Imperialism 2 review
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Again, the voices of protest-from the Paris Commune to the Bolsheviks-had little resonance. This time, it was the famous “civilizing mission.” The voices that expressed the clearest thinking at the time were those of cynical bourgeoises, like Cecil Rhodes, who envisaged colonial conquest so as to avoid social revolution in England. But again, European opinion-including the workers’ movement of the Second International-did not see these realities and accepted the new legitimizing discourse of capital.
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“To open the markets”-like the market for opium forced on the Chinese by the Puritans of England-and to seize the natural resources of the globe were the real motives here, as everyone knows today. The second phase of imperialist devastation was based on the industrial revolution and manifested itself in the colonial subjection of Asia and Africa. And if I do not cite here either the famous “American revolution” or that of the Spanish colonies that soon followed, it is because those only transferred the power of decision from the metropolis to the colonists so that they could go on doing the same thing, pursue the same project with even greater brutality, but without having to share the profits with the “mother country.”
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The first revolution of the Western Hemisphere was that of the slaves of Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti) at the end of the eighteenth century, followed more than a century later by the Mexican revolution of the decade of 1910, and fifty years after that by the Cuban revolution. The disastrous results of this first chapter of world capitalist expansion produced, some time later, the forces of liberation that challenged the logics that produced them. Nevertheless, the contemporary Europeans accepted the ideological discourse that justified them, and the voices of protest-that of Las Casas, for example-did not find many sympathetic listeners. For whereas the Catholic Spaniards acted in the name of the religion that had to be imposed on conquered peoples, the Anglo-Protestants took from their reading of the Bible the right to wipe out the “infidels.” The infamous slavery of the Blacks, made necessary by the extermination of the Indians-or their resistance-briskly took over to ensure that the useful parts of the continent were “turned to account.” No one today has any doubt as to the real motives for all these horrors or is ignorant of their intimate relation to the expansion of mercantile capital. The fundamental racism of the Anglo-Saxon colonists explains why this model was reproduced elsewhere, in Australia, in Tasmania (the most complete genocide in history), and in New Zealand. The net result was the destruction of the Indian civilizations and their Hispanicization- Christianization, or simply the total genocide on which the United States was built. The first phase of this devastating enterprise was organized around the conquest of the Americas, in the framework of the mercantilist system of Atlantic Europe at the time. The imperialist conquest of the planet by the Europeans and their North American children was carried out in two phases and is perhaps entering a third. Imperialism is not a stage, not even the highest stage, of capitalism: from the beginning, it is inherent in capitalism’s expansion. This article is a reconstruction from notes of a talk delivered at the World Social Forum meeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil in January 2001. He is the author of numerous books and articles including Spectres of Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998).
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SAMIR AMIN is director of the African Office (in Dakar, Senegal) of the Third World Forum, an international non-governmental association for research and debate. Topics: Imperialism Political Economy Stagnation