Communist Manifesto in the Age of Imperialism
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Tag Archives: imperialism
Richard Sennett: The Culture of New Capitalism
David Harvey: The New Imperialism
“On the one hand, these fast-moving events made it very difficult to devise a set of lectures on the topic of’the new imperialism’. But, on the other hand, the very nature of these events and the threats they posed economically, politically, and militarily to global security made some sort of in-depth analysis imperative. I therefore determined to try as best I could to penetrate beneath the surface flux to divine some of the deeper currents in the making of the world’s historical geography that might shed some light on why we have arrived at such a dangerous and difficult conjuncture.” (Preface)
Download: David Harvey: The New Imperialism
Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature (Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said)
“The three essays presented here have in common with one another and with the Field Day enterprise the conviction that we need a new discourse for a new relationship between our idea of the human subject and our idea of human communities. (from the introduction by Seamus Deane)
Download: Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature – Eagleton Jameson Said
‘Korean Wave’ — The Popular Culture, Comes as Both Cultural and Economic Imperialism in the East Asia (Xiaowei Huang)
“Korean popular culture such as movies, TV dramas, and pop music is overwhelmingly powerful and TV dramas are one of the most remarkable popular cultures of these. They are not only popular in terms of the fanaticalness of audiences and fans, but also bring considerable profit to the national income. Cultural imperialism to be a new form of economic imperialism. The Korean wave brings a different level of Korean fever in certain East Asian countries, such as China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, and the Philippines. This paper aims to analyse the changing position of audiences and consumers. It discusses the role of the media, especially, television, which is not only to provide entertainment to its audiences, but is also to change the audiences’ consumption.” (abstract)
On Practice and Contradiction (Mao Tse Tung)
“The fundamental contradiction in the process of development of a thing and the essence of the process determined by this fundamental contradiction will not disappear until the process is completed; but in a lengthy process the conditions usually differ at each stage. The reason is that, although the nature of the fundamental contradiction in the process of development of a thing and the essence of the process remain unchanged, the fundamental contradiction becomes more and more intensified as it passes fr om one stage to another in the lengthy process. In addition, among the numerous major and minor contradictions which are determined or influenced by the fundamental contradiction, some become more intense, some are temporarily or partially resolved or mitigated, and some new ones emerge: hence the process is marked by stages. If people do not pay attention to the stages in the process of development of a thing, they cannot deal with its contradictions properly.” -Mao Tse Tung
Download: Mao On Practice and Contradiction
Commonwealth (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri)
“War, suffering, misery, and exploitation increasingly characterize our globalizing world. There are so many reasons to seek refuge in realm ‘outside,’ some place separate from the discipline and control of today’s emerging Empire…One primary effect of globalization, however, is the creation of a common world, a world that for better or worse, we all share, a world that has no ‘outside.'”
Download: Commonwealth
Empire (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri)
“Empire is materializing before our very eyes. Over the past several decades, as colonial regimes were overthrown and then precipitously after the Soviet barriers to the capitalist world market finally collapsed, we have witnessed an irresistible and irreversible globalization of economic and cultural exchanges. Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule —in short, a new form of sovereignty. Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world.”
Download: Empire
Pingkian: Journal for Emancipatory and Anti-Imperialist Education Vol. 1 No. 1
“Today we live in a world that prophets of capitalism declare as ‘END OF HISTORY.’ In the words of Francis Fukuyama, “Western liberal democracy [is] as the final form of human government.”1 Consequently, socialism, now celebrated by the organic intellectuals of capitalism as defunct, is consigned to the dustbin of history’s barbarism. Yet the so-called Western liberal democracy proves to be more barbaric than its supposed nightmarish opposite, socialism. For today, the richest fifth of the world’s people consumes eighty-six percent of all goods and services while the poorest fifth consumes just 1.3 percent. Indeed, the richest fifth consumes forty-five percent of all meat and fish, fifty-eight percent of all energy used and eighty-four percent of all paper, has seventy-four percent of all telephone lines and owns eighty-seven percent of all vehicles. The world’s 225 richest individuals, of whom sixty are Americans with total assets of $311 billion, have a combined wealth of over $1 trillion—equal to the annual income of the poorest forty-seven percent of the entire world’s population. On the opposite extreme, the poor consisting of the 4.4 billion people in developing countries, nearly three-fifths lack access to safe sewers, a third have no access to clean water, a quarter do not have adequate housing and a fifth have no access to modern health services of any kind.” (from the introduction)
Download: Pingkian: Journal for Emancipatory and Anti-Imperialist Education Vol. 1 No. 1
Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Vladimir Lenin)
“We must now try to sum up, to draw together the threads of what has been said above on the subject of imperialism. Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general. But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, when certain of its fundamental characteristics began to change into their opposites, when the features of the epoch of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic system had taken shape and revealed themselves in all spheres. Economically, the main thing in this process is the displacement of capitalist free competition by capitalist monopoly. Free competition is the basic feature of capitalism, and of commodity production generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale industry and forcing out small industry, replacing large-scale by still larger-scale industry, and carrying concentration of production and capital to the point where out of it has grown and is growing monopoly: cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks, which manipulate thousands of millions. At the same time the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system.” (from “Imperialism as a Special Stage of Capitalism”)
Aklatang Bayan 