Ideals and Ideologies by Ball Terence

Author:Ball, Terence.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317232315
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

IMPERIALISM: THE HIGHEST STAGE OF CAPITALISM

… When nine-tenths of Africa had been seized (by 1900), when the whole world had been divided up, inevitably there arrived the era of monopoly colonial possession and, consequently, of particularly acute struggle for the division and the repartition of the world.

The extent to which monopolistic capitalism has intensified all the contradictions of capitalism is generally known. It suffices to point to the high cost of living and to the tyranny of the cartels. This intensification of contradictions constitutes the most powerful driving force of the transitional period of history that began with the time of the final victory of global finance capital.

Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination rather than the striving for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations—all this has given birth to those distinctive features of imperialism that compel us to characterize it as parasitic or decaying capitalism. More and more prominently there emerges, as one of the tendencies of imperialism, the creation of the “rentier state,” the usurer state, in which the bourgeoisie lives increasingly on the export of capital and by “clipping coupons.” It would be a mistake to believe that this tendency to decay precludes the rapid growth of capitalism. No. In the epoch of imperialism, certain branches of industry, certain strata of the bourgeoisie, certain nations demonstrate now one and now another of these tendencies to a greater or lesser degree. On the whole, capitalism is growing immeasurably faster than ever; but not only is this growth becoming more uneven in general, but this unevenness also manifests itself in part in the decay of countries that are richest in capital (Britain).

In regard to the rapidity of Germany’s economic development, [Jakob] Riesser, the author of the study on big German banks, states: “The progress of the preceding period (1848–70), which was not overly slow, relates to the speed of all economic development in Germany, including its banks, during the present period (1870–1905) in approximately the same way that the speed of the mail coach in the good old days relates to the speed of the contemporary automobile, which races so swiftly that it becomes a danger both to the innocent pedestrian, and to the occupants of the car themselves.” In its turn, this extraordinarily quickly-growing finance capital—precisely because it has grown so quickly—is not against transitioning to a more “tranquil” possession of colonies that are subject to seizure, and not only by peaceful means, from richer nations. Meanwhile, in the United States, economic development in the last decades proceeded even more rapidly than in Germany, and precisely thanks to this fact, the parasitic features of this newest form of American capitalism have emerged with particular prominence. On the other hand, a comparison of, say, the republican American bourgeoisie with the monarchist Japanese or German bourgeoisie demonstrates that the greatest political distinction diminishes to an extreme degree in the epoch of imperialism—not because it is

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.