Liberalism and Imperialism, 2 sides of the same Capitalist coin…
Preamble: --2022 Update: with the author going into palliative care, it’s time to updatLiberalism and Imperialism, 2 sides of the same Capitalist coin…
Preamble: --2022 Update: with the author going into palliative care, it’s time to update this review and fill in some gaps (esp. political economy of imperialism). --I am most interested in the materialist structures (political economy: production/distribution) behind “liberalism” rather than getting lost in the cultural spillover effects. What drives our notions of “progress”, “growth” and “cosmopolitanism” behind liberalism? Instead of merely dwelling in ideas (where we are a bundle of contradictions), what about the production/distribution of real-world capitalism (i.e. commodification of society for endless private accumulation) from the 1600 East India Company and 1694 Bank of England to today’s Amazon and Wall Street? --Meanwhile, this critical examination of real-world history/political economy is buried. “History” starts with names and dates; names of the great men who won (and their perspectives) and dates of singular events (noisy surface phenomenon which barely reveal the underlying structures). Next, “economics” takes the winners, abstracts away interrelations (ex. imperialism), and builds a vulgar utopian (insert “free” to everything) model devoid of real-world application (power, class, contradictions, crises). --What we are left with, once we remove the politically-correct facade, is enlightened (industrious + humane) Western liberalism burdened with bringing civilization to the backward, coloured continents.
The bones of history: --On one side, the colonizers bask in their spoils while looking away from the ruins of the other side. Critical books like this one are not meant to simply cross to the other side and pick through the bones; they are meant to rebuild historical context. --Consider: a common capitalist ploy to make socialism/communism scary is comparing “communist famines” with the mass consumerism of capitalism. On the surface this seems so obvious. Let’s first unpack “capitalist mass consumerism”, and then “communist famines”:
a) “Capitalist mass consumerism”: first, consider the decreases in living standards of the masses upon the introduction of capitalism. This initial capitalist accumulation in the real-world requires the violent enforcement of the land market (private “enclosures” of “Commons” common land), forcing the creation of the labour market of masses dispossessed and thus can only sell their labour (a crucial input for capitalist production). Introduced in Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails. …Thus, conditions for (domestic) masses only recovered (ex. English workers’ 300+ years of struggle 1500-1800s) after workers organized to struggle for proto-socialist/socialist reforms (social services esp. public sanitation/health, less atrocious working conditions, welfare, etc.). A summary of this decolonization perspective is found in Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World and detailed in Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital. …Capitalism's global relations have been tidal waves of dispossession during booms and busts (colonial loot/slave trade/drug trade workhouses/dark satanic mills of the Industrial revolution/military industrial complex). No doubt the real-world has many contradictions; capitalist property rights’ sheer abstraction ensures mass social consent required to mobilize and squeeze the masses to unleash vast productive powers. ...Capitalist technology is driven by private accumulation for the few; “mass consumerism” only reached the (domestic) masses after the 2 greatest wars in human history; WWI from the collision of imperialist rivalries; WWII from capitalism’s Great Crash and endless Great Depression that spawned fascism’s attempt to revive capitalist production. …World destruction was the only excuse capitalists could tolerate for risking enough social planning which revolutionized production/technologies. The risk is the realization that we don’t need the absentee shareholders/bondholders and private bankers behind capitalist property rights (remember: management is a waged occupation; shareholding/capital gains/collecting interest is not work) and can instead plan our economy for social needs. War is tolerable because it is inherently hierarchical and driven by short-term pillaging, like a corporation: The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. …Capitalists were gifted with so much new technologies by the planned war economy, but the irrationality of a society driven by capitalist accumulation meant returning to the Great Depression when the war markets of WWII world destruction ended. This is when capitalists finally shifted to “mass consumerism” (and the welfare state compromise to catch up to the USSR on social services), but for many war industries (esp. the “near bankrupt aircraft industry”: Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation) this was not enough (while other industries quickly reached overproduction/market saturation, thus requiring built-in obsolescence (Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage) and a colossal advertising industry of dissatisfaction/social addiction (Captains Of Consciousness: Advertising And The Social Roots Of The Consumer Culture). Hence, the Cold War and the Military Industrial Complex war spending's continuous centrality to the US economy since WWII.
b) “Communist famines”: just what is the starting point of our comparison? How convenient it is to compare capitalist winners (and not the capitalist losers, i.e. the colonized!) who already went through industrialization over centuries, on the backs of slavery/dark satanic mills/colonialism/settler colonialism that (surprise!) include the communist countries. Meanwhile, 20th century revolutions started from feudal backwaters/colonized destitution (pre-revolution China was the "Sick Man of Asia" with a life expectancy in the 30's), going through rapid industrialization/urbanization/agrarian reforms in decades in a hostile capitalist world, i.e. economic sanctions (US’s total trade embargo on post-revolution China 1950-1972 and continuing embargo on post-revolution Cuba) and “war communism” of USSR being mutilated from Civil War’s imperialist invasion/direct Nazi invasion/Cold War arms race arms chase more accurately, see: The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. …Next, let's take the biggest bogeyman: China’s Mao-era famines. More honest liberals (not surprisingly originating in the Global South, i.e. not the imperialist winners) like Amartya Sen are willing to make non-ludicrous comparisons: post-independence China under a communist party/“socialism with Chinese characteristics” vs. post-independence India under liberalism (parliamentary “democracy” + driven by capitalist markets). The results are something you just do not hear in our “free marketplace of ideas”, which I summarize at the bottom of this review: Capitalism: A Ghost Story …For more, see: 1) Vijay Prashad on imperialist ideological censorship: https://youtu.be/6jKcsHv3c74 2) ...on comparing countries ("the world's largest democracy" India and "authoritarian" China): https://youtu.be/4hz5sXYiBo8 3) Michael Parenti on comparing countries: https://youtu.be/npkeecCErQc 4) Global South decolonization and self-determination: The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World and https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS...
Highlights: --My apologies if the above is already obvious; in the spirit of uncensored histories, I felt the preamble was necessary. Finally, onto the book (note: I've filled in gaps in political economy, with sources):
1) History of the Visible Fist: --Civilizations of China and India were non-capitalist: these were “societies with markets”, not “market societies” (as mentioned earlier, capitalism = driven by endless private accumulation from the commodification of society via land market/labour market, and increasingly stock/financial markets + private investment banking). China/India were also global leaders in traded goods and were only overtaken by violent conquest (instead of utopic “free trade”/”free market” competition), where Britain’s superior violence (no doubt refined from centuries of European religious wars) smashed Indian manufacturers and turned them into growing opium to force-sell to China (after superior violence in the Opium Wars). Finally, Britain could fix its trade imbalance with Asia, as prior to this Britain’s only worthwhile traded commodity to offer was silver/gold from settler colonial pillaging. --Of course, on the back of the tidal waves of violence, Britain could establish more abstract (once again: social consent, long-term) economic imperialism. Britain’s industrialization policy contradicted “free trade” propaganda because domestic “infant industries” in manufacturing must be protected (protectionism) and nurtured against global competition of superior foreign manufacturing. Once British manufacturing became dominant, Britain could preach “free trade” to prevent competitors from the same tactic of “infant industry protection” and keep them as cheap raw materials exporters to feed British manufacturing. This is popularized to the liberal mainstream in Ha-Joon Chang’s “kicking away the ladder”Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism, but we can bypass Chang's US enlightenment lens with The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions, and related: The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry. --The book’s last quarter maps out British imperialism amidst imperialist competition, where British free trade policy (including opening its domestic market to industrial imports i.e. US/German) eventually led to second-rate technology compared to US and German tariff-protected state-subsidized innovations. The crucial point here is British imperialism's pillaging of India/China allowed the British Empire to sustain such deficits with rising US/Germany during the Late Victorian era, thus a triangular colonial arrangement that indirectly subsidized US/German industrialization. See the dense but essential Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present which compares this “triangular colonial arrangement” with the other major phases of capitalism.
2) Politics of Capitalist Famines: --Tens of millions died of famines during the Late Victorian era (1876-1902). Are we to believe the ancient civilizations of China and India are destined for “overpopulation” and starvation? Davis details the political nature of mass famines. China and India had numerous adaptations (price control, grain surplus granaries/redistribution mechanisms, hydraulic infrastructure to handle floods/irrigation) but these all collapsed as British imperialism forced both countries to become cheap exporters to feed global capitalism. --Capitalist famines resulted not from absolute food scarcity, but from high food prices of laissez-faire market, as State famine relief and ecological regulation were demolished. The dispossessed died next to railroads that shipped food away for export. Profit (and racism) over people. See “The Divide” mentioned earlier, as global capitalism continues to kill millions annually due not to lack of resources/overpopulation (Too Many People?: Population, Immigration, and the Environmental Crisis) but due to maldistribution of imperialist trade pillaging via capitalist markets/property rights.
3) Non-capitalist Famine Relief: --Details of China and India’s prior famine relief infrastructure was fascinating. While European peasants had no guarantee of subsistence as a human right despite European liberalism’s “Age of Reason”, French Physiocrats (precursors of Classical political economy) marveled at China’s mobilization for famine relief. Never believe “there is no alternative”. --I’m curious to read more on Classical political economy Adam Smith’s perspectives on China (Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century. Despite being vulgarized to just the “Invisible Hand” bringing the best social outcome from selfish individuals, moral philosopher Smith wrote an entire book (The Theory of Moral Sentiments) on his moral assumptions prior to his “The Wealth of Nations”.
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