to the creation of a broad foundation for the commodity economy and for large-scale industry; it was only during this period that serfdom was abolished and a railway network established.359
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*The Anti–Corn Law league, founded in 1838 by Richard Cobden and John Bright for the purpose of ending tariffs on imported wheat; the campaign was aimed to undermine the power of the British landowning aristocracy. The Corn Laws were abolished in 1846.
†Prussia forced Austria out of the German Confederation in the Seven Weeks War of 1866. This proved instrumental in the formation of the German Empire in 1870.
It was clear from the very outset, then, that the international system of free trade would constitute no more than a fleeting episode in the history of capital accumulation. For this reason alone, it is perverse to attempt to explain the general reversion to protective tariffs since the end of the 1870s as merely a defensive reaction to British free trade.360
Several facts speak against such an explanation: in Germany, as well as in France and Italy, the leading role in the reversion to protective tariffs was played by agrarian interests, which were in competition not with the U.K., but with the U.S.; furthermore, it was not so much against the U.K. that the emerging homegrown industry in Russia and Italy needed to be protected, for example, but rather against Germany and France, respectively. Nor was the protracted general depression on the world market since the crisis of the 1870s, which engendered a readiness to embrace protective tariffs, bound up with the U.K.’s monopoly to any great extent. The general cause of the volte-face on the question of protective tariffs thus lay deeper than this. The pure standpoint of commodity exchange, which was the origin of the illusions of a harmony of interests on the world market harbored by the adherents of the free trade doctrine, was abandoned as soon as large-scale industrial capital had gained enough of a foothold in the most important countries in continental Europe to gain an awareness of the conditions of its accumulation. That which now came to the foreground was the antagonistic character of these conditions, and the competitive struggle over the noncapitalist milieu, both of which ran counter to the reciprocity of interests of the capitalist states.
At the very inception of the free trade era, the Far East was opened up by the Opium Wars in China, and European capital began to gain ground in Egypt. Throughout the 1880s, in parallel with the return to protective tariffs, the policy of expansion was pursued with increasing force in an uninterrupted sequence of events: the British occupation of Egypt [in 1882], the German colonial conquests in Africa,* the French occupation of Tunisia [in 1881] and expedition to Tonkin [from 1883 to 1885], Italy’s advances into Assab and Massawa, the Abyssinian War and the formation of Eritrea,† and the British conquests in South Africa.‡ The conflict between Italy and France over the sphere of interest in Tunisia§ represented the characteristic prelude to the Franco–Italian customs war seven years later [in 1888 to 1889], which formed a dramatic epilogue to the end of the free trade harmony of interests on the European continent. For capital, the solution was now to monopolize noncapitalist areas for its expansion, both within the old capitalist states as well as overseas, while free trade (the “open door” policy) became a specific form of the defenselessness of noncapitalist countries in the face of international capital and its competitive equilibrium, and constituted a preliminary stage of their partial or total occupation as colonies or as spheres of interest. If the U.K. alone has remained true to free trade, this is first and foremost bound up with its status as the oldest colonial empire and its possession of vast noncapitalist areas; these provided it from the outset with an operational basis offering the prospect of virtually unconfined capital accumulation, and in practice placed it beyond competition from other countries, at least until very recently. This is the reason for the universal drive toward protective tariffs, as capitalist countries seek to close themselves off from each other, even as international trade between them is constantly increasing and they are becoming ever more dependent upon each other for the material conditions of reproduction, and even though protective tariffs have now become utterly redundant from the standpoint of the technical development of the productive forces, even leading in many instances to the artificial preservation of antiquated forms of production. The internal contradiction within the international policy of protective tariffs, like the contradictory character of the international credit system, is a mere reflection of the historical contradiction that has arisen between the interests of accumulation—i.e. those of the realization and capitalization of surplus value, of expansion—and the pure standpoint of commodity exchange.
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*Cavour allied himself with France for the purpose of facilitating the unification of Italy in the 1860s. He actually promoted free trade policies prior to his alliance with Napoleon III, when he served as prime minister to Piedmont-Sardinia in the early 1850s. He later expanded these to the whole of Italy when he became Italy’s first prime minister.
A palpable expression of this is the fact that the modern system of high protective tariffs was essentially introduced as the basis on which capitalist states could strengthen their military capabilities in line with colonial expansion and the intensifying antagonisms within the capitalist milieu. In Germany, as in France, Italy, and Russia, the reversion to protective tariffs went hand-in-hand with the expansion of the armed forces, and was implemented for this purpose, constituting the basis for the European system of competitive armament that started at that time, as states increased the military capabilities first of their armies, and then of their navies. The continental military system, whose main focus was the army, corresponded to the European system of free trade; this has now given way to the protective tariff as the basis for, and supplement to, the imperialist military system, which increasingly revolves around naval power.
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*Germany occupied what is now Tanzania, Namibia, and Togo, beginning in the mid-1880s.
†Italy invaded Massawa, a city in Eritrea, in 1885. It annexed it in 1888, and shortly thereafter made Eritrea an Italian colony. In 1895 it attempted to conquer Ethiopia (Abyssinia), without success.
‡The U.K. began its conquest of South Africa in 1806, when it took control of Cape Town, and it brought the entire country under its rule by the end of the Second Boer War in 1902.
§France took control of Tunisia in 1881, after rebuffing the efforts of Italy to secure it as its colony.
As a concrete, historical process, capitalist accumulation as a whole thus has two different facets. The first of these consists in the process that occurs at the point of production of surplus value—in the factories, the mines, the farms—and on the commodity market. Viewed from this aspect alone, accumulation is an economic process whose most important phase is played out between the capitalist and the wage laborer, but it is one that moves exclusively within the confines of commodity exchange—the exchange of equivalents—in both phases (i.e. both within the sphere of production and that of circulation). Here, on the level of form, it is peace, property, and equality that prevail, and it required the acute dialectic of a scientific analysis to expose the way in which, during the process of accumulation, the right of property turns into the appropriation of alien property, commodity exchange turns into exploitation, and equality turns into class domination.
The other dimension of capital accumulation consists in a process that takes place between capital and noncapitalist forms of production. Its setting is the world stage. In this case, the dominant methods are those of colonial policy, the system of international credit, the policy of spheres of interest, and war. Here violence, fraud, oppression, and plunder are displayed quite openly, without any attempt to disguise them, and it requires a lot of effort to uncover the strict laws governing the economic process beneath this turmoil of political violence and trials of strength.
Bourgeois liberal theory only takes one side of this process into consideration, namely the sphere of “peaceful competition,” the marvels of technology, and pure commodity exchange; it thus separates off the other dimension of capitalist accumulation, the realm of capital’s thunderous shows of force, which it holds to be more or less contingent expressions of “foreign policy,” from the economic domain of capital.
In reality, political violence is nothing but a vehicle for the economic process; both sides of capital accumulation are organically bound up with each other through the very conditions of the reproduction of capital, and it is only together that they result in the historical trajectory of capital. Capital does not merely come into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt,”* it also imposes itself on the world step by step in the same way, thus preparing its own demise amid ever more violent convulsions.
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*Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 926.