Notes on Imperialism

  1. Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist
    Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist
    What is Imperialism?
    By Gregory Zinoviev
    http://www.marxists.org/archive/zino...ks/x01/x01.htm

    The cheapness of the articles produced by machinery, and the improved means of transport and communication furnish the weapons for conquering foreign markets. By ruining handicraft production in other countries, machinery forcibly converts them into fields for the supply of its raw material. In this way East India was compelled to produce cotton, wool, hemp, jute and indigo for Great Britain. By constantly making a part of the hands “super-numerary.” modern industry, in ail countries where it has taken root, gives a spur to emigration and to the colonization of foreign lands, which are thereby converted into settlements for the growing of the raw material of the mother country; just as Australia, for example, was converted into a colony for growing wool. A new and international division of labor, a division suited to the requirement of the chief center of modern industry springs up and converts one part of the globe into a chiefly agricultural field of production, for supplying the other part, which remains a chiefly industrial field. This revolution hangs together with radical changes in agriculture. (Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Pt. IV, p. 453. London, 1901. Moore-Aveling trans.)