Engels
THE FOREIGN POLICY OF RUSSIAN TSARDOM
Written in December 1889-February 1890 (translated into English in March 1890)
First published, in Russian, in Sotsialdemokrat, Nos. 1 and 2, February and August 1890, in Die Neue Zeit, No. 5, May 1890 and, in Engels' English translation, in the Time, April and May 1890
Reproduced from the Time, checked with Die Neue Zeit
“The first Russian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Bakunin's translation, was published in the early sixties†c by the printing office of the Kolokol.†87 At that time the significance to the West of the Russian translation of this work was at most that of a literary curiosity. Such a view would no longer be possible today. What a limited field the proletarian movement still occupied at that time (January 1848†d) is best shown by the last chapter of the Manifesto: “Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Opposition Parties.”†e The most notable omissions here are Russia and the United States. It was the time when Russia constituted the last great reserve of European reaction and when emigration to the United States absorbed the surplus forces of the European proletariat. Both countries supplied Europe with raw materials and at the same time provided markets for the sale of its manufactured goods. Thus both served, each in its own way, as pillars of the European social order.
“How all that has changed today! It is that self-same European emigration which has made possible the immense development of North American agriculture which, through its competition, is shaking the very foundations of European landed property — large and small. It has also enabled the United States to make a start on exploiting its tremendous industrial resources, and with such energy and on such a scale that this is bound in a short while to put an end to the industrial monopoly of Western Europe. And these two circumstances react in revolutionary manner also on America itself. The small and medium landed property of the self-employed farmers, the foundation of America's entire political system, is increasingly succumbing to competition from giant farms, whilst simultaneously in the industrial regions a numerically strong proletariat is taking shape for the first time alongside a fabulous concentration of capitals.
Wednesday 9 February 2011
Marx Emigration to USA
[Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser No. 199, August 20, 1841]
Bremen, July
I went on board a big frigate the deck of which was full of emigrants who stood watching the “yawl” being hauled up. A yawl here is any boat which has a keel and is therefore suitable for service at sea. The people were still cheerful; they had not yet trodden the last clod of their native soil. But I have seen how deeply it affects them when they really leave German soil forever, when the ship, with all its passengers on board, slowly moves from the quay into the roadstead and thence sails into the open sea. They are almost all true German faces, without falseness, with strong arms, and you need only be among them for a moment and see the cordiality with which they greet each other to realise that it is certainly not the worst elements who leave their Fatherland to settle in the land of dollars and virgin forests. The saying: stay at home and feed yourself honestly†a seems to be made for the Germans, but this is not so; people who want to feed themselves honestly go, very often at least, to America. And it is by no means always lack of food, much less greed, which drives these people into distant lands; it is the German peasant's uncertain position between serfdom and independence, it is the inherited bondage and the rules and regulations of the patrimonial courts†91 which make his food taste sour and disturb his sleep until he decides to leave his Fatherland.
The people going over on this ship were Saxons. We went below to take a look at the inside of the ship. The saloon was most elegantly and comfortably appointed; a little square room, everything elegant, mahogany inlaid with gold, as in an aristocratic drawing-room. In front of the saloon were the berths for the passengers in small, nice little cabins; from an open door by the side we got a whiff of ham from the larder. We had to go on deck again to reach the steerage by another companion-way: “But it's terrible down there,”†b all my companions quoted when we got back. Down there lay the dregs who had not enough money to spend ninety talers on the cabin class fare, the people to whom nobody raises a hat, whose manners some here call common, others uneducated, a plebs which owns nothing, but which is the best any king can have in his realm and which alone upholds the German principle, particularly in America. It is the Germans in the cities who have taught the Americans their deplorable contempt for our nation. The German merchant makes it a point of honour to discard his Germanness and become a complete Yankee ape. This hybrid creature is happy if the German in him is no longer noticed, he speaks English even to his compatriots, and when he returns to Germany he acts the Yankee more than ever. English is often heard in the streets of Bremen, but it would be a great mistake to take every English speaker for a Britisher or a Yankee. The latter always speak German when they come to Germany in order to learn our difficult language; but these English speakers are invariably Germans who have been to America. It is the German peasant alone, perhaps also the craftsman in the coastal towns, who adheres with iron firmness to his national customs and language, who, separated from the Yankees by the virgin forests, the Allegheny mountains and the great rivers, is building a new, free Germany in the middle of the United States; in Kentucky, Ohio and in Western Pennsylvania only the towns are English, while everybody in the countryside speaks German. And in his new Fatherland the German has learnt new virtues without losing the old ones. The German corporative spirit has developed into one of political, free association; it presses the government daily to introduce German as the language of the courts in the German counties,†a it creates German newspapers one after another, which are all devoted to the calm, level-headed endeavour to develop existing elements of freedom, and, as the best proof of its strength, it has caused the “Native Americans”†b party to be founded which has spread through all the states and aims to hinder immigration and to make it difficult for the immigrant to acquire citizenship.†92
“But it's terrible down there.” All round the steerage runs a row of berths, several close together and even one above the other. An oppressive air reigns here, where men, women and children are packed next to one another like paving stones in the street, the sick next to the healthy, all together. Every moment one stumbles over a heap of clothes, household goods, etc; here little children are crying, there a head is raised from a berth. It is a sad sight; and what must it be like when a prolonged storm throws everything into confusion and drives the waves across the deck, so that the hatch, which alone admits fresh air, cannot be opened! And yet, the arrangements on the Bremen ships are the most humane. Everybody knows what it is like for the majority who travel via Le Havre. Afterwards we visited another, an American, ship; they were cooking, and when a German woman standing nearby saw the bad food and even worse preparation she said weeping bitterly that if she had known this before she would rather have stayed at home.
[Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser No. 200, August 21, 1841]
Bremen, July
We went back to the inn. The prima donna of our theatre sat there in a corner with her husband, its ultimo uomo, and with several other actors; the rest of the company was very dull, and so I reached for some printed matter that lay on the table, of which an annual report on Bremen trade was the most interesting. I took it and read the following passages:
“Coffee in demand in summer and autumn, until slacker conditions set in towards winter. Sugar enjoyed a steady sale, but the actual idea for this only came with rising supplies.”
What is a poor man of letters to say when he sees how the manner of expression not only of modern belles-lettres but of philosophy is infecting the style of the broker! Conditions and ideas in a trade report — who would have expected that! I turned the page and found the description:
“Superfine medium good ordinary real Domingo coffee.”
I asked the agent of one of the leading Bremen merchant shippers who happened to be present what this superfine designation might mean. He replied: “Look at this sample I have just taken from a consignment delivered to us; that description will fit it roughly.” Thus I learned that superfine medium good ordinary real Domingo coffee is a pale grey-green coffee from the island of Haiti, each pound of which has fifteen half-ounces of good beans, ten half-ounces of black beans and seven half-ounces of dust, small stones and other rubbish. I then let myself be initiated into several other mysteries of Hermes and in this way passed the time until midday, when we partook of a very indifferent meal and were called back to the steamer by the bell. The rain abated at last, and no sooner had the steamer “laid” the Geest than the clouds broke and the rays of the sun fell bright and warming on our still wet clothes. To everybody's astonishment, however, the steamer did not go upstream, but down the roadstead where a proud three-master had just anchored. We had barely reached the middle of the current when the waves grew bigger and the steamer began to pitch noticeably. Who, if he has ever been to sea, does not feel his pulse quicken when he senses this sign of the proximity of the sea! For a moment he believes he is again going out into the free, roaring sea, into the deep, clear green of the waves, right into the middle of that marvellous light which is created by the sun, azure and sea together; he involuntarily begins to find his sea-legs again. The ladies, however, were of a different opinion, looked at each other in fright and grew pale, while the steamer, “in a gallant style”,†a as the English say, described a semicircle around the newly arrived ship and picked up its captain. The assistant insurance broker was just explaining to some gentlemen, who had vainly endeavoured to find the ship's name on the bow, that according to the number on its flag it was the Maria, Captain Ruyter, and that according to Lloyd's list it had sailed from Trinidad de Cuba between such-and-such a date, when the captain came up the steamer's companion-way. Our assistant insurance broker met him, shook his hand with the expression of a protector, asked how the voyage had been, what cargo he was carrying, and in general conducted a long discourse with him in Low German, while I listened to the flatteries which the bookdealer was lavishing on the half-naive, half-flirtatious tailor's daughters.
The sun went down in full glory. A glowing ball, it hung in a net of clouds, the strands of which seemed already to have caught fire, so that one expected it to burn through the net at any moment and drop hissing into the river! But it sank calmly behind a group of trees which looked like Moses' burning bush. Truly, both here and there God speaks with a loud voice! But the hoarse croaking of a member of the Bremen opposition tried to shout Him down; this clever man was straining hard to prove to his neighbour that it would have been much wiser to deepen the fairway of the Weser for larger ships instead of building Bremerhaven. Unfortunately, the opposition here is too often motivated by envy of the power of the patricians than by the consciousness that the aristocracy resists the rational state, and in this matter its representatives are so narrow-minded that talking to them about the affairs of Bremen is as difficult as to firm supporters of the Senate.†93 — Both parties convince one more and more that such small states as Bremen have outlived themselves and even in a mighty union of states would lead a life under pressure from without and phlegmatically senile within. — Now we were close to Bremen. The high spire of the Church of Ansgarius, with which our “church troubles” were connected, rose from moor and heath, and soon we reached the tall warehouses framing the right bank of the Weser.
Written in July 1840
First published in the Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser Nos. 196, 197, 198, 199 and 200, August 17-21, 1841
Printed according to the newspaper
Bremen, July
I went on board a big frigate the deck of which was full of emigrants who stood watching the “yawl” being hauled up. A yawl here is any boat which has a keel and is therefore suitable for service at sea. The people were still cheerful; they had not yet trodden the last clod of their native soil. But I have seen how deeply it affects them when they really leave German soil forever, when the ship, with all its passengers on board, slowly moves from the quay into the roadstead and thence sails into the open sea. They are almost all true German faces, without falseness, with strong arms, and you need only be among them for a moment and see the cordiality with which they greet each other to realise that it is certainly not the worst elements who leave their Fatherland to settle in the land of dollars and virgin forests. The saying: stay at home and feed yourself honestly†a seems to be made for the Germans, but this is not so; people who want to feed themselves honestly go, very often at least, to America. And it is by no means always lack of food, much less greed, which drives these people into distant lands; it is the German peasant's uncertain position between serfdom and independence, it is the inherited bondage and the rules and regulations of the patrimonial courts†91 which make his food taste sour and disturb his sleep until he decides to leave his Fatherland.
The people going over on this ship were Saxons. We went below to take a look at the inside of the ship. The saloon was most elegantly and comfortably appointed; a little square room, everything elegant, mahogany inlaid with gold, as in an aristocratic drawing-room. In front of the saloon were the berths for the passengers in small, nice little cabins; from an open door by the side we got a whiff of ham from the larder. We had to go on deck again to reach the steerage by another companion-way: “But it's terrible down there,”†b all my companions quoted when we got back. Down there lay the dregs who had not enough money to spend ninety talers on the cabin class fare, the people to whom nobody raises a hat, whose manners some here call common, others uneducated, a plebs which owns nothing, but which is the best any king can have in his realm and which alone upholds the German principle, particularly in America. It is the Germans in the cities who have taught the Americans their deplorable contempt for our nation. The German merchant makes it a point of honour to discard his Germanness and become a complete Yankee ape. This hybrid creature is happy if the German in him is no longer noticed, he speaks English even to his compatriots, and when he returns to Germany he acts the Yankee more than ever. English is often heard in the streets of Bremen, but it would be a great mistake to take every English speaker for a Britisher or a Yankee. The latter always speak German when they come to Germany in order to learn our difficult language; but these English speakers are invariably Germans who have been to America. It is the German peasant alone, perhaps also the craftsman in the coastal towns, who adheres with iron firmness to his national customs and language, who, separated from the Yankees by the virgin forests, the Allegheny mountains and the great rivers, is building a new, free Germany in the middle of the United States; in Kentucky, Ohio and in Western Pennsylvania only the towns are English, while everybody in the countryside speaks German. And in his new Fatherland the German has learnt new virtues without losing the old ones. The German corporative spirit has developed into one of political, free association; it presses the government daily to introduce German as the language of the courts in the German counties,†a it creates German newspapers one after another, which are all devoted to the calm, level-headed endeavour to develop existing elements of freedom, and, as the best proof of its strength, it has caused the “Native Americans”†b party to be founded which has spread through all the states and aims to hinder immigration and to make it difficult for the immigrant to acquire citizenship.†92
“But it's terrible down there.” All round the steerage runs a row of berths, several close together and even one above the other. An oppressive air reigns here, where men, women and children are packed next to one another like paving stones in the street, the sick next to the healthy, all together. Every moment one stumbles over a heap of clothes, household goods, etc; here little children are crying, there a head is raised from a berth. It is a sad sight; and what must it be like when a prolonged storm throws everything into confusion and drives the waves across the deck, so that the hatch, which alone admits fresh air, cannot be opened! And yet, the arrangements on the Bremen ships are the most humane. Everybody knows what it is like for the majority who travel via Le Havre. Afterwards we visited another, an American, ship; they were cooking, and when a German woman standing nearby saw the bad food and even worse preparation she said weeping bitterly that if she had known this before she would rather have stayed at home.
[Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser No. 200, August 21, 1841]
Bremen, July
We went back to the inn. The prima donna of our theatre sat there in a corner with her husband, its ultimo uomo, and with several other actors; the rest of the company was very dull, and so I reached for some printed matter that lay on the table, of which an annual report on Bremen trade was the most interesting. I took it and read the following passages:
“Coffee in demand in summer and autumn, until slacker conditions set in towards winter. Sugar enjoyed a steady sale, but the actual idea for this only came with rising supplies.”
What is a poor man of letters to say when he sees how the manner of expression not only of modern belles-lettres but of philosophy is infecting the style of the broker! Conditions and ideas in a trade report — who would have expected that! I turned the page and found the description:
“Superfine medium good ordinary real Domingo coffee.”
I asked the agent of one of the leading Bremen merchant shippers who happened to be present what this superfine designation might mean. He replied: “Look at this sample I have just taken from a consignment delivered to us; that description will fit it roughly.” Thus I learned that superfine medium good ordinary real Domingo coffee is a pale grey-green coffee from the island of Haiti, each pound of which has fifteen half-ounces of good beans, ten half-ounces of black beans and seven half-ounces of dust, small stones and other rubbish. I then let myself be initiated into several other mysteries of Hermes and in this way passed the time until midday, when we partook of a very indifferent meal and were called back to the steamer by the bell. The rain abated at last, and no sooner had the steamer “laid” the Geest than the clouds broke and the rays of the sun fell bright and warming on our still wet clothes. To everybody's astonishment, however, the steamer did not go upstream, but down the roadstead where a proud three-master had just anchored. We had barely reached the middle of the current when the waves grew bigger and the steamer began to pitch noticeably. Who, if he has ever been to sea, does not feel his pulse quicken when he senses this sign of the proximity of the sea! For a moment he believes he is again going out into the free, roaring sea, into the deep, clear green of the waves, right into the middle of that marvellous light which is created by the sun, azure and sea together; he involuntarily begins to find his sea-legs again. The ladies, however, were of a different opinion, looked at each other in fright and grew pale, while the steamer, “in a gallant style”,†a as the English say, described a semicircle around the newly arrived ship and picked up its captain. The assistant insurance broker was just explaining to some gentlemen, who had vainly endeavoured to find the ship's name on the bow, that according to the number on its flag it was the Maria, Captain Ruyter, and that according to Lloyd's list it had sailed from Trinidad de Cuba between such-and-such a date, when the captain came up the steamer's companion-way. Our assistant insurance broker met him, shook his hand with the expression of a protector, asked how the voyage had been, what cargo he was carrying, and in general conducted a long discourse with him in Low German, while I listened to the flatteries which the bookdealer was lavishing on the half-naive, half-flirtatious tailor's daughters.
The sun went down in full glory. A glowing ball, it hung in a net of clouds, the strands of which seemed already to have caught fire, so that one expected it to burn through the net at any moment and drop hissing into the river! But it sank calmly behind a group of trees which looked like Moses' burning bush. Truly, both here and there God speaks with a loud voice! But the hoarse croaking of a member of the Bremen opposition tried to shout Him down; this clever man was straining hard to prove to his neighbour that it would have been much wiser to deepen the fairway of the Weser for larger ships instead of building Bremerhaven. Unfortunately, the opposition here is too often motivated by envy of the power of the patricians than by the consciousness that the aristocracy resists the rational state, and in this matter its representatives are so narrow-minded that talking to them about the affairs of Bremen is as difficult as to firm supporters of the Senate.†93 — Both parties convince one more and more that such small states as Bremen have outlived themselves and even in a mighty union of states would lead a life under pressure from without and phlegmatically senile within. — Now we were close to Bremen. The high spire of the Church of Ansgarius, with which our “church troubles” were connected, rose from moor and heath, and soon we reached the tall warehouses framing the right bank of the Weser.
Written in July 1840
First published in the Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser Nos. 196, 197, 198, 199 and 200, August 17-21, 1841
Printed according to the newspaper
Malcolm X on Immigration
" 400 years of black blood and sweat invested here in America and the
white man still has the black man begging for what every immigrant
fresh off the ship can take for granted the minute he walks down the
gangplank"
"Negroes had been in New York City since 1683 before any of them came
(Irish, Italians, Jews) and had been ghettoed all over the city"
white man still has the black man begging for what every immigrant
fresh off the ship can take for granted the minute he walks down the
gangplank"
"Negroes had been in New York City since 1683 before any of them came
(Irish, Italians, Jews) and had been ghettoed all over the city"
Lenin: Against Open Borders...
Lenin:
"What does 'Down with frontiers' mean? It is the
beginning of anarchy.... Only when the socialist revolution has become a
reality, and not a method, will the slogan 'Down with frontiers' be a
correct slogan."
Lenin April 1917 on the National Question
"What does 'Down with frontiers' mean? It is the
beginning of anarchy.... Only when the socialist revolution has become a
reality, and not a method, will the slogan 'Down with frontiers' be a
correct slogan."
Lenin April 1917 on the National Question
Bukharin: Immigration
Bukharin:
"If the international movement of commodities expresses the 'mutation
process' in the socioeconomic world organism then the international
movement of the populations expresses mainly the redistribution of the
main factor of economic life, the labour power. Just as within the
framework of the 'national economy' the redistribution of the labour
power among the various production branches is regulated by the scales
of wages which tend to one level, so in the framework of world
economy the process of equalising the various wage scales is taking
place with the aid of migration. The gigantic reservoir of the
capitalist New World absorbs the 'superfluous population of Europe and
Asia, from the pauperised peasants who are being driven out of
agriculture to the 'reserve army' of the unemployed in the cities.
Thus there is being created on a world scale a correspondence between
the supply and demand of 'hands' in proportion necessary for capital.
An idea of the quantitative side of the process may be gleaned from
the following figures:
Number of Immigrants Entering United States:
Years
1904 812,870
1905 1,026,499
1906 1,100,735
1907 1,285,349
1914 1,218,480
Number of Foreigners in Germany
Years
1880 276,057
1900 778,737
1910 1,259,873
In 1912, 711,446 emigrated from Italy, 467,762 from England and
Ireland, 176,567 from Spain (1911), 127,747 from Russia etc. To this
number of final emigrants ie of workers who relinquish their fatherland
forever and look for a new country, must be added a number of
emigrants of a temporary and seasonal character. Russian and Polish
workers immigrate into Germany for agricultural work (the so-called
Sachsengangerei etc). These ebbs and flows of labour power already
from one of the phenomena of the world labour market.
Corresponding to the movement of labour power as one of the poles of
capitalist relations is the movement of capital as another pole. As in
the former case the movement is regulated by the law of the
equalisation of the rates of profit. The movement of capital which
from the point of view of the capital exporting country is usually
called capital export, has acquired an unrivalled importance in modern
economic life so that some economists (like Sartorius von
Walterhausen) define modern capitalism as export capitalsm
(p39-40) My underlining
"In the same way as the international movement of commoditites brings
the local and 'national' prices to the one and only level of world
prices, in the same way as migration tends to bring the nationally
different wage scales for hired workers to one level, so the movement
of captial tends to bring the 'national' rates of profit to one level,
which tendency expresses nothing but one of the most general laws of
the capitalist mode of production on a world scale.
Within the framework of world economy the concentration tendencies of
capitalist development assume the same organisational forms as are
manifest within the framework of 'national economy' - namely there
come more strikingly to the foreground tendencies towards limiting
free competition by means of forming monopoly enterprises." P.46 My
underlining
Finally in dedication to the globalists who believe in a globalist
conflict free world future where the transnationals dominate all and
sundry using the twin tools of exporting capital and importing labour,
a re-hash of Kautsky's ultra-imperialism, ie globalism with a human
face, written by Lenin in his introduction to Bukharins book.
"Can one however deny that in the abstract a new face of capitalism to
follow imperialism - namely a phase of ultra-imperialism - is
thinkable? No. In the abstract one can think of such a phase. In
practice, however he who denies the sharp tasks of today in the name
of dreams about soft tasks of the future becomes an opportunist.
Theoretically it means to fail to base oneself on the developments now
going on in real life, to detach oneself from them in the name of
dreams. There is no doubt that the development is going in the
direction of a single world trust that will swallow up all enterprises
and states without exception. But the development in this direction is
proceeding under such stress, with such tempo with such
contradictions conflicts and convulsions - not only economical, but
also political national etc etc - that before a single world trust
will be reached, before the respective national finance capitals will
have formed a world union of 'ultra-imperialism', imperialism will
inevitably explode and capitalism will turn into its opposite.
December 1915
"If the international movement of commodities expresses the 'mutation
process' in the socioeconomic world organism then the international
movement of the populations expresses mainly the redistribution of the
main factor of economic life, the labour power. Just as within the
framework of the 'national economy' the redistribution of the labour
power among the various production branches is regulated by the scales
of wages which tend to one level, so in the framework of world
economy the process of equalising the various wage scales is taking
place with the aid of migration. The gigantic reservoir of the
capitalist New World absorbs the 'superfluous population of Europe and
Asia, from the pauperised peasants who are being driven out of
agriculture to the 'reserve army' of the unemployed in the cities.
Thus there is being created on a world scale a correspondence between
the supply and demand of 'hands' in proportion necessary for capital.
An idea of the quantitative side of the process may be gleaned from
the following figures:
Number of Immigrants Entering United States:
Years
1904 812,870
1905 1,026,499
1906 1,100,735
1907 1,285,349
1914 1,218,480
Number of Foreigners in Germany
Years
1880 276,057
1900 778,737
1910 1,259,873
In 1912, 711,446 emigrated from Italy, 467,762 from England and
Ireland, 176,567 from Spain (1911), 127,747 from Russia etc. To this
number of final emigrants ie of workers who relinquish their fatherland
forever and look for a new country, must be added a number of
emigrants of a temporary and seasonal character. Russian and Polish
workers immigrate into Germany for agricultural work (the so-called
Sachsengangerei etc). These ebbs and flows of labour power already
from one of the phenomena of the world labour market.
Corresponding to the movement of labour power as one of the poles of
capitalist relations is the movement of capital as another pole. As in
the former case the movement is regulated by the law of the
equalisation of the rates of profit. The movement of capital which
from the point of view of the capital exporting country is usually
called capital export, has acquired an unrivalled importance in modern
economic life so that some economists (like Sartorius von
Walterhausen) define modern capitalism as export capitalsm
(p39-40) My underlining
"In the same way as the international movement of commoditites brings
the local and 'national' prices to the one and only level of world
prices, in the same way as migration tends to bring the nationally
different wage scales for hired workers to one level, so the movement
of captial tends to bring the 'national' rates of profit to one level,
which tendency expresses nothing but one of the most general laws of
the capitalist mode of production on a world scale.
Within the framework of world economy the concentration tendencies of
capitalist development assume the same organisational forms as are
manifest within the framework of 'national economy' - namely there
come more strikingly to the foreground tendencies towards limiting
free competition by means of forming monopoly enterprises." P.46 My
underlining
Finally in dedication to the globalists who believe in a globalist
conflict free world future where the transnationals dominate all and
sundry using the twin tools of exporting capital and importing labour,
a re-hash of Kautsky's ultra-imperialism, ie globalism with a human
face, written by Lenin in his introduction to Bukharins book.
"Can one however deny that in the abstract a new face of capitalism to
follow imperialism - namely a phase of ultra-imperialism - is
thinkable? No. In the abstract one can think of such a phase. In
practice, however he who denies the sharp tasks of today in the name
of dreams about soft tasks of the future becomes an opportunist.
Theoretically it means to fail to base oneself on the developments now
going on in real life, to detach oneself from them in the name of
dreams. There is no doubt that the development is going in the
direction of a single world trust that will swallow up all enterprises
and states without exception. But the development in this direction is
proceeding under such stress, with such tempo with such
contradictions conflicts and convulsions - not only economical, but
also political national etc etc - that before a single world trust
will be reached, before the respective national finance capitals will
have formed a world union of 'ultra-imperialism', imperialism will
inevitably explode and capitalism will turn into its opposite.
December 1915
Kautsky
Very differently from the apprentice or the merchant is the modern
proletarian torn loose from the soil. He becomes a citizen of the
world; the whole world is his home.
No doubt this world-citizenship is a great hardship for the workers in
countries where the standard of living is high and the conditions of
labor are comparatively good. In such countries, naturally, immigration
will exceed emigration. As a result the laborers with the higher
standard of living will be hindered in their class-struggle by the influx of
those with a lower standard and less power of resistance.
Under certain circumstances this sort of competition, like that of the
capitalists, may lead to a new emphasis on national lines, a new hatred
of foreign workers on the part of the native born. But the conflict of
nationalities, which is perpetual among the capitalists, can be only
temporary among the proletarians. For sooner or later the workers will
discover that the immigration of cheap labor-power from the more
backward to the more advanced countries, is as inevitable a result
of the capitalist system as the introduction of machinery or the forcing
of women into industry.
In still another way does the labor movement of an advanced country
suffer under the influence of the backward conditions of other lands.
The high degree of exploitation endured by the proletariat of the
economically undeveloped nations becomes an excuse for the capitalists of the more
highly developed ones for opposing any movement in the direction of
higher wages or better conditions.
In more than one way, then, it is borne in upon the workers of each
nation that their success in the class-struggle is dependent on the
progress of the working-class of other nations. For a time this may turn
them against foreign workers, but finally they come to see that there is
only one effective means of removing the hindering influence of backward
nations: to do away with the backwardness itself. German workers have
every reason to co-operate with the Slavs and Italians in order that
these may secure higher wages and a shorter working-day; the English workers
have the same interest in relation to the Germans, and the Americans in
relation to Europeans in general.
The dependence of the proletariat of one land on that of another
leads inevitably to a joining of forces by the militant proletarians of
various lands.
The survivals of national seclusion and national hatred which the
proletariat took over from the bourgeoisie, disappear steadily. The
working-class is freeing itself from national prejudices. Working-men
learn more and more to see in the foreign laborer a fellow-fighter,
a comrade.
The strongest bonds of international solidarity, naturally, are
those which bind groups of proletarians, which, though of different
nationalities, have the same purposes and use the same methods to
accomplish them.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1892/erfurt/ch05.htm
proletarian torn loose from the soil. He becomes a citizen of the
world; the whole world is his home.
No doubt this world-citizenship is a great hardship for the workers in
countries where the standard of living is high and the conditions of
labor are comparatively good. In such countries, naturally, immigration
will exceed emigration. As a result the laborers with the higher
standard of living will be hindered in their class-struggle by the influx of
those with a lower standard and less power of resistance.
Under certain circumstances this sort of competition, like that of the
capitalists, may lead to a new emphasis on national lines, a new hatred
of foreign workers on the part of the native born. But the conflict of
nationalities, which is perpetual among the capitalists, can be only
temporary among the proletarians. For sooner or later the workers will
discover that the immigration of cheap labor-power from the more
backward to the more advanced countries, is as inevitable a result
of the capitalist system as the introduction of machinery or the forcing
of women into industry.
In still another way does the labor movement of an advanced country
suffer under the influence of the backward conditions of other lands.
The high degree of exploitation endured by the proletariat of the
economically undeveloped nations becomes an excuse for the capitalists of the more
highly developed ones for opposing any movement in the direction of
higher wages or better conditions.
In more than one way, then, it is borne in upon the workers of each
nation that their success in the class-struggle is dependent on the
progress of the working-class of other nations. For a time this may turn
them against foreign workers, but finally they come to see that there is
only one effective means of removing the hindering influence of backward
nations: to do away with the backwardness itself. German workers have
every reason to co-operate with the Slavs and Italians in order that
these may secure higher wages and a shorter working-day; the English workers
have the same interest in relation to the Germans, and the Americans in
relation to Europeans in general.
The dependence of the proletariat of one land on that of another
leads inevitably to a joining of forces by the militant proletarians of
various lands.
The survivals of national seclusion and national hatred which the
proletariat took over from the bourgeoisie, disappear steadily. The
working-class is freeing itself from national prejudices. Working-men
learn more and more to see in the foreign laborer a fellow-fighter,
a comrade.
The strongest bonds of international solidarity, naturally, are
those which bind groups of proletarians, which, though of different
nationalities, have the same purposes and use the same methods to
accomplish them.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1892/erfurt/ch05.htm
Engels: Irish Immigration
Engels
Condition of the Working Class in England, by Engels, 1845
Irish Immigration
We have already referred several times in passing to the Irish who have immigrated into England; and we shall now have to investigate more closely the causes and results of this immigration.
The rapid extension of English industry could not have taken place if England had not possessed in the numerous and impoverished population of Ireland a reserve at command. The Irish had nothing to lose at home, and much to gain in England; and from the time when it became known in Ireland that the east side of St. George's Channel offered steady work and good pay for strong arms, every year has brought armies of the Irish hither. It has been calculated that more than a million have already immigrated, and not far from fifty thousand still come every year, nearly all of whom enter the industrial districts, especially the great cities, and there form the lowest class of the population. Thus there are in London, 120,000; in Manchester, 40,000; in Liverpool, 34,000; Bristol, 24,000; Glasgow, 40,000; Edinburgh, 29,000, poor Irish people. [4] These people having grown up almost. without civilisation, accustomed from youth to every sort of privation, rough, intemperate, and improvident, bring all their brutal habits with them among a class of the English population which has, in truth, little inducement to cultivate education and morality. Let us hear Thomas Carlyle upon this subject: [5]
"The wild Milesian [6] features, looking false ingenuity, restlessness, unreason, misery, and mockery, salute you on all highways and byways. The English coachman, as he whirls past, lashes the Milesian with his whip, curses him with his tongue; the Milesian is holding out his hat to beg. He is the sorest evil this country has to strive with. In his rags and laughing savagery, he is there to undertake all work that can be done by mere strength of hand and back -- for wages that will purchase him potatoes. He needs only salt for condiment, he lodges to his mind in any pig-hutch or dog-hutch, roosts in outhouses, and wears a suit of tatters, the getting on and off of which is said to be a difficult operation, transacted only in festivals and the high tides of the calendar. The Saxon-man, if he cannot work on these terms, finds no work. The uncivilised Irishman, not by his strength, but by the opposite of strength, drives the Saxon native out, takes possession in his room. There abides he, in his squalor and unreason, in his falsity and drunken violence, as the ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder. Whoever struggles, swimming with difficulty, may now find an example how the human being can exist not swimming, but sunk.... That the condition of the lower multitude of English labourers approximates more and more to that of the Irish, competing with them in all the markets: that whatsoever labour, to which mere strength with little skill will suffice, is to be done, will be done not at the English price, but at an approximation to the Irish price; at a price superior as yet to the Irish, that is, superior to scarcity of potatoes for thirty weeks yearly; superior, yet hourly, with the arrival of every new steamboat, sinking nearer to an equality with that."
If we except his exaggerated and one-sided condemnation of the Irish national character, Carlyle is perfectly right. These Irishmen who migrate for fourpence to England, on the deck of a steamship on which they are often packed like cattle, insinuate themselves everywhere. The worst dwellings are good enough for them; their clothing causes them little trouble, so long as it holds together by a single thread; shoes they know not; their food consists of potatoes and potatoes only; whatever they earn beyond these needs they spend upon drink. What does such a race want with high wages? The worst quarters of all the large towns are inhabited by Irishmen. Whenever a district is distinguished for especial filth and especial ruinousness, the explorer may safely count upon meeting chiefly those Celtic faces which one recognises at the first glance as different from the Saxon physiognomy of the native, and the singing, aspirate brogue which the true Irishman never loses. I have occasionally heard the Irish-Celtic language spoken in the most thickly populated parts of Manchester. The majority of the families who live in cellars are almost everywhere of Irish origin. In short, the Irish have, as Dr. Kay says, discovered the minimum of the necessities of life, and are now making the English workers acquainted with it. Filth and drunkenness, too, they have brought with them. The lack of cleanliness, which is not so injurious in the country, where population is scattered, and which is the Irishman's second nature, becomes terrifying and gravely dangerous through its concentration here in the great cities. The Milesian deposits all garbage and filth before his house door here, as he was accustomed to do at home, and so accumulates the pools and dirt-heaps which disfigure the working- people's quarters and poison the air. He builds a pig-sty against the house wall as he did at home, and if he is prevented from doing this, he lets the pig sleep in the room with himself. This new and unnatural method of cattle-raising in cities is wholly of Irish origin. The Irishman loves his pig as the Arab his horse, with the difference that he sells it when it is fat enough to kill. Otherwise, he eats and sleeps with it, his children play with it, ride upon it, roll in the dirt with it, as any one may see a thousand times repeated in all the great towns of England. The filth and comfortlessness that prevail in the houses themselves it is impossible to describe. The Irishman is unaccustomed to the presence of furniture; a heap of straw, a few rags, utterly beyond use as clothing, suffice for his nightly couch. A piece of wood, a broken chair, an old chest for a table, more he needs not; a tea-kettle, a few pots and dishes, equip his kitchen, which is also his sleeping and living room. When he is in want of fuel, everything combustible within his reach, chairs, door-posts, mouldings, flooring, finds its way up the chimney. Moreover, why should he need much room? At home in his mud-cabin there was only one room for all domestic purposes; more than one room his family does not need in England. So the custom of crowding many persons into a single room, now so universal, has been chiefly implanted by the Irish immigration. And since the poor devil must have one enjoyment, and society has shut him out of all others, he betakes himself to the drinking of spirits. Drink is the only thing which makes the Irishman's life worth having, drink and his cheery care-free temperament; so he revels in drink to the point of the most bestial drunkenness. The southern facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness. The temptation is great, he cannot resist it, and so when he has money he gets rid of it down his throat. What else should he do? How can society blame him when it places him in a position in which he almost of necessity becomes a drunkard; when it leaves him to himself, to his savagery?
With such a competitor the English working-man has to struggle, with a competitor upon the lowest plane possible in a civilised country, who for this very reason requires less wages than any other. Nothing else is therefore possible than that, as Carlyle says, the wages of English working-man should be forced down further and further in every branch in which the Irish compete with him. And these branches are many. All such as demand little or no skill are open to the Irish. For work which requires long training or regular, pertinacious application, the dissolute, unsteady, drunken Irishman is on too low a plane. To become a mechanic, a mill-hand, he would have to adopt the English civilisation, the English customs, become, in the main, an Englishman. But for all simple, less exact work, wherever it is a question more of strength than skill, the Irishman is as good as the Englishman. Such occupations are therefore especially overcrowded with Irishmen: hand-weavers, bricklayers, porters, jobbers, and such workers, count hordes of Irishmen among their number, and the pressure of this race has done much to depress wages and lower the working-class. And even if the Irish, who have forced their way into other occupations, should become more civilised, enough of the old habits would cling to them to have a strong, degrading influence upon their English companions in toil, especially in view of the general effect of being surrounded by the Irish. For when, in almost every great city, a fifth or a quarter of the workers are Irish, or children of Irish parents, who have grown up among Irish filth, no one can wonder if the life, habits, intelligence, moral status -- in short, the whole character of the working-class assimilates a great part of the Irish characteristics. On the contrary, it is easy to understand how the degrading position of the English workers, engendered by our modern history, and its immediate consequences, has been still more degraded by the presence of Irish competition.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES
4. Archibald Alison, The Principles of Population, and their Connection with Human Happiness, two vols., 1840. This Alison is the historian of the French Revolution, and, like his brother, Dr. W. P. Alison, a religious Tory.-- Note by Engels. Return to Text
5.Chartism, pp. 28, 31, etc.-- Note by Engels. Return to Text
6. Milesian -- the name of an ancient family of Celtic kings of Ireland.-- Note by Engels Return to Text
Condition of the Working Class in England, by Engels, 1845
Irish Immigration
We have already referred several times in passing to the Irish who have immigrated into England; and we shall now have to investigate more closely the causes and results of this immigration.
The rapid extension of English industry could not have taken place if England had not possessed in the numerous and impoverished population of Ireland a reserve at command. The Irish had nothing to lose at home, and much to gain in England; and from the time when it became known in Ireland that the east side of St. George's Channel offered steady work and good pay for strong arms, every year has brought armies of the Irish hither. It has been calculated that more than a million have already immigrated, and not far from fifty thousand still come every year, nearly all of whom enter the industrial districts, especially the great cities, and there form the lowest class of the population. Thus there are in London, 120,000; in Manchester, 40,000; in Liverpool, 34,000; Bristol, 24,000; Glasgow, 40,000; Edinburgh, 29,000, poor Irish people. [4] These people having grown up almost. without civilisation, accustomed from youth to every sort of privation, rough, intemperate, and improvident, bring all their brutal habits with them among a class of the English population which has, in truth, little inducement to cultivate education and morality. Let us hear Thomas Carlyle upon this subject: [5]
"The wild Milesian [6] features, looking false ingenuity, restlessness, unreason, misery, and mockery, salute you on all highways and byways. The English coachman, as he whirls past, lashes the Milesian with his whip, curses him with his tongue; the Milesian is holding out his hat to beg. He is the sorest evil this country has to strive with. In his rags and laughing savagery, he is there to undertake all work that can be done by mere strength of hand and back -- for wages that will purchase him potatoes. He needs only salt for condiment, he lodges to his mind in any pig-hutch or dog-hutch, roosts in outhouses, and wears a suit of tatters, the getting on and off of which is said to be a difficult operation, transacted only in festivals and the high tides of the calendar. The Saxon-man, if he cannot work on these terms, finds no work. The uncivilised Irishman, not by his strength, but by the opposite of strength, drives the Saxon native out, takes possession in his room. There abides he, in his squalor and unreason, in his falsity and drunken violence, as the ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder. Whoever struggles, swimming with difficulty, may now find an example how the human being can exist not swimming, but sunk.... That the condition of the lower multitude of English labourers approximates more and more to that of the Irish, competing with them in all the markets: that whatsoever labour, to which mere strength with little skill will suffice, is to be done, will be done not at the English price, but at an approximation to the Irish price; at a price superior as yet to the Irish, that is, superior to scarcity of potatoes for thirty weeks yearly; superior, yet hourly, with the arrival of every new steamboat, sinking nearer to an equality with that."
If we except his exaggerated and one-sided condemnation of the Irish national character, Carlyle is perfectly right. These Irishmen who migrate for fourpence to England, on the deck of a steamship on which they are often packed like cattle, insinuate themselves everywhere. The worst dwellings are good enough for them; their clothing causes them little trouble, so long as it holds together by a single thread; shoes they know not; their food consists of potatoes and potatoes only; whatever they earn beyond these needs they spend upon drink. What does such a race want with high wages? The worst quarters of all the large towns are inhabited by Irishmen. Whenever a district is distinguished for especial filth and especial ruinousness, the explorer may safely count upon meeting chiefly those Celtic faces which one recognises at the first glance as different from the Saxon physiognomy of the native, and the singing, aspirate brogue which the true Irishman never loses. I have occasionally heard the Irish-Celtic language spoken in the most thickly populated parts of Manchester. The majority of the families who live in cellars are almost everywhere of Irish origin. In short, the Irish have, as Dr. Kay says, discovered the minimum of the necessities of life, and are now making the English workers acquainted with it. Filth and drunkenness, too, they have brought with them. The lack of cleanliness, which is not so injurious in the country, where population is scattered, and which is the Irishman's second nature, becomes terrifying and gravely dangerous through its concentration here in the great cities. The Milesian deposits all garbage and filth before his house door here, as he was accustomed to do at home, and so accumulates the pools and dirt-heaps which disfigure the working- people's quarters and poison the air. He builds a pig-sty against the house wall as he did at home, and if he is prevented from doing this, he lets the pig sleep in the room with himself. This new and unnatural method of cattle-raising in cities is wholly of Irish origin. The Irishman loves his pig as the Arab his horse, with the difference that he sells it when it is fat enough to kill. Otherwise, he eats and sleeps with it, his children play with it, ride upon it, roll in the dirt with it, as any one may see a thousand times repeated in all the great towns of England. The filth and comfortlessness that prevail in the houses themselves it is impossible to describe. The Irishman is unaccustomed to the presence of furniture; a heap of straw, a few rags, utterly beyond use as clothing, suffice for his nightly couch. A piece of wood, a broken chair, an old chest for a table, more he needs not; a tea-kettle, a few pots and dishes, equip his kitchen, which is also his sleeping and living room. When he is in want of fuel, everything combustible within his reach, chairs, door-posts, mouldings, flooring, finds its way up the chimney. Moreover, why should he need much room? At home in his mud-cabin there was only one room for all domestic purposes; more than one room his family does not need in England. So the custom of crowding many persons into a single room, now so universal, has been chiefly implanted by the Irish immigration. And since the poor devil must have one enjoyment, and society has shut him out of all others, he betakes himself to the drinking of spirits. Drink is the only thing which makes the Irishman's life worth having, drink and his cheery care-free temperament; so he revels in drink to the point of the most bestial drunkenness. The southern facile character of the Irishman, his crudity, which places him but little above the savage, his contempt for all humane enjoyments, in which his very crudeness makes him incapable of sharing, his filth and poverty, all favour drunkenness. The temptation is great, he cannot resist it, and so when he has money he gets rid of it down his throat. What else should he do? How can society blame him when it places him in a position in which he almost of necessity becomes a drunkard; when it leaves him to himself, to his savagery?
With such a competitor the English working-man has to struggle, with a competitor upon the lowest plane possible in a civilised country, who for this very reason requires less wages than any other. Nothing else is therefore possible than that, as Carlyle says, the wages of English working-man should be forced down further and further in every branch in which the Irish compete with him. And these branches are many. All such as demand little or no skill are open to the Irish. For work which requires long training or regular, pertinacious application, the dissolute, unsteady, drunken Irishman is on too low a plane. To become a mechanic, a mill-hand, he would have to adopt the English civilisation, the English customs, become, in the main, an Englishman. But for all simple, less exact work, wherever it is a question more of strength than skill, the Irishman is as good as the Englishman. Such occupations are therefore especially overcrowded with Irishmen: hand-weavers, bricklayers, porters, jobbers, and such workers, count hordes of Irishmen among their number, and the pressure of this race has done much to depress wages and lower the working-class. And even if the Irish, who have forced their way into other occupations, should become more civilised, enough of the old habits would cling to them to have a strong, degrading influence upon their English companions in toil, especially in view of the general effect of being surrounded by the Irish. For when, in almost every great city, a fifth or a quarter of the workers are Irish, or children of Irish parents, who have grown up among Irish filth, no one can wonder if the life, habits, intelligence, moral status -- in short, the whole character of the working-class assimilates a great part of the Irish characteristics. On the contrary, it is easy to understand how the degrading position of the English workers, engendered by our modern history, and its immediate consequences, has been still more degraded by the presence of Irish competition.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES
4. Archibald Alison, The Principles of Population, and their Connection with Human Happiness, two vols., 1840. This Alison is the historian of the French Revolution, and, like his brother, Dr. W. P. Alison, a religious Tory.-- Note by Engels. Return to Text
5.Chartism, pp. 28, 31, etc.-- Note by Engels. Return to Text
6. Milesian -- the name of an ancient family of Celtic kings of Ireland.-- Note by Engels Return to Text
Marx: A Warning
Marx
The International Workingmen's Association, 1866
A warning
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written: by Marx on March 15, 1865;
First published: in Der Bote vom Niederrhein, No. 57, May 13, 1866 Oberrheinischer Courier, No. 113, May 15, 1866, Mitteldeutsche Volks-Zeitung, No. 184, August 10, 1866.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some time ago the London journeymen tailors formed a general association 120 to uphold their demands against the London master tailors, who are mostly big capitalists. It was a question not only of bringing wages into line with the increased prices of means of subsistence, but also of putting an end to the exceedingly harsh treatment of the workers in this branch of industry. The masters sought to frustrate this plan by recruiting journeymen tailors, chiefly in Belgium, France and Switzerland. Thereupon the secretaries of the Central Council of the International Working Men's Association published in Belgian, French and Swiss newspapers a warning which was a complete success. The London masters' maneuver was foiled; they had to surrender and meet their workers' just demands.
Defeated in England, the masters are now trying to take counter-measures, starting in Scotland. The fact is that, as a result of the London events, they had to agree, initially, to a 15 per cent. wage rise in Edinburgh as well. But secretly they sent agents to Germany to recruit journeymen tailors, particularly in the Hanover and Mecklenburg areas, for importation to Edinburgh. The first group has already been shipped off. The purpose of this importation is the same as that of the importation of Indian COOLlES to Jamaica, namely, perpetuation of slavery. If the Edinburgh masters succeeded, through the import of German labour, in nullifying the concessions they had already made, it would inevitably lead to repercussions in England. No one would suffer more than the German workers themselves, who constitute in Great Britain a larger number than the workers of all the other Continental nations. And the newly-imported workers, being completely helpless in a strange land, would soon sink to the level of pariahs.
Furthermore, it is a point of honour with the German workers to prove to other countries that they, like their brothers in France, Belgium and Switzerland, know how to defend the common interests of their class and will not become obedient mercenaries of capital in its struggle against labour.
On behalf of the Central Council
of the International Working Men's Association,
Karl Marx
London, May 4, 1866
German journeymen tailors who wish to know more about conditions in Britain are requested to address their letters to the German branch committee of the London Tailors' Association, c/o Albert F. Haufe, Crown Public House, Hedden Court, Regent Street, London.
The International Workingmen's Association, 1866
A warning
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written: by Marx on March 15, 1865;
First published: in Der Bote vom Niederrhein, No. 57, May 13, 1866 Oberrheinischer Courier, No. 113, May 15, 1866, Mitteldeutsche Volks-Zeitung, No. 184, August 10, 1866.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some time ago the London journeymen tailors formed a general association 120 to uphold their demands against the London master tailors, who are mostly big capitalists. It was a question not only of bringing wages into line with the increased prices of means of subsistence, but also of putting an end to the exceedingly harsh treatment of the workers in this branch of industry. The masters sought to frustrate this plan by recruiting journeymen tailors, chiefly in Belgium, France and Switzerland. Thereupon the secretaries of the Central Council of the International Working Men's Association published in Belgian, French and Swiss newspapers a warning which was a complete success. The London masters' maneuver was foiled; they had to surrender and meet their workers' just demands.
Defeated in England, the masters are now trying to take counter-measures, starting in Scotland. The fact is that, as a result of the London events, they had to agree, initially, to a 15 per cent. wage rise in Edinburgh as well. But secretly they sent agents to Germany to recruit journeymen tailors, particularly in the Hanover and Mecklenburg areas, for importation to Edinburgh. The first group has already been shipped off. The purpose of this importation is the same as that of the importation of Indian COOLlES to Jamaica, namely, perpetuation of slavery. If the Edinburgh masters succeeded, through the import of German labour, in nullifying the concessions they had already made, it would inevitably lead to repercussions in England. No one would suffer more than the German workers themselves, who constitute in Great Britain a larger number than the workers of all the other Continental nations. And the newly-imported workers, being completely helpless in a strange land, would soon sink to the level of pariahs.
Furthermore, it is a point of honour with the German workers to prove to other countries that they, like their brothers in France, Belgium and Switzerland, know how to defend the common interests of their class and will not become obedient mercenaries of capital in its struggle against labour.
On behalf of the Central Council
of the International Working Men's Association,
Karl Marx
London, May 4, 1866
German journeymen tailors who wish to know more about conditions in Britain are requested to address their letters to the German branch committee of the London Tailors' Association, c/o Albert F. Haufe, Crown Public House, Hedden Court, Regent Street, London.
Monday 7 February 2011
Lenin: Capitalism and Workers Immigration
CAPITALISM AND WORKERS' IMMIGRATION
Capitalism has given rise to a special form of migration of nations.
The rapidly developing industrial countries, introducing machinery on
a large scale and ousting the backward countries from the world
market, raise wages at home above the average rate and thus attract
workers from the backward countries.
Hundreds of thousands of workers thus wander hundreds and thousands of
versts. Advanced capitalism drags them forcibly into its orbit, tears
them out of the backwoods in which they live", makes them participants
in the world-historical movement and brings them face to face with the
powerful, united, international class of factory owners.
THERE CAN BE NO DOUBT THAT DIRE POVERTY ALONE COMPELS PEOPLE TO
ABANDON THEIR NATIVE LAND, AND THAT THE CAPITALISTS EXPLOIT THE
IMMIGRANT WORKERS IN THE MOST SHAMELESS MANNER. BUT ONLY REACTIONARIES
CAN SHUT THEIR EYES TO THE PROGRESSIVE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS MODERN
MIGRATION OF NATIONS. EMANCIPATION FROM THE YOKE OF CAPITAL IS
IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT THE FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM, AND WITHOUT
THE CLASS STRUGGLE THAT IS BASED ON IT. AND IT IS INTO THIS STRUGGLE
THAT CAPITALISM IS DRAWING THE MASSES OF THE WORKING PEOPLE OF THE
WHOLE WORLD, BREAKING DOWN THE MUSTY, FUSTY HABITS OF LOCAL LIFE,
BREAKING DOWN NATIONAL BARRIERS AND PREJUDICES, UNITING WORKERS FROM
ALL COUNTRIES IN HUGE FACTORIES AND MINES IN AMERICA, GERMANY, AND SO
AMERICA HEADS THE LIST OF COUNTRIES WHICH IMPORT WORKERS. The
following are the immigration figures for America :
Ten years 1821-30 99,000
" " 1831-40 496,000
" " 1841-50 1,597,000
" " 1851-60 2,453,000
" " 1861-70 2,064,000
" " 1871-80 2,262,000
" " 1881-90 4,722,000
" " 1891-1900 3,703,000
Nine " 1901-09 7,210,000
The growth of immigration is enormous and continues to increase.
During the five years 1905-09 the average number of immigrants
entering America (the United States alone is referred to) was over a
million a year.
It is interesting to note the change in the place of origin of those
emigrating to America. Up to 1880 the so-called old immigration
prevailed, that is, immigration from the old civilised countries, such
as Great Britain, Germany and partly from Sweden. Even up to 1890,
Great Britain and Germany provided more than half the total
immigrants.
From 1880 onwards, there was an incredibly rapid increase in what is
called the new immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, from
Austria, Italy and Russia. The number of people emigrating from these
three countries to the United States was as follows:
Ten years 1871-80 201,000
" " 1881-90 927,000
" " 1891-1900 1,847,000
" " 1901-09 5,127,000
Thus, the most backward countries in the old world, those that more
than any other retain survivals of feudalism in every branch of social
life, are, as it were, undergoing compulsory training in civilisation.
American capitalism is tearing millions of workers of backward Eastern
Europe (including Russia, which in 1891-1900 provided 594,000
immigrants and in 1900-09, 1,410,000) out of their semi-feudal
conditions and is putting them in the ranks of the advanced,
international army of the proletariat.
Hourwich, the author of an extremely illuminating book, Immigration
and Labour, which appeared in English last year, makes some
interesting observations. The number of people emigrating to America
grew particularly after the 1905 revolution (1905-1,000,000;
1906-1,200,000; 1907- 1,400,000; 1908 and 1909-1,900,000
respectively). Workers who had participated in various strikes in
Russia introduced into America the bolder and more aggressive spirit
of the mass strike.
Russia is lagging farther and farther behind, losing some of her best
workers to foreign countries; America is advancing more and more
rapidly, taking the most vigorous and able-bodied sections of the
working population of the whole world.
Other countries on the American Continent besides the United States
are also rapidly advancing. The number of immigrants entering the
United States last year was about 250,000, Brazil about 170,000 and
Canada over 200,000; total 620,000 for the year.
Germany, which is more or less keeping pace with the United States, is
changing from a country which released workers into one that attracts
them from foreign countries. The number of immigrants from Germany to
America in the ten years 1881-90 was 1,453,000; but in the nine years
1901-09 it dropped to 310,000. The number of foreign workers in
Germany, however, was 695,000 in 1910-11 and 729,000 in 1911-12.
Dividing these immigrants according to occupation and country of
origin we get the following:
Foreign workers employed in Germany in 1911-12 (thousands)
Agriculture Industry Total
From Russia 274 34 308
Austria 101 162 263
other 22 135 157
total 397 331 728
The more backward the country the larger is the number of "unskilled"
agricultural labourers it supplies. _The advanced nations seize, as it
were, the best paid occupations for themselves and leave the
semi-barbarian countries the worst paid occupations. Europe in general
("other countries") provided Germany with 157,000 workers, of whom
more than eight-tenths (135,000 out of 157,000) were industrial
workers. Backward Austria provided only six-tenths (162,000 out of
263,000) of the industrial workers. The most backward country of all,
Russia, provided'only one-tenth of the industrial workers (34,000 out
of 308,000).
Thus, Russia is punished everywhere and in everything for her
backwardness. But compared with the rest of the population, it is the
workers of Russia who are more than any others bursting out of this
state of backwardness and barbarism, more than any others combating
these "delightful" features of their native land, and more closely
than any others uniting with the workers of all countries into a
single international force for emancipation.
The bourgeoisie incites the workers of one nation against those of
another in the endeavour to keep them disunited. CLASS-CONSCIOUS
WORKERS, REALISING THAT THE BREAKDOWN OF ALL THE NATIONAL BARRIERS BY
CAPITALISM IS INEVITABLE AND PROGRESSIVE, ARE TRYING TO HELP TO
ENLIGHTEN AND ORGANISE THEIR FELLOW-WORKERS FROM THE BACKWARD
COUNTRIES.
Za Pravdu No. 22, October 29, 1913
Vol. 19, pp. 454-57
Signed: V. I. Lenin
Capitalism has given rise to a special form of migration of nations.
The rapidly developing industrial countries, introducing machinery on
a large scale and ousting the backward countries from the world
market, raise wages at home above the average rate and thus attract
workers from the backward countries.
Hundreds of thousands of workers thus wander hundreds and thousands of
versts. Advanced capitalism drags them forcibly into its orbit, tears
them out of the backwoods in which they live", makes them participants
in the world-historical movement and brings them face to face with the
powerful, united, international class of factory owners.
THERE CAN BE NO DOUBT THAT DIRE POVERTY ALONE COMPELS PEOPLE TO
ABANDON THEIR NATIVE LAND, AND THAT THE CAPITALISTS EXPLOIT THE
IMMIGRANT WORKERS IN THE MOST SHAMELESS MANNER. BUT ONLY REACTIONARIES
CAN SHUT THEIR EYES TO THE PROGRESSIVE SIGNIFICANCE OF THIS MODERN
MIGRATION OF NATIONS. EMANCIPATION FROM THE YOKE OF CAPITAL IS
IMPOSSIBLE WITHOUT THE FURTHER DEVELOPMENT OF CAPITALISM, AND WITHOUT
THE CLASS STRUGGLE THAT IS BASED ON IT. AND IT IS INTO THIS STRUGGLE
THAT CAPITALISM IS DRAWING THE MASSES OF THE WORKING PEOPLE OF THE
WHOLE WORLD, BREAKING DOWN THE MUSTY, FUSTY HABITS OF LOCAL LIFE,
BREAKING DOWN NATIONAL BARRIERS AND PREJUDICES, UNITING WORKERS FROM
ALL COUNTRIES IN HUGE FACTORIES AND MINES IN AMERICA, GERMANY, AND SO
AMERICA HEADS THE LIST OF COUNTRIES WHICH IMPORT WORKERS. The
following are the immigration figures for America :
Ten years 1821-30 99,000
" " 1831-40 496,000
" " 1841-50 1,597,000
" " 1851-60 2,453,000
" " 1861-70 2,064,000
" " 1871-80 2,262,000
" " 1881-90 4,722,000
" " 1891-1900 3,703,000
Nine " 1901-09 7,210,000
The growth of immigration is enormous and continues to increase.
During the five years 1905-09 the average number of immigrants
entering America (the United States alone is referred to) was over a
million a year.
It is interesting to note the change in the place of origin of those
emigrating to America. Up to 1880 the so-called old immigration
prevailed, that is, immigration from the old civilised countries, such
as Great Britain, Germany and partly from Sweden. Even up to 1890,
Great Britain and Germany provided more than half the total
immigrants.
From 1880 onwards, there was an incredibly rapid increase in what is
called the new immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, from
Austria, Italy and Russia. The number of people emigrating from these
three countries to the United States was as follows:
Ten years 1871-80 201,000
" " 1881-90 927,000
" " 1891-1900 1,847,000
" " 1901-09 5,127,000
Thus, the most backward countries in the old world, those that more
than any other retain survivals of feudalism in every branch of social
life, are, as it were, undergoing compulsory training in civilisation.
American capitalism is tearing millions of workers of backward Eastern
Europe (including Russia, which in 1891-1900 provided 594,000
immigrants and in 1900-09, 1,410,000) out of their semi-feudal
conditions and is putting them in the ranks of the advanced,
international army of the proletariat.
Hourwich, the author of an extremely illuminating book, Immigration
and Labour, which appeared in English last year, makes some
interesting observations. The number of people emigrating to America
grew particularly after the 1905 revolution (1905-1,000,000;
1906-1,200,000; 1907- 1,400,000; 1908 and 1909-1,900,000
respectively). Workers who had participated in various strikes in
Russia introduced into America the bolder and more aggressive spirit
of the mass strike.
Russia is lagging farther and farther behind, losing some of her best
workers to foreign countries; America is advancing more and more
rapidly, taking the most vigorous and able-bodied sections of the
working population of the whole world.
Other countries on the American Continent besides the United States
are also rapidly advancing. The number of immigrants entering the
United States last year was about 250,000, Brazil about 170,000 and
Canada over 200,000; total 620,000 for the year.
Germany, which is more or less keeping pace with the United States, is
changing from a country which released workers into one that attracts
them from foreign countries. The number of immigrants from Germany to
America in the ten years 1881-90 was 1,453,000; but in the nine years
1901-09 it dropped to 310,000. The number of foreign workers in
Germany, however, was 695,000 in 1910-11 and 729,000 in 1911-12.
Dividing these immigrants according to occupation and country of
origin we get the following:
Foreign workers employed in Germany in 1911-12 (thousands)
Agriculture Industry Total
From Russia 274 34 308
Austria 101 162 263
other 22 135 157
total 397 331 728
The more backward the country the larger is the number of "unskilled"
agricultural labourers it supplies. _The advanced nations seize, as it
were, the best paid occupations for themselves and leave the
semi-barbarian countries the worst paid occupations. Europe in general
("other countries") provided Germany with 157,000 workers, of whom
more than eight-tenths (135,000 out of 157,000) were industrial
workers. Backward Austria provided only six-tenths (162,000 out of
263,000) of the industrial workers. The most backward country of all,
Russia, provided'only one-tenth of the industrial workers (34,000 out
of 308,000).
Thus, Russia is punished everywhere and in everything for her
backwardness. But compared with the rest of the population, it is the
workers of Russia who are more than any others bursting out of this
state of backwardness and barbarism, more than any others combating
these "delightful" features of their native land, and more closely
than any others uniting with the workers of all countries into a
single international force for emancipation.
The bourgeoisie incites the workers of one nation against those of
another in the endeavour to keep them disunited. CLASS-CONSCIOUS
WORKERS, REALISING THAT THE BREAKDOWN OF ALL THE NATIONAL BARRIERS BY
CAPITALISM IS INEVITABLE AND PROGRESSIVE, ARE TRYING TO HELP TO
ENLIGHTEN AND ORGANISE THEIR FELLOW-WORKERS FROM THE BACKWARD
COUNTRIES.
Za Pravdu No. 22, October 29, 1913
Vol. 19, pp. 454-57
Signed: V. I. Lenin
John Reed 1903 Strike-Use of Imported Labour
In describing the strikes in the coalmines of the southern USA which
were owned by the Robber Barons of the 19th century, Rockefeller et al
he says this about a 1903 strike:
"A large part of those who are striking today were brought in as strike
breakers in the great walkout in 1903. Now in that year more than 70
percent of the miners in southern Colorado were English pseaking:
Americans, English, Scotch and Weslh. Their demands were practically
the same as the present ones. Before that every, every ten years, back
to 1884, there had been similar strikes. Militia and imported mine
guards wantonly murdered, imprisoned and deported out of the state
hundreds of miners. Two years before the 1903 strike 6,000 men were
blacklisted and beaten out of the mines, in defiance of the state law,
because they belonged to the union. Inspite of the eight hour law, no
man worked less than ten hours and when the miners went out Adjutant
General Sherman Bell of the militia suspended the right of habeas
corpus, remarking 'To hell with the Constitution!' After the strike was
broken 10,000 men found themselves blacklisted, for the operators made
a careful study of people most patient under oppression, and
deliberately imported foreigners to fill the mies, carefully massing
each mine men of different languages, who would not be able to
organise. They policed their camps with armed guards, who had the right
of trial and sentence for any crime."
( John Reed "Shaking the World"
Courteousy of TUC appointed bookseller 'Bookmarks' SWP-UK p.15)
were owned by the Robber Barons of the 19th century, Rockefeller et al
he says this about a 1903 strike:
"A large part of those who are striking today were brought in as strike
breakers in the great walkout in 1903. Now in that year more than 70
percent of the miners in southern Colorado were English pseaking:
Americans, English, Scotch and Weslh. Their demands were practically
the same as the present ones. Before that every, every ten years, back
to 1884, there had been similar strikes. Militia and imported mine
guards wantonly murdered, imprisoned and deported out of the state
hundreds of miners. Two years before the 1903 strike 6,000 men were
blacklisted and beaten out of the mines, in defiance of the state law,
because they belonged to the union. Inspite of the eight hour law, no
man worked less than ten hours and when the miners went out Adjutant
General Sherman Bell of the militia suspended the right of habeas
corpus, remarking 'To hell with the Constitution!' After the strike was
broken 10,000 men found themselves blacklisted, for the operators made
a careful study of people most patient under oppression, and
deliberately imported foreigners to fill the mies, carefully massing
each mine men of different languages, who would not be able to
organise. They policed their camps with armed guards, who had the right
of trial and sentence for any crime."
( John Reed "Shaking the World"
Courteousy of TUC appointed bookseller 'Bookmarks' SWP-UK p.15)
Eleanor Marx to Samuel Gompers Issue the Importation of Labour
Will Thorne and Eleanor Marx-Aveling To Samuel Gompers
January 25, 1891
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
First Published: in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 2nd Russian ed.,
Vol. 38, 1963;
Eleanor Marx-Aveling’s and William Thorne’s letter was addressed to
the Chairman of the association of the trade unions of American
workers — the American Federation of Labour (A.F.L.). The authors, who
expressed the sentiments of the revolutionary forces acting under
Engels’s leadership, advocated the unity of the international labour
movement, and did all they could to bring it about.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Samuel Gompers
for the American Federation of Labour
Dear Comrade,
During the recent visit of Comrades Bebel, Liebknecht and Singer on
the occasion of Frederick Engels’ 70th birthday, they met
representatives of the Gasworkers and General Labourers Union
(comprising about 100,000 men and women belonging to over seventy
trades) and of several other Unions and Organisations, besides John
Burns, Cunninghame Graham, M. P. and others. At this meeting the
feeling was very strong that the time had come to bring about a close
and organised relation between the labour parties of the different
countries. The most immediate question is that of preventing the
introduction from one country to another of unfair labour, i.e., of
workers who not knowing the conditions of the labour-struggle in a
particular country, are imported into that country by the Capitalists,
in order to reduce wages, or lengthen the hours of labour, or both.
The most practical way of carrying this out appears to be the
appointing in each country of an International Secretary, who shall be
in communication with all the other International Secretaries. Thus,
the moment any difficulty between capitalists and labourers occurs in
any country, the International Labour Secretaries of all the other
countries should be at once communicated with, and will make it their
business to try to prevent the exportation from their particular
country of any labourers to take the place on unfair terms of those
locked-out or on strike in the country where the difficulty has
occurred. Whilst this is the most immediate and most obvious matter to
be dealt with, it is hoped that an arrangement of the kind proposed,
will in every way facilitate the interchange of ideas on all questions
between the workers of every nation that is becoming every day and
every hour the most pressing necessity of the working-class movement.
If your organisation agrees with the views of the Gasworkers and
General Labourers Union, will you at once communicate with us, and
give us the name of the Secretary appointed by it to take part in this
important movement?
Yours fraternally
W. Thorne (General Secretary)
Eleanor Marx-Aveling (On the behalf of the Executive Committee)
January 25, 1891
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
First Published: in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 2nd Russian ed.,
Vol. 38, 1963;
Eleanor Marx-Aveling’s and William Thorne’s letter was addressed to
the Chairman of the association of the trade unions of American
workers — the American Federation of Labour (A.F.L.). The authors, who
expressed the sentiments of the revolutionary forces acting under
Engels’s leadership, advocated the unity of the international labour
movement, and did all they could to bring it about.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mr. Samuel Gompers
for the American Federation of Labour
Dear Comrade,
During the recent visit of Comrades Bebel, Liebknecht and Singer on
the occasion of Frederick Engels’ 70th birthday, they met
representatives of the Gasworkers and General Labourers Union
(comprising about 100,000 men and women belonging to over seventy
trades) and of several other Unions and Organisations, besides John
Burns, Cunninghame Graham, M. P. and others. At this meeting the
feeling was very strong that the time had come to bring about a close
and organised relation between the labour parties of the different
countries. The most immediate question is that of preventing the
introduction from one country to another of unfair labour, i.e., of
workers who not knowing the conditions of the labour-struggle in a
particular country, are imported into that country by the Capitalists,
in order to reduce wages, or lengthen the hours of labour, or both.
The most practical way of carrying this out appears to be the
appointing in each country of an International Secretary, who shall be
in communication with all the other International Secretaries. Thus,
the moment any difficulty between capitalists and labourers occurs in
any country, the International Labour Secretaries of all the other
countries should be at once communicated with, and will make it their
business to try to prevent the exportation from their particular
country of any labourers to take the place on unfair terms of those
locked-out or on strike in the country where the difficulty has
occurred. Whilst this is the most immediate and most obvious matter to
be dealt with, it is hoped that an arrangement of the kind proposed,
will in every way facilitate the interchange of ideas on all questions
between the workers of every nation that is becoming every day and
every hour the most pressing necessity of the working-class movement.
If your organisation agrees with the views of the Gasworkers and
General Labourers Union, will you at once communicate with us, and
give us the name of the Secretary appointed by it to take part in this
important movement?
Yours fraternally
W. Thorne (General Secretary)
Eleanor Marx-Aveling (On the behalf of the Executive Committee)
Marx: Capitalists Importing Foreigners
FROM THE MINUTES
OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL MEETING
OF JULY 23, 1867
INTERFERENCE IN TRADES' DISPUTES†a
One of the best means of demonstrating the beneficent influence of
international combination is the assistance rendered by the
International Working Men's Association in the daily occurring trades'
disputes. It used to be a standard threat with British capitalists, not only in London, but also in the provinces,
when their workmen would not tamely submit to their arbitrary
dictation, that they would supplant them by an importation of
foreigners. The possibility of such importations taking place was in
most cases sufficient to deter the British workmen from insisting on
their demands. The action taken by the Council has had the effect of
putting a stop to these threats being made publicly. Where anything of
the kind is contemplated it has to be done in secret, and the
slightest information obtained by the workmen suffices to frustrate
the plans of the capitalists. As a rule, when a strike or a lock-out
occurs concerning any of the affiliated trades, the Continental
correspondents are at once instructed to warn the workmen in their
respective localities not to enter into any engagements with the
agents of the capitalists of the place where the dispute is. However,
this action is not confined to affiliated trades. The same action is
taken on behalf of other trades upon application being received. This
generally leads to the affiliation of the trades that invoke our aid.
Now and then it happens that the capitalists succeed in getting a few
stragglers, but they generally repudiate their engagements upon being
informed of the reason why they were engaged.
During the London basket-makers' dispute last winter information was
received that six Belgians were at work under the railway arches in
Blue Anchor Lane, Bermondsey. They were as strictly guarded against
coming in contact with the outside public as a kidnapped girl in a
nunnery. By some stratagem a Flemish member of the Council succeeded
in obtaining an interview, and upon being informed of the nature of
their engagement the men struck work and returned home. Just as they
were about to embark a steamer arrived with a fresh supply. The new
arrivals were at once communicated with; they too repudiated their
engagements, and returned home, promising that they would exert
themselves to prevent any further supplies, which they accomplished.
In consequence of the appeals made by deputations from the Council to
various British societies, the Paris bronze-workers received very
considerable pecuniary support during their lockout, and the London
tailors on strike have in turn received support from Continental
associations through the intercession of the Council. The good offices
of the Council were also employed on behalf of the excavators, the
wire-workers, the block-cutters, the hairdressers, and others.
OF THE GENERAL COUNCIL MEETING
OF JULY 23, 1867
INTERFERENCE IN TRADES' DISPUTES†a
One of the best means of demonstrating the beneficent influence of
international combination is the assistance rendered by the
International Working Men's Association in the daily occurring trades'
disputes. It used to be a standard threat with British capitalists, not only in London, but also in the provinces,
when their workmen would not tamely submit to their arbitrary
dictation, that they would supplant them by an importation of
foreigners. The possibility of such importations taking place was in
most cases sufficient to deter the British workmen from insisting on
their demands. The action taken by the Council has had the effect of
putting a stop to these threats being made publicly. Where anything of
the kind is contemplated it has to be done in secret, and the
slightest information obtained by the workmen suffices to frustrate
the plans of the capitalists. As a rule, when a strike or a lock-out
occurs concerning any of the affiliated trades, the Continental
correspondents are at once instructed to warn the workmen in their
respective localities not to enter into any engagements with the
agents of the capitalists of the place where the dispute is. However,
this action is not confined to affiliated trades. The same action is
taken on behalf of other trades upon application being received. This
generally leads to the affiliation of the trades that invoke our aid.
Now and then it happens that the capitalists succeed in getting a few
stragglers, but they generally repudiate their engagements upon being
informed of the reason why they were engaged.
During the London basket-makers' dispute last winter information was
received that six Belgians were at work under the railway arches in
Blue Anchor Lane, Bermondsey. They were as strictly guarded against
coming in contact with the outside public as a kidnapped girl in a
nunnery. By some stratagem a Flemish member of the Council succeeded
in obtaining an interview, and upon being informed of the nature of
their engagement the men struck work and returned home. Just as they
were about to embark a steamer arrived with a fresh supply. The new
arrivals were at once communicated with; they too repudiated their
engagements, and returned home, promising that they would exert
themselves to prevent any further supplies, which they accomplished.
In consequence of the appeals made by deputations from the Council to
various British societies, the Paris bronze-workers received very
considerable pecuniary support during their lockout, and the London
tailors on strike have in turn received support from Continental
associations through the intercession of the Council. The good offices
of the Council were also employed on behalf of the excavators, the
wire-workers, the block-cutters, the hairdressers, and others.
Sunday 6 February 2011
Engels Letter to Sorge Why no US LABOUR PARTY?
London, December 2, 1893.
Dear Sorge:
Many thanks to you and your wife for your friendly wishes and your
letter of November 19th.
I am very sorry that you are suffering from gout; I hope it will come
around with time. It is a tricky disease.
The repeal of the silver purchase law has saved America from a severe
money crisis and will promote industrial prosperity. But I don’t know
whether it wouldn’t have been better for this crash to have actually
occurred. The phrase “cheap money” seems to be bred in the bone of
your Western farmers. First, they imagine that if there are lots of
means of circulation in the country, the interest rate must drop,
whereby they confuse means of circulation and available money capital,
concerning which very enlightening things will come to light in Volume
III. Second, it suits all debtors to contract debts in good currency
and to pay them off later in depreciated currency. That is why the
debt-ridden Prussian Junkers also clamor for a double currency, which
would provide them with a veiled Solonic riddance of their debts. Now
if they had been able to wait with the silver reform in the United
States until the consequences of the nonsense had also reacted upon
the farmers, that would have opened many of their dense heads.
The tariff reform, slow as it is in getting started, does seem to have
caused a sort of panic among the manufacturers in New England already.
I hear — privately and from the papers — of the layoff of numerous
workers. But that will calm down as soon as the law is passed and the
uncertainty is over; I am convinced that America can boldly enter into
competition with England in all the great branches of industry.
The German socialists in America are an annoying business. The people
you get over there from Germany are usually not the best — they stay
here — and in any event they are not at all a fair sample of the
German party. And as is the case everywhere, each new arrival feels
himself called upon to turn everything he finds upside down, turning
it into something new, so that a new epoch may date from himself.
Moreover, most of these greenhorns remain stuck in New York for a long
time or for life, continually reinforced by new additions and relieved
of the necessity of learning the language of the country or of getting
to know American conditions properly. All of that certainly causes
much harm, but on the other hand, it is not to be denied that American
conditions involve very great and peculiar difficulties for a
continuous development of a workers’ party.
First, the Constitution, based as in England upon party government,
which causes every vote for any candidate not put up by one of the two
governing parties to appear to be lost. And the American, like the
Englishman, wants to influence his state; he does not throw his vote
away.
Then, and more especially, immigration, which divides the workers into
two groups: the native-born and the foreigners, and the latter in turn
into (1) the Irish, (2) the Germans, (3) the many small groups, each
of which understands only itself: Czechs, Poles, Italians,
Scandinavians, etc. And then the Negroes. To form a single party out
of these requires quite unusually powerful incentives. Often there is
a sudden violent élan, but the bourgeois need only wait passively, and
the dissimilar elements of the working class fall apart again.
Third, through the protective tariff system and the steadily growing
domestic market the workers must be exposed to a prosperity no trace
of which has been seen here in Europe for years now (except in Russia,
where, however, the bourgeois profit by it and not the workers).
A country like America, when it is really ripe for a socialist
workers’ party, certainly cannot be hindered from having one by the
couple of German socialist doctrinaires.
Part I of Volume III (246 pages of ms., dating from about 1850) is
ready for the printer. This is between the two of us. It will now go
ahead rapidly, I hope.
Cordial regards to your wife and yourself, and wishes for your
recovery, from L. K. and
Your
F. Engels
Dear Sorge:
Many thanks to you and your wife for your friendly wishes and your
letter of November 19th.
I am very sorry that you are suffering from gout; I hope it will come
around with time. It is a tricky disease.
The repeal of the silver purchase law has saved America from a severe
money crisis and will promote industrial prosperity. But I don’t know
whether it wouldn’t have been better for this crash to have actually
occurred. The phrase “cheap money” seems to be bred in the bone of
your Western farmers. First, they imagine that if there are lots of
means of circulation in the country, the interest rate must drop,
whereby they confuse means of circulation and available money capital,
concerning which very enlightening things will come to light in Volume
III. Second, it suits all debtors to contract debts in good currency
and to pay them off later in depreciated currency. That is why the
debt-ridden Prussian Junkers also clamor for a double currency, which
would provide them with a veiled Solonic riddance of their debts. Now
if they had been able to wait with the silver reform in the United
States until the consequences of the nonsense had also reacted upon
the farmers, that would have opened many of their dense heads.
The tariff reform, slow as it is in getting started, does seem to have
caused a sort of panic among the manufacturers in New England already.
I hear — privately and from the papers — of the layoff of numerous
workers. But that will calm down as soon as the law is passed and the
uncertainty is over; I am convinced that America can boldly enter into
competition with England in all the great branches of industry.
The German socialists in America are an annoying business. The people
you get over there from Germany are usually not the best — they stay
here — and in any event they are not at all a fair sample of the
German party. And as is the case everywhere, each new arrival feels
himself called upon to turn everything he finds upside down, turning
it into something new, so that a new epoch may date from himself.
Moreover, most of these greenhorns remain stuck in New York for a long
time or for life, continually reinforced by new additions and relieved
of the necessity of learning the language of the country or of getting
to know American conditions properly. All of that certainly causes
much harm, but on the other hand, it is not to be denied that American
conditions involve very great and peculiar difficulties for a
continuous development of a workers’ party.
First, the Constitution, based as in England upon party government,
which causes every vote for any candidate not put up by one of the two
governing parties to appear to be lost. And the American, like the
Englishman, wants to influence his state; he does not throw his vote
away.
Then, and more especially, immigration, which divides the workers into
two groups: the native-born and the foreigners, and the latter in turn
into (1) the Irish, (2) the Germans, (3) the many small groups, each
of which understands only itself: Czechs, Poles, Italians,
Scandinavians, etc. And then the Negroes. To form a single party out
of these requires quite unusually powerful incentives. Often there is
a sudden violent élan, but the bourgeois need only wait passively, and
the dissimilar elements of the working class fall apart again.
Third, through the protective tariff system and the steadily growing
domestic market the workers must be exposed to a prosperity no trace
of which has been seen here in Europe for years now (except in Russia,
where, however, the bourgeois profit by it and not the workers).
A country like America, when it is really ripe for a socialist
workers’ party, certainly cannot be hindered from having one by the
couple of German socialist doctrinaires.
Part I of Volume III (246 pages of ms., dating from about 1850) is
ready for the printer. This is between the two of us. It will now go
ahead rapidly, I hope.
Cordial regards to your wife and yourself, and wishes for your
recovery, from L. K. and
Your
F. Engels
Trotsky on Regulation of Immigration for Japanese and Koreans
Here's a quote from Trotsky calling for contols on Japanese and Korean
immigrants into Soviet Russia (taken from Problems of our Policy With
Repect To China and Japan).
III. On Japanese Immigration
When resolving the question of Japanese immigration to the Soviet Far
East we must take into account the intense interest the Japanese
public is showing in this matter. However, in view of the danger of
Japanese colonization in the Far East, every step we take will have to be
cautious and gradual. It is premature at this time to fix the number of
Japanese immigrants who are to be allowed into the USSR, but, in any case,
Japanese immigration should not be large. It should be strictly regulated
and should result in the breaking up of Japanese-controlled resources by
means of a special agency set up for that purpose. The Japanese colonists
should be settled in a checkerboard fashion, being alternated with a
reinforcement of colonization from central Russia. The land that is
parceled out should be acceptable to the Japanese peasants and should be
suited to the peculiarities of Japanese agriculture. There are areas
of land suitable for the Japanese colonists in the vicinity of Khabarovsk
and further south, but not in the Siberian interior. We must not allow
Korean immigration into these regions under the pretense that it is
Japanese. The question of Korean immigration must be examined
separately. The Koreans can be granted land that is considerably farther
into the depths of Siberia.
--
Here's a quote from the Erfurt Programme where Kautsky gives a formally
classical but decidely non-class analysis of immigration (note the word
"inevitable"). It is interesting to compare this with quotes from Marx and
Engels on Irish immigration. Kautsky's orthodoxy causes him to acknowledge
that immigration tends to reduce wages, but he presents us with open
borders logic anyway. Question - was Kautsky the first open borders
Marxist?
Very differently from the apprentice or the merchant is the modern
proletarian torn loose from the soil. He becomes a citizen of the
world; the whole world is his home.
No doubt this world-citizenship is a great hardship for the workers in
countries where the standard of living is high and the conditions of
labor are comparatively good. In such countries, naturally, immigration
will exceed emigration. As a result the laborers with the higher standard
of living will be hindered in their class-struggle by the influx of
those with a lower standard and less power of resistance.
Under certain circumstances this sort of competition, like that of the
capitalists, may lead to a new emphasis on national lines, a new hatred of
foreign workers on the part of the native born. But the conflict of
nationalities, which is perpetual among the capitalists, can be only
temporary among the proletarians. For sooner or later the workers will
discover that the immigration of cheap labor-power from the more
backward to the more advanced countries, is as inevitable a result
of the capitalist system as the introduction of machinery or the forcing
of women into industry.
In still another way does the labor movement of an advanced country
suffer under the influence of the backward conditions of other lands. The
high degree of exploitation endured by the proletariat of the economically
undeveloped nations becomes an excuse for the capitalists of the more
highly developed ones for opposing any movement in the direction of
higher wages or better conditions.
In more than one way, then, it is borne in upon the workers of each
nation that their success in the class-struggle is dependent on the
progress of the working-class of other nations. For a time this may turn
them against foreign workers, but finally they come to see that there is
only one effective means of removing the hindering influence of backward
nations: to do away with the backwardness itself. German workers have
every reason to co-operate with the Slavs and Italians in order that these
may secure higher wages and a shorter working-day; the English workers
have the same interest in relation to the Germans, and the Americans in
relation to Europeans in general.
The dependence of the proletariat of one land on that of another
leads inevitably to a joining of forces by the militant proletarians of
various lands.
The survivals of national seclusion and national hatred which the
proletariat took over from the bourgeoisie, disappear steadily. The
working-class is freeing itself from national prejudices. Working-men
learn more and more to see in the foreign laborer a fellow-fighter,
a comrade.
The strongest bonds of international solidarity, naturally, are
those which bind groups of proletarians, which, though of different
nationalities, have the same purposes and use the same methods to
accomplish them.
immigrants into Soviet Russia (taken from Problems of our Policy With
Repect To China and Japan).
III. On Japanese Immigration
When resolving the question of Japanese immigration to the Soviet Far
East we must take into account the intense interest the Japanese
public is showing in this matter. However, in view of the danger of
Japanese colonization in the Far East, every step we take will have to be
cautious and gradual. It is premature at this time to fix the number of
Japanese immigrants who are to be allowed into the USSR, but, in any case,
Japanese immigration should not be large. It should be strictly regulated
and should result in the breaking up of Japanese-controlled resources by
means of a special agency set up for that purpose. The Japanese colonists
should be settled in a checkerboard fashion, being alternated with a
reinforcement of colonization from central Russia. The land that is
parceled out should be acceptable to the Japanese peasants and should be
suited to the peculiarities of Japanese agriculture. There are areas
of land suitable for the Japanese colonists in the vicinity of Khabarovsk
and further south, but not in the Siberian interior. We must not allow
Korean immigration into these regions under the pretense that it is
Japanese. The question of Korean immigration must be examined
separately. The Koreans can be granted land that is considerably farther
into the depths of Siberia.
--
Here's a quote from the Erfurt Programme where Kautsky gives a formally
classical but decidely non-class analysis of immigration (note the word
"inevitable"). It is interesting to compare this with quotes from Marx and
Engels on Irish immigration. Kautsky's orthodoxy causes him to acknowledge
that immigration tends to reduce wages, but he presents us with open
borders logic anyway. Question - was Kautsky the first open borders
Marxist?
Very differently from the apprentice or the merchant is the modern
proletarian torn loose from the soil. He becomes a citizen of the
world; the whole world is his home.
No doubt this world-citizenship is a great hardship for the workers in
countries where the standard of living is high and the conditions of
labor are comparatively good. In such countries, naturally, immigration
will exceed emigration. As a result the laborers with the higher standard
of living will be hindered in their class-struggle by the influx of
those with a lower standard and less power of resistance.
Under certain circumstances this sort of competition, like that of the
capitalists, may lead to a new emphasis on national lines, a new hatred of
foreign workers on the part of the native born. But the conflict of
nationalities, which is perpetual among the capitalists, can be only
temporary among the proletarians. For sooner or later the workers will
discover that the immigration of cheap labor-power from the more
backward to the more advanced countries, is as inevitable a result
of the capitalist system as the introduction of machinery or the forcing
of women into industry.
In still another way does the labor movement of an advanced country
suffer under the influence of the backward conditions of other lands. The
high degree of exploitation endured by the proletariat of the economically
undeveloped nations becomes an excuse for the capitalists of the more
highly developed ones for opposing any movement in the direction of
higher wages or better conditions.
In more than one way, then, it is borne in upon the workers of each
nation that their success in the class-struggle is dependent on the
progress of the working-class of other nations. For a time this may turn
them against foreign workers, but finally they come to see that there is
only one effective means of removing the hindering influence of backward
nations: to do away with the backwardness itself. German workers have
every reason to co-operate with the Slavs and Italians in order that these
may secure higher wages and a shorter working-day; the English workers
have the same interest in relation to the Germans, and the Americans in
relation to Europeans in general.
The dependence of the proletariat of one land on that of another
leads inevitably to a joining of forces by the militant proletarians of
various lands.
The survivals of national seclusion and national hatred which the
proletariat took over from the bourgeoisie, disappear steadily. The
working-class is freeing itself from national prejudices. Working-men
learn more and more to see in the foreign laborer a fellow-fighter,
a comrade.
The strongest bonds of international solidarity, naturally, are
those which bind groups of proletarians, which, though of different
nationalities, have the same purposes and use the same methods to
accomplish them.
Karl Marx Instructions for the Delegats of the Provisional Council
First published in The Commonwealth, No. 180, August 18, 1866
Reproduced from the Minute Book of the General Council checked with
the newspaper
Karl Marx
INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE DELEGATES
OF THE PROVISIONAL GENERAL COUNCIL
2. — INTERNATIONAL COMBINATION OF EFFORTS.
BY THE AGENCY OF THE ASSOCIATION,
IN THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN LABOUR AND CAPITAL
(a) From a general point of view, this question embraces the whole
activity of the International Association which aims at combining and
generalising the till now disconnected efforts for emancipation by the
working classes in different countries.
(b) To counteract the intrigues of capitalists always ready, in cases
of strikes and lockouts, to misuse the foreign workman as a tool
against the native workman, is one of the particular functions which
our Society has hitherto performed with success. It is one of the
great purposes of the Association to make the workmen of different
countries not only feel but act as brethren and comrades in the army
of emancipation.
(c) One great “International combination of efforts” which we suggest
is a statistical inquiry into the situation of the working classes of
all countries to be instituted by the working classes themselves. To
act with any success, the materials to be acted upon must be known. By
initiating so great a work, the workmen will prove their ability to
take their own fate into their own hands. We propose therefore:
That in each locality, where branches of our Association exist, the
work be immediately commenced, and evidence collected on the different
points specified in the subjoined scheme of inquiry.
That the Congress invite all workmen of Europe and the United States
of America to collaborate in gathering the elements of the statistics
of the working class; that reports and evidence be forwarded to the
Central Council. That the Central Council elaborate them into a
general report, adding the evidence as an appendix.
That this report together with its appendix be laid before the next
annual Congress, and after having received its sanction, be printed at
the expense of the Association.
GENERAL SCHEME OF INQUIRY,
WHICH MAY OF COURSE BE MODIFIED BY EACH LOCALITY
Page me20.186
1. Industry, name of.
2. Age and sex of the employed.
3. Number of the employed.
4. Salaries and wages: (a) apprentices; (b) wages by the day or piece
work; scale paid by middlemen. Weekly, yearly average.
5. (a) Hours of work in factories. (b) The hours of work with
small employers and in home work, if the business be carried on in
those different modes. (c) Nightwork and daywork.
6. Meal times and treatment.
7. Sort of workshop and work: overcrowding, defective ventilation,
want of sunlight, use of gaslight. Cleanliness, etc.
8. Nature of occupation.
9. Effect of employment upon the physical condition.
10. Moral condition. Education.
11. State of trade: whether season trade, or more or less uniformly
distributed over year, whether greatly fluctuating, whether exposed to
foreign competition, whether destined principally for home or foreign
competition,†a etc.
Reproduced from the Minute Book of the General Council checked with
the newspaper
Karl Marx
INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE DELEGATES
OF THE PROVISIONAL GENERAL COUNCIL
2. — INTERNATIONAL COMBINATION OF EFFORTS.
BY THE AGENCY OF THE ASSOCIATION,
IN THE STRUGGLE BETWEEN LABOUR AND CAPITAL
(a) From a general point of view, this question embraces the whole
activity of the International Association which aims at combining and
generalising the till now disconnected efforts for emancipation by the
working classes in different countries.
(b) To counteract the intrigues of capitalists always ready, in cases
of strikes and lockouts, to misuse the foreign workman as a tool
against the native workman, is one of the particular functions which
our Society has hitherto performed with success. It is one of the
great purposes of the Association to make the workmen of different
countries not only feel but act as brethren and comrades in the army
of emancipation.
(c) One great “International combination of efforts” which we suggest
is a statistical inquiry into the situation of the working classes of
all countries to be instituted by the working classes themselves. To
act with any success, the materials to be acted upon must be known. By
initiating so great a work, the workmen will prove their ability to
take their own fate into their own hands. We propose therefore:
That in each locality, where branches of our Association exist, the
work be immediately commenced, and evidence collected on the different
points specified in the subjoined scheme of inquiry.
That the Congress invite all workmen of Europe and the United States
of America to collaborate in gathering the elements of the statistics
of the working class; that reports and evidence be forwarded to the
Central Council. That the Central Council elaborate them into a
general report, adding the evidence as an appendix.
That this report together with its appendix be laid before the next
annual Congress, and after having received its sanction, be printed at
the expense of the Association.
GENERAL SCHEME OF INQUIRY,
WHICH MAY OF COURSE BE MODIFIED BY EACH LOCALITY
Page me20.186
1. Industry, name of.
2. Age and sex of the employed.
3. Number of the employed.
4. Salaries and wages: (a) apprentices; (b) wages by the day or piece
work; scale paid by middlemen. Weekly, yearly average.
5. (a) Hours of work in factories. (b) The hours of work with
small employers and in home work, if the business be carried on in
those different modes. (c) Nightwork and daywork.
6. Meal times and treatment.
7. Sort of workshop and work: overcrowding, defective ventilation,
want of sunlight, use of gaslight. Cleanliness, etc.
8. Nature of occupation.
9. Effect of employment upon the physical condition.
10. Moral condition. Education.
11. State of trade: whether season trade, or more or less uniformly
distributed over year, whether greatly fluctuating, whether exposed to
foreign competition, whether destined principally for home or foreign
competition,†a etc.
Karl Marx: Forced Emigration
Karl Marx in the New York Tribune 1853
Forced Emigration
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;
Written: by Marx, March 4, 1853;
First Published: in the New York Daily Tribune of March 22, 1853 and republished in the People’s Paper of April 16, 1853;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Colonial Emigration Office gives the following return of the emigration from England, Scotland, and Ireland, to all parts of the world, from Jan. 1, 1847, to Jan. 30, 1852:
Year English Scotch Irish Total
1847 34,685 8,616 214,969 258,270
1848 58,865 11,505 177,719 248,089
1849 73,613 17,127 208,758 299,498
1850 57,843 15,154 207,852 280,849
1851 69,557 18,646 247,763 335,966
1852 (till June) 40,767 11,562 143,375 195,704
Total 335,330 82,610 1,200,436 1,618,376
“Nine-tenths,” remarks the Office, “of the emigrants from Liverpool are assumed to be Irish. About three-fourths of the emigrants from Scotland are Celts, either from the Highlands, or from Ireland through Glasgow.”
Nearly four-fifths of the whole emigration are, accordingly, to be regarded as belonging to the Celtic population of Ireland and of the Highlands and islands of Scotland. The London Economist says of this emigration:
“It is consequent on the breaking down of the system of society founded on small holdings and potato cultivation;” and adds: “The departure of the redundant part of the population of Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland is an indispensable preliminary to every kind of improvement. .The revenue of Ireland has not suffered in any degree from the famine of 1846-47, or from the emigration that has since taken place. On the contrary, her net revenue amounted in 1851 to £4,281,999, being about £184,000 greater than in 1843.”
Begin with pauperising the inhabitants of a country, and when there is no more profit to be ground out of them, when they have grown a burden to the revenue, drive them away, and sum up your Net Revenue! Such is the doctrine laid down by Ricardo, in his celebrated work, “The Principle of Political Economy.” The annual profits of a capitalist amounting to £2,000, what does it matter to him whether he employs 100 men or 1,000 men? “Is not,” says Ricardo, “the real income of a nation similar?” The net real income of a nation, rents and profits, remaining the same, it is no subject of consideration whether it is derived from ten millions of people or from twelve millions. Sismondi, in his “Nouveaux Principes d'Economie Politique,” answers that, according to this view of the matter, the English nation would not be interested at all in the disappearance of the whole population, the King (at that time it was no Queen, but a King) remaining alone in the midst of the island, supposing only that automatic machinery enabled him to procure the amount of net revenue now produced by a population of twenty millions. Indeed that grammatical entity, “the national wealth,” would in this case not be diminished.
But it is not only the pauperised inhabitants of Green Erin [Ireland] and of the Highlands of Scotland that are swept away by agricultural improvements, and by the “breaking down of the antiquated system of society.” It is not only the able-bodied agricultural labourers from England, Wales, and Lower Scotland, whose passages are paid by the Emigration Commissioners. The wheel of “improvement” is now seizing another class, the most stationary class in England. A startling emigration movement has sprung up among the smaller English farmers, especially those holding heavy clay soils, who, with bad prospects for the coming harvest, and in want of sufficient capital to make the great improvements on their farms which would enable them to pay their old rents, have no other alternative but to cross the sea in search of a new country and of new lands, I am not speaking now of the emigration caused by the gold mania, but only of the compulsory emigration produced by landlordism, concentration of farms, application of machinery to the soil, and introduction of the modern system of agriculture on a great scale.
In the ancient States, in Greece and Rome, compulsory emigration, assuming the shape of the periodical establishment of colonies, formed a regular link in the structure of society. The whole system of those States was founded on certain limits to the numbers of the population, which could not be surpassed without endangering the condition of antique civilisation itself. But why was it so? Because the application of science to material production was utterly unknown to them. To remain civilised they were forced to remain few. Otherwise they would have had to submit to the bodily drudgery which transformed the free citizen into a slave. The want of productive power made citizenship dependent on a certain proportion in numbers not to be disturbed. Forced emigration was the only remedy.
It was the same pressure of population on the powers of production. that drove the barbarians from the high plains of Asia to invade the Old World. The same cause acted there, although under a different form. To remain barbarians they were forced to remain few. They were pastoral, hunting, war-waging tribes, whose manners of production required a large space for every individual, as is now the case with the Indian tribes in North-America. By augmenting in numbers they curtailed each other’s field of production. Thus the surplus population was forced to undertake those great adventurous migratory movements which laid the foundation of the peoples of ancient and modern Europe.
But with modern compulsory emigration the case stands quite opposite. Here it is not the want of productive. power which creates a surplus population; it is the increase of productive power which demands a diminution of population, and drives away the surplus by famine or emigration. It is not population that presses on productive power; it is productive power that presses on population.
Now I share neither in the opinions of Ricardo, who regards ‘Net-Revenue’ as the Moloch to whom entire populations must be sacrificed, without even so much as complaint, nor in the opinion of Sismondi, who, in his hypochondriacal philanthropy, would forcibly retain the superannuated methods of agriculture and proscribe science from industry, as Plato expelled poets from his Republic. Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way. But can there be anything more puerile, more short-sighted, than the views of those Economists who believe in all earnest that this woeful transitory state means nothing but adapting society to the acquisitive propensities of capitalists, both landlords and money-lords? In Great Britain the working of that process is most transparent. The application of modern science to production clears the land of its inhabitants, but it concentrates people in manufacturing towns.
“No manufacturing workmen,” says The Economist, “have been assisted by the Emigration Commissioners, except a few Spitalfields and Paisley hand-loom weavers, and few or none are emigrated at their own expense.”
The Economist knows very well that they could not emigrate at their own expense, and that the industrial middle-class would not assist them in emigrating. Now, to what does this lead? The rural population, the most stationary and conservative element of modern society, disappears while the industrial proletariat, by the very working of modern production, finds itself gathered in mighty centres, around the great productive forces, whose history of creation has hitherto been the martyrology of the labourers. Who will prevent them from going a step further, and appropriating these forces, to which they have been appropriated before — Where will be the power of resisting them? Nowhere! Then, it will be of no use to appeal to the ‘ rights of property.’ The modern changes in the art of production have, according to the Bourgeois Economists themselves, broken down the antiquated system of society and its modes of appropriation. They have expropriated the Scotch clansman. the Irish cottier and tenant, the English yeoman, the hand-loom weaver, numberless handicrafts, whole generations of factory children and women; they will expropriate, in due time, the landlord and the cotton lord.
Forced Emigration
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;
Written: by Marx, March 4, 1853;
First Published: in the New York Daily Tribune of March 22, 1853 and republished in the People’s Paper of April 16, 1853;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Colonial Emigration Office gives the following return of the emigration from England, Scotland, and Ireland, to all parts of the world, from Jan. 1, 1847, to Jan. 30, 1852:
Year English Scotch Irish Total
1847 34,685 8,616 214,969 258,270
1848 58,865 11,505 177,719 248,089
1849 73,613 17,127 208,758 299,498
1850 57,843 15,154 207,852 280,849
1851 69,557 18,646 247,763 335,966
1852 (till June) 40,767 11,562 143,375 195,704
Total 335,330 82,610 1,200,436 1,618,376
“Nine-tenths,” remarks the Office, “of the emigrants from Liverpool are assumed to be Irish. About three-fourths of the emigrants from Scotland are Celts, either from the Highlands, or from Ireland through Glasgow.”
Nearly four-fifths of the whole emigration are, accordingly, to be regarded as belonging to the Celtic population of Ireland and of the Highlands and islands of Scotland. The London Economist says of this emigration:
“It is consequent on the breaking down of the system of society founded on small holdings and potato cultivation;” and adds: “The departure of the redundant part of the population of Ireland and the Highlands of Scotland is an indispensable preliminary to every kind of improvement. .The revenue of Ireland has not suffered in any degree from the famine of 1846-47, or from the emigration that has since taken place. On the contrary, her net revenue amounted in 1851 to £4,281,999, being about £184,000 greater than in 1843.”
Begin with pauperising the inhabitants of a country, and when there is no more profit to be ground out of them, when they have grown a burden to the revenue, drive them away, and sum up your Net Revenue! Such is the doctrine laid down by Ricardo, in his celebrated work, “The Principle of Political Economy.” The annual profits of a capitalist amounting to £2,000, what does it matter to him whether he employs 100 men or 1,000 men? “Is not,” says Ricardo, “the real income of a nation similar?” The net real income of a nation, rents and profits, remaining the same, it is no subject of consideration whether it is derived from ten millions of people or from twelve millions. Sismondi, in his “Nouveaux Principes d'Economie Politique,” answers that, according to this view of the matter, the English nation would not be interested at all in the disappearance of the whole population, the King (at that time it was no Queen, but a King) remaining alone in the midst of the island, supposing only that automatic machinery enabled him to procure the amount of net revenue now produced by a population of twenty millions. Indeed that grammatical entity, “the national wealth,” would in this case not be diminished.
But it is not only the pauperised inhabitants of Green Erin [Ireland] and of the Highlands of Scotland that are swept away by agricultural improvements, and by the “breaking down of the antiquated system of society.” It is not only the able-bodied agricultural labourers from England, Wales, and Lower Scotland, whose passages are paid by the Emigration Commissioners. The wheel of “improvement” is now seizing another class, the most stationary class in England. A startling emigration movement has sprung up among the smaller English farmers, especially those holding heavy clay soils, who, with bad prospects for the coming harvest, and in want of sufficient capital to make the great improvements on their farms which would enable them to pay their old rents, have no other alternative but to cross the sea in search of a new country and of new lands, I am not speaking now of the emigration caused by the gold mania, but only of the compulsory emigration produced by landlordism, concentration of farms, application of machinery to the soil, and introduction of the modern system of agriculture on a great scale.
In the ancient States, in Greece and Rome, compulsory emigration, assuming the shape of the periodical establishment of colonies, formed a regular link in the structure of society. The whole system of those States was founded on certain limits to the numbers of the population, which could not be surpassed without endangering the condition of antique civilisation itself. But why was it so? Because the application of science to material production was utterly unknown to them. To remain civilised they were forced to remain few. Otherwise they would have had to submit to the bodily drudgery which transformed the free citizen into a slave. The want of productive power made citizenship dependent on a certain proportion in numbers not to be disturbed. Forced emigration was the only remedy.
It was the same pressure of population on the powers of production. that drove the barbarians from the high plains of Asia to invade the Old World. The same cause acted there, although under a different form. To remain barbarians they were forced to remain few. They were pastoral, hunting, war-waging tribes, whose manners of production required a large space for every individual, as is now the case with the Indian tribes in North-America. By augmenting in numbers they curtailed each other’s field of production. Thus the surplus population was forced to undertake those great adventurous migratory movements which laid the foundation of the peoples of ancient and modern Europe.
But with modern compulsory emigration the case stands quite opposite. Here it is not the want of productive. power which creates a surplus population; it is the increase of productive power which demands a diminution of population, and drives away the surplus by famine or emigration. It is not population that presses on productive power; it is productive power that presses on population.
Now I share neither in the opinions of Ricardo, who regards ‘Net-Revenue’ as the Moloch to whom entire populations must be sacrificed, without even so much as complaint, nor in the opinion of Sismondi, who, in his hypochondriacal philanthropy, would forcibly retain the superannuated methods of agriculture and proscribe science from industry, as Plato expelled poets from his Republic. Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way. But can there be anything more puerile, more short-sighted, than the views of those Economists who believe in all earnest that this woeful transitory state means nothing but adapting society to the acquisitive propensities of capitalists, both landlords and money-lords? In Great Britain the working of that process is most transparent. The application of modern science to production clears the land of its inhabitants, but it concentrates people in manufacturing towns.
“No manufacturing workmen,” says The Economist, “have been assisted by the Emigration Commissioners, except a few Spitalfields and Paisley hand-loom weavers, and few or none are emigrated at their own expense.”
The Economist knows very well that they could not emigrate at their own expense, and that the industrial middle-class would not assist them in emigrating. Now, to what does this lead? The rural population, the most stationary and conservative element of modern society, disappears while the industrial proletariat, by the very working of modern production, finds itself gathered in mighty centres, around the great productive forces, whose history of creation has hitherto been the martyrology of the labourers. Who will prevent them from going a step further, and appropriating these forces, to which they have been appropriated before — Where will be the power of resisting them? Nowhere! Then, it will be of no use to appeal to the ‘ rights of property.’ The modern changes in the art of production have, according to the Bourgeois Economists themselves, broken down the antiquated system of society and its modes of appropriation. They have expropriated the Scotch clansman. the Irish cottier and tenant, the English yeoman, the hand-loom weaver, numberless handicrafts, whole generations of factory children and women; they will expropriate, in due time, the landlord and the cotton lord.
Minutes of the General Council of the First International 1866-1868
Minutes of the General Council of the First International 1866-1868
Explanatory Notes
1. The leading body of the International Working Men’s Association,
elected at the inaugural meeting held at St. Martin’s Hall, London, on
September 28, 1864, was originally called the Central Council. When
national central committees uniting the International’s sections in
each country began to appear, the Central Council in London gradually
came to be known as the General Council. This name was fixed in the
Rules approved by the Geneva Congress of 1866 .
The announcement about the change of the Council’s name was given in
the report of a regular Council meeting published in The Commonwealth
No. 188 October 13, 1866. Nevertheless, in the years that followed, in
the documents written in English the old name of the Council was used
alongside the new one. This is partly to be explained by the Council’s
continuing use for some time of the seal and headed note-paper
obtained during the first year of the International’s activities.
2. In the summer of 1866, when new railway lines were being laid,
large-scale excavations were in progress in the London suburbs. When
one of the construction firms, Brothers Waring, tried to replace local
labour by Belgians at lower rates, this caused trouble between the
English and Belgian excavators. The General Council began to discuss
this question for the first time on August 21, 1866 (see The General
Council of the First International. 1864-1866. The London Conference,
1865. Minutes, Moscow, p. 226. In the references given below this book
is simply referred to as The General Council. 1864-1866). At its
meeting on August 28, at which James Lee, the Secretary of the United
Excavators’ Society, was present, the General Council adopted the
following resolution:
“That in case the Excavators’ Society takes steps to form a branch in
the district where the disturbance occurred, that the Central Council
send a delegate speaking the Belgian language to accompany the
excavators’ delegates to induce the Belgians to join the Excavators’
Society.” The General Council committed itself to use its influence to
Prevent the importation of any more Belgian workers at reduced Prices
(ibid., p. 424).
Explanatory Notes
1. The leading body of the International Working Men’s Association,
elected at the inaugural meeting held at St. Martin’s Hall, London, on
September 28, 1864, was originally called the Central Council. When
national central committees uniting the International’s sections in
each country began to appear, the Central Council in London gradually
came to be known as the General Council. This name was fixed in the
Rules approved by the Geneva Congress of 1866 .
The announcement about the change of the Council’s name was given in
the report of a regular Council meeting published in The Commonwealth
No. 188 October 13, 1866. Nevertheless, in the years that followed, in
the documents written in English the old name of the Council was used
alongside the new one. This is partly to be explained by the Council’s
continuing use for some time of the seal and headed note-paper
obtained during the first year of the International’s activities.
2. In the summer of 1866, when new railway lines were being laid,
large-scale excavations were in progress in the London suburbs. When
one of the construction firms, Brothers Waring, tried to replace local
labour by Belgians at lower rates, this caused trouble between the
English and Belgian excavators. The General Council began to discuss
this question for the first time on August 21, 1866 (see The General
Council of the First International. 1864-1866. The London Conference,
1865. Minutes, Moscow, p. 226. In the references given below this book
is simply referred to as The General Council. 1864-1866). At its
meeting on August 28, at which James Lee, the Secretary of the United
Excavators’ Society, was present, the General Council adopted the
following resolution:
“That in case the Excavators’ Society takes steps to form a branch in
the district where the disturbance occurred, that the Central Council
send a delegate speaking the Belgian language to accompany the
excavators’ delegates to induce the Belgians to join the Excavators’
Society.” The General Council committed itself to use its influence to
Prevent the importation of any more Belgian workers at reduced Prices
(ibid., p. 424).
The Question of the General Council’s Resolution on the Irish
5. The Question of the General Council’s Resolution on the Irish
Amnesty.
While England is the bulwark of landlordism and capitalism, Ireland is
the only point where the great blow against official England can
really be struck.
First, Ireland is the bulwark of English landlordism. If it fell in
Ireland, it would also fall in England. In Ireland this is a hundred
times easier, because the economic struggle there is concentrated
exclusively in landed property, because the struggle there is at the
same time a national one, and because the people there are more
revolutionary and more embittered than in England. In Ireland,
landlordism is maintained solely by the English army. The moment the
forced union between the two countries ends, a social revolution will
break out in Ireland, even if in outmoded form. English landlordism
would not only lose a substantial source of its wealth, but also its
greatest moral force – that of representing the domination of England
over Ireland. On the other hand, by maintaining the power of their
landlords in Ireland, the English proletariat makes them invulnerable
in England itself.
Second, the English bourgeoisie has not only exploited the Irish
misery to keep down the working class in England by forced immigration
of poor Irishmen, it has also divided the proletariat into two hostile
camps. The revolutionary ardor of the Celtic worker does not go well
with the solid but slow nature of the Anglo-Saxon worker. On the
contrary, in all the big industrial centres in England, there is a
profound antagonism between the Irish and English proletarians. The
average English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who
lowers wages and the standard of life. He feels national and religious
antipathies for him.
He regards him practically in the same way the the poor whites in the
southern states of North America regard the black slaves. This
antagonism between the proletarians in England is artificially
nourished and kept alive by the bourgeoisie. It knows that this split
is the true secret of maintaining its power.
This antagonism is reproduced also on the other side of the Atlantic.
The Irish, driven from their native soil by the oxen and the sheep,
reassemble in North America, where they constitute a conspicuous and
ever-growing section of the population. Their only thought, their only
passion, is hatred for England. The English and American governments
(that is, the classes they represent) nourish these passions in order
to perpetuate the covert struggle between the United States and
England, and thereby prevent a sincere and serious alliance between
the working classes on both sides of the Atlantic, and, consequently,
their emancipation.
Furthermore, Ireland is the only pretext the English Government has
for maintaining a large standing army, which in case of necessity, as
has happened before, can be loosed against the English workers after
getting its military training in Ireland.
Finally, England today is seeing a repetition of what happened on a
gigantic scale in ancient Rome. A nation that enslaves another forges
its own chains.
The position of the International on the Irish Question is thus clear.
Its first task is to hasten the social revolution in England. To this
end, the decisive blow must be struck in Ireland.
The General Council’s resolution on the Irish amnesty serves only as
an introduction to other resolutions which will affirm that, apart
from ordinary international justice, it is a precondition for the
emancipation of the English working class to transform the present
forced union (that is, the enslavement of Ireland) into an equal and
free confederation, if possible, or complete separation, if need be.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/03/28.htm
Amnesty.
While England is the bulwark of landlordism and capitalism, Ireland is
the only point where the great blow against official England can
really be struck.
First, Ireland is the bulwark of English landlordism. If it fell in
Ireland, it would also fall in England. In Ireland this is a hundred
times easier, because the economic struggle there is concentrated
exclusively in landed property, because the struggle there is at the
same time a national one, and because the people there are more
revolutionary and more embittered than in England. In Ireland,
landlordism is maintained solely by the English army. The moment the
forced union between the two countries ends, a social revolution will
break out in Ireland, even if in outmoded form. English landlordism
would not only lose a substantial source of its wealth, but also its
greatest moral force – that of representing the domination of England
over Ireland. On the other hand, by maintaining the power of their
landlords in Ireland, the English proletariat makes them invulnerable
in England itself.
Second, the English bourgeoisie has not only exploited the Irish
misery to keep down the working class in England by forced immigration
of poor Irishmen, it has also divided the proletariat into two hostile
camps. The revolutionary ardor of the Celtic worker does not go well
with the solid but slow nature of the Anglo-Saxon worker. On the
contrary, in all the big industrial centres in England, there is a
profound antagonism between the Irish and English proletarians. The
average English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who
lowers wages and the standard of life. He feels national and religious
antipathies for him.
He regards him practically in the same way the the poor whites in the
southern states of North America regard the black slaves. This
antagonism between the proletarians in England is artificially
nourished and kept alive by the bourgeoisie. It knows that this split
is the true secret of maintaining its power.
This antagonism is reproduced also on the other side of the Atlantic.
The Irish, driven from their native soil by the oxen and the sheep,
reassemble in North America, where they constitute a conspicuous and
ever-growing section of the population. Their only thought, their only
passion, is hatred for England. The English and American governments
(that is, the classes they represent) nourish these passions in order
to perpetuate the covert struggle between the United States and
England, and thereby prevent a sincere and serious alliance between
the working classes on both sides of the Atlantic, and, consequently,
their emancipation.
Furthermore, Ireland is the only pretext the English Government has
for maintaining a large standing army, which in case of necessity, as
has happened before, can be loosed against the English workers after
getting its military training in Ireland.
Finally, England today is seeing a repetition of what happened on a
gigantic scale in ancient Rome. A nation that enslaves another forges
its own chains.
The position of the International on the Irish Question is thus clear.
Its first task is to hasten the social revolution in England. To this
end, the decisive blow must be struck in Ireland.
The General Council’s resolution on the Irish amnesty serves only as
an introduction to other resolutions which will affirm that, apart
from ordinary international justice, it is a precondition for the
emancipation of the English working class to transform the present
forced union (that is, the enslavement of Ireland) into an equal and
free confederation, if possible, or complete separation, if need be.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/03/28.htm
Luxembourg: S African and Immigration
In quite a different historical setting, in South Africa, the same
process shows up even more clearly the ‘peaceful methods’ by which
capital competes with the small commodity producer.
In the Cape Colony and the Boer Republics, pure peasant economy
prevailed until the sixties of the last century. For a long time the
Boers had led the life of animal-tending nomads; they had killed off
or driven out the Hottentots and Kaffirs with a will in order to
deprive them of their most valuable pastures. In the eighteenth
century they were given invaluable assistance by the plague, imported
by ships of the East India Company, which frequently did away with
entire Hottentot tribes whose lands then fell to the Dutch immigrants.
When the Boers spread further East, they came in conflict with the
Bantu tribes and initiated the long period of the terrible Kaffir
wars. These god fearing Dutchmen regarded themselves as the Chosen
People and took no small pride in their old-fashioned Puritan morals
and their intimate knowledge of the Old Testament; yet, not content
with robbing the natives of their land, they built their peasant
economy like parasites on the backs of the Negroes, compelling them to
do slave-labour for them and corrupting and enervating them
deliberately and systematically. Liquor played such an important part
in this process, that the prohibition of spirits in the Cape Colony
could not be carried through by the English government because of
Puritan opposition. There were no railways until 1859, and Boer
economy in general and on the whole remained patriarchal and based on
natural economy until the sixties. But their patriarchal attitude did
not deter the Boers from extreme brutality and harshness. It is well
known that Livingstone complained much more about the Boers than about
the Kaffirs. The Boers considered the Negroes an object, destined by
God and Nature to slave for them, and as such an indispensable
foundation of their peasant economy. So much so that their answer to
the abolition of slavery in the English colonies in 1836 was the
‘Great Trek’, although there the owners had been compensated with
£3,000,000. By way of the Orange River and Vaal, the Boers emigrated
from the Cape Colony, and in the process they drove the Matabele to
the North, across the Limpopo, setting them against the Makalakas just
as the American farmer had driven the Red Indian West before him under
the impact of capitalist economy, so the Boer drove the Negro to the
North. The ‘Free Republics’ between the Orange River and the Limpopo
thus were created as a protest against the designs of the English
bourgeoisie on the sacred right of slavery. The tiny peasant republics
were in constant guerilla warfare against the Bantu Negroes And it was
on the backs of the Negroes that the battle between the Boers and the
English government, which went on for decades, was fought. The Negro
question, i.e. the emancipation of the Negroes, ostensibly aimed at by
the English bourgeoisie, served as a pretext for the conflict between
England and the republics. In fact, peasant economy and great
capitalist colonial policy were here competing for the Hottentots and
Kaffirs, that is to say for their land and their labour power. Both
competitors had precisely the same aim: to subject, expel or destroy
the coloured peoples, to appropriate their land and press them into
service by the abolition of their social organisations. Only their
methods of exploitation were fundamentally different. While the Boers
stood for out-dated slavery on a petty scale, on which their
patriarchal peasant economy was founded, the British bourgeoisie
represented modern large-scale capitalist exploitation of the land and
the natives. The Constitution of the Transvaal (South African)
Republic declared with crude prejudice: ‘The People shall not permit
any equality of coloured persons with white inhabitants, neither in
the Church nor in the State.’ (23)
In the Orange Free State and in the Transvaal no Negro was allowed to
own land, to travel without papers or to walk abroad after sunset.
Bryce tells us of a case where a farmer, an Englishman as it happened
in the Eastern Cape Colony had flogged his Kaffir slave to death. When
he was acquitted in open court, his neighbours escorted him home to
the strains of music. The white man frequently maltreated his free
native labourers after they had done their work – to such an extent
that they would take to flight, thus saving the master their wages.
The British government employed precisely the opposite tactics. For a
long time it appeared as protector of the natives; flattering the
chieftains in particular, it supported their authority and tried to
make them claim a right of disposal over their land. Wherever it was
possible, it gave them ownership of tribal land, according to well-
tried methods, although this flew in the face of tradition and of the
actual social organisation of the Negroes. All tribes in fact held
their land communally, and even the most cruel and despotic rulers
such as the Matabele Chieftain Lobengula merely had the right as well
as the duty to allot every family a piece of land which they could
only retain so long as they cultivated it. The ultimate purpose of the
British government was clear: long in advance it was preparing for
land robbery on a grand scale, using the native chieftains themselves
as tools. But in the beginning it was content with the ‘pacification’
of the Negroes by extensive military actions. Up to 1879 were fought 9
bloody Kaffir wars to break the resistance of the Bantus.
British capital revealed its real intentions only after two important
events had taken place: the discovery of the Kimberley diamond fields
in 1869–70, and the discovery of the gold mines in the Transvaal in
1882–5, which initiated a new epoch in the history of South Africa.
Then the British South Africa Company, that is to say Cecil Rhodes,
went into action. Public opinion in England rapidly swung over, and
the greed for the treasures of South Africa urged the British
government on to drastic measures. South Africa was suddenly flooded
with immigrants who had hitherto only appeared in small numbers –
immigration having been deflected to the United States. But with the
discovery of the diamond and gold fields, the numbers of white people
in the South African colonies grew by leaps and bounds: between 1885
and 1895, 100,000 British had immigrated into Witwatersrand alone. The
modest peasant economy was forthwith pushed into the background – the
mines, and thus the mining capital, coming to the fore. The policy of
the British government veered round abruptly. Great Britain had
recognised the Boer Republics by the Sand River Agreement and the
Treaty of Bloemfontein in the fifties. Now her political might
advanced upon the tiny republic from every side, occupying all
neighbouring districts and cutting off all possibility of expansion.
At the same time the Negroes, no longer protected favourites, were
sacrificed. British capital was steadily forging ahead. In 1868,
Britain took over the rule of Basutoland – only, of course, because
the natives had ‘repeatedly implored’ her to do so.(24) In 1871, the
Witwatersrand diamond fields, or West Griqualand, were seized from the
Orange Free State and turned into a Crown Colony. In 1879, Zululand
was subjected, later to become part of the Natal Colony; in 1885
followed the subjection of Bechuanaland, to be joined to the Cape
Colony. In 1888 Britain took over Matabele and Mashonaland, and in
1889 the British South Africa Company was given a Charter for both
these districts, again, of course, only to oblige the natives and at
their request.(25) Between 1884 and 1887, Britain annexed St. Lucia
Bay and the entire East Coast as far as the Portuguese possessions. In
1894, she subjected Tongaland. With their last strength, the Matabele
and Mashona fought one more desperate battle, but the Company, with
Rhodes at the head, first liquidated the rising in blood and at once
proceeded to the well tried measure for civilising and pacifying the
natives: two large railways were built in the rebellious district.
The Boer Republics were feeling increasingly uncomfortable in this
sudden stranglehold, and their internal affairs as well were becoming
completely disorganised. The overwhelming influx of immigrants and the
rising tides of the frenzied new capitalist economy now threatened to
burst the barriers of the small peasant states. There was indeed a
blatant conflict between agricultural and political peasant economy on
the one hand, and the demands and requirements of the accumulation of
capital on the other. In all respects, the republics were quite unable
to cope with these new problems. The constant danger from the Kaffirs,
no doubt regarded favourably by the British, the unwieldy, primitive
administration, the gradual corruption of the volksraad in which the
great capitalists got their way by bribery, lack of a police force to
keep the undisciplined crowds of adventurers in some semblance of
order, the absence of labour legislation for regulating and securing
the exploitation of the Negroes in the mines, lack of water supplies
and transport to provide for the colony of 100,000 immigrants that had
suddenly sprung up, high protective tariffs which increased the cost
of labour for the capitalists, and high freights for coal – all these
factors combined towards the sudden and stunning bankruptcy of the
peasant republics.
They tried, obstinately and unimaginatively, to defend themselves
against the sudden eruption of capitalism which engulfed them, with an
incredibly crude measure, such as only a stubborn and hide-bound
peasant brain could have devised: they denied all civic rights to the
uitlanders who outnumbered them by far and who stood for capital,
power, and the trend of the time. In those critical times it was an
ill-omened trick. The mismanagement of the peasant republics caused a
considerable reduction of dividends, on no account to be put up with.
Mining capital had come to the end of its tether. The British South
Africa Company built railroads, put down the Kaffirs, organised
revolts of the uitlanders and finally provoked the Boer War. The bell
had tolled for peasant economy. In the United States, the economic
revolution had begun with a war, in South Africa war put the period to
this chapter. Yet in both instances, the outcome was the same: capital
triumphed over the small peasant economy which had in its turn come
into being on the ruins of natural economy, represented by the
natives’ primitive organisations. The domination of capital was a
foregone conclusion, and it was just as hopeless for the Boer
Republics to resist as it had been for the American farmer. Capital
officially took over the reins in the new South African Union which
replaced the small peasant republics by a great modern state, as
envisaged by Cecil Rhodes’ imperialist programme. The new conflict
between capital and labour had superseded the old one between British
and Dutch. One million white exploiters of both nations sealed their
touching fraternal alliance within the Union with the civil and
political disfranchisement of five million coloured workers. Not only
the Negroes of the Boer Republics came away empty handed, but the
natives of the Cape Colony, whom the British government had at one
time granted political equality, were also deprived of some of their
rights. And this noble work, culminating under the imperialist policy
of the Conservatives in open oppression, was actually to be finished
by the Liberal Party itself, amid frenzied applause from the liberal
cretins of Europe who with sentimental pride took as proof of the
still continuing creative vigour and greatness of English liberalism
the fact that Britain had granted complete self-government and freedom
to a handful of whites in South Africa.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/ch29.htm
process shows up even more clearly the ‘peaceful methods’ by which
capital competes with the small commodity producer.
In the Cape Colony and the Boer Republics, pure peasant economy
prevailed until the sixties of the last century. For a long time the
Boers had led the life of animal-tending nomads; they had killed off
or driven out the Hottentots and Kaffirs with a will in order to
deprive them of their most valuable pastures. In the eighteenth
century they were given invaluable assistance by the plague, imported
by ships of the East India Company, which frequently did away with
entire Hottentot tribes whose lands then fell to the Dutch immigrants.
When the Boers spread further East, they came in conflict with the
Bantu tribes and initiated the long period of the terrible Kaffir
wars. These god fearing Dutchmen regarded themselves as the Chosen
People and took no small pride in their old-fashioned Puritan morals
and their intimate knowledge of the Old Testament; yet, not content
with robbing the natives of their land, they built their peasant
economy like parasites on the backs of the Negroes, compelling them to
do slave-labour for them and corrupting and enervating them
deliberately and systematically. Liquor played such an important part
in this process, that the prohibition of spirits in the Cape Colony
could not be carried through by the English government because of
Puritan opposition. There were no railways until 1859, and Boer
economy in general and on the whole remained patriarchal and based on
natural economy until the sixties. But their patriarchal attitude did
not deter the Boers from extreme brutality and harshness. It is well
known that Livingstone complained much more about the Boers than about
the Kaffirs. The Boers considered the Negroes an object, destined by
God and Nature to slave for them, and as such an indispensable
foundation of their peasant economy. So much so that their answer to
the abolition of slavery in the English colonies in 1836 was the
‘Great Trek’, although there the owners had been compensated with
£3,000,000. By way of the Orange River and Vaal, the Boers emigrated
from the Cape Colony, and in the process they drove the Matabele to
the North, across the Limpopo, setting them against the Makalakas just
as the American farmer had driven the Red Indian West before him under
the impact of capitalist economy, so the Boer drove the Negro to the
North. The ‘Free Republics’ between the Orange River and the Limpopo
thus were created as a protest against the designs of the English
bourgeoisie on the sacred right of slavery. The tiny peasant republics
were in constant guerilla warfare against the Bantu Negroes And it was
on the backs of the Negroes that the battle between the Boers and the
English government, which went on for decades, was fought. The Negro
question, i.e. the emancipation of the Negroes, ostensibly aimed at by
the English bourgeoisie, served as a pretext for the conflict between
England and the republics. In fact, peasant economy and great
capitalist colonial policy were here competing for the Hottentots and
Kaffirs, that is to say for their land and their labour power. Both
competitors had precisely the same aim: to subject, expel or destroy
the coloured peoples, to appropriate their land and press them into
service by the abolition of their social organisations. Only their
methods of exploitation were fundamentally different. While the Boers
stood for out-dated slavery on a petty scale, on which their
patriarchal peasant economy was founded, the British bourgeoisie
represented modern large-scale capitalist exploitation of the land and
the natives. The Constitution of the Transvaal (South African)
Republic declared with crude prejudice: ‘The People shall not permit
any equality of coloured persons with white inhabitants, neither in
the Church nor in the State.’ (23)
In the Orange Free State and in the Transvaal no Negro was allowed to
own land, to travel without papers or to walk abroad after sunset.
Bryce tells us of a case where a farmer, an Englishman as it happened
in the Eastern Cape Colony had flogged his Kaffir slave to death. When
he was acquitted in open court, his neighbours escorted him home to
the strains of music. The white man frequently maltreated his free
native labourers after they had done their work – to such an extent
that they would take to flight, thus saving the master their wages.
The British government employed precisely the opposite tactics. For a
long time it appeared as protector of the natives; flattering the
chieftains in particular, it supported their authority and tried to
make them claim a right of disposal over their land. Wherever it was
possible, it gave them ownership of tribal land, according to well-
tried methods, although this flew in the face of tradition and of the
actual social organisation of the Negroes. All tribes in fact held
their land communally, and even the most cruel and despotic rulers
such as the Matabele Chieftain Lobengula merely had the right as well
as the duty to allot every family a piece of land which they could
only retain so long as they cultivated it. The ultimate purpose of the
British government was clear: long in advance it was preparing for
land robbery on a grand scale, using the native chieftains themselves
as tools. But in the beginning it was content with the ‘pacification’
of the Negroes by extensive military actions. Up to 1879 were fought 9
bloody Kaffir wars to break the resistance of the Bantus.
British capital revealed its real intentions only after two important
events had taken place: the discovery of the Kimberley diamond fields
in 1869–70, and the discovery of the gold mines in the Transvaal in
1882–5, which initiated a new epoch in the history of South Africa.
Then the British South Africa Company, that is to say Cecil Rhodes,
went into action. Public opinion in England rapidly swung over, and
the greed for the treasures of South Africa urged the British
government on to drastic measures. South Africa was suddenly flooded
with immigrants who had hitherto only appeared in small numbers –
immigration having been deflected to the United States. But with the
discovery of the diamond and gold fields, the numbers of white people
in the South African colonies grew by leaps and bounds: between 1885
and 1895, 100,000 British had immigrated into Witwatersrand alone. The
modest peasant economy was forthwith pushed into the background – the
mines, and thus the mining capital, coming to the fore. The policy of
the British government veered round abruptly. Great Britain had
recognised the Boer Republics by the Sand River Agreement and the
Treaty of Bloemfontein in the fifties. Now her political might
advanced upon the tiny republic from every side, occupying all
neighbouring districts and cutting off all possibility of expansion.
At the same time the Negroes, no longer protected favourites, were
sacrificed. British capital was steadily forging ahead. In 1868,
Britain took over the rule of Basutoland – only, of course, because
the natives had ‘repeatedly implored’ her to do so.(24) In 1871, the
Witwatersrand diamond fields, or West Griqualand, were seized from the
Orange Free State and turned into a Crown Colony. In 1879, Zululand
was subjected, later to become part of the Natal Colony; in 1885
followed the subjection of Bechuanaland, to be joined to the Cape
Colony. In 1888 Britain took over Matabele and Mashonaland, and in
1889 the British South Africa Company was given a Charter for both
these districts, again, of course, only to oblige the natives and at
their request.(25) Between 1884 and 1887, Britain annexed St. Lucia
Bay and the entire East Coast as far as the Portuguese possessions. In
1894, she subjected Tongaland. With their last strength, the Matabele
and Mashona fought one more desperate battle, but the Company, with
Rhodes at the head, first liquidated the rising in blood and at once
proceeded to the well tried measure for civilising and pacifying the
natives: two large railways were built in the rebellious district.
The Boer Republics were feeling increasingly uncomfortable in this
sudden stranglehold, and their internal affairs as well were becoming
completely disorganised. The overwhelming influx of immigrants and the
rising tides of the frenzied new capitalist economy now threatened to
burst the barriers of the small peasant states. There was indeed a
blatant conflict between agricultural and political peasant economy on
the one hand, and the demands and requirements of the accumulation of
capital on the other. In all respects, the republics were quite unable
to cope with these new problems. The constant danger from the Kaffirs,
no doubt regarded favourably by the British, the unwieldy, primitive
administration, the gradual corruption of the volksraad in which the
great capitalists got their way by bribery, lack of a police force to
keep the undisciplined crowds of adventurers in some semblance of
order, the absence of labour legislation for regulating and securing
the exploitation of the Negroes in the mines, lack of water supplies
and transport to provide for the colony of 100,000 immigrants that had
suddenly sprung up, high protective tariffs which increased the cost
of labour for the capitalists, and high freights for coal – all these
factors combined towards the sudden and stunning bankruptcy of the
peasant republics.
They tried, obstinately and unimaginatively, to defend themselves
against the sudden eruption of capitalism which engulfed them, with an
incredibly crude measure, such as only a stubborn and hide-bound
peasant brain could have devised: they denied all civic rights to the
uitlanders who outnumbered them by far and who stood for capital,
power, and the trend of the time. In those critical times it was an
ill-omened trick. The mismanagement of the peasant republics caused a
considerable reduction of dividends, on no account to be put up with.
Mining capital had come to the end of its tether. The British South
Africa Company built railroads, put down the Kaffirs, organised
revolts of the uitlanders and finally provoked the Boer War. The bell
had tolled for peasant economy. In the United States, the economic
revolution had begun with a war, in South Africa war put the period to
this chapter. Yet in both instances, the outcome was the same: capital
triumphed over the small peasant economy which had in its turn come
into being on the ruins of natural economy, represented by the
natives’ primitive organisations. The domination of capital was a
foregone conclusion, and it was just as hopeless for the Boer
Republics to resist as it had been for the American farmer. Capital
officially took over the reins in the new South African Union which
replaced the small peasant republics by a great modern state, as
envisaged by Cecil Rhodes’ imperialist programme. The new conflict
between capital and labour had superseded the old one between British
and Dutch. One million white exploiters of both nations sealed their
touching fraternal alliance within the Union with the civil and
political disfranchisement of five million coloured workers. Not only
the Negroes of the Boer Republics came away empty handed, but the
natives of the Cape Colony, whom the British government had at one
time granted political equality, were also deprived of some of their
rights. And this noble work, culminating under the imperialist policy
of the Conservatives in open oppression, was actually to be finished
by the Liberal Party itself, amid frenzied applause from the liberal
cretins of Europe who with sentimental pride took as proof of the
still continuing creative vigour and greatness of English liberalism
the fact that Britain had granted complete self-government and freedom
to a handful of whites in South Africa.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/ch29.htm
Luxembourg: Imperialism and Immigration...
Chapter 6
Imperialism
However that may be, we have at last arrived at imperialism. The
concluding chapter of Bauer’s essay is entitled The Explanation of
Imperialism. After this, the reader might well hope finally to find
one. After Bauer had explained that I had only uncovered one root of
imperialism, ‘but not the only one’, one could only expect that, from
the standpoint of his theory, he himself would lay bare the other
roots. Unfortunately, this was not the case. To the end, Bauer fails
to give one single indication of the other roots, he keeps the secret
to himself. In spite of the concluding chapter’s promising title and
introduction we are still left with only the one miserable ‘root’ of
imperialism, which forms the ‘kernel of truth’ in my incorrect
explanation.
In doing this, however, Bauer has already conceded too much to me, in
the shape of the ‘one root’ which he kindly accepts as true’. For here
too it is a case of either/or, and the compromise which Bauer tries to
make is basically as impermanent and ethereal as most compromises.
For if his ‘population growth’ theory of accumulation were correct,
the ‘root’ would be completely unnecessary, since then imperialism
would simply be impossible.
Let us remind ourselves what Bauer’s ‘mechanism’ consists of. It
consists in the fact that capitalist production automatically
readjusts itself to the growth of the working class. Then how can one
speak of a ‘limit’ to accumulation? Capital neither needs to nor can
it overstep this limit’. For if production grows faster than the
working class – in Bauer’s ‘over-accumulation’ phase – it compensates
for this by lagging behind the available working population again in
the following phase of ‘under-accumulation’. In this way there is in
general no surplus capital in Bauer’s ‘mechanism’ which could outgrow
his ‘limit’. Yet for the same reason this theory, as we have seen,
excludes the formation of reserve capital and the ability of
production to expand suddenly. Surplus capital appears as only a
passing phase which must periodically be replaced by the opposite
extreme, capital shortage: in Bauer’s ‘mechanism’ both phases replace
each other with the pedantic regularity of new moon and full moon.
There are no more ‘limits’ to capital accumulation than there is a
tendency for these to be exceeded; Bauer himself explicitly states
that accumulation always returns to this limit of its own accord, due
to the ‘mechanism of capitalist production itself’.[1] Thus, there is
no conflict between capital’s ability to expand and an alleged
limitation. Bauer only takes the trouble to include these concepts in
his ‘mechanism’ so that he can build some sort of artificial bridge
between it and imperialism. The explanation which he is compelled to
give of imperialism from the standpoint of his theory shows most
clearly that this construction is forced.
Since, according to Bauer, the working class is the axis around which
capital revolves, expansion of the limits to accumulation comes to
mean increase in the population of workers! This is down in black and
white in Neue Zeit.[2]
Accumulation is at first limited by the growth of the working
population. Imperialism increases the number of workers who are forced
to sell their labour power to capital. It accomplishes this by
destroying the old modes of production in colonial areas and thereby
forcing millions either to emigrate to capitalist areas or to serve
European or American capital in their native land, where the capital
has been invested. Since with a given organic composition of capital
the amount of accumulation is determined by the growth in the
available working population, imperialism is in fact a means to
enlarge the limits of accumulation.
So this is the main function and the main concern of imperialism: to
increase ‘greatly’ the number of workers, either by immigration from
the colonies or in their own country! And this, despite the fact that
anyone who is in full possession of his senses is aware, on the
contrary, of the continual presence of a complete, consolidated
industrial reserve army of the proletariat and unemployment in the
home countries of imperialist capital, in the old capitalist
countries, whilst in the colonies capital is always complaining about
labour shortage! Thus, in its urge for new wage proletarians,
imperialist capital escapes from those countries where rapid
technological progress, the energetic process of the
proletarianization of the intermediate strata and the destruction of
the proletarian family are continually replenishing the labour
reserve; it prefers to flow to the very parts of the world in which
rigid social relations in traditional forms of property keep the
labour force in such strong shackles that it takes decades of the
crushing impact of the domination of capital to produce, as the final
result of this domination, a semi-usable proletariat!
Bauer fantasizes about a ‘giant’ stream of workers coming from the
colonies to the old centres of capitalist production, while anyone
with eyes can see that, on the contrary, workers emigrate to the
colonies, along with the emigration of capital from the old centres to
the colonies, which, as Marx says, ‘indeed only follows emigrating
capital’. Indeed, look at the ‘giant’ stream of people from Europe
settling in North and South America, South Africa and Australia in the
nineteenth century. Look at the different modes of ‘moderate’ slavery
and forced labour European and North American capital employs to
secure the necessary minimum of labour in the African colonies, in the
West Indies, South America and the South Seas.
According to Bauer, English capital fought long and bloody wars with
China for half a century to secure a ‘giant’ stream of Chinese coolies
to meet the drastic lack of English workers. The same urgent need must
have caused the united European crusade against China at the turn of
the century. French capital was obviously mainly after the Berbers in
Morocco to compensate for its deficit of French proletarians.
Naturally, Austrian imperialism in Serbia and Albania was primarily
hunting for fresh labour. German capital is now scouring Asia Minor
and Mesopotamia with a torch for Turkish industrial workers, all the
more as there was such a shocking lack of labour in all sectors in
Germany before the World War! Clearly, Otto Bauer, ‘as a man who
speculates’, has yet again forgotten our plain earth. He cold-
bloodedly interprets modern imperialism as capitalism in search of new
labour. This is meant to be the nucleus, the innermost principle
motivating imperialism. Only as a matter of secondary importance does
he mention the need for overseas raw materials, which has no economic
connexion with his theory of accumulation, and comes like a bolt from
the blue. If accumulation in the specific ‘isolated capitalist
society’ can flourish as well as Bauer shows us, then it must have at
hand all the necessary natural treasures and gifts from heaven on the
miraculous island – quite different from the miserable capitalism of
harsh reality, which from its very inception has depended for its
existence on the world’s means of production. And finally, in the
third place, Bauer quite casually mentions in two sentences the
acquisition of new markets as a minor motive for imperialism, and only
as another means to mitigate the crises. This, of course, is another
‘nice thing to say’; as is commonly known on our planet, any
considerable expansion of the market is followed by an enormous
sharpening of the crises.
This is the ‘explanation of imperialism’ Otto Bauer finally gives: ‘In
our opinion capitalism is possible even without expansion.’[3] This is
the culmination of his theory of ‘isolated’ accumulation, and we are
left with the consoling assurance that one way or the other, ‘with or
without expansion capitalism will bring about its own downfall ...’
That is historical materialist research method in ‘expert’ execution.
So capitalism is also conceivable even without expansion. Indeed, for
Marx the urge of capitalism to expand suddenly forms a vital element,
the most outstanding feature of modern development; indeed, expansion
has accompanied the entire history of capitalism and in its present,
final, imperialist phase, it has adopted such an unbridled character
that it puts the whole civilization of mankind in question. Indeed,
this untameable drive of capital to expand has gradually constructed a
world market, connected the modern world economy and so laid the
historical basis for socialism. Indeed, the proletarian International,
which is to make an end of capitalism, is itself only a product of the
global expansion of capital. But all this is quite unnecessary, a
different historical course is conceivable. Indeed, is anything
‘inconceivable’ for a powerful thinker? ‘In our opinion capitalism is
conceivable even without expansion.’ In our opinion modern development
is conceivable even without the discovery of America and the
circumnavigation of Africa. If one thinks about it for long enough one
can even conceive of man’s history without capitalism. Finally, the
solar system is conceivable without our earth. German philosophy is
perhaps conceivable without its ‘metaphysical clumsiness’. Only one
thing seems to us to be quite inconceivable: that an official Marxism
which thinks in this way could, as the intellectual avant garde of the
Labour movement in the phase of imperialism, have resulted in
something other than the miserable fiasco of Social Democracy which we
have to witness today in the World War.
Of course, tactics and strategy in the practical struggle are not
directly dependent on whether one considers the second volume of
Capital to be a finished work or just a fragment, whether one believes
in the possibility of accumulation in an ‘isolated’ capitalist society
or not, whether one interprets Marx’s models of reproduction one way
or the other. Thousands of proletarians are good and brave fighters
for the aims of socialism without knowing about these theoretical
problems . for the reasons of a common basic understanding of the
class struggle, an incorruptible class instinct and the revolutionary
traditions of the movement. But there is the closest connexion between
the understanding and treatment of theoretical problems and the
practice of political parties over long periods. In the decade before
the World War, German Social Democracy, as the international
metropolis of proletarian intellectual life, displayed total harmony
in theoretical as well as practical areas; in both areas the same
indecision and ossification appeared, and it was the same imperialism
as the overwhelmingly dominant manifestation of public life which
defeated the theoretical as well as the political general staff of
Social Democracy. The proud monolithic edifice of official German
Social Democracy was revealed at its first historical trial to be a
Potemkin village.[4] Similarly, the apparent theoretical ‘expert
knowledge’ and infallibility of official Marxism, which blessed every
practice of the movement, turned out to be a grandiose façade hiding
its inner insecurity and inability to act behind intolerant and
insolent dogmatism. The sad routine moving along the old tracks of the
‘tried and tested tactics’, i.e. nothing but parliamentarianism,
corresponded to the theoretical epigons who clung to the master’s
formula whilst renouncing the living spirit of his teachings. We have
already noted in passing some proof of this thoughtlessness in the
‘supreme court’ of ‘experts’.
But the connexion with practice is in our case even more obvious than
it may seem at first sight. It basically means two different methods
of fighting imperialism.
Marx’s analysis of accumulation was developed at a time when
imperialism had not yet entered on to the world stage. The final and
absolute rule of capital over the world – the precondition on which
Marx bases his analysis – entails the a priori exclusion of the
process of imperialism. But – and here lies the difference between the
errors of a Marx and the crass blunders of his epigons – in this case
even the error leads on to something fruitful. The problem posed and
left unanswered in the second volume of Capital – to show how
accumulation takes place under the exclusive rule of capitalism – is
insoluble. Accumulation is simply impossible under these conditions.
This apparently rigid theoretical contradiction has only to be
translated into historical dialectics, in that it conforms to the
spirit of the entire Marxist teaching and way of thinking, and the
contradiction in Marx’s model becomes the living mirror of the global
career of capitalism, of its fortune and fall.
Accumulation is impossible in an exclusively capitalist environment.
Therefore, we find that capital has been driven since its very
inception to expand into non-capitalist strata and nations, ruin
artisans and peasantry, proletarianize the intermediate strata, the
politics of colonialism, the politics of ‘opening-up’ and the export
of capital. The development of capitalism has been possible only
through constant expansion into new domains of production and new
countries. But the global drive to expand leads to a collision between
capital and pre-capitalist forms of society, resulting in violence,
war, revolution: in brief, catastrophes from start to finish, the
vital element of capitalism.
Capital accumulation progresses and expands at the expense of non-
capitalist strata and countries, squeezing them out at an ever faster
rate. The general tendency and final result of this process is the
exclusive world rule of capitalist production. Once this is reached,
Marx’s model becomes valid: accumulation, i.e. further expansion of
capital, becomes impossible. Capitalism comes to a dead end, it cannot
function any more as the historical vehicle for the unfolding of the
productive forces, it reaches its objective economic limit. The
contradiction in Marx’s model of accumulation is, seen dialectically,
only the living contradiction between the boundless expansionist drive
and the limit capital creates for itself through progressive
destruction of all other forms of production; it is the contradiction
between the huge productive forces which it awakens throughout the
world during the process of accumulation and the narrow basis to which
it is confined by the laws of accumulation. Marx’s model of
accumulation – when properly understood – is precisely in its
insolubility the exact prognosis of the economically unavoidable
downfall of capitalism as a result of the imperialist process of
expansion whose specific task it is to realize Marx’s assumption: the
general and undivided rule of capital.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/anti-critique/ch06.htm
Imperialism
However that may be, we have at last arrived at imperialism. The
concluding chapter of Bauer’s essay is entitled The Explanation of
Imperialism. After this, the reader might well hope finally to find
one. After Bauer had explained that I had only uncovered one root of
imperialism, ‘but not the only one’, one could only expect that, from
the standpoint of his theory, he himself would lay bare the other
roots. Unfortunately, this was not the case. To the end, Bauer fails
to give one single indication of the other roots, he keeps the secret
to himself. In spite of the concluding chapter’s promising title and
introduction we are still left with only the one miserable ‘root’ of
imperialism, which forms the ‘kernel of truth’ in my incorrect
explanation.
In doing this, however, Bauer has already conceded too much to me, in
the shape of the ‘one root’ which he kindly accepts as true’. For here
too it is a case of either/or, and the compromise which Bauer tries to
make is basically as impermanent and ethereal as most compromises.
For if his ‘population growth’ theory of accumulation were correct,
the ‘root’ would be completely unnecessary, since then imperialism
would simply be impossible.
Let us remind ourselves what Bauer’s ‘mechanism’ consists of. It
consists in the fact that capitalist production automatically
readjusts itself to the growth of the working class. Then how can one
speak of a ‘limit’ to accumulation? Capital neither needs to nor can
it overstep this limit’. For if production grows faster than the
working class – in Bauer’s ‘over-accumulation’ phase – it compensates
for this by lagging behind the available working population again in
the following phase of ‘under-accumulation’. In this way there is in
general no surplus capital in Bauer’s ‘mechanism’ which could outgrow
his ‘limit’. Yet for the same reason this theory, as we have seen,
excludes the formation of reserve capital and the ability of
production to expand suddenly. Surplus capital appears as only a
passing phase which must periodically be replaced by the opposite
extreme, capital shortage: in Bauer’s ‘mechanism’ both phases replace
each other with the pedantic regularity of new moon and full moon.
There are no more ‘limits’ to capital accumulation than there is a
tendency for these to be exceeded; Bauer himself explicitly states
that accumulation always returns to this limit of its own accord, due
to the ‘mechanism of capitalist production itself’.[1] Thus, there is
no conflict between capital’s ability to expand and an alleged
limitation. Bauer only takes the trouble to include these concepts in
his ‘mechanism’ so that he can build some sort of artificial bridge
between it and imperialism. The explanation which he is compelled to
give of imperialism from the standpoint of his theory shows most
clearly that this construction is forced.
Since, according to Bauer, the working class is the axis around which
capital revolves, expansion of the limits to accumulation comes to
mean increase in the population of workers! This is down in black and
white in Neue Zeit.[2]
Accumulation is at first limited by the growth of the working
population. Imperialism increases the number of workers who are forced
to sell their labour power to capital. It accomplishes this by
destroying the old modes of production in colonial areas and thereby
forcing millions either to emigrate to capitalist areas or to serve
European or American capital in their native land, where the capital
has been invested. Since with a given organic composition of capital
the amount of accumulation is determined by the growth in the
available working population, imperialism is in fact a means to
enlarge the limits of accumulation.
So this is the main function and the main concern of imperialism: to
increase ‘greatly’ the number of workers, either by immigration from
the colonies or in their own country! And this, despite the fact that
anyone who is in full possession of his senses is aware, on the
contrary, of the continual presence of a complete, consolidated
industrial reserve army of the proletariat and unemployment in the
home countries of imperialist capital, in the old capitalist
countries, whilst in the colonies capital is always complaining about
labour shortage! Thus, in its urge for new wage proletarians,
imperialist capital escapes from those countries where rapid
technological progress, the energetic process of the
proletarianization of the intermediate strata and the destruction of
the proletarian family are continually replenishing the labour
reserve; it prefers to flow to the very parts of the world in which
rigid social relations in traditional forms of property keep the
labour force in such strong shackles that it takes decades of the
crushing impact of the domination of capital to produce, as the final
result of this domination, a semi-usable proletariat!
Bauer fantasizes about a ‘giant’ stream of workers coming from the
colonies to the old centres of capitalist production, while anyone
with eyes can see that, on the contrary, workers emigrate to the
colonies, along with the emigration of capital from the old centres to
the colonies, which, as Marx says, ‘indeed only follows emigrating
capital’. Indeed, look at the ‘giant’ stream of people from Europe
settling in North and South America, South Africa and Australia in the
nineteenth century. Look at the different modes of ‘moderate’ slavery
and forced labour European and North American capital employs to
secure the necessary minimum of labour in the African colonies, in the
West Indies, South America and the South Seas.
According to Bauer, English capital fought long and bloody wars with
China for half a century to secure a ‘giant’ stream of Chinese coolies
to meet the drastic lack of English workers. The same urgent need must
have caused the united European crusade against China at the turn of
the century. French capital was obviously mainly after the Berbers in
Morocco to compensate for its deficit of French proletarians.
Naturally, Austrian imperialism in Serbia and Albania was primarily
hunting for fresh labour. German capital is now scouring Asia Minor
and Mesopotamia with a torch for Turkish industrial workers, all the
more as there was such a shocking lack of labour in all sectors in
Germany before the World War! Clearly, Otto Bauer, ‘as a man who
speculates’, has yet again forgotten our plain earth. He cold-
bloodedly interprets modern imperialism as capitalism in search of new
labour. This is meant to be the nucleus, the innermost principle
motivating imperialism. Only as a matter of secondary importance does
he mention the need for overseas raw materials, which has no economic
connexion with his theory of accumulation, and comes like a bolt from
the blue. If accumulation in the specific ‘isolated capitalist
society’ can flourish as well as Bauer shows us, then it must have at
hand all the necessary natural treasures and gifts from heaven on the
miraculous island – quite different from the miserable capitalism of
harsh reality, which from its very inception has depended for its
existence on the world’s means of production. And finally, in the
third place, Bauer quite casually mentions in two sentences the
acquisition of new markets as a minor motive for imperialism, and only
as another means to mitigate the crises. This, of course, is another
‘nice thing to say’; as is commonly known on our planet, any
considerable expansion of the market is followed by an enormous
sharpening of the crises.
This is the ‘explanation of imperialism’ Otto Bauer finally gives: ‘In
our opinion capitalism is possible even without expansion.’[3] This is
the culmination of his theory of ‘isolated’ accumulation, and we are
left with the consoling assurance that one way or the other, ‘with or
without expansion capitalism will bring about its own downfall ...’
That is historical materialist research method in ‘expert’ execution.
So capitalism is also conceivable even without expansion. Indeed, for
Marx the urge of capitalism to expand suddenly forms a vital element,
the most outstanding feature of modern development; indeed, expansion
has accompanied the entire history of capitalism and in its present,
final, imperialist phase, it has adopted such an unbridled character
that it puts the whole civilization of mankind in question. Indeed,
this untameable drive of capital to expand has gradually constructed a
world market, connected the modern world economy and so laid the
historical basis for socialism. Indeed, the proletarian International,
which is to make an end of capitalism, is itself only a product of the
global expansion of capital. But all this is quite unnecessary, a
different historical course is conceivable. Indeed, is anything
‘inconceivable’ for a powerful thinker? ‘In our opinion capitalism is
conceivable even without expansion.’ In our opinion modern development
is conceivable even without the discovery of America and the
circumnavigation of Africa. If one thinks about it for long enough one
can even conceive of man’s history without capitalism. Finally, the
solar system is conceivable without our earth. German philosophy is
perhaps conceivable without its ‘metaphysical clumsiness’. Only one
thing seems to us to be quite inconceivable: that an official Marxism
which thinks in this way could, as the intellectual avant garde of the
Labour movement in the phase of imperialism, have resulted in
something other than the miserable fiasco of Social Democracy which we
have to witness today in the World War.
Of course, tactics and strategy in the practical struggle are not
directly dependent on whether one considers the second volume of
Capital to be a finished work or just a fragment, whether one believes
in the possibility of accumulation in an ‘isolated’ capitalist society
or not, whether one interprets Marx’s models of reproduction one way
or the other. Thousands of proletarians are good and brave fighters
for the aims of socialism without knowing about these theoretical
problems . for the reasons of a common basic understanding of the
class struggle, an incorruptible class instinct and the revolutionary
traditions of the movement. But there is the closest connexion between
the understanding and treatment of theoretical problems and the
practice of political parties over long periods. In the decade before
the World War, German Social Democracy, as the international
metropolis of proletarian intellectual life, displayed total harmony
in theoretical as well as practical areas; in both areas the same
indecision and ossification appeared, and it was the same imperialism
as the overwhelmingly dominant manifestation of public life which
defeated the theoretical as well as the political general staff of
Social Democracy. The proud monolithic edifice of official German
Social Democracy was revealed at its first historical trial to be a
Potemkin village.[4] Similarly, the apparent theoretical ‘expert
knowledge’ and infallibility of official Marxism, which blessed every
practice of the movement, turned out to be a grandiose façade hiding
its inner insecurity and inability to act behind intolerant and
insolent dogmatism. The sad routine moving along the old tracks of the
‘tried and tested tactics’, i.e. nothing but parliamentarianism,
corresponded to the theoretical epigons who clung to the master’s
formula whilst renouncing the living spirit of his teachings. We have
already noted in passing some proof of this thoughtlessness in the
‘supreme court’ of ‘experts’.
But the connexion with practice is in our case even more obvious than
it may seem at first sight. It basically means two different methods
of fighting imperialism.
Marx’s analysis of accumulation was developed at a time when
imperialism had not yet entered on to the world stage. The final and
absolute rule of capital over the world – the precondition on which
Marx bases his analysis – entails the a priori exclusion of the
process of imperialism. But – and here lies the difference between the
errors of a Marx and the crass blunders of his epigons – in this case
even the error leads on to something fruitful. The problem posed and
left unanswered in the second volume of Capital – to show how
accumulation takes place under the exclusive rule of capitalism – is
insoluble. Accumulation is simply impossible under these conditions.
This apparently rigid theoretical contradiction has only to be
translated into historical dialectics, in that it conforms to the
spirit of the entire Marxist teaching and way of thinking, and the
contradiction in Marx’s model becomes the living mirror of the global
career of capitalism, of its fortune and fall.
Accumulation is impossible in an exclusively capitalist environment.
Therefore, we find that capital has been driven since its very
inception to expand into non-capitalist strata and nations, ruin
artisans and peasantry, proletarianize the intermediate strata, the
politics of colonialism, the politics of ‘opening-up’ and the export
of capital. The development of capitalism has been possible only
through constant expansion into new domains of production and new
countries. But the global drive to expand leads to a collision between
capital and pre-capitalist forms of society, resulting in violence,
war, revolution: in brief, catastrophes from start to finish, the
vital element of capitalism.
Capital accumulation progresses and expands at the expense of non-
capitalist strata and countries, squeezing them out at an ever faster
rate. The general tendency and final result of this process is the
exclusive world rule of capitalist production. Once this is reached,
Marx’s model becomes valid: accumulation, i.e. further expansion of
capital, becomes impossible. Capitalism comes to a dead end, it cannot
function any more as the historical vehicle for the unfolding of the
productive forces, it reaches its objective economic limit. The
contradiction in Marx’s model of accumulation is, seen dialectically,
only the living contradiction between the boundless expansionist drive
and the limit capital creates for itself through progressive
destruction of all other forms of production; it is the contradiction
between the huge productive forces which it awakens throughout the
world during the process of accumulation and the narrow basis to which
it is confined by the laws of accumulation. Marx’s model of
accumulation – when properly understood – is precisely in its
insolubility the exact prognosis of the economically unavoidable
downfall of capitalism as a result of the imperialist process of
expansion whose specific task it is to realize Marx’s assumption: the
general and undivided rule of capital.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/anti-critique/ch06.htm
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