Rod Hay wrote: >This is probably false. Both Canada and the United States relied very >heavily on foreign investment particularily during the early stage of >industrialisation. Both made it by heavy exploitation of natural resources, >but would not have been able to get these out to market without the foreign >investment in the development of the infrastructure (railways, canals,) or >the importation of foreign technology. I expect that Australia did it the >same way. This is completely ahistorical. While it was understandable that Marx could have argued similarly for British colonialism in India in his 1850s Herald Tribune articles, it makes no sense to do so today. Canada, the US and Australia were basically bourgeois settler regimes in the midst of hunter-gatherer and agrarian societies who were exterminated in order to allow for efficient exploitation of timber, fur, etc. In China and India, you had advanced feudal societies that were actually more advanced economically in many ways than the Europe which colonized them. Extermination was not feasible, so instead savage colonial regimes were imposed that both utilized the most repressive aspects of the pre-existing feudal state (the Moguls, etc.) while delivering none of the benefits. In practice, this meant that Indian and China were forestalled from accomplishing the capitalist institutions born in 17th century England. British capitalism in its colonial aspect prevented Indian capitalism from developing. This is what Marx came to believe himself, as he wrote the Russian Danielson in the 1870s that the British were only "thieves" in India. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
