Six Theses on Imperialism and Underdevelopment

By Tom Keefer | October 16, 2006 | POLS 6200 | tkeefer@yorku.ca

1. The origins of capitalism are preindustrial and Europes global project of

colonization predates the generalization of capitalist social relations.
The original processes of primitive accumulation central to the development of capitalism
occurred in the English countryside as property relations were transformed through an
intense process of class struggle. While Marx details the importance of conquest,
plunder, extirpation and enslavement to the development of capitalisms industrial form,
he argues that the essential precondition of capitalist accumulation -- the process of
divorcing the producer from the means of production -- first occurred in its classic
form in 16th-century England.1 In summarizing the perspective of a group of Marxist
theorists writing on the development of capitalism in England, Ellen Meiksins Wood
argues that neither the origins of capitalism or the dynamics of capitalist imperialism can
be explained by processes of primitive accumulation taking place on the periphery of
the world system. As she points out, despite their massive plundering of the New
World and their reliance on slave labor, neither Portugal nor Spain developed in a
capitalist fashion.2 For Wood it is the social property relations at home in the imperial
power, the particular conditions of systemic reproduction associated with those property
relations, and the particular economic processes set in motion by them that determine
the nature of colonial exploitation.3 Thus while colonial wealth may have had an
important impact on the later development of British capitalism, this impact was shaped
1

Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, New York: Vintage Books, pp. 875-876.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, London: Verso, p. 148.
3
Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, p. 149.
2

by the particular way that the British economy was structured by agrarian capitalist
property relations.

2. While capitalism was enabled by state directed extra-economic processes of

primitive accumulation, this prehistory of capital is distinct from the real
subsumption of labor under capital which characterizes mature capitalism.
Marx and Wood distinguish between surplus extracted by extra-economic means and
surplus produced from unequal market exchange. All pre-capitalist class societies have
extracted surplus from subordinated classes through extra-economic means, that is, by
means of direct coercion, using military, political, and juridical powers to extract
surpluses from direct producers who typically remained in possession of the means of
production.4 The mode of surplus extraction particular to capitalism is one where the
direct producers are both free of the ownership of the means of production and free
to sell their labor power as a commodity on the market. Surplus value is derived from the
difference between the sum paid for commodified labor power and the value it
contributes to the production process. The use of state coercion in extracting economic
surplus is the exception rather than the rule as social re/production is determined by
market forces. From this perspective we can see that much of the early development of
colonialism and imperialism was based on extracting surplus through extra-economic
means and not via processes of capitalist imperialism.5 Primitive accumulation involves
the use of extra-economic force, which as Marx argues is itself an economic power.
4

Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism, p.150.

This perspective is challenged by world systems theorists such as Immanuel Wallerstein who consider all
production for the world market to be capitalist, regardless of whether this production occurs under a
feudal, or slave, or other mode of production. (See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Rise and Future Demise of
the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis Comparative Studies in Society and
History, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Sep., 1974), pp. 387-415.)
5

According to Marx, what is common to processes of primitive accumulation is that they

...employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organized force of society, to
hasten, as in a hothouse, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production
into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition.6 Although primitive accumulation
(the separation of the primary producers from the means of production and/or the
appropriation of their accumulated surplus by force) is a precondition for the
establishment of capitalism, it belongs, properly speaking to the prehistory of capitalism. 7

3. The development of a mature form of capitalism characterized by the real

subsumption of labor to capital and capitalist forms of imperialism requires an
industrial form of capitalism.
The imposition of capitalist social relations across the globe in the 19th century was made
possible by specifically industrial forms of production, transportation and warfare. This
global conquest and administration would simply not have been possible for an agrarian
capitalist society to accomplish. Agrarian capitalism and any pre-industrial putting out
system faces immediate limits to both its own internal reproduction and its external
expansion. In the first place it is limited by the biotic limits of time and space as travel,
communication, warfare, transport of goods, etc. necessary for accumulation can only
take place at the speed of wind, or human and animal power. The Industrial Revolution
and the replacement of biotic energies by fossil fuel energies made possible for the first
time a truly global order, one controlled by the monopoly capitalist combines, cartels

Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 915-916.

David Harvey takes a very different perspective, arguing that the conception of primitive accumulation
can be better understood by the concept of accumulation by dispossession which he sees as a continual
and ongoing process under capitalism. See David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005 pp. 137-182.
7

and trusts which dominated these new industrial industries.8 The second major limitation
is that non-industrial forms of capitalism are reliant on accumulation by means of
increasing absolute surplus value as opposed to relative surplus value, which inevitably
leads to the increasing of domestic class struggle. Due to the dramatically heightened
productivity of fossil fueled industrial production the class antagonism between labor and
capital was checked by the possibility that when pushed by class conflict, capitalists
could increase wages in return for labor peace and heightened productivity. As Samir
Amin argues, more or less full employment and social peace can be guaranteed in the
core countries if capital and labor accept, under the aegis of the state, a social contract
which relates increases in real wage to increases in productivity. 9 The maintenance and
expansion of what Lenin termed a labor aristocracy is possible as long as cheap energy
inputs are available and as long as the biosphere can continue to absorb the waste
products of industrial society, limits that human society is rapidly approaching.

4. In addition to providing a temporary solution of the labor problem within the

capitalist core countries, the advent of industrial production encourages relations of
unequal exchange with the periphery.
In Amins conception of unequal exchange, capitalists can ensure further profits by
employing labor and importing products produced on the periphery where the return to
labor will be less than what it is at the center.10 While capitalist imperialism benefits
from the exploitation of the differential costs of labor power and will create industrial
outposts to employ this labor, modern processes of capitalist accumulation also contain
8

V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, New York: International Publishers, p. 123.
Samir Amin, Accumulation and Development: A Theoretical Model, Review of African Political
Economy 1, p. 11.
10
A Samir Amin, Accumulation and Development: A Theoretical Model, p. 13.
9

an energetic and environmental component which has been largely overlooked in Marxist
theorizations of imperialism. Alf Hornborg has attempted to identify a thermodynamics
of imperialism which would understand how peripheral, less industrialized countries are
at a systematic disadvantage in their exchange of energy and materials with the
industrialized core. He argues that:
The flows of energy and materials from [periphery to core] tend to reduce complexity and
power in the hinterland while augmenting complexity and power in the core. Extractive
economies generally cannot count on a cumulative development of infrastructure as can
the productive economies in the core, because economic activities in the former are
dispersed and shifting according to the location of the extracted materials. As the stocks
of natural resources become increasingly difficult to extract as they are depleted, an
intensification of extraction will tend also to increase costs per unit of extracted
resources, instead of yielding the economies of scale associated with intensification in the
industrial core.11

Andr Gunder Frank points out that, this process is replicated throughout global, national
and local structures. Each of the satellites... serves as an instrument to suck capital and
economic surplus out of its own satellites and to channel part of the surplus to the world
metropolis of which all are satellites.12 This is related to the overall dominance of
industrial over agricultural regions. As Karl Kautsky notes:
As a rule, industrial zones overmaster and dominate agrarian zones. This was true earlier
of the city vis--vis the countryside, and it is now true of the industrial state vis--vis an
agrarian state. A state which remains agrarian decays politically and usually
economically, too, and loses its autonomy in both respects.13

5. The maintenance of an industrial capitalist system based in industrialized nations

requires constant flows of low entropy fuels and minerals from periphery to core.
Unequal exchange takes the form of the export of labor, fossil fuels, metals, and other
raw materials kept artificially cheap by the value system of international capitalism. The
core capitalist countries were fortunate to have large and easily accessible deposits of
11

Alf Hornborg, The Power of the Machine: Global Inequalities of Economy, Technology, and
Environment, Oxford, Alta Mira Press, 2001, p. 28.
12
Andr Gunder Frank, "The Development of Underdevelopment", Monthly Review, Sept. 1966, p. 20.
13
Karl Kautsky, Ultra Imperialism, New Left Review, p. 43.

fossil fuels to enable their initial process of industrial accumulation, but as they have
expanded they have become increasingly dependent on the extraction of low entropy
minerals and fossil fuels from the periphery. Each year from its inception to the present,
the global industrial capitalist system has drawn down more energy from fossil fuel
stocks than the year before. Economic growth which is inherently dissipative of energy
requires constant inputs of new forms of energy and minerals in order to maintain its
growth, and these resources are increasingly coming from the underdeveloped areas of
the world economy. A few statistics provide a sense of the dynamic:
the US share of world energy consumption is 25%, while 20% of the worlds people do
not have access to enough energy to successfully maintain their own body metabolism...
the richest 20% of the worlds population consume 86% of the it aluminum, 81% of the
paper, 80% of the iron, and 76% of the lumber. Per capita carbon dioxide emissions in
1990 were around 5 tons in the United States but only 0.1 tons in India. 14

6. In an epoch of industrial capitalism, continued reproduction of the system and

possibilities for hegemonic transition are conditioned by access to and control over
low entropy sources of energy and materials.
The British ruling class was conscious that its empire and industrial economy was
contingent upon the availability of cheap coal, and by the 1880s, the British ruling class
was fixated on the effect of declining coal reserves on industrial production and the
maintenance of their global empire against the rising industrial economies of France,
Germany, and the United States. By the beginning of the 20th century, control of global oil
reserves proved to be a determining factor in the competition between the US and Britain
for world hegemony. Ultimately, the USs huge reserves of domestic petroleum proved
decisive to the victory of the Allies in both world wars ensured the USs hegemonic
position for the remainder of the century. However, domestic US oil production peaked in
14

Alf Hornborg, The Power of the Machine, p. 28.

1970 and the geo-political consequences of this were brought home by the 1973 Arab oil
embargo which marked the first time that the US was not able to meet market disruptions
to the global oil supply by increasing their own domestic oil production. If it is the case,
as Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly J. Silver argue, that the world since 1970 has been going
through a new phase of global hegemonic transition,15 then it would appear that control
over oil, the lifeblood of the industrial system, will be of fundamental importance in
determining the emergence of any new global hegemon. The problem of the global
peaking of world oil production and the attempts to implement alternative energy regimes
(nuclear, photovoltaic, wind etc..) thus emerge as central concerns for the study of global
political economy.

15

Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly J. Silver, Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, p. 272.