Colonial Theory Question

[JazzRemington]

In the final chapter of the first volume of Capital, Marx explains how colonialism spreads capitalism. I understand that the countries that are being colonised have independent producers generally producing for themselves, as in pre-capitalist and early capitalist society, but I don't understand how a mother country turns these countries into capitalist economic systems.

Marx explains a sytem where the government puts a price on the land of the colony, which compels the worker to work harder for wages to obtain the land, and the fund generated by the sale of the land is used to export workers from the mother country to the colony. I don't understand how this system turns a country that is colonized into a capitalist economy system.

Can anyone explain to me how this happens?

[Brownfist]

This indeed is a very complicated question and needs to be analyzed country by country. Furthermore, the answer is several volumes long but I will try to briefly discuss some of the methodologies that have been employed. In majority of the case studies that I can think of capitalism in the colony is developed through linkages between the bourgeoisie and the ruling classes in the colony and the bourgeoisie in the metropole. Thus there can be a sale of raw commodities in the colony in exchange for refined commodities, foreign capital and technologies. This is further encouraged through the colonial state which allows for the establishment of transnational capital systems like international banking, but also in major projects like the development of railroad networks. This is further exacerbated through the colonial states re-regulation of economic flows within the colony, and intra-nationally, with a series of legislation that encourage the development of private property and economic systems that are predicated on capitalism.

[Rawthentic]

Well, it more like spreads imperialism, while keeping the colonial subjects in a backwards social structure. For example, before the Cuban Revolution, Cuba was kept in a backwards agrarian state by US interests and imperialism, mainly for the sugar. This stopped Cuba from progressing to capitalism.

[Severian]

Originally posted by [email protected] 03, 2007 05:37 pm
Marx explains a sytem where the government puts a price on the land of the colony, which compels the worker to work harder for wages to obtain the land, and the fund generated by the sale of the land is used to export workers from the mother country to the colony. I don't understand how this system turns a country that is colonized into a capitalist economy system.
You mean this chapter (http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch33.htm)?

OK, first of all he's not talking about colonialism in general, like what Brownfist is talking about, for that you have to see some of Marx's articles about India. for example. (http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/07/22.htm) Marx isn't talking about places that already have highly developed feudal or ancient societies.

At the end of Captial, Marx is talking about colonies in the original sense, settlements. As in North America and Australia. Places where the settlers can easily grab land to farm for themselves.

And he's not mostly aiming to explain the development of the colonies: "However, we are not concerned here with the conditions of the colonies. The only thing that interests us is the secret discovered in the new world by the Political Economy of the old world, and proclaimed on the housetops: that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the laborer."

He's using them mostly to explain the basic functioning of capitalism anywhere: that capital can't be capital without a class of propertyless wage-workers. Nobody will work for wages if they can make a living some other way. And a factory's no use without someone to work in it.

So in order to develop capitalism in North America and Australia, there had to be some way of creating a class of propertyless workers. Marx points out one proposal that was actually tried by Britain: that "the [British] Government put upon the virgin soil an artificial price, independent of the law of supply and demand, a price that compels the immigrant to work a long time for wages before he can earn enough money to buy land, and turn himself into an independent peasant." Should be apparent how this creates a class of wage-workers. Problem was, Marx points out, this just made people emigrate to the U.S. instead.

In the U.S., a working class also develops: "the enormous and ceaseless stream of men, year after year driven upon America, leaves behind a stationary sediment in the east of the United States, the wave of immigration from Europe throwing men on the labor-market there more rapidly than the wave of emigration westwards can wash them away."

I could add that it wasn't really that easy for immigrants to take up farming. Takes more than land to farm: it takes tools, seed, draft animals (or nowadays machinery), something to live on 'til harvest - in short, money. Modern historians have pointed out most wage-workers never became farmers for this reason; even those who did, probably woulda had to work for bosses for a while to earn the money to start farming.

That's where the U.S. working class came from - an essential part of turning it into a capitalist country. There's other factors, other conditions necessary to developing capitalism. But in this chapter Marx is just dealing with this one condition, in order to show: "that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property, have for their fundamental condition the annihilation of self-earned private property; in other words, the expropriation of the laborer."

"self-earned private property" is basically peasant and artisan property.

[Brownfist]

I would not recommend reading Marx on India just because it is difficult to gauge what to read. I mean some of the initial work that was done is predicated on orientalist logic and images, especially his discussion of the supposed "asiatic mode of production". But, I think that some of the later work that he did, especially post-1857 tends to be much better, especially because Marx acknowledges that the reports he uses provided a very incorrect depiction of India.