PDF-Version: Il Programma Comunista – Historical Colonialism and Thermonuclear Colonialism



Since the end of the Second World War, or rather since the course of it, we have been witnessing, it is now said everywhere, the “end of colonialism”. In fact, what is setting in motion before our eyes is only one form of colonialism.

Colonialism is much older than capitalism, its causes lying in the inequality of historical development and the division of society into classes. Now such objective conditions pre-exist capitalism; therefore there has been slave colonialism and feudal colonialism, as well as bourgeois colonialism. In its universal economic essence, colonialism is the aggregation to a superior economy of a backward economy, that is, the meeting point of economies at different stages of historical development and the violent transforming of the antiquated economy into the developed one. In every historical age the planet has been the seat of different and disparate modes of production: in its general meaning colonialism has represented a form of diffusion in the geographical space of the predominant economy in a given historical period. If we consider the facts well, the history of the Mediterranean civilisation, to give an example, is the history of the succession of different colonisations: Phoenician, Greek, Roman.

Consequently, if we accept the basic principle of Marxism that the succession of historical epochs is determined by the revolutionary succession of modes of production, we must recognise that colonialism has functioned as a “spring” of historical progress, imposing the overcoming of old relations of production and thus promoting the spread of the most advanced mode of production. Every type of class society has endeavoured to form the world in its own image. Colonialism is precisely the manifestation of this tendency, common to every form of state, that is, of political and military power based on class domination. In such conditions colonialism could not be dissociated from the use of violence. In a class society, whether of the slave or capitalist type, the spread of the mode of production outside the borders of the state can only take place in the form of violent conquest. All non-Marxist critics of colonialism started from this fact: the use of violence and the subjection of conquered peoples to formulate their curses. For all of them, the holy ideal of the anti-colonialist revolt is the “liberation” of the subject peoples. Now it is happening today, as it has already happened in other historical epochs, that the former colonies that manage to achieve the expulsion of the colonialist occupier and to give themselves an independent state, do not put themselves in a great hurry to erase the relations of production “imported” and imposed with weapons by the conquerors, but instead spread them more than they did, and to further strengthen them in space.

The affirmation that colonialism, notwithstanding the bloodshed and the drastic forms of racial subjugation, has played a positive role, favouring the diffusion of the dominant mode of production, will sound like blasphemy to the adepts of the anti-colonialist religion, the fashionable political religion. If we then add, drawing a logical consequence, that colonial warfare is the only means available to the class state for the geographical spread of the predominant economy, it will only result in an avalanche of accusations, including that of thinking the same way as angry bourgeois racists. Now it is incontrovertible that the democratic national revolutions that gave birth to the new Afro-Asian independent states (the foundation of the first black state, the republic of Ghana) tend to make the transition from the archaic feudal relations locally predominant to the modern capitalist industrialism – it matters little whether private or statist – as they aim precisely to carry out megalomaniac plans of industrialisation. The Afro-Asian revolutions constitute, as paradoxical as it may seem, a dialectical continuation of colonialism. What did white colonialism achieve, in fact, if not to impose in the overseas territories a minimum of the capitalist relations in force in the metropoles?

The democratic and national revolutions of Nehru, Mao Zedong, Sukarno and colleagues do not, from the point of view of the mode of production and social organisation, reach goals different from those that came before, under the cover of different ideologies, the colonialist leaders à la Cecil Rhodes. Another horrible blasphemy for the ears of the gurus of ancient colonialism! They constitute a quite heterogeneous church, if on the side of the Gandhian Nehru, the neo-Nazi Nasser and the Stalinist Mao Zedong, not to mention King Saud of Arabia, whose political principles remained at the Ottoman level. But all of them certainly do not tend to restore the economic and social “status quo” which was partly subverted by the colonial conquest, but they make strenuous efforts to favour the diffusion of productive forms which for a couple of centuries at least have been in force in the former colonialist metropoles: capitalist management of agriculture (production of foodstuffs destined for the market, as well as for the consumption of the agricultural family), monetisation of mercantile exchange, associated wage labour, industrial mechanism.

It is unimportant that such programmes are labelled “democratic socialism” in India, or “communism” in China. Their historical existence is purely capitalist, and will continue to be so until the proletarian revolution returns to roar in the heart of Western capitalism. Socialism is everything that moves away from wage labour and mercantilism, which are, instead, the goal towards which the Afro-Asiatic revolutions are running.

The thesis that colonialist imperialism found its interest in the petrified preservation of feudalism, that of even more antiquated types of social organisation, which the colonial conquerors had found in the overseas territories, is one of the hundred clichés of the pseudo-Marxist reformists. They forget that the basis of capitalist exploitation is the appropriation of surplus value. The raids that capitalism carries out to the detriment of society are completely different from the raids that the barbarian hordes carried out in the regions of the Roman Empire or, to stay with our times, from the raids that the Bedouin desert raiders still carry out today to the detriment of the inhabitants of the oases. The capitalist economy is the greatest prey economy that has ever existed up to now: in comparison to it, the large-scale looting carried out in history by the nomadic peoples becomes a young man’s business. This does not take away the stupid “cliché” of colonialism represented as an invasion of looters intent only on stripping territories, leaving their economies intact, indeed preventing any change, falls apart as soon as we consider the true essence of the capitalist mode of production that can never stop, nor let pre-established forms stop.

In other words, white imperialism could never have exploited the colonies if it had not transported into them, and imposed by force of arms, a minimum of capitalist relations. That is, if it had not transferred to the colonies, immersed in the forms of scattered feudal production or even linked to the primitive production techniques of the savage tribe, the forms of associated wage labour. And what is associated wage labour if not the basis on which the new Afro-Asian regimes tend to build modern productive machines? When one understands this, one sees how the supposed abyss that would separate the new anti-colonialist states and white imperialism is resolved in a difference of degree. The state baptised by Pandit Nehru, like the one sanctified by “comrade” Mao Zedong, is based on the same principle on which the immense power of the Western imperialist states accumulated over the decades: wage labour, the irreplaceable source of capitalist profit. Why be scandalised, then, if we say that the Afro-Asian revolutions are, from the point of view of the mode of production, the dialectical continuation of colonialism? And why be scandalised if we say, in the light of undeniable facts, that colonialism has played a positive role, of course if we look at it from the point of view of the process of spreading capitalism in the world?

In fact, white colonialism acted as a force of preservation only because it tended to perpetuate the political superstructure proper to feudalism, i.e. the despotic and personal forms of political power, linked to primitive economic relations in the countryside, while at first it was slowed down (but only slowed down) in the erosion of these artisan structures by the need to open a market for the finished products of the metropoles to be exchanged for local raw materials. Very instructive is the case of India, where power was divided between the British Crown, which directly controlled only a part of the Indian Inpero, and a myriad of vassal princes who governed their subjects in an absolutist fashion. A similar political structure is still in place in Malaysia, to remain in Asia. In the calculations of the regents of colonial empires, the feudal-capitalist diarchy was supposed to ensure the preservation of white colonialism, the power of the old dominant castes of Asian feudalism having to function as an auxiliary apparatus of central power emanating from the metropoles. The facts showed that such calculations were wrong. In the long run, the archaic legal forms proved to be powerless to contain the new erupting productive forces, so that they were blown up as soon as the external support of the imperialist powers failed as a result of the Second World War.

Since we are not obliged to incense the Nehrus and Mao Zedongs, we can safely say that the Afro-Asian revolutions, far from opening the way to socialism, have marked important milestones in the spread of capitalism in the world. Many people believe that in Beijing and New Delhi the driving forces of socialism, whether democratic or Stalinist, are on the march. In fact, in the struggle between colonialism and anti-colonialism, pan-capitalism has won, that is, the field of social forces that tend to fill the “gaps” left by capitalism in its bloody march across the continents. The Nehrus and the Mao Zedongs cannot say these things, but to what do the production plans of the new anti-colonialist regimes tend if not to expand the islands of industrialism that they have received in partial inheritance from the defeated colonial occupiers? Only those who are not Marxists can deny that industrialism based on wage labour is capitalist industrialism!

The Afro-Asian revolutions tend to erase the inequalities of historical development in the world. Since Asia and Africa have started the chase towards industrialisation, the qualitative unification of the world economy has begun. It can be predicted that, as the geographical-social areas in which pre-capitalist relations of production still survive and anti-feudal revolutions implement their programmes of “modernisation” of the local economy, the planet will move towards the unification of modes of production. Pre-capitalist relations of production will progressively withdraw, the capitalist mode of production will consequently spread. Will we come to see an all-capitalist world? We are certain that the proletarian revolution will intervene in order to avoid this catastrophe which has plunged the monstrous capitalist states of the West into the grave. Meanwhile, the pan-capitalist tendency exists. The spread of capitalism in the world has received a formidable impulse from the anti-colonial revolutions. With an energy that is truly unparalleled in that spent by the former colonisers, the democratic national regimes of Asia and Africa are preparing the modern forms of capitalist industrialism in regions that had hitherto remained immune to it.

Keeping an eye on these upheavals, even if still in their potential state, the paladins of anti-colonialism proclaim the end of the colonial era and sign the death certificate of imperialism. But have the fundamental causes of colonialism really failed?

In the inequality of historical development and the division of society into classes, we have identified the causes of colonialism, a historical phenomenon that manifests itself in the subordination of a lower-ranking economy and social structure to a higher-ranking economy and social structure. Colonisation tends to suppress the current mode of production in the colony and replace it with the more evolved and profitable mode of production of the imperialist metropoles. In practice, capitalist colonisation has had to export to the overseas territories the capitalist mode of production outside the will and calculations of the metropolitan bourgeoisie itself, eager to secure a position of monopolistic exclusivity for national production. For example, the American oil companies could not exploit Arabia without creating, by investing industrial capital, an indigenous paid class of drillers. What does that mean? That the differences between the economy of the metropoles and the economy of the colony where the exploitation takes place can no longer be qualitative differences, i.e. differences between modes of production, but quantitative differences, i.e. differences in degrees of development within the same mode of production. In Texas as in Dhahran, oil is extracted according to a single technical and economic system. What, instead, divides the two states like an abyss, which can very well be seen for this reason in the metropolis-colony relation, is the different degree of development of capitalism, which in the USA reaches dizzying levels and totally saturates the social economy, while in Arabia it only constitutes an oasis in the desert of a backward economy. This can also be seen on an ideological and psychological level. The Arab anti-colonialist is not ashamed of the oil drills but complains that “modernisation” – for the colonial peoples “modernising” does not mean copying the mode of production of the evolved peoples, and therefore of their colonialist master – is limited only to a few productive branches.

In conclusion, even if the whole world becomes capitalist and modern industrial complexes cover the whole of Asia and mark the end of the tribal systems of Africa, even if we arrive at total qualitative equality in the capitalist mode of production in the world, the differences between the levels of development of the various economies will not be eliminated. In an all-capitalist world from the pole to the equator, there would still be quantitative differences. Now it is precisely in the inequality of historical development and the existence of the class state that colonialism is perpetuated. The ideologists of anti-colonialism are therefore very wrong when they claim that, by modernising the Afro-Asian states according to the economic model of the imperialist metropoles, they will lack the objective conditions of the colonial regime.

However, the disintegration of colonial empires warns us that something has changed in colonialism. What is waning is historical colonialism. It was much older than capitalism, but it died before that. Over its rubble a new form of colonialism is taking over, a form appropriate to the development of imperialism described by Lenin. Historical colonialism is based on military conquest and permanent occupation of colony territories. It embraces historical epochs in which the predominant production was based on agriculture, mercantile exchange was limited, and the level of military technology involved the use of expeditionary corps and their quartering on the conquered territory. To this type of colonialism belonged, at the limits between the Middle Ages and the modern era, the absolute monarchies that had powerful naval fleets. In the respective cases, the aim of the French, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, British colonial conquest was the conquest of agricultural land or the compulsory passage of maritime trade.

Historical colonialism was ultimately based on the direct and immediate possession of the means of production present in the colonies, and this made the annexation of the territory indispensable. This law could not be avoided by early capitalism, so it had to proceed with the colonialisation of overseas territories by copying the methods of the colonial conquerors of dead ages.

What changes pushed historical colonialism into the grave? The most impressive aspect of the transformations that took place in imperialism was the profound upheaval of military technology. But military technique is only one particular aspect of production technique in general. The degree of development that capitalism has reached allows the highest centres of world finance to control the means of production in a way that is neither direct nor immediate. The enormous power reached by financial capital has reduced the material occupation of the territory to be exploited in the ancient colonial way to pure introductory expenditure and to the liabilities of the balance sheet. The imperialists of the second method no longer need to send expeditionary forces to the transmarine territories and maintain an expensive bureaucracy of occupation. They can control at a distance the productive mechanism of the “underdeveloped regions” of the globe through the game of loans and subsidies which, in legal fiction, were stipulated between “sovereign states”. On the contrary, they are able to build, anticipating their capitals, large industrial companies which they will let (in appearance) be administered by the natives elevated to the rank of “free citizens” of sovereign republics, but which, through the international banking mechanisms, they will pilot as they wish, without moving from their offices and without the fleet having to rush in. Who does not know that the industrialisation plans of China, India and the other Afro-Asian states are being implemented thanks to the intervention of foreign capital (read: United States, Germany, Russia)?

The new colonialists of the thermonuclear “era” do without the occupation of “checkpoints” of world trade, such as the naval bases already held by England in the four corners of the world. By means of the immense international cartels, they will re-establish world trade in the prison of the monopoly, from whose steel walls any escape is unthinkable. When Iran expropriated the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, imperialism did not use the old methods of historical colonialism, it let Mossadegh drown in its unsold oil instead of organising a punitive “raid” against the rebels. And, once the operation was completed, it was seen that the methods of the new colonialism advocated by the United States had prevailed within the international oil cartel, which, without firing a cartridge, managed to get their hands on the oil even though it had been nationalised by Iran.

Again. Historical colonialism did not have at its disposal for the domination of the seas – an indispensable condition for imperialist territorial control and domination – the weapons with which the thermonuclear imperialists abound. It was the advent of aircraft carrier imperialism that drove historical colonialism out of its positions. We must be wary, however, of falling into the error of decoupling force from economy. Although it may seem that the cannon, and the ships on which it was mounted (battleship, cruiser, etc.), formed an apparatus of force which, on the economic terrain, required less expenditure, it is true that modern aircraft carriers, even though they cost much more than traditional naval means, allow the imperialist centres a considerable reduction in the overall expenditure required by the policy of hegemony. It may seem paradoxical, but the imperialism of aircraft carriers is less expensive than the imperialism of armies and battleships, even if an aircraft carrier such as the “Forrestal” costs one hundred and thirty billion lire and so do the aircraft that it no longer carries. In fact, in order to maintain the predominance of the Mediterranean, England had to keep a chain of well-equipped bases: Gibraltar, Malta, Alexandria, Cyprus, not to mention the area of the Suez Canal, in whose ports an imposing fleet was stationed. To achieve the same objective, the American imperialists quietly used a fleet, the VI, composed of two aircraft carriers (the “Forrestal” and the “Lake Champlain”), a 45 thousand tonne battleship (the “Iowa”), the two cruisers (the “Salem” and the “Boston”) and 20 destroyers and two submarines.

But the listed vessels constitute only one of the combat groups (task forces) that make up the fleet, and precisely the T. F. 60. Aggregated to it is the T. F. 61 which includes an amphibious force supported by a contingent of landing infantry armed with atomic artillery constituting the T. F. 62. Finally, there is the T. F. F. 66 which is an anti-submarine combat force. But the U.S. Sixth Fleet, the most powerful in the world, which is equipped with missiles of various types, long-range bombers and atomic artillery, which can land infantry forces anywhere on the Mediterranean coast and keep under control of its aircraft territories within a circumference of 1400 miles, and thus including southern Russia and the entire Levant, has no logistics base in the Mediterranean: it is only a “guest” in the ports it traditionally visits. In fact, its logistical supply is entrusted to another combat group, the T. F. 63, which has its base in Norfolk (Virginia).

A modern super-carrier may cost alone as much as an entire fleet of other times, but an instrument of combat and denomination like the VI Fleet brings together in a few units a military potential that at the time of historical colonialism could not even be imagined. Historical colonialism had to give way to thermonuclear colonialism, because it proved more profitable. After all, there is a difference in the degree of productivity at the root of the transition, which is to the detriment of the old colonialist states of Europe.

The new colonialism is remote-controlled: it remotely controls both the capitals, manipulated in the offices of the great financial pirates by radiotelegraph, and the weapons, which are entrusted with the protection of profits. No wonder, then, the missiles in a world where even financial capital is… remote-controlled. Neither can the super-fleet that combines the weapons of the earth, the sea and the sky, be called the latest military discovery of American imperialism, the successor of the “perfidious Albion”. The Pentagon is studying a new type of airborne division. According to a Neapolitan newspaper, “At Fort Bragg, in North Carolina and elsewhere, a new type of unit is currently being tested, equipped with weapons of the latest model and organised according to new criteria. It is a new type of airborne division which, embarked from American bases, could land anywhere in the world within 40 hours. This airborne division would include 11,500 men, almost all paratroopers, who would be carried in flight by about 600 specially designed transport aircraft, such as the C 119 for troops, the C 123 for heavy equipment, the C 124 for long distance. This new division is called ‘Pentomic’ because it comprises five groups out of five platoons”. The newspaper, exuding joy, announces that the first such division will be ready by next June. Subsequently, an Army Corps with two or three “Pentomic” divisions would be formed. (Let us not delay to establish how much, in this description, there is bluffing and intimidation: terror and the “propaganda of fear” are also instruments of force, remote control weapons …).

We need nothing else to explain the anti-colonialism of the Eisenhowers and Foster Dulles, which is then only aversion to the old forms of capitalist colonialism. With the VI Fleet in the Mediterranean and one base, only one, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, the thermonuclear imperialism of the American brigands can hold the whole Middle East. If “marines” disembarked from the TF 61 encountered difficulties, to the shame of the carpet bombardments carried out by the “Skywarriors” which took off from the very modern Y-bridge of the “Forrestal”, their punishment would last no more than 40 hours, the time necessary for the “Pentomic” divisions to rush to the site, well equipped with missiles, recoilless cannons, mortars, machine guns and, naturally, air-transported tanks. This explains how King Hussein of Jordan was able, last year of these days, to hunt Glubb Pasha, and the bluffer, Nasser, to achieve the evacuation of Port Said. By now, an entire enemy armada on the spot is less scary than an airborne division headquartered 6,000 miles away.

Historical colonialism was an imperfect form of capitalist colonialism. It perpetuated bastard relations of production, in which control and appropriation of the labour power of the producer, which is the essence of capitalism, was accompanied by the physical subjugation of the worker, which was the essence of modes of production of dead ages. The foundation of the new Afro-Asian States, suppressing the racial distinctions and privileges established by the colonialist occupiers, had the effect of making the worker of the colonies completely “free”. Thermonuclear colonialism, the colonialism that the United States is introducing in the world, is pure capitalist colonialism. It exploits “free” workers enthralled by the megalomaniac plans of industrialisation of governments which, under the pretext of building “something other than capitalism”, function, and will function even more in the future, as vehicles of the imperialist expansionism of the dollar.

The old colonialism, in its brutal denial of the rights of the “human person”, was less repugnant than the new colonialism, which perpetuates the capitalist exploitation always, but adds to it the sickening hypocrisy of ideologies about the equality of races.

Source: Il Programma Comunista, N. 6-7, 1957.