And now we come to imperialism.
Rhodes vs. You Know Who
Let's start with something obvious:
The world is nearly all parceled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered and colonized. To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far. - Cecil Rhodes: Last Will and TestamentNow who the fuck does that sound like?...
In the 1890s, Cecil Rhodes was co-founder and chairman of DeBeers Consolidated Mines. He had a literal world monopoly of diamonds: controlling 80 to 85% of the world's diamond mines and could name any price in any country. Any purchaser who wanted even the smallest diamond would have to buy what he dictated.
He was also, wait for it, the Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, one of Britain's four colonies that comprised what we now call South Africa. In order to stymie native black Africans from having a political voice in the Cape Colony he increased the from their land being worth 25 pounds sterling in order to vote to 75 pounds, and then he set limits on the amount of land black Africans could own. His view was that "Black people need to be driven off their land to stimulate them to labour. It must be brought home to them that in future nine-tenths of them will have to spend their lives in manual labour, and the sooner that is brought home to them the better." Ten years after his death, the now united South Africa implemeted a plan for which he was one of the chief architects: which allowed black Africans to only own land on 10 percent of the country's land while whites were entitled to the other 90 percent. It prohibited interracial marriage, created white-only spaces, and segregated bathrooms, fountains, parks and beaches. While the Apartheid era technically begins in 1948, many of its rules were already in place by 1913.
From the beginning, modern imperialism has been so bound up with corporate partnership with governments that the border between state and business is often obliterated--one could almost call it corporate control of governments. Money can only be accumulated so much so long as the government regulates it, and the only option to stop government for regulating business is for business to regulate government. That's how we get lobbies, that's how we get unlimited campaign contributions and Super PACs, and most importantly, that's how we get the constantly revolving door between lobbyist and public servant--there is no better advocacy for a business than a public servant who has an extremely vested interest in increasing its income. That's how we get public funding being cut for foreign aid and social programs while simultaneously funding the world's richest man, some reports say his net worth could be close to 40 or 50% government funded.
The same sick narcissism, and it is an illness, that makes people want to accumulate unlimited power makes people want to accumulate unlimited wealth, and so long as two archetypal narcissists beset by twin addictions can stay in the same room with each other, it's inevitable that they will try as hard as they can to become allies and friends, even though both of them are incapable of either. I can't do better than these two Arendt quotes:
1: "Money could finally beget money because power, with complete disregard for all laws--economic as well as ethical--could appropriate wealth. Only when exported money succeeded in stimulating the export of power could it accomplish its owners' designs. Only the unlimited accumulation of power could bring about the unlimited accumulation of capital."'
2: At the close of the century the owning classes had become so dominant that it was almost ridiculous for a state employee to keep up the pretense of serving the nation."
So two questions now:
1. Who is the more powerful partner in an imperium? Is it countries or corporations?
2. How, if at all, can you tell the power of one from the power of the other?
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Rhodes vs. You Know Who Part 2
Alright, let's say his name... When dealing with the comparisons of Cecil Rhodes and Elon Musk, we m may be seeing the evolution of imperialism through the span of 125 years. Modern imperialism began long before Rhodes, but Rhodes the embodiment of its historical zenith. Everything that imperialism was, everything imperialism stood for, was Cecil Rhodes.
Whatever stand one takes about how much 20th century America resembled the imperialism of 19th century Europe, it would seem that America is heading into a very different form of imperialism during the 21st; and for the moment you can, if you like, interpret Elon Musk's presence on the world stage as figure who acquaints the United States with much older notions of how the world should be run, and much as the older imperialists did, he brings us to this very old way of running the world by conquest by claiming that he is bringing the world very new things.
However ambitious Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency seems, it could easily be much more ambitious. Musk and Trump do not want to remove the incompetent or superfluous from government, they want to remove all conscientious public servants so that their actions have no accountability. Once they're removed, their kleptocracy operates without interference, and it's only a matter of months before the kleptocracy turns its attentions abroad.
I'm not good at predictions, but if the US fulfills Trump's threats to invade Canada and Greenland, I will eat my shoe. The US carries 26% of the world's gross domestic product, that may be half of what it used to be, but it's concentrated in the hands of 756 billionaires and roughly 20,000 corporations. If the United States government wants to dictate policy to a weaker country, it is so much easier to do it through economic leverage than go to the expense and frustration of an invasion. A country like Russia can only get its way through territorial expansion because, having only 3.53% of the world's gross domestic product, Russia does not have the economic power to dictate terms to anyone by business (and much more, of course, on Russian imperialism in a later class...). If America decides to territorially expand, it would only be if an American President was so in the pocket of his Russian counterpart that he would expand American territory as a means to normalize Russia's behavior...
21st century imperialism has little need of territorial acquisition. All it requires is to make submissive countries economically dependent on the companies of a dominating world power. So long as the companies are in control its own government's policies, that is empire in all but name. One could make a reasonably good argument that America was already that sort of neo-imperial power in the 20th century, but the controls on other countries are likely to seem very loose in comparison to the direction America seems to be taking under Trump.
Elon Musk began his life in South Africa, Cecil Rhodes ended it there, and Musk was raised in the conditions and worldview Cecil Rhodes provided: white nationalism, hostility to protests, hostility to labor unions, economic deregulation and most importantly, authoritarian control over the country's majority maintained by economic dependence of the poor on the rich--which also 'happens' to divide on racial, and given a figleaf of legitimacy by defending it as the results of 'free private enterprise.'
Cecil Rhodes imported the archetypal form of imperialism to South Africa, and Elon Musk seems to be the historical figure to export it.
So two questions:
1. From whatever you konw about imperialism, how was were foreign policies of 20th century America similar to 19th century European imperialism?
2. The opposite: How was 20th century America different from 19th century European imperialism?
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Shortly into the section on imperialism, Arendt makes a point that I somewhat disagree with, and that will lead us into a broader discussion of imperialism. She notes that imperialism was the first time that 'expansion became an end in itself and not a temporary means.' That can't possibly be true, can it?
First of all, what kind of imperialism? We take imperialism to mean 19th century Europe, but does it really begin there? Isn't every military conquest some form of imperium? Isn't the plunder of tribute states the oldest dirty trick in politics? And looking at so many of the world's largest empires: Romans, Mongols, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, the Caliphates: what really was the difference between them and the Brits and French? Constant need for expansion? Check. Plundering conquered territories of their wealth and resources? Check. Exploitation of foreign workers? Check. Creating an empire that subsists on mass trade? Check. Indoctrinating the occupied countries into the culture of their rulers? Check and a half.
And that leads to the ultimate question about imperialism.
Is it possible to have a world without imperialism?
Over the last four-hundred years, parts of the world have been neatly divided into nations a number of times, borders usually determined by language, and it's usually resulted in a larger power subsuming the smaller countries into subservience. That obviously gets us to inter-European imperialism, which we'll discuss in a later class, but it can't be denied that there are ways in which imperialism has brought benefits: not equal to its horrors, but realistically speaking, the way the world evolves is a process not all that dissimilar from imperialism: a country with superior technology conquers another country, brings their developments into the new place, the new place struggles with a divided sense of identity these new technologies bring, and sometimes, the conquered country synthesizes these disparate conceptions of the world to create a new identities and new technologies, and they become the conqueror instead of the conquered. No one in 1648 would have predicted that Germany would become a functional state, let alone either a totalitarian imperium or the world's most reliable liberal democracy. Similarly, no one in 200 AD would imagine that Italy would spend the next 2000 years as the sick man of Western Europe.
(keep going for a while)
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Theft vs. Collapse
Another point Arendt makes is that imperialism delayed the inevitable collapse of Europe, and the governments of Europe knew perfectly well a collapse was coming even if the people did not. Britain and Germany, the two dominant industrial powers, came very close to war a number of times before World War I, political assassination was a colossal risk that every head of state simply had to accept, economic depressions equal to the Great Depression were a guaranteed event for one year out of every twenty, and organized labor caused mass civil unrest regularly. Perhaps what's more extraordinary than World War I was that a similarly deadly event hadn't happened already. The revolutions of 1848 almost made the governments of Europe go up in smoke at the same time, and after that, the upper classes feared a moment that would bring Europe to collapse for decades, until seventy years later, when it was the upper classes who facilitated European collapse by instigating World War I.
What delayed the collapse for so long was imperialism: the relatively easy theft of goods and raw materials from parts of the world that often didn't know their own resources and couldn't defend themselves from countries with superior weaponry. Europe experienced no major wars between 1871 and 1914. They came close: countries always do, and there were plenty of conflicts in imperial colonies, but why go to war with an equally powerful country over resources when resources flowed in so easily from elsewhere?
So two questions:
1. Would you support impoverishing another country to prevent the collapse of your own?
2. Would you support your country taking resources from a country that would have no idea how to extract them without your country's presence?
Arendt points to another problem: capitalism requires expansion, and by the 1880s, it was only through imperialism that capital would expand into new markets. Imperialism was not only a way to import goods, it was a way to export them. It was a means to create new markets by Westernizing the culture of native colonists, making them dependent on products of which they had no idea until the West controlled their countries. It would take too long to list all the products and where they were manufactured, but this was the period when global trade became a phenomenon on a truly mass scale. Everyone produced, and everyone consumed.
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