Capitalism and imperialism
The rise and decline of the British Empire
My primary focus in this essay is not on the reasons or methods of the British Empire's rise , though that is certainly a crucial question for any British Marxist to understand. However, it is important that we note that one of the primary tools of the colonial expansion was the chartered company, to whom the government gave exclusive rights – a legal monopoly – to plunder other regions of the world. Take the British East India Company, the Royal Niger Company, or the British South Africa Company (run by the infamous Mr Rhodes). All these were chartered companies, and British expansion was often based on protecting their business interests and, indeed, those of the wider bourgeois class. The Royal Niger Company was formed out of a conglomeration of small British firms operating in the region. British interests in west Africa were gold and palm oil, in southern Africa were diamonds, and in east Africa were, among other things, its strategic location in relation to the Middle East, German colonies, and the Indian Ocean. In this way, imperial expansion and operations, in Britain as in America, are and always were a question of protecting the interests of the capitalist class. Let us also touch on the decline of the e mpire. The World Wars represented an economic strain that made the Empire harder and harder to sustain. Just as importantly, the growing industries of Germany, the USA, even Russia to a degree, and the broader diminishing of Britain’s economic dominance led to Britain being challenged by other powers. These other powers adopted British industrial techniques, British colonial strategy, and the protectionist policies Britain had tinkered with and developed over time in its rise to pre-eminence. Pax Britannica, the role of Britain as world police, British supremacy in a free trade system, British industrial pioneering: all these things were under threat. Eventually, events showed that it was more and more unfeasible for Britain to sustain its dominance. The overall trend produced a series of accidents, happenings, and climaxes, such as the Amritsar massacre and, famously, the Suez Crisis. A number of parallels can surely be drawn out here. The contemporary growth of Chinese and Russian economic imperialism, using the American and European modus operandi can be compared to the rise of European imperialist nations who were using British tactics; the decline of Britain’s empire can be compared with contemporary cracks in imperialism, as in Afghanistan and, to a degree, most of US imperial endeavours since 9/11.
Proletarian imperialism
One of the central contradictions of the British state and national identity is that, though the British proletariat has been brutally treated and continues to be robbed, Britain controlled the greatest empire in the world, and still plays a significant role on the world stage (though this, too, is starting to disappear). Many people think that having colonies overseas benefitted the average person, but what we need to remember is that the profits from empire went to the of Britain, to the and the of Britain. The decisions of ‘Britain’ were always the decisions of its bourgeoisie, and the empire was an empire by and for the British bourgeoisie. Wealth, as even the IMF acknowledges, does not trickle down. While it is true that, largely from the proceeds of empire, we built the Keynesian welfare state of the mid-20th century, which put a plaster over some of the exploitation of Britain’s working class – especially because we exported our exploitation abroad – , we brutally exploited the colonies. Neither the Keynesian state nor the empire exist anymore, and the public ownership state of the same era, the railways, the utilities,
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