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A Theory of Imperialism

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imperialism is the set of policies (income deflation) devised by countries that rely on those commodities but do not sufficiently produce them, to prevent that from happening and thereby preventing the threat to the stability of the value of money on which their monetary economy depends. — location: 131 ^ref-51098

With increasing accumulation of capital, there is a continuous need for these commodities from these regions at non-increasing prices, if the value of money and a monetary system which allows wealth to be stored, is to remain stable, — location: 146 ^ref-17449

Capitalism is centred on money (or assets tied to money) as a store of wealth. This is what underlies and makes possible the circulation of money via its function as a medium for transactions. — location: 153 ^ref-30848

If the value of money falls against commodities, there is a danger that citizens will shy away from holding money and move towards holding commodities, thereby undermining money’s status as a store of wealth and eventually therefore its status as a circulatory medium. — location: 157 ^ref-59614

“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the Capitalistic System was to debauch the currency … Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.” — location: 162 ^ref-60528

‘income deflation’, a method of reducing the power of these populations to purchase these goods, which then releases them for consumption in the metropole (Or it may take a slightly different form: the suppression of demand for some goods that are not in demand in the metropole via the curtailment of the spending power of these populations may lead to the abandoning of their production for the production of other goods that are demanded by the metropole.) — location: 170 ^ref-36108

the neo-liberalism of the last thirty years was a way of returning to the protection of the value of money against commodities (something essential to the wealth-holding function of money on which capitalism fundamentally depends) by a restoration of capitalism’s built-in imperialism, i.e. its policy of income deflation in the periphery (but now by different post-colonialist strategies of primitive accumulation by land dispossession of petty producers, fiscal responsibility and austerity measures, etc) to counter the increase in commodity prices resulting from the policies of a heterodox interregnum in the years immediately following the Second World War. — location: 246 ^ref-20940

no vector-wise increase in the output of both commodities. Ricardo’s proposition falls to the ground if both countries do not produce both goods before trade. — location: 592 ^ref-52150

To this day, obtaining nonagricultural market access in the developing world is the mantra for advanced countries, — location: 599 ^ref-37580

the pressure to export primary products the advanced countries cannot produce has led to the same outcome of declining grain production per head in developing countries. — location: 600 ^ref-34518

the basic problem that the premise itself—that both countries can produce both goods (and by extension, all countries can produce all goods)—is not true. — location: 604 ^ref-24289

commodities can never possibly become a substitute for money as a form of wealth, unless the rate of inflation expected to obtain exceeds the carrying cost. — location: 687 ^ref-19197

the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, which has been usually put down to President De Gaulle’s “bloody-mindedness,” was in reality a result of the fact that money with gold backing cannot function as money in the face of inflation. This is exactly what we are arguing. — location: 725 ^ref-38879

if inflation occurs in commodity prices and is expected to continue, then the value of money in the metropolis gets destabilized. — location: 751 ^ref-53022

capitalism in its “spontaneity” does not bring about “land augmentation.” Since such land augmentation requires state effort, and since the requisite state effort is not forthcoming under capitalism in its spontaneity, land augmentation suffers. — location: 974 ^ref-47168

The state acting directly and exclusively in the interests of the lead actor of the world capitalism of the time is what capitalism in its “spontaneity” demands. — location: 977 ^ref-23090

Imperialism is defined as a set of nonmarket coercive political and economic mechanisms designed to prevent tropical producers from ever exercising their potential monopoly powers in global trade. If they were ever able to do so, then prices in the metropolis would skyrocket, the value of money in the metropolitan capitalist economies would be destroyed, and the capitalist system would crumble. — location: 3240 ^ref-26833

The super-exploitation of the tropical landmass through imperialist practices has always been and still is a constant and necessary feature of the reproduction of capital. Without it, capital would simply cease to be. — location: 3252 ^ref-28990

capitalism is unsustainable under the normal rules of exchange. It requires coercion to be exerted on this outside world, a coercion we call imperialism.” — location: 3262 ^ref-6153

Imperialism in short is linked to capitalism as a social system; — location: 3613 ^ref-53479

The great potato blight famine of 1846–47 killed one million Irish, out of a total population of eight million at most, while wheat and livestock products continued to be forcibly exported. — location: 3644 ^ref-55431

the low productivity of late medieval European agriculture and the very poor standard of life of the European population—a standard that started rising only after these countries acquired control over the superior productivity of biodiverse tropical lands. — location: 3648 ^ref-17203

When crops failed in successive years and famine ensued in Europe, as it did in the fourteenth century, many cases, documented in the chronicles, of collective cannibalism occurred. — location: 3657 ^ref-50641

A vast flow of foodstuffs and raw materials was extracted completely gratis, a fact that continues to be not only ignored but actively obfuscated to this day by the leading economic historians of Britain, who try to project a purely internal dynamic for the first capitalist industrialization. — location: 3702 ^ref-11695

agriculture was the main source of energy in that it provided feed grains for oxen and horses used in cultivation, traction, and transport until the 1840s when fossil fuels came into wider use. Advanced countries are once more reverting to agriculture for biofuels today.) — location: 3712 ^ref-47442

The fact that nineteenth-century emigrant Europeans had a high income had nothing to do with any allegedly higher “product wage” in their home country since no such higher annual yield in fact existed on their cold single-crop lands. Their relatively high income had much to do with their successful decimation of indigenous populations in the Americas, Australia, and elsewhere and their seizure of rich resources—land, timber, water, minerals—to a far greater extent than they commanded in their home countries. — location: 3744 ^ref-47590

Irish peasants who emigrated to the tune of a million persons in a single year after one-eighth of the population perished in the great famine of 1846–47, while wheat exports to Britain continued. — location: 3752 ^ref-5069

If U.S. agriculture was even of average efficiency, it would not need any subsidies — location: 3789 ^ref-51050

meat-based diets of northern populations are extremely resource- and energy-intensive in terms of very high feedgrain, pasture, and water demand, while others have found that the energy balance ratio is not only unfavourably high in northern agriculture but rising over time. — location: 3794 ^ref-20931

Ricardo’s conclusion of mutual benefit follows only if the assumption of his model, that “both countries produce both goods” (indeed his unstated assumption is that “all countries produce all goods”) — location: 3810 ^ref-38109

from a very restricted premise a general conclusion of mutual benefit is improperly drawn and applied to situations where the premise is not satisfied. — location: 3819 ^ref-12770

Given the insatiable demand of the then-developing countries for food stuffs and raw materials, India earned the second largest export surplus in the world for over four decades up to 1928 — location: 3842 ^ref-64795

all its foreign exchange earnings were systematically appropriated by Britain every year to pay for Britain’s own balance of payments deficits with the above-mentioned developing regions, including the United States, while local colonized peasant and artisan producers of export goods were “paid” out of the budgetary tax revenues raised from them—which means that they were apparently paid, but were not actually paid at all. — location: 3844 ^ref-49210

The rapid diffusion of capitalism in Europe and North America through capital exports by Britain simply would not have been possible without its wholesale appropriation of the exchange earnings of its colonies that were disguised as its own earnings. — location: 3854 ^ref-55613

the United States alone accounted for nearly a quarter of all India’s export surplus earnings by 1928, while continental Europe accounted for 40 percent. — location: 3861 ^ref-2478

Not a single dollar earned from export surplus to these fast-developing regions was allowed to flow back to the tropical colonies. — location: 3862 ^ref-23211

Indeed, an important part of the modus operandi of imperialism is in the intellectual domain, where it promotes incorrect theories of trade and of unemployment combined with illogical methods of measuring poverty to show a decline when deprivation is actually on the rise. — location: 3872 ^ref-7864

Perhaps overnight all products from nontemperate lands have to disappear from the supermarket shelves to make it clear how significant these products are in underpinning the highly diversified consumption basket to which rich consumers in the North are complacently habituated. — location: 3896 ^ref-48191

If tea, coffee, cocoa, cane sugar, chocolate or vanilla flavoured ice-cream and confectionery, fresh vegetables, fruits and flowers, and imported seafood all disappeared, their supermarket shelves, especially in winter, would be bare except for cereals and dairy and meat products, which are all that northern countries can produce in abundance. — location: 3898 ^ref-65223

Interestingly Germany exports spices and stimulants to a substantial extent, though it produces none at all: it re-exports one-third of its spices imports and two-thirds of its stimulants imports. — location: 3909 ^ref-20003

it imports nearly one thousand times the stimulants and over three hundred times the spices that it produces, and it engages in re-export of these items. — location: 3926 ^ref-25548

rich populations have now become habituated to a year-round supply of perishable vegetables and fruit, fish and seafood. — location: 3964 ^ref-51376

Our theory of imperialism therefore is based on the recognition of a basic trait of capitalism: namely, when it is faced with two alternatives, one of which can be described as a “cooperative solution” effected through state activism to the benefit of all, and the other at the expense of the working population, it invariably chooses the latter. — location: 3990 ^ref-46482