A Theory of Imperialism

A THEORY OF IMPERIALISM Brought to you by | provisional account Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/19/16 1:44 PM Brought to you by | provisional account Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/19/16 1:44 PM A THEORY OF IMPERIALISM Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik with a commentary from David Harvey and a foreword by Akeel Bilgrami Columbia University Press New York Brought to you by | provisional account Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/19/16 1:44 PM Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup . columbia. edu Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data Names: Patnaik, Utsa, author. | Patnaik, Prabhat, author. Title: A theory of imperialism / Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik ; with a commentary by David Harvey. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifi ers: LCCN 2016014641 | ISBN 9780231179782 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231179799 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Imperialism—Economic aspects. | Capitalism— Developed countries— History. | Developed countries— Commerce. | Colonies— Commerce. Classifi cation: LCC JC359 .P37 2017 | DDC 325/.3201– dc23 LC rec ord available at https://lccn .loc . gov / 2016014641 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of Ameri ca c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Cover design: Diane Lugar Cover image: © Amy–Iv/Adobe Stock Brought to you by | provisional account Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/19/16 1:44 PM Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik dedicate their contribution to this book to Malini and Mihir Bhattacharya. Brought to you by | provisional account Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/19/16 1:44 PM Brought to you by | provisional account Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/19/16 1:44 PM Contents Foreword by Akeel Bilgrami ix Preface xxv chapter one Introduction 1 chapter two The Threat of Increasing Supply Price 8 chapter three Coping with the Threat 28 chapter four The Reserve Army of Labour in the Periphery 47 chapter five Capitalism, Poverty, and In equality 61 chapter six Further Elaborations and Clarifi cations 78 Brought to you by | provisional account Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/19/16 1:44 PM viii Contents chapter seven Metropolitan Demand on Tropical Landmass: The Empirical Picture 97 chapter eight The International Monetary System: Some Issues in Po liti cal Economy 118 chapter nine Some Concluding Remarks 142 A Commentary on A Theory of Imperialism by David Harvey 154 A Response to David Harvey’s Comments 173 Notes 199 References 209 Index 217 Brought to you by | provisional account Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/19/16 1:44 PM Foreword by Akeel Bilgrami I The concept of imperialism has been wielded and studied by a wide range of disciplines over the last two centuries or more (History, Politi- cal Studies, Po litical Economy, Cultural Studies) as well as by diverse theoretical traditions (Liberalism, Marxism, Post- Colonialism). For all this varied deployment and a distinguished intellectual history in the writings of Burke, Marx, Hobson, Lenin, Luxemburg, Gandhi, Fanon, Guha, and Said, there remains disagreement about its meaning and relevance; and there is still much confusion about its relationship to ‘colonialism’. On a standard understanding of the distinction between colonialism and imperialism, the latter— deriving in its etymology from the Latin term ‘imperium’ connoting ‘command’—has to do with the domination of one region by another through some form of control whether direct or indirect; whereas the former refers to such a control by a direct and relatively abiding, if not always permanent, settlement of a population or, at the very least, a governing class, by some form of conquest of one region by another. The treatment of the subject in the pages that follow is a variant on the standard view and its focus is en- tirely on the modern period. A clear claim is made: ‘Imperialism’ is said to be the more general term and it is defi ned by a form of economic domination of one region by another. Colonialism is then treated as an historically special case of imperialism. Historically, imperialism fi rst took a colonialist form. But it frequently survived the passing of colonialism, that is to say survived the withdrawal of a governing class from the conquered region after the latter gained its inde pen dence from Brought to you by | provisional account Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/19/16 1:45 PM x Foreword colonial rule. It shares with colonialism certain properties of economic domination of one geo graphi cal region over another, properties that get modifi ed after decolonization, yet at a more general and more fun- damental level of description these properties are invariant in colonial as well as post- colonial contexts. Presenting these invariant properties is the large theoretical preoc- cupation of the book. A specifi cation of these invariant properties may properly be said to be the theory of imperialism on off er in it. Presenting the diff er ent mechanisms by which these invariant properties are instantiated fi rst during and then after the colonial period respectively, is only one of the several illuminating details it pres ents. The analy sis, though it has some affi nities with the Marxist tradition, derives a good bit of its argument by revealing some of the lim- itations of that tradition. It is a highly original argument made with both a conscientious focus on empirical detail as well as a deep theoretical foundation, building up its case by coming to its main claims from a variety of diff er ent angles, fair- minded against the views it opposes, and throughout raising hard questions and objections to its own con- victions and responding to them with attentive care. For all these rea- sons, despite its modest use of the indefi nite article in the title of the book, the analy sis is as close to a defi nitive scholarly treatment of imperialism as one can hope for in a book of relatively short length. It takes the concept of imperialism beyond its popu lar usage today, which only speaks of episodic forms of domination via invasions and wars waged by stronger nations on weaker ones, to a chronic condition of history over centuries down to the present day. The most general of the book’s claims regarding the economic basis of imperialism, is that there is no understanding the nature of capitalism as an economic formation of modernity without understanding imperialism as being, not a mere ‘last stage’ to use Lenin’s phrase, but essential to capitalism pretty much from the outset. This means that it is not suffi cient to see capitalism merely in terms of the privatization of land and property and the recruitment of wage-labour by its propri- etors to work on it with the purpose of obtaining surpluses. If that were suffi cient to defi ne the economic formation that we call ‘capitalism’, then imperialism would be a merely contingent further accrual to it, an expansionist extra, as it were, but not built into its essential workings. This would be to view the nature of capital in purely static terms, miss- ing its intrinsically dynamic nature whereby, as a result of the demands Brought to you by | provisional account Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/19/16 1:45 PM Foreword xi forced by the incessantly competitive nature of capital, new and external stimuli are indispensable to the reproduction of capital—and one vital such external stimulus is provided by the relations that capital con- stantly seeks from outside of its initial territorial anchors in more dis- tant regions of the world. These relations are inevitably relations of domination and the features of the relations that specify the exact nature of the domination is what is called ‘imperialism’. As I said, these features were fi rst instantiated historically by the mechanisms which colonialism put into place by conquest and direct control, and recurred in a diff er ent form after decolonization. II What, then, are these features according to the Patnaiks? They are presented in a theory and, like all theories of this sort, it contains an analytical component and an empirical component. The analytical component contains a sustained argument which, at the most schematic and general level, exploits three central concepts, with a number of further auxiliary concepts brought in to elaborate the details of the theory and to defend it against pos sible objections. The three chief concepts are ‘increasing supply price’, ‘the value of money’, and ‘income defl ation’. The general line of argument, taking capitalism to be the prevailing economic formation, is this: Capital accumulation causes increased demand for certain goods, leading to more production, leading in turn to increasing supply price. When this happens, there will be a threat to the value of money. The actualization of such a threat, given the nature of capitalism, is intolerable. The actualization of this threat to the value of money can only be avoided by enforcing an income defl ation that imposes hardship on the petty producers and work- ing population. This theoretical argument, as I have expounded it, is, as I said, general and schematic, so imperialism is not vis i ble in it. When the analytical schema is fi lled in with ele ments of the empirical component, the argument becomes an argument about imperialism. The fi rst and driving empirical observation is that both in the past and in the pres ent some countries have provided certain commodities which other countries cannot really do without and which they cannot produce in their own territories because of climactic and geo graphi cal Brought to you by | provisional account Unauthenticated Download Date | 12/19/16 1:45 PM xii Foreword considerations.

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