On Colonialism

Cuadernos de Pasado y Presente #37

by Karl Marx, Carl Marx, Friedrich Engels

In the articles collected in this volume Karl Marx and Frederick Engels deal with the history of colonialism and provide a Marxist analysis of the economic causes colonial policy. Most of these articles were written in the 1850s when mighty anti-colonialist movements developed in Asia.

Genres: Economics, Politics, Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Social Science, Theory

388 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

With the help of Friedrich Engels, German philosopher and revolutionary Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867-1894), works, which explain historical development in terms of the interaction of contradictory economic forces, form many regimes, and profoundly influenced the social sciences.

German social theorist Friedrich Engels collaborated with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto in 1848 and on numerous other works.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin in London opposed Communism of Karl Marx with his antithetical anarchy.

Works of Jacques Martin Barzun include Darwin, Marx, Wagner (1941).

The Prussian kingdom introduced a prohibition on Jews, practicing law; in response, a man converted to Protestantism and shortly afterward fathered Karl Marx.

Marx began co-operating with Bruno Bauer on editing Philosophy of Religion of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (see Democritus and Epicurus), doctoral thesis, also engaged Marx, who completed it in 1841. People described the controversial essay as "a daring and original piece... in which Marx set out to show that theology must yield to the superior wisdom." Marx decided to submit his thesis not to the particularly conservative professors at the University of Berlin but instead to the more liberal faculty of University of Jena, which for his contributed key theory awarded his Philosophiae Doctor in April 1841. Marx and Bauer, both atheists, in March 1841 began plans for a journal, entitled Archiv des Atheismus (Atheistic Archives), which never came to fruition.

Marx edited the newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844 in Paris. The urging of the Prussian government from France banished and expelled Marx in absentia; he then studied in Brussels. He joined the league in 1847 and published.

Marx participated the failure of 1848 and afterward eventually wound in London. Marx, a foreigner, corresponded for several publications of United States.
He came in three volumes. Marx organized the International and the social democratic party.

Marx in a letter to C. Schmidt once quipped, "All I know is that I am not a Marxist," as Warren Allen Smith related in Who's Who in Hell .

People describe Marx, who most figured among humans. They typically cite Marx with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, the principal modern architects.

Bertrand Russell later remarked of non-religious Marx, "His belief that there is a cosmic ... called dialectical materialism, which governs ... independently of human volitions, is mere mythology" ( Portraits from Memory , 1956).

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bi...
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/...
http://www.historyguide.org/intellect...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/...
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/t...

Reviews

[Reid tries to read]

Revolution in China and in Europe (may 20th, 1853): Marx lays out the basics of imperialism as I understand it: “notwithstanding California and Australia, notwithstanding the immense and unprecedented emigration, there must ever, without any particular accident, in due time arrive at a moment when the extension of the markets is unable to keep pace with the extension of British manufactures, and this disproportion must bring about a new crisis with the same certainty as it has done in the past… if one of the great markets suddenly becomes contracted, the arrival of the crisis is necessarily accelerated thereby.” (p. 18)

How the ‘weakest-chain’ of imperialism threatens the whole system: “The contraction of so important a market as China will coincide with a deficient harvest in Western Europe, and, therefore, with rising prices of meat, corn, and all other agricultural produce. Hence contracted markets for manufactures, because every rise in the prices of the first necessaries of life is counterbalanced, at home and abroad, by a corresponding reduction in the demand for manufactures….the Chinese revolution will throw the spark into the overloaded mine of the present industrial system and cause the explosion of the long-prepared general crisis, which, spreading abroad, will be closely followed by political revolutions on the Continent” (p. 20-21)

The British Rule In India (June 10, 1853): Marx admits the brutality of English colonialism in India: “There cannot, however, remain any doubt but that the misery inflicted by the British on Hindustan is of an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindustan had to suffer before… England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society without any symptoms of reconstruction yet appearing. This loss of his old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindu, and separates Hindusta… from the whole of its past history.” (p. 33-34)

English colonialism/capitalism as ‘revolutionary’: “English interference, having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindu spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest and, to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia…Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies.” (p. 37-38)

“England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.” (p. 39)
THE INDIAN QUESTION—IRISH TENANT RIGHT (June 28,1853):
“A (Irish) tenant having incorporated his capital, in one form or another, in the land, and having thus effected an improvement of the soil, either directly by irrigation, drainage, manure, or indirectly by construction of buildings for agricultural purposes, in steps the landlord with demand for increased rent…If he resists, he will be very unceremoniously ejected, and supplanted by a new tenant, the latter being enabled to pay a higher rent by the very expenses incurred by his predecessors, until he also, in his turn, has become an improver of the land, and is replaced in the same way… If the tenant was industrious and enterprising, he became taxed in consequence of his very industry and enterprise. If, on the contrary, he grew inert and negligent, he was reproached with the ‘aboriginal faults of the Celtic race.’ He had, accordingly, no other alternative left but to become a pauper to pauperize himself by industry, or to pauperize by negligence.” (p. 55-56)

THE FUTURE RESULTS OF THE BRITISH RULE IN INDIA (June 22, 1853): “How came it that English supremacy was established in India? The paramount power of the Great Mogul was broken by the Mogul Viceroys. The power of the Viceroys was broken by the Mahrattas. The power of the Mahrattas was broken by the Afghans, and while all were struggling against all, the Briton rushed in and was enabled to subdue them all… A country not only divided between Mohammedan and Hindu, but between tribe and tribe, between caste and caste…were they not the predestined prey to conquest?” (p. 83)

“India, then, could not escape the fate of being conquered, and the whole of her past history, if it be anything, is the history of the successive conquests she has undergone. Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history, is but the history of the successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society.” (p. 83)

“England has to fulfill a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating—the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia. Arabs, Turks, Tartars, Moguls, who had successively overrun India, soon became Hinduized, the barbarian con- querors being, by an eternal law of history, conquered themselves by the superior civilization of their subjects. The British were the first conquerors superior, and, therefore, inaccessible to Hindu civilization. They destroyed it by breaking up the native communities, by uprooting the native industry, and by levelling all that was great and elevated in the native society. The historic pages of their rule in India report hardly anything beyond that destruction. The work of regeneration hardly transpires through a heap of ruins. Nevertheless it has begun. The political unity of India, more consolidated, and ex- tending farther than it ever did under the Great Moguls was the first condition of its regeneration. That unity, imposed by the British sword, will now be strengthened and perpetuated by the electric telegraph.” (p. 84)

Just entirely wrong here: “The introduction of railways may be easily made to subserve agricultural purposes by the formation of tanks, where ground is required for embankment, and by the conveyance of water along the different lines. Thus irrigation, the sine qua non of farming in the East, might be greatly extended, and the frequently recurring local famines, arising from the want of water, would be averted.” (p. 85-86)

How British colonialism will modernize India, and is therefore progressive: “the English millocracy intend to endow India with railways with the exclusive view of extracting at diminished expenses the cotton and other raw materials for their manufactures. But when you have once introduced machinery into the locomotion of a country, which possesses iron and coals, you are unable to withhold it from its fabrication. You cannot maintain a net of railways over an immense country without introducing all those industrial processes necessary to meet the immediate and current wants of railway locomotion, and out of which there must grow the application of machinery to those branches of industry not immediately connected with railways. The railway system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry. This is the more certain as the Hindus are allowed by British authorities themselves to possess particular aptitude for accommodating themselves to entirely new labour, and acquiring the requisite knowledge of machinery.” (p. 87)

The bourgeois will not intentionally emancipate India, but they are unintentionally laying the framework for this emancipation: “All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social con- dition of the mass of the people, depending not only on the development of the productive powers, but on their appropriation by the people. But what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both…The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether.” (p. 88)

Ireland (excerpt from Capital Vol. 1 Chp. 25): “The first act of the agricultural revolution was to sweep away the huts situated on the field of labour. This was done on the largest scale. Thus many labourers were compelled to seek shelter in villages and towns. There they were thrown like refuse into garrets, hotels, cellars and corners, in the worst back slums. Thousands of Irish families… notable for their rare attachment to the domestic hearth, for their gaiety and the purity of their home-life, found themselves suddenly transplanted into hotbeds of vice. The men are now obliged to seek work of the neighbouring farmers and are only hired by the day, and therefore under the most precarious form of wage. Hence ‘they sometimes have long distances to go to and from work, often get wet, and suffer much hardship, not unfrequently ending in sickness, disease and want.’...The towns have had to receive from year to year what was deemed to be the surplus-labour of the rural division” (p. 281)

Marx to Engels (November 30, 1867): “What the Irish need is:
1) Self-government and independence from England.
2) An agrarian revolution. With the best intentions in the world the English cannot accomplish this for them, but they can give them the legal means of accomplishing it for themselves.
3) Protective tariffs against England. Between 1783 and 1801 every branch of Irish industry flourished. The Union, which overthrew the protective tariffs established by the Irish Parliament, destroyed all industrial life in Ireland.”

Marx to L. Kugelmann (November 29, 1869): “I have become more and more convinced—and the only question is to drive this conviction home to the English working class - that it can never do anything decisive here in England until it separates its policy with regard to Ireland most definitely from the policy of the ruling classes, until it not only makes common cause with the Irish but actually takes the initiative in dissolving the Union established in 1801 and replacing it by a free federal relationship. And this must be done, not as a matter of sympathy with Ireland but as a demand made in the interests of the English proletariat. If not, the English people will remain tied to the leading-strings of the ruling classes, because it will have to join with them in a common front against Ireland. Every one of its movements in England itself is crippled by the strife with the Irish, who form a very important section of the working class in England. The prime condition of emancipation here - the overthrow of the English landed oligarchy - remains impossible because its position here cannot be stormed so long as it maintains its strongly entrenched outposts in Ireland. But there, once affairs are in the hands of the Irish people itself, once it is made its own legislator and ruler, once it becomes autonomous, the abolition of the landed aristocracy (to a large extent the same persons as the English landlords) will be infinitely easier than here, because in Ireland it is not merely a simple economic question but at the same time a national question, since the landlords there are not, like those in England, the traditional dignitaries and representatives of the nation, but its mortally hated oppressors.” (p. 327-328)

Marx To Engels (December 10, 1869): English imperialism in Ireland is what is preventing an English proleterian revolution: “For a long time I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working-class ascendancy. I always expressed this point of view in the New York Tribune. Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything until it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. That is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.” (p. 329)

Marx to S. Meyer and A. Vogt (April 9, 1870): “After occupying myself with the Irish question for many years I have come to the conclusion that the decisive blow against the English ruling classes (and it will be decisive for the workers' movement all over the world) cannot be delivered in England but only in Ireland.” (p. 332)

“I shall give you here only quite briefly the decisive points. Ireland is the bulwark of the English landed aristocracy. The exploitation of that country is not only one of the main sources of this aristocracy's material welfare; it is its greatest moral strength. It, in fact, represents the domination of England over Ireland. Ireland is therefore the great means by which the English aristocracy maintains its domination in England itself…the overthrow of the English aristocracy in Ireland involves as a necessary consequence its overthrow in England. And this would fulfill the preliminary condition for the proletarian revolution in England.” (p. 333)

“As for the English bourgeoisie, it has in the first place a common interest with the English aristocracy in turning Ireland into mere pasture land which provides the English market with meat and wool at the cheapest possible prices. It is equally interested in reducing, by eviction and forcible emigration, the Irish population to such a small num- ber that English capital (capital invested in land leased for farming) can function there with "security." It has the same interest in clearing the estate of Ireland as it had in the clearing of the agricultural districts of England and Scotland.” (p. 333)

The English and Irish proletarians were played against each other much like the white and black proletarians in America: “But the English bourgeoisie has, besides, much more important interests in Ireland's present-day economy. Owing to the constantly increasing concentration of tenant farming, Ireland steadily supplies its own surplus to the English labour market, and thus forces down wages and lowers the moral and material condition of the English working class. And most important of all! Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life….His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the ‘poor whites’ to the ‘n**gers’ in the former slave states of the U.S.A. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker at once the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rule in Ireland. This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organization.” (p. 334)

Engels to Kautsky (September 12, 1882): “You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general: the same as the bourgeois think. There is no workers' party here, you see, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England's monopoly of the world market and the colonies.” (p. 340)

[Alaa Salaheldin · Rating 3 out of 5]

مجموعة من المقالات كتبها كارل ماركس وفريدريك انجلس يتناولا فيها قضايا هامة في تاريخ الدول الرأسمالية الكبري مثل انجلترا و فرنسا في الفترة من 1700 - 1900 ويوضحان سبب انتهاج هذه اليلدان السياسة الاستعمارية.
الكتاب يوضح ايضا التحولات الاجتماعية والسياسة والاقتصادية التي انتجتها الممارسات الاستعمارية في الهند و الصين وغيرهما من المستعمرات.

[Velvetink · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have read extracts of this..

[Moaz Elshinawy · Rating 3 out of 5]

.الكتاب عبارة عن مقالات وبعض المقتطفات من كتب ماركس وبعض مراسلات ماركس وانجلز
.أهم المقالات في رأيي هي ما كتبه ماركس عن الهند والصين
.من الممكن الاكتفاء بقراءة أول 70 صفحة فقط

[1688miami]

1688miami มาสมัครเข้าร่วมเล่นเกมบาคาร่า 1688miami เว็บไซต์คาสิโนออนไลน์ที่ดีที่สุดในตอนนี้ เล่นเกมการเดิมพันกับเว็บไซต์คาสิโนออนไลน์1688miamiของเราเพื่อนไม่จำเป็นที่จะต้องห่วงเรื่องของการโดนโกงเลย เพราะว่าเว็บไซต์ของเราเป็นเว็บไซต์คาสิโนออนไลน์ที่มีมาตรฐาน เว็บคาสิโนออนไลน์ที่เปิดให้บริการมาอย่างยาวนาน1688miamiนอกจากนี้เรายังมีบ่อนคาสิโนจริง ๆ เปิดให้บริการด้วยในต่างประเทศ เพื่อนๆก็ไม่จำเป็นที่จะต้องเดินทางไปเล่นบ่อนคาสิโนที่ต่างประเทศ