The bourgeois period of history has to create the material basis of the new world . . . . in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”
Colonialism, Imperialism & Globalism
The colonial shape [form] of development meant
1. the more technologically developed states, city-states and areas of civilization
2. brought the less developed areas into their economic, social and political orbit.
3. It was the act of ruling peoples and classesusing a superior technological complex, superior organization, more advanced private property relations and forms of wealth that negated the old way of life of the people colonized. Negation means the incorporation of certain aspects of the old in the new. Therefore, the new is always connected to the old and colonial relations leap forward in new guises.
4. The social power of money began to structure society based on avarice, male supremacy and militarism.
5. The colonial form of development meant creation of structures and institutions to bring and hold the colonized at the bottom of the social order, and relegate them to a secondary status in social life – to “chop wood and carry water” for Roman soldiers. The totality of the system that ensures the colonized remain at the bottom of the social order is colonial architecture.
6. The colonial form was the vehicle that spread uneven development into every corner of the earth.
Derived from the Latin word colere, “to inhabit,” colonialism was/is military domination of earth, and subjugation of one people by another, not merely class domination based on private property. The impetus for the colonial form development appeared with the rise of private property, the state and the appearance of slavery and the establishment of a professional armies perhaps 10,000 years ago.
Colonialism was the forcible extension of rule by one people over another. The authority of Empire was imposed on peoples unable to resist being dragged into the political-military authority of the conquerors. Ancient colonialism reached its climax under the Roman Empire, which collapsed in the West after two centuries of Pax Romana and withered away finally in the East in the late Middle Ages with the collapse of the Byzantine Empire in 1453. Some historians view the fall of Constantinople in 1453 as the beginning of the modern age.
The 1776 American Revolution and 1804 Haitian workers-slave Revolution are used as political markers for the birth of the national question, national movement and national revolutions.
A new form of colonialism was reborn in the West with the rise of the money economy, mercantilism and commercial capitalism in the 17th century in which external trade – export of commodities – became indispensable to the growth of domestic economies.
The rise of industrial capitalism dated from the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century with the private ownership of the means of production imposed on distant markets. Nineteenth-century imperialism was an extension of industrial capitalism, or rather based on the factory system, the Berlin Conference of 1885 and rise of the monopoly stage of capital in the 1890s.
(See, Henry C.K. Liu, The Abduction of Modernity, 2003)
Colonialism was an aspect of all modes of production with private property relations of production. Consequently, its architecture and impact are felt today as humanity becomes globalized. While often used interchangeably, colonialism, imperialism and globalism are not the same. Each refers to a specific stage of development of society. Colonialism appeared thousands of years before imperialism.
The word imperialism appears in the 1858 edition of Webster’s dictionary. It is proper to connect the word to that period, which includes the American Civil War, financing of both sides of the war by Wall Street, inaugurating the leap to financial-industrial capitalism and formation of a new financial oligarchy.
Imperialism is a form of colonialism during the last stage transition from agriculture to industry, when the monopoly stage of capitalism dominates capitalist property relations and throughout the industrial revolution of the 20th century. It is the export of finance-capital (money) which destroys the natural economies of those colonized.
Imperialism emerged between the 1871 Franco-Prussian War and the Berlin Conference of 1885, when European leaders divided Africa into colonial possessions, creating the European based direct colonial system, and the modern world of imperialism. The age of imperialism completed the transition from agriculture to the factory system and reconfigured the world based on colonial empires dominated by imperial peoples and not simply by exploiting classes.
In the 1980s a new non-banking financial architecture based in the digital-computer revolution, formed. Financial-industrial capital was negated by speculative finance, creating neo-liberalism – a new world of globalism dominated by the USA’s empire of military bases. The colonialism and imperialism of the epoch of the industrial revolution have been sublated by globalism.
“Globalism” and “globalization” in the USA entered public consciousness based on the 1999 massive demonstration in Seattle. In 2020 globalism refers to speculative finance regime, dominating the world total capital, in the age of the digital revolution, rather than the world being round and historically colonized by powerful states.
Imperialism is a form of colonialism. Globalism is not!
Globalism is not a form of colonialism. Globalism grew out of bourgeois colonialism and imperialism. Globalization emerged at a “certain stage in the development of the material power” of the digital revolution, and the rise of a qualitatively new real time international infrastructure of digital processes and robotics; the internet of things, big data and new financial architecture that brought humanity into one more or less, universal mode of existence. Globalism defines a technological complex that begins negation of European colonialism and imperialism of the industrial epoch. We are in an epoch of world proletarian revolution.
The era of Marxism and the National Question
First period.
The first period begins with the industrial revolution as a benchmark. During the industrial revolution, revolutionaries in Europe called the process of bringing the conquered peoples into the orbit of their political states “the National Question.”
What questions did the National Question ask? The national question asked, “And what of the colonies, ‘our peoples,’ and ‘our’ second class citizens incorporated into ‘our’ Empire?”
“What is ‘our colonial policy’ towards those held in colonial bondage by ‘our’ imperial state?”
The national question referred primarily to white European peoples between the 1848 writing of the Communist Manifesto and the 1884 Berlin Conference.
The NATIONAL question was posed during two distinct periods.
(Quote)
“The first period is the period which saw the break-up of feudalism in the West and the triumph of capitalism. . . . In Eastern Europe, on the contrary, the process of formation of nationalities and the elimination of feudal disunity did not coincide in time with the process of formation of centralized states. I am referring to Hungary, Austria and Russia. In these countries capitalist development had not yet begun; it was perhaps only incipient; but the necessity of taking defensive measures against the invasions of the Turks, Mongols and other Oriental peoples, [required] that centralized states capable of withstanding the onslaught of the invaders should be formed without delay. And since in Eastern Europe the process of formation of centralized states proceeded more rapidly than the process of formation of people into nations, mixed states arose, each made up of several nationalities which had not yet formed themselves into nations but which were already united in a common state. Thus, the first period is marked by the appearance of nationalities in the dawn of capitalism: in Western Europe we observe the birth of purely national states to which national oppression is unknown, whereas in the East we observe the birth of multinational states with one more developed nation at the head and the remaining, less developed nations in a state of political, and later of economic, subjection to the dominant nation. These multinational states of the East were the birthplace of that national oppression which gave rise to national conflicts, national movements, the national problem and the various methods of solving that problem.
(N. Peery, The Comintern position on the Negro Question: A Review of H. Haywood’s Negro Liberation, 1979, pages 29-30.) A similar translation of the quote from Stalin is located here.
In Marxism colonial development during the initial overthrow of feudalism was expressed as the national question. The national question arose and took shape during the breakup of the feudal social pattern, and before the outbreak of the 1917 October Revolution. The national question referred primarily to the so-called civilized white peoples of Europe. The national question would later be displaced by the national-colonial question.
From the National Question to the National-Colonial Question
Second period.
Lenin’s Bolsheviks won state power October 1917, established Soviet power and ushered in a new political era in world history. The era of Soviet power politically transformed the old bourgeois national democratic movement and the national question into an era of national liberation movements and the national-colonial question. The national-colonial question included the colonial peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The national question excluded the colonial peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
(Quote)
Formerly, the national question was usually confined to a narrow circle of questions, concerning, primarily, ‘civilized’ nationalities. The Irish, the Hungarians, the Poles, the Finns, the Serbs, and several other European nationalities — that was the circle of unequal peoples in whose destinies the leaders of the Second International were interested. The scores and hundreds of millions of Asiatic and African peoples who are suffering national oppression in its most savage and cruel form usually remained outside of their field of vision. They hesitated to put white and black, ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ on the same plane. Two or three meaningless, lukewarm resolutions, which carefully evaded the question of liberating the colonies — that was all the leaders of the Second International could boast of. Now we can say that this duplicity and half-heartedness in dealing with the national question has been brought to an end. Leninism laid bare this crying incongruity, broke down the wall between whites and blacks, between European and Asiatics, between the ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’ slaves of imperialism, and thus linked the national question with the question of the colonies. The national question was thereby transformed from a particular and internal state problem into a general and international problem, into a world problem of emancipating the oppressed peoples in the dependent countries and colonies from the yoke of imperialism.
Summary:
The national question took shape during the breakup of the feudal social pattern, before the outbreak of the first world imperialist war. It is clear that the national question is the question of a people who are deprived of civil rights, who are shunted aside in economic growth, who are economically subjugated. It is a question of a people deprived of equal rights – a people defeated in their struggle toward a national state.
This surely sounds like the position of the so-called Negro people ever since the defeat of Reconstruction and during the 20th century. But it is not, and cannot be, because the development of the oppressed nation is connected with the struggle against feudalism and the defeat of the national bourgeoisie during that period. The national question referred primarily to the “civilized” oppressed white peoples of Europe.
The consolidation of monopoly capitalism witnessed the first world imperialist war for the redivision of an already divided world. This war was fought out in Europe, but the fight was over markets and the colonies represented by Europe – Asia, Africa and Latin America.
The end of World War I and victory of the 1917 October Revolution, spelled the end of the political period of the national question. The world consisted of imperialist states, colonies and Soviet Power. Soviet Power was antagonistic to capital and built a political front against imperialism that included the colonial peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This was the era of the national-colonial question. The national question is before WWI. The national-colonial question is after WWI.
Changes in the post-World War II political system included destruction of the European based direct colonial system. The national-colonial question was resolved in favor of imperialism with the rise of the neo-colonial state, dominated by comprador fascists. The victory of the Vietnamese revolution and 1976 unification of Vietnam bookmarked the closing of the period of the neo-colonial state and the start of the first stage of globalism.
Globalization ended the era of the national-colonial question. Globalism severed the institutional connections between the neo-colony and the former direct colonizer and left these areas of the world free to be dominated by world speculative finance and the mega corporate state [transnational state]. Globalism is evening up the world in such a way that there is only one universal technological complex dominating the entire planet, thus creating the foundation to end the colonial shape of history. There are no areas of planet earth left to colonize.
Colony, Neo-colonialism, Neo-colony, Semi-colony; Categories of 20th Century imperial colonization during the last stage transition from agriculture to industry as driving social force of history.
Colony
A colony is a geographical area and its peoples brought under the direct economic and political control of a foreign state. It is an area, country, nation and/or non-sovereign people economically subjugated, politically ruled and governed by direct state and military intervention of an imperialist state.
The export of commodities into the colonized area, the establishment and enlargement of the money economy alongside destruction of the natural economy, the stationing of the army of imperial aggression in the subjugated area and the reduction of the non-sovereign peoples to slaves, peons and permanent “second-class citizens,” defined the colony in the epoch of rising capitalism.
While a handful of colonies still exists, the world is no longer based on the old colonial system. Asia, Africa and Latin American have been objectively decolonized. The terms “colony,” “neo-colonialism,” “neocolony” and “semicolony” are each bound up with specific stages of development of the industrial revolution and imperialism outlined in V. I. Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism.
“Colony,” “neo-colonialism,” “neocolony,” and “semicolony” DO NOT describe the salient feature or essences of today’s globalized world market. The salient feature and essence of the proletarian revolution in 2020 is a worldwide destitute proletariat, developing its consciousness in a new digital worldwide infrastructure.
Neo-colonialism:
Neo-colonialism is the system of financial control of a former colony by its former colonizer who has granted it political independence, or the colony has won independence but remains economically dependent upon its former political master.
Neocolony
When the European direct colonial system was shattered during World War II, and these direct colonies gained independence, controlled their state and domestic political institutions, but remained financially dependent upon the former direct colonizer, they became neo-colonies. The neocolony was the last stage of imperial bondage based on monopoly capital and the Henry Ford stage of the industrial revolution. There remains a handful of direct colonies and neo-colonies, but the era of the direct colony and neo-colonialism ended by the 1990s, and the new world of globalism began to define economic and political relations. In the new globalized world infrastructure, the neocolony left the exclusive economic orbit of its historical colonizer and became open to world speculative finance.
Semicolony
A semicolony was a country that broke the direct colonial relationship with it imperial master, and domestic democratic forces gained at least partial and temporary control of the state. It was a semicolony because the country remained dependent and locked into the system of finance capital. In the past century a semicolony either left the capitalist system or lapsed back into a neocolonial status. The Chilean government of Salvador Allende is the classic example of the semicolony of the post-World War II era.
National-Colonial Question
Economic & Political Period
The national question and national-colonial question referred to two different economic and political eras and epochs during the final transition from agriculture to industry. Both express the colonial form of history. Each represented different intertwining stages in the form of private property, the industrial revolution and political forms of rule. Each reflected a different political period.
The era of modern imperialism, which in the US emerged on the basis of the American Civil War (1861-1865), witnessed the triumph of Wall Street, emergence of Yankee imperialism and conversion of the plantation South into the Black Belt nation and Yankee imperialism’s first and most important colony.
Imperialism quickly gobbled up the world and has fought two wars for its redivision. Under such conditions, it was not possible for nations and peoples to remain outside of the sphere of world imperialism. All formerly oppressed nations, connected to specific states and treated as the specific state problems, were transformed into colonies of imperialism. With the Black Belt nation subdued under the world’s first fascist state form, American troops landed in Cuba, American warships bombarded Puerto Rico, with an expeditionary force headed to the Philippine, while Hawaii was to be conquered by “red, white and blue” imperialism. In the wake of the Civil War, the US emerged as a multinational state system.
From the Bourgeois democratic national movement
(first period)
to the National Peoples Liberation movement
(second period)
The parties of the Comintern used the October Revolution as a political divide in world history and birth of the national-colonial question.
The October Revolution put an end to the old bourgeois movement for national emancipation and inaugurated the era of a new, communistic movement of the workers and peasants of the colonies, directed against the rule of the bourgeoisie, their own and foreign, and against imperialism in general. This political configuration opened because it was possible for the colonies to enter into the orbit of the Soviet state and Soviet power.
After establishment of the Comintern it became obvious that the emancipation of the toiling masses of the colonies remained inconceivable without a break with imperialism, without the overthrow by each of its ‘own’ national bourgeoisie and entering the orbit of Soviet power. It was equally obvious that in this period of its extreme parasitism, financial-imperialism would never peacefully allow any colonized peoples, especially a small nation, an independent existence.
US Marxists of the post WW II period described the 1865 – 1922 movement of the former black slaves and their descendant the Negro bourgeois democratic national movement. During this period Booker T Washington emerged as leader/spokesperson of a maturing Negro comprador bourgeoisie. Dr. DuBois – the brilliant scholar and organizer of small business – emerged as a leader of the “Negro National bourgeoisie.”
Before October 1917 the worldwide movements of the oppressed were called bourgeois democratic movements. After the October Revolution, the Marxists spoke of the Negro Peoples’ Liberation Movement. This distinction corresponded fully with Lenin’s presentation to the Comintern.
Lenin’s distinction between the bourgeois democratic national movement (pre-October 1917) and the National Revolutionary Movement is reprinted below, in its entirety.
(Quote)
Third, I should like especially to emphasize the question of the bourgeois-democratic movement in backward countries. This is a question that has given rise to certain differences. We have discussed whether it would be right or wrong, in principle and in theory, to state that the Communist International and the Communist parties must support the bourgeois-democratic movement in backward countries. As a result of our discussion, we have arrived at the unanimous decision to speak of the national-revolutionary movement rather than of the “bourgeois-democratic” movement. It is beyond doubt that any national movement can only be a bourgeois-democratic movement, since the overwhelming mass of the population in the backward countries consist of peasants who represent bourgeois-capitalist relationships. It would be utopian to believe that proletarian parties in these backward countries, if indeed they can emerge in them, can pursue communist tactics and a communist policy, without establishing definite relations with the peasant movement and without giving it effective support. However, the objections have been raised that, if we speak of the bourgeois-democratic movement, we shall be obliterating all distinctions between the reformist and the revolutionary movements. Yet that distinction has been very clearly revealed of late in the backward and colonial countries, since the imperialist bourgeoisie is doing everything in its power to implant a reformist movement among the oppressed nations too. There has been a certain rapprochement between the bourgeoisie of the exploiting countries and that of the colonies, so that very often—perhaps even in most cases—the bourgeoisie of the oppressed countries, while it does support the national movement, is in full accord with the imperialist bourgeoisie, i.e., joins forces with it against all revolutionary movements and revolutionary classes. This was irrefutably proved in the commission, and we decided that the only correct attitude was to take this distinction into account and, in nearly all cases, substitute the term “national-revolutionary” for the term “bourgeois-democratic”. The significance of this change is that we, as Communists, should and will support bourgeois-liberation movements in the colonies only when they are genuinely revolutionary, and when their exponents do not hinder our work of educating and organising in a revolutionary spirit the peasantry and the masses of the exploited. If these conditions do not exist, the Communists in these countries must combat the reformist bourgeoisie, to whom the heroes of the Second International also belong. Reformist parties already exist in the colonial countries, and in some cases their spokesmen call themselves Social-Democrats and socialists. The distinction I have referred to has been made in all the theses with the result, I think, that our view is now formulated much more precisely.
(V. I. Lenin, The Second Congress, Communist International, 1920. Bold added.)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jul/x03.htm#fw3
Today the world has been globalized. The digital-robotic economy has evened up development in such a way that only one universal mode of production and communications has emerged. This digital-robotic economy and new universal technological complex embrace all of humanity, although the rates of growth and development vary.
Under conditions where all of humanity are bound up in one general technological complex based on robotics, the world has been politically evened up as never before, since the breakup of primitive communism and emergence of women as the first proletariat.
Definition of terms
Bribery & privilege:
As a feature of colonialism during the epoch of the industrial revolution, bribery granted a structured material benefit to the colonizing peoples of all classes, in their interactions with the colonized. These material benefits maintained loyalty to the capitalist system and its political causes. Bribery of the working class refers to the broad social phenomena of colonial enslavement built into the architecture of the system. Architecture, with its spoken and unspoken legality relegated groups of peoples, based on their colonial status, to second class citizens throughout world imperialism.
“. . . . the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would appear to be the possession, alongside the bourgeoisie, of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat.”
(F. Engels, Letter to Marx, 1858.)
https://marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1858/letters/58_10_07.htm
Bribery and privilege are also the essence of male supremacy and describe the social position of men and women.
Chauvinism:
Chauvinism declares that one nation, state or people are superior to everyone else, ordained by God, biological necessity, heredity, skin color or chance to rule and control the wealth of society and earth and dominate peoples brought into the economic order of the colonizer. Chauvinism does away with class outlook and class interest, and instead substitutes the bourgeois imperialist outlook as a worldview. Chauvinism masquerades as patriotism and is used by the bourgeoisie to stir up pro-war feelings.
Chauvinism, national chauvinism, has been the national idea of loyalty to one’s “own” bourgeoisie — and bourgeois “patriotism.” Chauvinist ideology justifies oppression and exploitation by one nation. American exceptionalism is the ideological foundation of US national chauvinism and white chauvinism. In the US white nationalism is white chauvinism.
There are two primary deviations within Marxism on the national question. They are national chauvinism and cultural-national autonomy (reactionary cultural nationalism). Both of these deviations disarm the proletariat and serve the interests of the imperialists in enabling them to maintain their dying system of exploitation and plunder.
National Chauvinism, white chauvinism
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National chauvinism is linked to imperialism and as such maintains the domination of one nation over another. When modern USNA imperialism arose in the late 1800’s, the only place they could expand was to the backward and “colored” areas of the world. The emergence of the Negro Nation, the enslavement of the “colored” Central and South America, the conquest of the Philippines, all added to the concepts that were left over by the history of slavery…“modern imperialism enslaved whole nations – hence, white supremacy turned into white chauvinism inasmuch as the enslaved nations were colored and the U.S. ruling class is white.”
The specific role of white supremacy in USNA history makes it inevitable that the most aggressive and brutal specific form of national chauvinism is white chauvinism. But by no means be deceived that Anglo-American national chauvinism is never directed toward whites. Any European will tell you otherwise. This even rubs off on Negro National Minorities who will sometimes tend to discriminate against blacks of other nations. This is also true of the Mexican National Minority who have lived in the Anglo-American nation; at times they will tend to discriminate against recent immigrants from Mexico, referring to them as “wetbacks” or “T.J.’s”, for example. It should be clear then that white supremacy that justified slavery was supplanted by national chauvinism. So that the new ideology of aggressive USNA imperialism had to assure certain forms of its forerunner–white supremacy. But it would be politically dangerous for us not to see the difference. White chauvinism is a leading and specific form of chauvinism. White chauvinism is the excuse for the brutal exploitation of the “colored” masses of the world and is the principle ideology of aggressive USNA fascism. However, white chauvinism is not the only form that great nation chauvinism takes against the Mexican National Minority.
Great nation chauvinism also takes the form of language and religious discrimination. This can be clearly seen by the forcible restriction of the Spanish language and Mexican culture in schools or in public life. In the courts, no provision is made for Spanish-speaking people and often people are tried, convicted, and sent to jail without knowing what happened. In the factories and in the fields many people are swindled out of their meager wages or are cheated out of benefits because they don’t speak English. Along with this the imperialists propagandize the lie that Mexicans are lazy, irresponsible and incapable of learning, so that they can force the Mexican National Minority workers into the lowest, hardest, filthiest jobs and pay them less than the Anglo-American workers.
Thus chauvinism is a concept that does away with class outlooks and seeks to divide the working class, giving privileges to some and brutalizing others, thus dividing the workers along national lines.
White chauvinism has become a material force–a powerful weapon in the hands of the ruling class to divide the working class, bribe the Anglo-American workers into accepting, if not supporting, aggressive imperialism…we must deepen our understanding that the necessary material base of white chauvinism is imperialism and white chauvinism will not be completely wiped out until imperialism is defeated.[2] (People’s Tribune, Vol. 3, No. 6, pg. 10.)
To hasten the downfall of imperialism we must wage a relentless struggle to unite the international proletariat. We must not allow ourselves to fall for the imperialist bait. We must take up the struggle to eliminate national privilege of all kinds, reject the fascist-imperialist ideology of white chauvinism, and demand a national program of equal rights for the Mexican National Minority and Regional Autonomy for the Southwest!
(Regional Autonomy for the Southwest, Communist League.) https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/cl-southwest/index.htm
Color line, color factor:
The color line, color factor in US history is a component of a global structure that is the privileged social position of white people, built into the architecture of global capitalist productive relations. This privilege position is the result of the colonial form of history. Color segregation and the roots of the color line go back to the African slave trade, New World conquest and plantation slavery in the western hemisphere. The color line is architecture. In the US, the privileged social position of white people first arose and developed based on Native American genocide, black chattel slavery, conquest of Mexico and then legal segregation. Racism is the ideological rationale for the color architecture.
During the rise of financial imperialism and the partitioning of Africa by the European colonial powers, the color line and color factor were institutionalized, that is built into the architecture of social life through legal, illegal and extra-legal methods of rule. In the USA/N (United States of North America), the privileged social position of white people was developed on the foundation of Native American genocide, conquest of Mexico’s territory and the subsequent development of the Mexican national-minority; black chattel slavery, and the formation of the Negro people within the framework of chattel slavery and the subsequent imposition of Jim Crow, an exceptionally violent system of segregation.
Frederick Douglass coined “The Color Line” in an 1881 article, and the phrase gained popularity after W. E. B. DuBois’ use of it in his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk. DuBois wrote that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”
Imperialism:
Imperialism first appeared in English speaking dictionaries during the 1800s and referred to financial colonialism, capitalist imperialism, rather than feudal colonialism or Roman “imperialism.” Within Marxism imperialism generally refers to a specific era of history, rather than the entire history of human colonization. Imperialism, that is to say “modern imperialism” begins after the American Civil War. Imperialism is the colonial form of society during the last stage transition from agriculture to industry, when the monopoly stage of capitalism dominates the bourgeois property relations and throughout the industrial revolution of the 20th century.
Imperialism as the monopoly stage of capitalism passed through its stages of development between 1890s and roughly 1990. This period completed the destruction of feudalism, collapse of the European direct colonial system and the rise of the neo-colonial regimes. In the 1980s a new non-banking financial architecture based in the digital revolution, became politically dominant. A new form of finance capital, speculative-finance, displaced the financial-industrial imperialism of the era of Lenin and birthed speculative finance, globalization and the era of Empire.
Nation:
“A nation is primarily a community, a definite community of people. This community is not racial, nor is it tribal. . . . a nation is not a racial or tribal, but a historically constituted community of people. . . . a nation is not a casual or ephemeral conglomeration, but a stable community of people . . . . Thus, a common language is one of the characteristic features of a nation. . . . A nation is formed only as a result of lengthy and systematic intercourse, as a result of people living together generation after generation. . . . Thus, a common territory is one of the characteristic features of a nation. . . . a common economic life, economic cohesion, is one of the characteristic features of a nation. [A] common psychological make-up, which manifests itself in a common culture, is one of the characteristic features of a nation.
“A nation is a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.
“It goes without saying that a nation, like every historical phenomenon, is subject to the law of change, has its history, its beginning and end.”
(J. V. Stalin, Marxism and the National Question, 1913.) http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1913/03a.htm#s1
A nation is a specific social-economic organization of people and classes that came into existence during the epoch of the industrial revolution. The “nations” of antiquity were more often than not city-states and not modern nations in the Marxist meaning. Modern nations, born of the epoch of industrialism, were constituted on the basis of capitalist production relations, during the transition from feudalism to capitalism, from agriculture to industry.
(Quote)
“Throughout the world, the period of the final victory of capitalism over feudalism has been linked up with national movements. For the complete victory of commodity production, the bourgeoisie must capture the home market, and there must be politically united territories whose population speak a single language, with all obstacles to the development of that language and to its consolidation in literature eliminated. Therein is the economic foundation of national movements. Language is the most important means of human intercourse. Unity and unimpeded development of language are the most important conditions for genuinely free and extensive commerce on a scale commensurate with modern capitalism, for a free and broad grouping of the population in all its various classes and, lastly, for the establishment of a close connection between the market and each and every proprietor, big or little, and between seller and buyer.
“Therefore, the tendency of every national movement is towards the formation of national states, under which these requirements of modern capitalism are best satisfied. The most profound economic factors drive towards this goal, and, therefore, for the whole of Western Europe, nay, for the entire civilized world, the national state is typical and normal for the capitalist period.”
(Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination; ital in the original
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/self-det/ch01.htm
A nation and a state are different organizations of human activity. A nation is relatively modern and belongs to the era of rising capitalism. States, or more accurately “the state” is much older with roots in the Temple-cities. The state arises after the emergence of private property and the division of society into classes. The state is an organization of violence in the hands of the ruling class and consists of the army, armed bands of men, penal institutions and the administration of society backed by force. The role of the state is to maintain the property relations and rule of the dominant class.
The nation is an economic formation born of the epoch of bourgeois private property, the industrial revolution and the rise of a national market. The national market is “national” because it ties a community of people together into new social relations of production.
The country folks come to desire and need the commodities produced in the cities, and later in the factory system. Clothes and implements of labor become cheaper to buy than making these things at home in the domestic system. The economic links between cities and the countryside, that is the exchange of products of labor and circulation of money, creates the foundation for the community of people to be transformed into a modern nation. The modern nation was born of capital.
The money economy, credit, insurance, financial instruments and swindles of all kinds made it possible for millions to take part in the buying and selling of commodities, including labor power.
Under the regime of capital two tendencies regarding nations exist: formation and dispersal of nations. Under the worldwide robotic economy and globalization, nations and national markets that arose on the basis of the industrial revolution decay in the face of increasing movement of capital and people.
The 21st century regime of speculative-finance writes the political agenda for world capital and has created the foundation and technical infrastructure for the transnational state and worldwide corporate government based on the mega-corporations. The old multinational state system of the last stage of colonialism has been transformed in front of us, in real time. In addition, the uprooted destitute proletariat worldwide desperately seeks the means of life and is dislocated both within the boundaries of the home country and across borders.
Nationalism:
Nationalism is a bourgeois ideology that does away with class outlook and substitutes notions of collective identity based on ethnicity, religion, color, nation, or political frontiers. Nationalism arose – “national identity – developed with capitalism, sublating “state identity.” The ideology of nationalism arose as an expression of the rising capitalist class’ quest to create and secure a home market. The home market is the framework and material foundation for the nation, the national idea and nationalism. The ideological campaign to indoctrinate the people with nationalism began with the development of the home market. The home market is the economic links, production relations between town and country and various classes tied together in reproduction of a new way of life based on the industrial revolution.
With the division of the world into imperial-colonial spheres, a national yearning for emancipation from imperialist colonization was born in the colonies and among the oppressed peoples. The yearning for emancipation from imperial slaughter and plunder is not nationalism. Hatred of oppression and exploitation is not nationalism. Nationalist ideology was an inescapable component of the anti-colonial revolutions. The nationalism of the colonized, who fought the imperial invaders to the death, was an ideology with limited political and economic goals. One sector of the anti-colonial revolution was anti-communism. Their goals did not include overthrow of private property relations as a social force, worldwide. Nationalist ideology, no matter how refined and noble, is not sufficient to emancipate the USA contingent of the world proletariat. This includes the USA’s black and brown proletariat.
In the US bourgeois nationalist ideology (including black and brown bourgeois nationalism) presents the oppression and exploitation of black and brown masses as “racism” rather than the color line as the form of imposing the colonial status on the non-white peoples of the earth. The color line remains an instrument of imperialist enslavement and since Frederick Douglas has been acknowledged as the color line and/or color factor in history. It is the petty bourgeois black and brown nationalist that glory in racism, crying crocodile tears over our historic debasement.
National Liberation:
National liberation refers to the movement for emancipation from colonial bondage. The American Revolution of 1774-1783 was an agrarian bourgeois democratic revolution, fought out as a revolutionary war for national independence– liberation. The thirteen colonies freed themselves from colonial imperialist England, established the separation of the church from the state, confiscated royal lands, began abolition of slavery in the Northern states, nationalized land in the West in 1787 and nationalized the post office and army, while they preserved bourgeois private property as the organizing principle for production and distribution.
The American Revolution inaugurated the national liberation movement, which ran its course over the next 200 years. It peaked during the post-World War II period of decolonization and closed out with the victory of the Vietnamese revolution and the 1976 Vietnam reunification.
(Quote)
The history of modern, civilized America opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains. That was the war the American people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in colonial slavery, in the same way as these “civilized” bloodsuckers are still oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in India, Egypt, and all parts of the world.”
(V. I. Lenin, Letter To American Workers, 1918.) https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/aug/20.htm
Revolutionaries point to the American Revolution in the 18th Century as one of the first successful national liberation movements. In fact, the Declaration written by Ho Chi Minh for the independence of Vietnam in 1945 begins with lines from the Declaration of Independence which launched the American Revolution.
(See, National question and national-colonial question.)
National-Minority, Nationals, Minority:
National-Minority, Nationals and Minority refer to the political status of peoples within the colonial system during the industrial epoch. These terms developed during the rise of the industrial revolution.
When a person from a colony migrated to the mother country that is/was “their” colonizer, they are referred to as being a national minority. National-minority means one who has migrated to their imperial nation. A person from Ireland who moved to England would there be a national minority, but if they moved to the US, they would be an Irish minority.
Imperialism knows two tendencies concerning the national question, the consolidation of nations and their dispersal. Imperialism creates nations in the process of imposing capitalism on the subject and non-sovereign peoples. In search for a better life away from the poverty and discrimination of the colony, people flee to the richer “mother country.”
The ideological excuse for the original conquest and continued oppression of a nation is great nation chauvinism – the ideology of the superiority of the oppressor nation. Chauvinist ideology brands the oppressed nationalities as inferior and hence unequal. This inferiority is translated into social inequality in the form of the denial of civil rights and second class citizenship. Hence, a national minority develops in every imperialist country, which cannot be integrated into the imperial center as long as the colonial relations exist.
Be they of the same or of a different color or religious outlook, the Algerian in France, the Irish in England, the Negro/Afro/American in Anglo-America and the Mexican national in the US Southwest are cast as national minorities.
When the same national minority migrated to a country that was NOT their imperial master, and enslaver, they were a minority. National-minority and minority means colonial peoples. Thus, the Afro-American in France was not segregated to the degree of the Algerian because Algeria was a colony of France.
National refers to individuals from colonizing states and/or the settler’s states of the industrial epoch. The Brits are neither minorities or national minority, because they were not colonized on the basis of the industrial revolution and rise of imperialism. In fact, the British Empire shaped much of the world today until the US emerged as world Emperor. A national is a person from an imperial center and/or unconquered nation/state. These terms, National-Minority, minorities, and nationals, developed during the rise and completion of the industrial revolution.
In the 21st century, the political categories born of the colonial form of development and the industrial revolution history no longer accurately express relationships within the global market and robotic economy. Colonialism still exists, although it no longer determines world events. Chauvinism of every conceivable brand is alive and well. If the US multinational state survives as a bourgeois state, we are going to face new categories of enslavement, exploitation and oppression.
People:
From the standpoint of the colonial shape of history, the Marxist concept of a people is a historically evolved stable community of human beings, whose economic development, cultural traits and connection to the land, are such to allow them to distinguish themselves from other historically evolved clusters of people. Rather than a concept of human beings, which Marxists refer to as “species-being,” people’s are distinct groups of human beings formed during a specific stage of development of the material power of productive forces. By the time of Sumerian society, people’s had come into existence based on the social division of labor and exchange between different tribes.
Different terms describe people: national group, advanced national group, tribe, band and ethnic group.
In the US there remain indigenous peoples, whose isolation and historic connection to the land define them as bands of the same people. The indigenous peoples exercised dominion over the land, which could not and did not assume the form of private property, prior to new world slavery, new world conquest and the bourgeois colonial form of enslavement. Although the settler’s state is very old and served as an engine of social revolution and colonialism, the 21st century destitute world proletariat faces the settlers’ states, after 200 years of evolution and its transformation in multinational state systems. These multinational state systems are increasingly part of a new transnational state founded on financial swindle, mega-corporations and the bourgeois private property principle.
Privilege:
Privilege means a higher economic, social and political status before the state and in all matters of civic society, given to the conquering peoples as compared with the more violent treatment of those conquered by the imperial peoples. The architecture of privilege is fused into all social relations built up on the basis of imperialism and exists as a system of bribery. Privilege is the social position of the conquering peoples carved into the architecture of every aspect of social life. Privilege is material, carried out as the practice of national and white-chauvinism; white supremacy and various forms of imperial egoism and domination are justified by the bourgeois ideology of racism and white-racism.
Race, racism and white racism: ideologies of conquest.
The concept of race is bogus. Race and racism are beliefs, conquerors ideology that states humanity consists of groups at different evolutionary stages of development and that the ruling group and conquering peoples are a superior species of human. Race doctrine states that physical, cultural, religious and ethical differences between people are proof of inferior and superior people and the conquerors are ordained by God and destiny to rule over the people of the world. The ideology of racism justifies exploitation and class-based inequality in society.
There is only one race, the human race. Period. There can be no compromise on this fact. Racism exists in the realm of ideology and can be created based on any feature of a group that distinguishes it from another group. Race and racism are ideologies that justify political supremacy. Supremacy is a form of class rule and social power that gives the ruling class and ruling people the power to deploy labor, resources and wealth for conquest and rule over the less technologically developed peoples.
White racist ideology holds that white people are genetically superior to non-white people and have an inalienable right to rule over the majority. White racist ideology is bourgeois justification for white supremacy. White supremacy is a material force, experienced as imperial enslavement and colonial subjugation. In history white supremacy is the color line. The color line is built into the social architecture of world society as a form of segregation and control of colonial people. This very real material social relation is justified in the ideological realm by white racism.
Supremacy:
Supremacy is a social power. It is the power to deploy labor, resources, wealth and military means in daily life. Supremacy is the ruling class and dominating peoples power to ensure their rule and maintenance of society in their image. The oldest form of supremacy is male supremacy. White supremacy is relatively new in comparison.
Doctrines of supremacy contend that
a. rulership on earth is the inherent right of men as males,
b. superior peoples,
c. and the existence of a ruling class and dominant people is proof of a natural order of social life.
All systems of supremacy develop ideologies of superior and inferior peoples based on God, biological necessity, heredity, skin color, class or caste to justify domination, imperial conquest and bloody rule by one people over another.
[2.0 May 4, 2020, May 5, 2020 edit, May 7, 2020, May 14, 2020, May 31, 2020 – title changed; June 24, 2020, June 28, 2020; 12.21 San Jose; June 29. July 2, 2020 8:55 am, September 25, 2020, 9:37 am, September 29, 2020, 12:50 pm, July 7, 2021]
