I respect Richard Wolff, but here he gets colonialism all wrong. I had tried to correct him and his team directly but to no avail.
In his video podcast, ” Global Capitalism: Trump’s Revival of Colonialism’ (Note 1) ….. he claims that at the Berlin Conference in 1884, which was put together by Bismarck, and the Western powers ‘took a map of Africa, they took markers and the British, French, and Germans, they carved it up. You got this one, and you got that piece..’
This is not just untrue (completely), but also important to the understanding of the contemporary world.
Wolff repeats a standard history text that, as a piece of history, has serious problems. A fundamental question any student of history has to ask is: why did it happen at this time and why did it happen at this place? You should immediately appreciate how the standard interpretation simply fails as even as a potentially good history. Let us start with: why did it happen at this time? By 1884 the West had taken over India for several centuries, and since the 1820s had begun raping China, so why was it only 1884 that the West turned to Africa? Given the scale of the transatlantic slave trade, it is not as if they did not know where Africa was. The way the story is told often implies that the West could have taken over Africa at any time it chose. Even if that were true (which it is not), it still does not answer the question ‘ why at this time?’
What actually happened was the invention of automatic weapons, namely the machine gun. Dr Richard Gatling first invented machine guns in 1862 in the US, toward the end of the US Civil War, but they were not actively used during the Civil War. However, the British used Gatling guns extensively first in the Anglo-Ashanti Wars but more effectively in the Anglo-Zulu Wars.
Machine guns were the first weapons of mass destruction. Consider the outcome of the Battle of Omdurman in 1898.
‘’Around 12,000 of the Mahdists were killed, 13,000 wounded, and 5,000 taken prisoner. Kitchener’s force lost 47 men killed and 382 wounded, ‘
12,000 enemy killed; only 47 own troops killed! Then add 13,000 wounded who were mostly bayonetted in cold blood after the battle.
John Ellis describes this: ‘.. It was not a battle but an execution’. ( Note 2 )
It was clear to European military commanders that machine guns were a game changer. Up until this point, British troops were generally losing to the Ashanti and the Zulus. However, for the new weapon to be fully effective, Europeans had to deny it to Africans. This awareness had two implications. A general European conference would be required to get all countries with access to machine gun technology to agree to embargo them to Africa (sanctions), and secondly, since embargoes are always eventually broken, it would be necessary to move with haste to take the greatest advantage of the period during which the embargo was effectively in place. King Leopold called the Congress of Brussels in 1882 primarily to secure European agreement to his occupation of the Congo. Few people came to his party. Subsequently, he proposed to Bismarck that he hold a follow-up Congress this time in Berlin. Under Bismarck’s leadership, everybody invited came to the party.
The embargo was initially kept out of the published text of the General Act except by euphemisms, whilst later it was made abundantly explicit in Article IX of the Amending Convention,
Meanwhile, the Gatling gun was replaced by the Maxim gun in 1884. This version of the automatic weapon used the recoil of the previous shot to load and fire the next, making it fully automatic. It could achieve a rate of 500-600 bullets per minute.
This leaves the question of place. Ethiopia resisted the invasion of Europe. If Europe was all-powerful, why was this place and not another place able to resist? All of Africa was aware of the new weapons technology and sought to obtain them but were denied. Ethiopia’s Coptic Orthodox Church appealed to the Russian Orthodox Church for assistance. From the Russian Orthodox Church’s point of view, their fellow Christians were seeking help against a barbarous horde of non-Christians (there was no mutual recognition of European Churches), and they appealed to the state to assist Ethiopia. Russia provided the latest weapons and, almost more important, senior military officers to explain how to use them to maximum effect. An Italian army, facing an African army equipped with the latest weapons, was routed at the Battle of Adwa in 1896. This was also an important historic lesson on the practical use and impact of these weapons for the Russian army staff.
This story has key implications for the Marxist theory of capitalist history that could explain Richard Wolff’s reluctance to abandon the standard version. Conventional Marxism interprets the West’s expansion as the irresistible force of the capitalist mode of production. However, this version emphasises the role of technology, particularly the technology of war. It is because of the superior technology of war that Europe was able to conquer and plunder the people of South America, and it was that plunder that financed the invasion of Africa at the start of the transatlantic slave trade. Columbus et al. could barely initially afford their travels to America. Without the plundered gold, the European states could not have funded the invasion of Africa and the start of the transatlantic slave trade.
Once we see the importance of technology, we can recognise the great importance of 1917 because it brought the collapse of the Berlin embargo. For the Soviet Union, the capitalist West’s plunder of the colonies would provide the superprofits to fund the invasion of the Soviet Union. Without the Soviet Union as a source of modern weapons, the anti-colonial movements would have had little chance of success.
According to standard Marxism, advanced capitalist production would always overwhelm other societies. But the defeat of the US Navy at the hands of Ansar Allah, the general success of the Russians vs NATO-Ukraine, and of Iran vs the US-Israel show an independent role for technology. The Korean and Vietnamese wars cannot be conceived without the role of Soviet weapons and technology. Soviet weapons played a decisive role in the defeat and collapse of apartheid South Africa at Cuito Cuanavale (Note 4).
Wulf D. Hund would see a direct connection between the standard Marxist view and the racism of the European left (Note 5). This standard Marxist view, adopted by many on the left, would allow racist views to be concealed not merely from their readers but also from themselves. The capitalist mode of production can be embodied in the capitalist world, which coincides with the white world such that the supremacy of capitalism and the supremacy of the White world order, i.e. White supremacy, coincide. Marx and Marxists had and have difficulty dealing with the revolution in Haiti, the successful Black liberation.
This view of the independent role of technology makes current events make better sense, and exposes historical interpretations to greater contingency rather than inevitability. We are also reminded that the periodisation of history in Marxism, widely adopted by many non-Marxists, grew out of and inherits much from the periodisation of history of Kant and Hegel, which was deeply racist.
This view also reveals that the competitive drive for expansion was a pre-capitalist and colonial directive. If European country A develops colonies B- E, the surplus arising could allow Country A to finance invasions of other European countries. This is exactly what happened with Spain’s surplus, which drove a competitive response from England. If introducing genocide increases the surplus by many factors, then genocide becomes an integral factor in the planning for colonies. This super-surplus then drives other European countries to seek colonies to match Country A. In addition, the exorbitant surplus from genocide created such enormous surpluses that it could fund all the domestic needs of the ruling class while funding forever wars of colonial subjugation. The initial costs of these wars would be treated as investments to be repaid through future plunder and genocide. These two forces, the lust for gold/surpluses through genocide on the one hand and the fear that if the other country acquired many colonies it would acquire such a surplus that it could fund the invasion of your country on the other. These two forces drove Europe towards two world wars, with the Russian hinterland playing the role of colonial territory in the German/Hitler imagination. Russia was a country ripe for plunder and settlement.
In the Marxist model, the drive for ever-increasing expansion was solely a capitalist event. Rather, it was initially a colonial event. Under colonialism, markets were protected by imperial preference on the one hand or tariffs on the other. The national intention was that the guaranteed surplus should go to the national war reserves. These guaranteed surpluses would be a necessary form of rent.
In later periods, a fundamental conflict of goals emerged. At one level, pursuing a global hegemonic role would imply lowering tariffs and opening all markets. From the point of view of a potential global hegemon, closed markets would allow competitors to develop. The hegemon’s creation of global markets assumes that its corporations would become dominant. If this should turn out incorrect, then the state would have recourse to naked violence. Corporations do not have the resources or means to wage global warfare to protect their markets and dominance. Only the state can play that role. When Japanese companies threatened the dominance of US corporations, the US state resorted to threats of violence and the imposition of the Plaza Accords.
Contrary to standard Marxism, which would assume that large corporations control the state, imperial needs overrode corporations’ immediate pursuit of profit. Corporations have a short time horizon, whereas the imperial state looks far further ahead. In the current period, the imperial state’s goals were clearly stated by Brzezinski and repeated by Kaja Kallas: break up Russia into smaller states. Many of these states would be non-white, and one suspects they would become targets of genocide to increase the total surplus available massively. In Brzezinski’s plan, the breakup follows apparent racial lines, and Europe’s history alone is sufficient to predict the unspoken future steps.
Conclusions
We have a global hegemon that was born out of genocide. Reading its history as a pure economic pursuit of private property requires being blind to the facts. Once the role of technology is fully understood and its close connection to genocide, much of recent events cease to be surprising. Threats to wipe out Iran’s civilisation are described by some as war crimes when they are in fact threats of genocide. Had there not been a Soviet Union, then Africa and Asia might have been depopulated like South America, and the population replaced by Europeans. Standard Marxist interpretations of the spread of capitalism have downplayed or excluded genocide, actual or proposed, and the important independent role of the technologies of war, and now make no sense of current events.
Notes
- ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P87-shXX_0c&t=328s ) at timestamp 11:47
- ‘The Social History of the machine gun’ – John Ellis, 1975
- ‘Ethiopia and Berlin:’ https://www.academia.edu/127828539/Ethiopia_and_Berlin_Keys_to_understanding_the_Ukraine_conflict
- ‘African and Black intellectuals and present-day Global Crisis’
https://dapo935.substack.com/p/african-and-black-intellectuals-and
- ‘Racism in White Sociology: from Adam Smith to Max Weber’ in Racism and Sociology 2014 Lit Verlag