And so 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. Only so much money can be accumulated 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 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, by bringing the newest technologies, he brings us to the very old way of running the world: by conquest.
However ambitious Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency seems, it could 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 the Trump administration's actions have no accountability. Once they're removed, any kleptocracy would operate without interference, and it's only a matter of months before a kleptocracy would turn its attentions abroad.
I'm no 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, a figure that is half of what it was post World War II, 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 and political manipulation 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, it is an 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 20th century 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 lines, and given a fig leaf 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 know about imperialism, how were the 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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Theft vs. Murder
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. The only differences are the active presence of mass murder and slavery markets, but the Belgians clearly committed both mass murder and slavery on the most gargantuan scale, and one can argue that the British committed colossal acts of genocide by subtler means.
And that leads to the ultimate question about imperialism.
Is it possible to have a world without imperialism?
I submit that we haven't had one yet.
To talk about imperialism in 2025 is an extremely loaded issue, and unfortunately we'll have to dive in over and over again in these classes. Just have a fair warning: you may be uncomfortable with the conclusions these talks draw. Here's just the beginning of our talks on it:
What this teacher can't doubt is that the best results of imperialism are no better than the best results of when the territories in question are under the best of their rulers. People who talk about the horrific Indian famines under the British neglect to mention one thing: the famines were no better under the reign of the Mughals, and if anything a bit less frequent under the Britih. Both imperiums hogged their resources while their subjects starved, but only one of them claimed they would do better than that for their subjects.
What most rankles this teacher most about 19th century imperialism is the foul hypocrisy of it. The British and French claimed that their true mission was to civilize their subjects, and all the while committed acts of theft on the grandest possible scale. Even if other parts of the world did not know how to mine their resources properly, the resources belonged to them, and perhaps it would been better just to leave these countries to their native pre-industrial mortality rates.
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 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 new identities and new technologies, and these peoples become the conqueror instead of the conquered. No one in 1648 would have predicted that Germany would eventually become a functional nation 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 majority of the next 2000 years as the sick man of Western Europe.
But even within Western imperialism, there are differences. On the one hand, there are the British and French who established some education, rule of law, medicine and infrastructure, on the other, there is the Belgian imperium in the Congo which established a country-wide rubber mine as the sole property of its king, enslaved the entire population, and killed somewhere between 2 and 10 million people--in a country of 20 million. So many who were spared death suffered all manner of other horror: not just slavery but all the crimes which come with slavery; labor well past exhaustion, unlawful imprisonment, mutilation, rape, and constant beatings. Less known about is the German imperium, which, while not nearly as lethal as Belgium, used chemical weapons during a war on its subjects, an obvious pre-echo of both World War I and the Holocaust.
But there are great debates about the number of deaths for which the British Empire is responsible. Some hold that the death toll in India alone is no less than 100 million people, and this is just over the forty years between 1880 and 1920. I've seen a figure that goes up to 165 million. These figures could not be disputed more highly by many historians, and even if true, this is clearly not the number of intentionally murdered, which I can't imagine percentage wise would ever approach the number in Belgian Congo, but rather, the alleged number of people who died prematurely. This figure is deeply problematic because it's nearly impossible to define premature death in rural, pre-industrial societies. Famine was at least as common before the British arrived and the populace could be killed at any point by the arbitrary spread of disease--diseases which the British were guaranteed to respond to better than the former Mughal rulers. But so far as can be measured, in spite of better medicine, life expectancy under British rule seems to have gone down, while extreme poverty increased, perhaps vastly, but even these statistics are disputable. The further forward in history you go, the more reliable the records get, so there may well have been more premature deaths and impoverishment before British rule than we can possibly know.
However, what can't be disputed is that Britain siphoned out literal trillions of pounds from India's holdings. No records are kept more reliably than in finance, so in almost two centuries of the British colonial presence and rule, beginning with the acquisition of Indian territory by British East India company in 1757 and ending with the British Empire leaving India in 1947: the British Empire seems to have extracted a contemporary currency value of 45 trillion modern dollars. Surely this must be the most spectacular act of theft in world history.
But this is only one country in the British Empire. When the figure combines with their other holdings, the extent of the theft would beggar belief still much more.
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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. The circumstantial evidence bears this out: 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 al the governments of Europe go up in smoke simultaneously, 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. More on those historical parallels to our condition another day.
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 wars in imperial colonies (insofar as they can be called wars when the power between two sides is so imbalanced); but why go to war with an equally powerful country over resources when resources flowed in so easily from elsewhere?
So here are two volatile 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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A Digression for a Double Duality:
Elites vs. Bourgeois
Mass vs. Mob
"In Marxist terms the new phenomenon of an alliance between mob and capital seemed so unnatural, so obviously in conflict with the doctrine of class struggle, that the actual dangers of the imperialist attempt--to divide mankind into master races and slave races, into higher and lower breeds, into colored peoples and white men, all of which were attempts to unify people on the basis of the mob--were completely overlooked."
So at some point, we have to talk about two important distinctions in Arendt: the difference between the 'elite' and the 'bourgeois', and the difference between she terms 'the masses' and what she terms 'the mob.'
Here's a lightning quick social history: in Arendt's terminology, the 'elite' is basically a term for the descendants of the aristocracy, whose power was obviously depleted in the French Revolution; not just in France but all around Europe. People let it be known in 1789 and again in 1848 that they would not stand for the abuses of monarchy and demanded new leadership. By the time of World War I, only Russia remained an absolute monarchy. Every other major European monarchy was constitutional, and while the social status and relative power of the aristocracy remained 'elite', they were no longer the true rulers of countries.
The true rulers were the 'bourgeoisie': the gentry, the millionaires, the industrialists, the bankers, the commodity traders, the lawyers. And as a 'class' that included, of course, their families. In a previous age, the aristocracy ruled by status: your status in society was fixed, you were born a noble or a peasant, and that's how you died; but the bourgeoisie ruled by social mobility. If you rose to wealth, the wealth bought you influence, and you became an important mover of society. This social structure obviously leant itself well to imperial practices.
So does the modern world have 'elites' or a fixed class system? Certainly not by the standards of any century before the 20th, but we've become so far removed from the old aristocracy that maybe we need entirely new definitions of social class.
So by Arendt's definition, whom would you say are our elites? Who are our bourgeoisie?
This problem is nebulous enough that I'll do something hopefully rare and answer my own question, to which I'm not sure there's an answer.
It's often said America's founding Anglo-Saxon Protestants comprise our 'elite' aristocracy, but compared to the elite privileges of Europe's aristocracy, it's miniscule. That's not a good answer. On the other hand, we all can't help noticing, the top 1% of the US owns 30% of our wealth: about $43 trillion, while when you combine the wealth of America's 801 billionaires, they hold nearly twice as much wealth as the bottom 50% of American society.
The further forward we go in recent history, the more wealth seems to concentrate at the top and the harder social mobility becomes. The holdings of the ultra-rich may or may not constitute a new aristocracy, or 'elite', perhaps time will tell if the descendants of today's mega-billionaires retain all their money and power through the generations, but in the meantime, the corporate leaders of this country surely have as much proportion of the wealth in our day as minor feudal lords had in theirs. Even if their power is not inherited, perhaps they can be considered a 'temporary aristocracy,' and that surely makes them 'elite'.' Meanwhile, perhaps the top 1% of the population constitutes a new 'bourgeois' class, and as working and middle class wages stagnate from decade to decade, the American bourgeois gradually becomes no more inclusive a class than existed in 19th century Western Europe.
On the other hand, it's obviously not the merely rich that the mega-rich mean to depose.
If this trend continued for another hundred years, which is hardly to say that it will, how hard is it believe the US would have something resembling an absolute monarch with a titled elite aristocracy?
So Arendt's term, the 'masses', is pretty self-explanatory. It's everybody who isn't an elite and isn't part of the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, the 'mob' is more complicated. The best thing I can do to describe it is to revive Hillary Clinton's old term, the 'basket of deplorables.'
Now, perhaps in a while, there will be all sorts who end up 'deplorables' of the Left, committing heinous acts like storming the Capitol in a January 6th like situation to overturn an election proven without reasonable doubt to go against them, but thus far, and there's no avoiding saying this or sugarcoating it: for all the misgivings one might have about current left ideology, and this teacher has plenty, anybody who sees greater or even equivalent authoritarianism on the left as the right is kidding themselves to a sinister extent. The right wing of American discourse, and not the soft-right, controls all three branches of government, almost always votes as a monolithic bloc, and the Supreme Court recently ruled that all Presidential acts have legality. The Supreme Court's composition was countermanded by a Senate majority that refused for a whole year to abide by the laws of the Constitution and allow a new justice to be appointed by a Democratic President. When it came time for the 2016 election, Congress refused to investigate evidence of interference from a foreign power, and their candidate won - likely as a result of the interference, which of course enables a far greater majority on the Supreme Court and seems to now enable far more radically conservative policy. Meanwhile, the results of the 2020 Presidential election favoring a Democratic candidate were widely denied by Republicans because a ruling on who won the election took several extra days: the biggest reason for that? President Trump deliberately stymied the Postal Service in an attempt to divert mail-in votes. There is no avoiding calling this fact for what it is, regardless of who is offended: American right has become the authoritarianism they claim they save us from.
But is the authoritarian wing of the Republican party really half of Trump voters as Secretary Clinton implied in a deeply tactless moment? I don't know, but what I do know is that the notion that Trump voters are the American poor is easily disproven. A 2016 poll showed that the average median income of a Trump voter's family was $72,000. Meanwhile, the same article from 538.com showed that the average Clinton voter had a household income of $61,000--Sanders voters by the way had the exact same average income. This is born out by other statistics: the Pew Research Center says that 58% of lower income families vote Democrat.
$72,000 is not quite as much as it might seem: many of these households have two-incomes. Nevertheless, it does show that from the beginning, Trump had much more support from higher income brackets than people generally suppose, and Clinton had much less. A more likely explanation than that the average Trump voter is poor is that the average Trump voter is afraid of losing income.
Here's where I draw the line about who's a 'deplorable,' and I'll tell you why in a moment. My drawing line between a deplorable and a non-deplorable is whether or not a Trump voter supported the insurrection on January 6th.
As far as attempted coup d'etats go, January 6th was relatively mild by the standards of your average attempted coup d'etat; but the intention was there for all to see with their eyes, and one's feelings on January 6th is the ultimate test of whether a Republican has crossed the line into authoritarianism.
So as rageful as one might be at them, we all should be deeply uncomfortable calling half of Trump voters a 'basket of deplorables.', but not as uncomfortable as we hope to be. In 2021, 50% of Republicans strongly disapproved of January 6th, and 28% somewhat disapproved, but one must angrily note that this disapproval waned over time. By 2024, only 30% strongly disapproved and 40% somewhat disapproved. According to Pew, the number of Republicans who said that it was important to prosecute the January 6th rioters went from 50% to 27% over just six months of 2021.
Not too many things are truly deplorable, but I think it safe to rule that one of them is an authoritarian takeover of the US government. So even if half of Trump voters are not 'deplorables', it's safe to say that a quarter are.
People are very complicated and deficiencies of character in one area are often compensated by a surfeit of character in others. What traits among people who might be termed 'deplorables' would you say are particularly redeeming?
There also remains the matter of those who believe January 6th was a completely unserious attempt at insurrection pursued by a minority at what was otherwise a peaceful protest, and the gathering's malice has been vastly exaggerated by partisanship. People who believe such notions are certainly not 'deplorables', they're not even fellow travelers to the insurrectionists, but they repress what their eyes tell them, and such willful naivete has been a reliable key in country after country to mounting all manner of dictatorship. Such excuses are deeply, deeply dangerous.
So now we come to Arendt's definition of the 'mob,' and relate it back to her definition of elites. Elsewhere, she often writes about the union of elites and mob in an attempt to overthrow the bourgeoisie, but it's telling here that in the quote at the beginning of this section she uses the word 'capital' instead of 'mob.' That implies a broader base of funding than just the aristocracy: it includes part of the bourgeoisie, perhaps that part that wants the rest of the bourgeoisie deposed so they can increase their power.
The 'elite' have a vested interest in overthrowing the bourgeois class, and join the mob which is made of something she does not call 'deplorables', but rather, in her words: "thedéclassés of all classes." More specifically:
"...mob is primarily a group in which the residue of all classes are represented. This makes it so easy to mistake the mob for the people, which also comprises all strata of society."
Basically, the mob is those who would commit civil violence to further their goals and all of their fellow travelers, and they come from every social strata. And according to Arendt, they are all in alliance with the elite, who always wants to take down the bourgeoisie. Again, we don't know who the elite is in American society, but we very much know who appears elite for now, and we know whom the elite wants to take down.
So allow me to offer a different interpretation of the modern bourgeoisie, one that might stand in exact opposition to what the 'bourgeoisie' used to be. Perhaps the American bourgeoisie is the progressively educated, 'white-collar' professionals; the left-of-center intelligentsia, the "creative class": scientists, academics, researchers, teachers, civil servants, librarians, artists, engineers, publicists, mental health professionals, many types of lawyers and doctors. They all lean Democrat. Some heavily. Meanwhile, no matter what the income distribution, it's true that most blue-collar jobs lean Republican: oil workers, loggers, truck drivers, exterminators, construction workers, plumbers, farmers, they all lean Republican. There are all sorts of jobs whose ideological orientation may surprise you: surgeons lean Republican, people who work in sports lean Democrat, while policemen are surprisingly close to 50/50. By this metric, it's true, blue-collar leans Republican, white-collar leans Democrat, but it might stun you how little income gap there is between the two. So in that sense, perhaps "the creative class" is a bad definition of 'bourgeois.'
But if Republicans number as much of the working class among them as they think, and Democrats number as much of this 'bourgeoisie' as Republicans allege, and if Republicans are as financially strapped as Republican politicians often claim, then this raise of the average income must still come from somewhere, and therefore can only come from the 'elite', or the 1%, that means to depose this class of white-collar liberal bourgeois, and the elite presence among Trump voters drives their average income massively upward. If this white-collar class is the bourgeoisie, and maybe it isn't, then there is little question of whom the most elite person among this temporary elite is attempting to strip of power. All you have to do is remember who was in the second row of the dais at Trump's inauguration, and then look at his twitter feed...
So whom ultimately does he want to depose? That segment of the 'creative class' that works in government. It may turn out to be many more people than that, but this at least is where he begins.
Perhaps this particular section is a digression, but it's a necessary one to have at some point early on so the reader/participant may be better oriented, because these terms will appear many times over the course of this class and you need to know what Arendt is talking about. To say nothing of the teacher.
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