As Lenin says, this is why capital needs this foreign market. It is nothing to do with the impossibility of realisation. The reason is that capital is driven to produce on an ever larger scale, and that, also requires ever larger markets. But, the whole point about these ever larger markets is that every market implies exchange, so that when country A exports to country B, country B exports to country A. The capitalist development of A leads necessarily to a capitalist development of B, which is, thereby, enabled to produce on a larger capitalistic basis, and to exchange its output with A. In the process, it raises its level of social development. As Marx puts it in The Communist Manifesto,
“Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages...
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”
This, of course, is the opposite conclusion to the “anti-imperialists” who only see in this process “the development of underdevelopment”. Almost the same argument was put by Sismondi, at the start of the 19th century, when America's economy was still colonial in nature. Lenin quotes his comment,
““The Americans are following the new principle: to produce without calculating the market (produire sans calculer le marché), and to produce as much as possible,” and here is “the characteristic feature of United States’ trade, from one end of the country to the other—an excess of goods of every kind over what is needed for consumption . . . constant bankruptcies are the result of this excess of commercial capital which cannot be exchanged for revenue” (I, 455-56). Good Sismondi! What would he say about present-day America—about the America that has developed so enormously, thanks to the very “home market” which, according to the romanticists’ theory, should have “shrunk”!” (p 166)
And, in fact, as Lenin says, it is precisely this feature of capital, to produce to the utmost limit, and to continually develop the forces of production to do so, to knock down all borders, and to spread capitalist production across the globe that gives it its progressive nature.
“Under all the old economic systems production was every time resumed in the same form and on the same scale as previously; under the capitalist system, however, this resumption in the same form becomes impossible, and unlimited expansion, perpetual progress, becomes the law of production.” (p 164)
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