Neil Faulkner > Quotes

“The bourgeoisie is leading its society to complete bankruptcy. It is capable of providing the people with neither bread nor peace. This is precisely why it cannot any longer tolerate the democratic order.”
― Neil Faulkner, A Marxist History of the World: From Neanderthals to Neoliberals

“The purpose of any economic system should be to produce the goods and services people need to live full and happy lives. But that is not the purpose of capitalism. Capitalism is a system of competitive capital accumulation driven by profit and the enrichment of the few. The drive for profit – as much as possible, as quick as possible, no matter how – had created the speculative bubble of the late 1920s. Now, in the crash, shoring up profits meant cutting wages, slashing services, and choking trade, thereby plunging the world into permanent slump.”
― Neil Faulkner, A Marxist History of the World: From Neanderthals to Neoliberals

“When wages are squeezed to reduce costs and raise profits, workers cannot afford to buy the goods that their labour has produced. But if wages increase and profits are reduced, capitalists have no incentive to invest. The search for profit powers the system.”
― Neil Faulkner, A Marxist History of the World: From Neanderthals to Neoliberals

“Most workers under capitalism have ‘mixed consciousness’. This arises from the interaction of three factors. First, because the system is based on exploitation, oppression, and violence, it engenders resentment and resistance in its victims. The class struggle is endemic to capitalism. On the other hand, the dominant ideas of society are those of the ruling class, and most workers accept at least some of these ideas for much of the time. What strengthens these ideas is a third factor: the fact that workers often lack the confidence to fight because the balance of class forces seems unfavourable.”
― Neil Faulkner, A Marxist History of the World: From Neanderthals to Neoliberals

“The contrast with the situation on the Atlantic seaboard was remarkable. The British had abolished the slave trade in 1807, slavery itself in 1833. The Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron, charged with enforcement, seized 1,600 ships and freed 150,000 Africans between 1807 and 1860. The effect was to reduce transatlantic trafficking to a fraction of what it had been in its eighteenth-century heyday. But as the West African trade collapsed, the East African trade surged to unprecedented levels.”
― Neil Faulkner, Empire and Jihad: The Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870-1920

“What unfolded in North-East Africa in the half century or so between 1870 and 1920 was not a collision between progress and reaction, between civilisation and barbarism, but one between two systems of domination and oppression, one that was new – the coolie capitalism of European empires – and one that was old – the slave system of Middle Eastern potentates. But these were not the only alternatives. In the womb of an increasingly globalised market economy, the ideals of liberalism, nationalism, and even socialism were gaining traction. Some men and women aspired to remake their own countries in the image of the European powers that otherwise threatened them.”
― Neil Faulkner, Empire and Jihad: The Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870-1920

“The matter of the East African trade would come to be viewed through an orientalist lens: a confirmation of the essential barbarism of the East, of Arabs, Turks, and Egyptians, and indeed of the Islamic faith.”
― Neil Faulkner, Empire and Jihad: The Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870-1920

“The demand was for ivory and slaves; and this was happy coincidence, for ivory was heavy and the only means of transport through the bush was human porters, and the fact that both could be sold when the cargo came to market doubled the profit.”
― Neil Faulkner, Empire and Jihad: The Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870-1920

“Across Europe, conservatives alarmed by the rise of labour were discovering antidotes in nationalism, racism, and jingoism. Intellectuals, politicians, industrialists, and empire-builders embraced the idea that the masses – the dark, threatening masses stirring in the social depths – could perhaps be distracted by a new kind of ‘bread and circuses’: the glory of empire. French philologist, philosopher, and historian Ernest Renan was explicit: it was ‘the only way to counter socialism’, and ‘a nation that does not colonise is condemned to end up with socialism, to experience a war between rich and poor’. Cecil Rhodes, the diamond magnate and colonial pioneer who did more than anyone to establish British imperial rule in Southern Africa, found himself thinking along precisely these lines after witnessing a rowdy meeting of the unemployed in East London. ‘On my way home,’ he later recalled, ‘I pondered over the scene, and I became more than ever convinced of the importance of imperialism … The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.”
― Neil Faulkner, Empire and Jihad: The Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870-1920

“The Condition of the Working Class in England”
― Neil Faulkner, Empire and Jihad: The Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870-1920