Ernest Mandel, "Marxist Economic Theory, Volume 2":
Born in Western Europe, industrial capitalism spread in the course of a
century over the entire world. But this expansion assumed a very special
form: all the countries in the world became outlets, sources of raw
material and, to a smaller extent, fields of investment for capital. But
the capitalist mode of production, and in particular the capitalist
factory, touched only the periphery of the economic life of three
continents. This is, briefly, the cause of the phenomenon is today known,
shamefacedly, by the euphemism of "underdevelopment".
While capitalism has spread all over the world, the greater part of the
world has experienced only its disintegrating effects, WITHOUT BENEFIT FROM
ITS CREATIVE SIDE. Indeed, the unlimited industrial advance of the Western
world has been possible only at the expense of the under-developed world,
which has been doomed to stagnation and regression. Three-quarters of a
century after the start of the era, the United Nations have been compelled
to recognise that in spite all the plans for aid to the under-developed
countries, COUNTRIES ARE BECOMING RICHER WHEREAS THE POOR ONES ARE BECOMING
POORER...
The export of goods to the backward countries during the nineteenth century
had the effect of destroying the old modes of production in those countries
without making possible the introduction of the new capitalist mode of
production. The export of goods made up to some extent for the inadequacy
of the native property-owning classes as regards accumulation of capital,
and so made possible an initial phase of capitalist development in these
countries. But the imperialist bourgeoisie introduced the capitalist mode
of production into the colonial semi-colonial countries in a very special
way. It developed there without any connection with the country in
question's needs for economic or industrial development, but, instead, in
accordance with exclusive interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie and of
the metropolitan country itself...
The result is a completely one-sided economic development, limited to the
production of a small number of products or even of a single product
(monoproduction, monoculture). In Chile, the tax on sodium nitrate exports
provided, on an average, half of the state's revenue between 1880 and 1930;
after that, copper took first place. In Cuba sugar is the backbone of the
economy; in 1937 it accounted for 78.7 per cent of the value of all
exports. In the same year, exports of tin from Bolivia made up 70 per cent
of all exports. This percentage is still higher in the case of cotton
exported from Egypt, the Sudan and Uganda, of oil exported from Venezuela,
Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar. Coffee provided in 1955 69 per cent
of Guatemala's exports and 84 per cent of Colombia's. In the same year
bananas made up 74 per cent of Panama's exports, and coffee and bananas
together 72 per cent of exports from Honduras, 75 per cent of those from
Ecuador, and 87 per cent of those from Costa Rica. Ground-nuts and products
derived from them represented 85 per cent of Senegal's exports, and coffee
and cacao 85 per cent of those from the Ivory Coast...
Thus, the penetration of the capitalist mode of production into the
colonial and semi-colonial countries during the last three-quarters of a
century has more than anything else produced there the DEGRADING BARBAROUS
effects of an all-round commercialisation of social life, WITHOUT THE
COMPLEMENTARY CIVILISING TENDENCIES OF CAPITAL BEING ALLOWED TO FLOWER...
===
Rosa Luxemberg, "The Junius Pamphlet":
This brutal victory parade of capital through the world, its way prepared
by every means of violence, robbery, and infamy, has its light side. It
creates the preconditions for its own final destruction. It put into place
the capitalist system of world domination, the indispensable precondition
for the socialist world revolution. This alone constitutes the cultural,
progressive side of its reputed "great work of civilization" in the
primitive lands. For bourgeois-liberal economists and politicians,
railroads, Swedish matches, sewer systems, and department stores are
"progress" and "civilization." In themselves these works grafted onto
primitive conditions are neither civilization nor progress, for they are
bought with the rapid economic and cultural ruin of peoples who must
experience simultaneously the full misery and horror of two eras: the
traditional natural economic system and the most modern and rapacious
capitalist system of exploitation. THUS, THE CAPITALIST VICTORY PARADE AND
ALL ITS WORKS BEAR THE STAMP OF PROGRESS IN THE HISTORICAL SENSE ONLY
BECAUSE THEY CREATE THE MATERIAL PRECONDITIONS FOR THE ABOLITION OF
CAPITALIST DOMINATION AND CLASS SOCIETY IN GENERAL. And in this sense
imperialism ultimately works for us.
Louis Proyect
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