3
The
Causes of White-Settler Colonisation.
I have argued that social development which reduces necessary labour time is progressive. The European colonisation of Australian and New Zealand was part of the world-wide bourgeois revolution in production that spread from Europe into the colonial world. The Settler colonies were a special type of colony – characterised by the physical transplantation of the capitalist mode of production made possible by the conquest of existing social forms. in this chapter I reject the neo-liberal justification of settler colonisation as the 'civilising mission'; the liberal account of a humanitarian process, and the radical neo-marxist version of European racist greed, in favour of a classic marxist explanation of settler colonisation as the subordination of pre-capitalist modes into an expanding capitalist mode of production establishing the basis for settler capitalism.
Part One: New Zealand 1
In this paper I shall present a brief outline of a Marxist approach to New Zealand’s ‘national development’.2 This process is explained in terms of the semi–colony’s role in the international division–of–labour rather than as a development from colonial dependence towards independence or nationhood. 3The prevailing approach to this question is to point to strictly non–economic causes, such as the role of the state, radical ideas,4 or historic high wages,5 in establishing the conditions for a ‘favoured’ economic development. In this view the New Zealand economy is dependent upon international capital not at the level of productive relations, but only at the level of the market.6 Since this is the case, economic policy is directed towards adapting to the dictates of the international marketplace, ‘export or die’, rather than at any attempt to overcome the basic contradictions of the capitalist world–system, and New Zealand’s role within this division–of–labour, which determines the behaviour of the market.7
I shall show that this latter approach to ‘national development’ remains fixed at the level of ‘appearances’, and like all the King’s horses, cannot piece these ‘fragments’ of reality back together again in the context of capitalist productive relations.8 This reality is one of the extended reproduction of capital on a world–scale which involves a continuous historical process of causal links between the economy, the political and the ideological (culture). In tracing the links between these ‘levels’ in a particular country we can demonstrate that while ‘political’ and ‘ideological’ events have a ‘relative autonomy’ with respect to the economy, this ‘independence’ is determined within limits set by the economy.9
In other words, while the state makes laws which entail certain values, in the final analysis these values are those consistent with the reproduction of capitalists and wage–labourers. By isolating these superstructural aspects from the total reproductive reality of the capitalist mode of production, orthodox approaches to New Zealand’s national development, fail to understand the basic causes of the semi–colony's origins and development.
Marx's discussion of semi–colonies (lands of white–settlement) took place in the context of foreign trade seen as a major historic counter–tendency to the basic tendency of capitalism to stagnate the more highly its productive forces were developed.10 While this form of expansion is seen to be a natural consequence of the development of capitalism on world–scale, in practice it came as the result of numerous attempts by capitalists to overcome temporary barriers to expansion by seeking new markets, new sources of labour–power, raw materials and foodstuffs. Capitalist expansion was always expressed as concrete class struggle between capitalists, wage–labourers and the pre–capitalist peoples whose natural economies were destroyed by the advance of capitalism.11 For this reason, the particular causes of any form of expansion could only be understood, according to Lenin, by "taking the facts of the development of capitalism in a particular country'". 12
In adopting this method of understanding the particular causes of white–settler colonisation and New Zealand’s semi–colonial development, we must begin with the "facts of the development of capitalism" in one particular period of British economic history. As we might expect, Marx and Engels provide us with the necessary ingredients of this analysis in their own history of British capitalism. The rise of the industrial bourgeoisie in Britain after 1780 came to a halt when it faced the remaining feudal barrier to further expansion–landed property in Britain and the protected colonies. The landlord class extracted an absolute rent from tenant farmers and consumed rather than transformed the surplus into capital.
Thus the further intensive exploitation of labour–power in Britain (which had by the 1830's reached the limits of the working-day despite a vast reserve army of unemployed) was hindered by the extensive exploitation of labour-power on the land, which under the mercantile system prevented a cheapening of the elements of constant capital (raw materials) and wage-goods (food etc), and with it the expansion of the domestic market.13 The consequence was a prolonged period of economic stagnation and social and political crisis.
The encumbrance of landed property to the further development of the forces of production was expressed politically and ideologically. Parliament was the preserve of landed property and the mercantilist system propped–up through its protection a system of landed property in which absolute rent was produced by agricultural labourers and tenant farmers in Britain and by slaves and peasants in the colonies.14
The breaking of the land barrier came only as the result of a lengthy class struggle in which the rising industrial bourgeoisie together with the pauperised agricultural workers and squeezed tenant farmers, combined on anti-poverty and anti-slavery platforms to assert their parliamentary supremacy, defeating the feudal rump of mercantilism and landed privilege, and putting in its place free trade. The effect was to unleash the expansion of British capitalism in an unprecedented boom from 1850–1870 based on cheap food, raw materials, a new iron and steel technology, and its rapid command of an expanding domestic and foreign market as the ‘workshop of the world’.
In terms of the explanation I am putting forward, the landed fetter to further industrial expansion constituted a determining cause which generated class struggle at the level of politics and ideology (demands for political and economic equality) which in turn established the political conditions for free foreign trade and removed the land barrier to further capital accumulation. If we can grasp the logic of this argument we are in the position to consider how the same historic causes of expansion gave rise to the colonisation of New Zealand.
Annexation
The orthodox concern to explain the act of annexation by means of a minute examination of the motives of those concerned, whether missionaries, the Colonial Office, or the white–settlers, begs the question of economic determination in the last instance.15 While these groups were all agents of the capitalist mode of production, they operated at different levels.
The colonists most directly represented the class struggle arising out of the land barrier in Britain. Consisting of those who were escaping high rents in the hope of capturing a founder’s rent,16 or the unemployed hoping to produce their means of subsistence from the land, they intended establishing themselves as a new landlord class or as independent producers. 17 The most influential were the systematic colonisers who, as Marx commented in his discussion of the Wakefield plan, 18 were not only would-be landlords but speculators in absolute rent. But of course they did not normally express their class interests in such frank terms. Their propaganda (ideology) was directed towards the imperial state in order to persuade it to overcome its resistance to the ‘faux frais’ of colonial expenditure. They did this by playing upon the widespread fear of the ‘spectre of communism’ in Britain.
The colonial reformers advocated colonisation at a time when the effects of the first major crisis of British capitalism were at their peak. Colonies, they argued, would provide a solution by attracting surplus capital and labour.19 Merivale, for example, went to great lengths to demonstrate that emigration would not deplete the labour market at home; ie., reduce the industrial reserve army below the numbers needed to hold down wages.20
In other words, the imperial state’s expenditure in the colonisation of New Zealand can be understood as a necessary cost incurred in the maintenance of law and order as a pre–condition of the reproduction of the capitalist system. Whether these expenses were in putting down rebellion at home, transporting convicts, or pacifying unruly ‘natives’, the purpose was the same – the reproduction of capitalist social relations.
Therefore the apparent contradiction between the expense of annexation and the regime of free trade, which can only be resolved by orthodox historians by invoking the ‘unique’ acts or values of individuals or lobbies in the British state apparatus, is in the final analysis, no contradiction. ‘Native Protection’ was merely a territorial extension of the ‘law and order’ function of the state.
But neither did annexation result from any direct economic cause. It reflects the relative autonomy of the state in exercising its function in reproducing capitalist social relations; that is, the exploitation of wage-labour by capital. It is also entirely consistent with this interpretation that the imperial state should have at the same time pursued its objective of free trade by refusing to allow the Wakefielder speculators to establish a new landlord class in New Zealand.
Once we have established that the dominant class interests of white-settlers were not in contradiction to the imperialist state, the highly over-rated role of the missionaries and humanitarians becomes clear. They constitute bourgeois agents in the reproduction of ideas (ideology), which though determined in the last instance by the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie (anti-slavery, native protection, civilising mission, etc) have considerable relative autonomy in practice.
Since the function of bourgeois ideology
is to represent the values of capital as natural and universal, one must
expect the role of well-intentioned missionaries to reflect of the degree
to which the universalistic ideology (civilising mission) competes with
the particularistic interests of capitalists (the extraction of surplus–value).
In the event of direct competition, land and labour–power comes before
‘soul-power’ every time, as in India, China, Africa, and before long, the
new colony.
The Destruction of Maori Society21
The penetration of the capitalist mode of production and the destruction of the natural economy of the Maori occurred at all three levels – economic, political and ideological. The immediate impact of the civilising mission was to challenge the ideological dominance of the Maori chiefs (elders) in the reproduction of Maori society. According to Merivale, religion is the basic means by which ‘civilisation’ is introduced to ‘savage tribes’, "for in what mode are we to excite the mind of the savage to desire civilisation?".22
Yet while ethnocide weakened the ideological resistance of Maori society to the capitalist market, allowing rapid adaptation,23 it was not sufficient to concert land and labour-power into a commodity form required by the capitalist mode of production. In Maori society the elders did not constitute a separate ruling class, and they functioned to reproduce the whole society by their ideological dominance. Since they could not be used as an intermediary class in gaining access to the land, the use of state force to break the elders’ control of Maori society was necessary.24
By 1860 the increasing pressure for land
threatened to destroy the basis of Maori social organisation, generating
a ‘resistance movement’ led by a number of chiefs who asserted their ideological
command over the remnants of their society in the form of the King Movement.
This resistance was interpreted by the settlers as political rebellion
justifying the use of state force in confiscating land. That the land
wars were not reducible in any strict determinist sense to the conflict
over land can be seen in the army’s pursuit of ‘rebels’ into areas which
had no rent value. By the destruction of Maori society the state, as midwife
of history, introduced the capitalist mode of production to New Zealand.
The Settlers’ State
With the intervention of the imperial state to establish by force the conditions for capitalist production in the colony, the way was then clear for the settlers to assume responsibility for self–government. They used the state "to hasten, as in a hot–house, the process of transformation... into the capitalist mode".25 The state took over on behalf of individual capitalists the task of opening-up, developing and settling the land by means of the national debt. In the period before 1890 the state developed an infrastructure of roads, railways, ports, etc., which after 1890 and the opening-up of trade in primary products with Britain, combined with a high natural fertility to return a high differential rent over British agriculture.26
As a result, from 1890 onwards, capital accumulation from the land was rapid, enriching a class of small farmers, a class of local bankers, and land companies and merchants, as well as contributing to accumulation in Britain by lowering the value of labour-power and returning interest on the national debt.27 Thus the bulk of the surplus-value extracted from agriculture was accumulated as capital and not consumed by a landlord class. This provided the capital fund that became the basis for the development of domestic manufacturing in the twentieth century, as well as the source of continued capital investment in agriculture.
Orthodox bourgeois explanations of this process of national development are of two sorts. First, there is the neo-classical emphasis upon the market and the law of comparative advantage, linked via the frontier thesis, to rapid economic growth.28 This view rests heavily upon the development of new lands, the rural frontier, as the safety-valve of the 'old' world with its problems of economic stagnation and overpopulation.29 New Zealand’s comparative advantage is its agricultural specialisation in fertile new lands: ‘nature's bounty’ plus labour and capital equals ‘take-off’.30
As an explanation the neo-classical approach fails because it does not take into account the key role of the state’s intervention in the market (ie the external economies in agriculture; the regulation of the labour market through state immigration or wage controls, etc). In tracing the causes of development to the market for commodities produced on fertile land, it derives politics and ideology as mere responses to the market. It is ‘economistic’ (limited to the level of distribution) since it allows for neither the existence of capitalist productive relations which underlay the market, nor for the overdetermining influence of politics and ideology on the market.31
The second explanation, labelled neo-Keynesian, draws upon the radical tradition of the progressives.32 In this view, the settlers, holding radical democratic values (Hartz’s ‘radical fragment’), and finding no resistance, set up the state to borrow British capital and develop the resources of the country. The result was a society of opportunity (the ‘frontier’ was extended into industry, commerce, public service, etc.), and the breaking-down of class boundaries as the bourgeois revolution was carried to its fullest extent in ‘state socialism’.33
This view begins with radical ideas, and converts them into state legislation to control the market in order to regulate capital and labour in the common interest.34 As Airey has pointed out, however, the historic extreme form of the bourgeois state is not state socialism, but the proto-fascist corporate state, into which individual and class identity is merged in the form of the community.35
Since it recognises the key role of state intervention in the market, in nationalisng the land, subsidising agriculture, protecting domestic industry, etc.,36 this view has some merit over the neo-classical view. But because in the progressive tradition, the class nature of the state is not recognised (ie its reproductive function in the capitalist system), the welfare state becomes not merely relatively autonomous from the economy, but absolutely autonomous, i.e.capable of determining economic development.37
We can see that the political and ideological manifestations of radical nationalism, while having a distinct impact on national development, are nonetheless themselvs determined by the economic in the last instance. The traditional historiography of the ‘long Pink Cloud’ in focusing on ‘progressive nationalism’ as the dominant force shaping history, has not looked beneath this level to discover the final cause of bourgeois radicalism.38 We can illustrate this point by taking the example of land reform movements (ideology) and the state’s active role in land development (politics) as expressions of more basic sets of economic interests set in motion by capital expansion.
In the 1880's the shortage of land generated radical ideas about land reform based on J.S. Mill and Henry George. While the landless were prepared to forego private property and pay rent to the state rather than to a landlord, and expressed these sentiments as political slogans for land nationalisation or the Single Tax, in practice their interest were to keep both private property and as much of the rent for themselves as possible.39 Once the radical slogans had achieved their purpose of state land settlement policies, the objective basis of radicalism no longer existed and was transformed into a conservatism in defence of private property.
To take the relative autonomy of
progressive nationalism as an independent cause of national development
is therefore to replace an economic with a cultural determinism in the
last instance. Through the settlers did use their state to develop the
economy, it was not sufficient to carry out this task. What was both necessary
and sufficient was the willingness of the British rentier to invest in
state development loans. While the settlers' state was vital as a guarantor
of a secure return (for capital is not invested otherwise) it was the new
land in the semi-colony which produced a high differential rent, or
super-profit, that in the last instance determined the policies and ideology
of national development.
The Reproduction of Capital on a World–Scale
I have tried to show that New Zealand’s national development can be understood by applying the Marxist method of analysing the development of capitalism in a particular country as it reflects the place of that country within the capitalist world system. It was the land barrier which initially shaped the politics and ideology of white-settler colonisation, establishing capitalist domination of agriculture as a new source of surplus-value that entered into the imperial circuit of capital, furthering accumulation both in Britain and the semi-colony.
However, while the extraction of surplus-value in New Zealand contributed to the reproduction of capital on a world scale, a number of factors have since combined to re-establish the land as a barrier to further accumulation.40 Therefore the role of the semi-colonies in breaking the land barrier in the nineteenth century is now assigned almost entirely to the raw materials colonies, while in the semi-colonies agriculture is heavily subsidised to maintain the basis for expansion of domestic manufacturing.
But this switch in the predominant source of surplus-value extraction in the semi-colonies, and the associated changes in the world division-of-labour, does not signify (as the orthodox economists tell us) a move towards economic independence. On the contrary, New Zealand’s dependence upon international capitalism has intensified with the direct penetration of foreign capital on an increasing scale in the post–war period.41
This new dependence of the semi-colonies, as Gunder Frank terms it, is to be found in the partnership of direct international investment and local capital under the domination of the multi-national corporation which controls markets and technology and can exploit the external economies offered by local states as inducements to ‘development’.42
The participation of international capital in this new dependence was not principally to find new markets, but to make use of cheap raw materials, cheap labour–power, and compliant local states, in realising super-profits which help raise the rate and mass of surplus-value and the reproduction of capital world-wide. New Zealand’s semi–colonial function may have shifted from an early ‘favoured’ dependence based upon the development of agriculture to a ‘new' dependence based on direct investment by multi-nationals, but this process can only be termed ‘development’ in the sense of the development of capitalism as a world-system.
Already the changes in politics and ideology
as the state responds to the dominant interests of international capital
are observable in the return to neo-classical laissez-faire economic policy.
The relation of these ‘levels’ to the economics of late capitalism
cannot be considered here, but they are likely to follow the trends established
by other dependent semi-colonies as, for example, Australia and Latin America.
What can we learn from the Australian example?
Part Two: Australian settler-capitalism.
As we saw above, the so-called ‘unique’ features of New Zealand development can be explained by reference to the destruction of pre-capitalist social relations, and the introduction of capitalist social relations which carried with it the possibility of a bourgeois revolution, the creation of national bourgeoisie, and a partial break with imperialism in the form of an advanced semi-colony.
In fact the first major contributions to this question in Australasia was the work of Fitzpatrick, who attempted to prove that Australia was economically dominated by imperialism, and in particular British finance capital. Against this view Butlin argued that Australia's economic development was internally generated. Kelvin Rowley's 1972 critique of this debate marked the first attempt to apply a Marxist method systematically to the causes of settler colonisation.
Rowley consciously set out to "open up the systematic analysis of Australian history from a scientific, Marxist standpoint." Along with a generation of 'new left' Marxists in Australia, he explained Australia's distinctive white settlement as the result of the expansion of the British Empire. He took a position which tried to incorporate both Fitzpatrick's and Butlin's limited perspsectives. Australia established capitalist agriculture as part of the the imperial division of labour, financed by Britain, and from which British imperialism gained. But Australia was able to establish some autonomy and create an internal market and capitalist class structure.43
The result was Australia became a 'junior partner' of British imperialism, exploited by Britain and more recently by Japan and the US, but also exploiting its own 'colonies' in the Pacific.44
Rowley opened up a fruitful Marxist critique of white settlement in which the establishment of the capitalist mode of prodution and social relations took a centre stage. Unfortunately, he deviated from this method in explaining the rise of industry as caused by high wages as well as technical backwardness and size of the local market. Here he foreshadows the fashionable 'new left' Ricardian account of Australian industrialisation. This argues that Federation and the the 'new protectionism' was not a national bourgeois accumulation strategy of insulation, but a political settlement between manufacturers and workers.45
Neo-Ricardians on Settlement
Also appearing at the 1970's were papers by Warwick Armstrong and Philip Ehrensaft which covered the same terrain arriving at somewhat different conclusions.46 In 1979 Philip McMichael published a long article on "Settler Capitalism in Australia" which helped fuel a debate over nearly two decades in which the basic themes of settler colonisation –'economic depencency' vs 'national autonomy' were canvassed.47
Then, in 1984 Philip McMichael and Donald Denoon both wrote influential books on 'settler colonialism' which put forward the idea that white settler colonisation is a special form of colonisation which explains some of the peculiarities of Australasian history. But at that point any similarity ends.
Denoon’s position is a 'unique' blend of neo-marxism with a Weberian focus on the state. His hostility to what he calls 'palaeo-marxism' blinds him to Marx’s method. He substitutes a non-marxist notion of a 'settler mode of production' to account for the 'unique' features of white-settler colonies.
These features are a combination of dependency with dynamic development which begins to approach that of the USA. He finds dependency theory, World Systems theory and palaeo-marxism inadequate to the task. His solution is to offer an eclectic distributional analysis in which the local ruling class engages in a 'production strategy' of agricultural staple production. So clearly, Denoon comes down on the Butlin side of the classic argument in support of internally generated development.
Denoon invents a "settler mode of production" as a variant of the capitalist mode of production (Cmop) to account for the autonomy of the settler state reproducing its own relations of production. The problem with this is that this concept of 'mode' is a ahistorical and empiricist abstraction of certain surface features of capitalism, namely the appearance of the 'unique' blend of dependency/dynamism, which fails to see that settler capitalism as a concrete manifestation of the articulation of sub-modes within the world-wide capitalist social formation.
Therefore, Denoon cannot see that the local autonomy is a surface appearance or symptom of the underlying causes of white settlement due to the dynamics of British capitalist crisis. Denoon does not engage with the export of capital and labour, nor with Marx’s critique of Wakefield’s ‘new’ theory of colonisation. Nor can Denoon explain why some pre-capitalist modes survived while others were destroyed or ‘incorporated’ into the capitalist social formation. Denoon flashes some trendy concepts around, but ends up back in the the stuffy Weber/Keynes/Butlin camp without a flashlight.
McMichael’s book is specifically about Australia, but his method can be applied to the wider historical phenomenon of white-settler colonisation. He is correct to explain Australia’s settlement in terms of the dynamics of British capitalism, yet these dynamics are understood in neo-ricardian rather than Marxist terms. That is, the British crisis is caused by rising raw material costs and wages putting pressure on profits, instead of a more fundamental tendency for the rate of profit to fall which is exacerbated by rising costs. 48
Australia’s development is then conceived of as class struggle over the conversion of land into modern landed property – i.e. capitalist property, as part of the development of world capitalism. Here the classic Marxist emphasis upon historically specific social relations of production enters into the analysis.
Yet once established, Australia’s dependency has less to do with its potential for accumulation ( eg its resource base and integration into an existing capitalist division of labour as a colony) and more to do with its ability to escape political dependency. Its ‘dynamism’ is rooted in the ability of the local state to develop capitalist agriculture as the basis for modern industry and to try to catch-up, USA style, with the metropolitan (imperialist) states.
Here McMichael's starting position, in which production relations once established in Australia become naturalised, is extended to the familiar neo-ricardian argument that capital flows are determined by international relations between states in the world system; that is in the sphere of exchange.
This postion clearly shifts the level of analysis from that of imperialism in which nations are plugged into a division of labour at the production level, to that of the level of exchange in which the economic surplus is distributed in the world system in terms of power relations among nation states.
This weaknesss in McMichael’s analysis allows him to adopt Wallerstein’s view of the development of capitalism i.e. based on the expansion of the market, facilitated by nation states which determine to a large degree the rates of development and pattern of inequalities in the world-system. This places the main cause of under/development as the (dis)ability of national elites to break free from the hegemonic states, i.e. the USA path of development.
Like all neo-ricardian analyses, the class history of accumulation is suppressed. Only the history of exchange and of the power relations which influence (unequal) exchange among nations are noticed. But this puts the cart before the horse. Australia was being established as a British jail at the same time as the American war of Independence. Timing is not everything but here it is crucial.
The Australian's never had to fight for
their independence. By the time the colonies demanded self-government,
it was in the interests of British imperialism to allow the white-settler
state to negotiate its independence on the installment plan. There was
never any threat of an Australasian war of Independence.
Constructing Capitalism.
The only classic Marxist account of Australian settlement is that of Andrew Wells in Constructing Capitalism. What distinguishes Wells is from the neo-ricardian left is his application of Marxist categories of capitalist relations of production in a dynamic way which I will loosely summarise in the following paragraphs.
McMichael's comparison of Australia with the US is ahistorical because it does not take into account the changes in British imperialism over the 19th century. 'Free trade' imperialism trialled in Canada avoided a US type war of independence and allowed for colonial self-government. So Australia could not have even begun to strike out on the USA path, had not a national bourgeoisie been created (artificially?) by the actions of the imperialist bourgeoisie.
Colonial capitalism was integrated into the imperialist economy. Australia began as a British jail and converted to colonial capitalism to cut costs consistent with imperialist free trade policy. It was a gift to the locals as a condition of self-sufficiency. The Imperialist state made it possible for land to be conquered, capitalised (modern landed property), and for a national bourgeoisie to retain some share in the accumulation of capital as a byproduct of removing the overflow of convicts.
British capitalists facilitated the establishment of capitalist property and relations of production because they benefitted from the cheap wool, and from the interest on capital advanced to finance colonial production. Thus Australia was neither a 'victim' or 'partner' of Britain since it was international classes and relations of production that were exploited or did the exploiting.49
Wells argues that in the 19th century Australian capitalists were a 'fraction' of the imperialist ruling class. So the emergence of capitalist production preceded the foundation of a national capitalist class, and the formation of a local capitalist state which did not happen until Federation in 1901.
Wells' Marxist analysis of colonial capitalism stops at 1901 and does not take in the transition from colonial capitalism to Dominion Capitalism. Like Rowley the crisis of the 1890's is a watershed. But unlike Rowley, Wells does not fall for the high wages settlement thesis that dominates the Australian left. Rather the crisis was one of overproduction which could only be resolved by restructuring colonial capitalism economically and politically. The role of labour in this restructuring was not one of class conciliation but one of class incorporation.50
Wells position is consistent with my argument that once the national bourgeoisie came into existence it was able to further the bourgeois revolution, by means of Federation and protectionist policies, but never to complete it.51
It couldn't complete it because even Federation was part of a deal with imperialism in which Britain (and later Japan and the US) negotiated with the national bourgeoisie to create a national market from which to extract their super-profits in exchange for Australasia's minor share in the lumpen-imperialist exploitation of the South Pacific! 52
What we learn from these accounts of settler colonisation, is that the Australasian colonies are not at all 'unique' or 'exceptional' (except at a superficial level) in their capitalist development. On the contrary, as Marx pointed out in his critique of the Wakefield scheme, settler colonies replicate, in an artificially compressed form, the ‘normal’ process of original capitalist development. Because the white-settler colonies result from the expansion of already existing capital which is exported as money capital and turned into productive capital, capitalist agriculture is established creating the basis for capitalist industry.
Thus a national capitalist class emerges and along with it a capitalist state which attempts to negotiate a bourgeois revolution short of a war of independence, to establish a measure of political independence. De-colonisation takes place but on the basis of the economy being locked by finance capital into a world capitalist division of labour. The exact nature of the superficial contradiction between the ‘unique’ features of the ‘dependency’ and ‘dynamic development’ in white settler colonies, is explained precisely by uncovering and utilising the method of "palaeo-marxism" i.e. classic Marxism.
As we will see, having made the transition
from colonial capitalism to Dominion capitalism, and finally today into
privileged 'semi-colonies', it is clear that such countries are unable
to break out of economic dependency and follow the USA path to its end.
. Why? Because they have been locked into imperialist circuits of capital
from birth.
Notes. (go to bibliography)
1 Part 1 of this paper was published in the Australian and NZ Journal of Sociology, Vol 14 (3) 1978. The basic argument still holds. NZ today is an advanced semi-colony which means that its place in the world capitalist division of labour is between imperialism and more impoverished semi-colonies. I focus in this chapter on the concept "white-settler" colony or colonial capitlaism as the first stage in the transition to dominion capitalism and then to a semi-colony. In Part 2 I take up some more recent arguments about "white-settler" colonies in Australia.
2 Macrae and Bedgggood, Development of Capiitalism in NZ
3 Sutch, Poverty and Progress. 90–97,
4 Sinclair, A History of New Zealand. p 60ff
5 Emmanuel, 'White Settler Colonisation...' ; Unequal Exchange
6 Blyth, 'The Industrialisation of NZ'.
7 Bayliss, 'Economic Bungling..' ; N.Z Planning Council, Planning Perspectives.
8 Barratt–Brown, The Economics of Imperialism. 17–29
9 Althusser, For Marx; Poulantzas, Classes in Contemporary Capitalism. 13–35
10 Marx, First International and After? 237–239; Don't Know what this is 1962 - Maybe Marx.Engels On Britain: 24–31; Mayer, Marx, Engels and Australia. 93–97.
11 Marx, Capital Vol 1, 837–930; Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia. 65–70, 597–602
12 The development of Capitalism in Russia. p. 67.
13 Hobsbawn, Industry and Empire. 56–108
14 Marx, Capital Vol 3 p 791 (no other has this many pages in 1974); Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory, Vol 1 282–292.
15 Sinclair, A History of NZ., 65; Ward, 'The Origins of the Anglo-Maori Wars.' 24–40.
16 Murray, 'Value and Ground Rent,' Part 2.
17 The question of founders rent and differential rent is explored at more length in the chapter Glorious Countries for Doctoring Marx"
19 Barratt–Brown, The Economics of Imperialism, 131
21 This question is expanded on in the Chapter The Conquest of Aboriginal and Maori Society
24 Rey, 'The Lineage Mode'; Bradby, 'The Destruction'; 'Equal Exchange'; Murray, 'Value and Rent' pts 1&2.
26 Murray, 'Value and Rent' pt 2.
27 Macrae and Bedggood, The Development of Capitalism in NZ.
28 Blyth, 'The Special Case' ; ' Industrialisation'
29 cf. Wakefield and Merivale cited in Marx, Capital Vol 1. 931-940
30 Blyth, 'Industrialisation'.
31 Althusser, For Marx. 200–217.
32 Reeves, State Experiments. 59–102.
33 Hartz, 'The Founding...' 40–43; Bedggood, 'The unmaking...'.
34 Reeves, State Experiments...'1969.
35 Airey, 'New Zealand Foreign Policy...'
36 Sutch, Poverty and Progress, 227–240.
37 Bedggood, 'Class Consciousness...' and 'State Capitalism...'
39 Marx, Theories of Surplus Value Vol 2. p 44. See also Marx on the "declamations of Henry George". "The Whole thing is thus simply a socialistically decked-out attempt to save capitalist rule and actually re-establish it on an even wider basis..."Letter to Sorge, 20 June, 1881.
40 Murray, 'Value and Rent' pts 1&2.
41 Palloix, 'Internationalisation...'; 'Self-Expansion...'; Macrae, 'The Evolution...'
42 Frank, Lumpenbourgeoisie... p.92-137.
43 Against Fitzpatrick, Rowley ('Pastoral...') argued that in the slump of 1840 was not caused by lack of capital, but an overproduction of capital given the the limits of expansive squatting on leasehold land. Capitalist production did not takeoff until land was freedholded. Against Butlin, Rowley argued that the gold rushes did not cause a takeoff in productive investment because of the lack of productive consumption, but rather fuelled the imperial economy and consumption. The 1890's slump was more complex then either Fitzpatrick or Butlin allowed. Although he doesnt spell it out for reasons I will explain later, Rowley essentially argues that the slump was the result of the limits or productive investment reached by the disorganised local colonial markets, which was not caused by British loans drying up, which could only be overcome by the formation of a national market.
44 Rowley; 'Pastoral...'; Rowley, 'The Political...' The question of Australia's status as "junior partner' of British imperialism is taken up in detail in the Chapter on Marx, Engels and Trotsky on the Pacific.
45 Rowley's lapse arises from conceptual confusion of production, distribution and exchange. Andrew Wells resolves the problem of the 1890's crisis by showing that (distributional) wage demands followed and did not cause the 1890's slump which was an accumulation (production) crisis (Constructing...p158) See my discussion of Wells below. I also ake up this issue in a critique of Connell and Irving in the Chapter on Class Matters
46 Armstrong and Ehrensaft adopted a version of dependency theory in which the white-settler colonies were located in the semi-periphery of the world economy. (See the Chapter Glorious Countries for Doctoring Marx, for a fuller treatment.)
47 McMichael's article appeared in Intervention 13 October 1979. McMichael's article was another watershed in its application of a neo-ricardian method to explaining Australia's settlement. The debate since then has tended to settle into a convergence between McMichael's now fully blown brand of world systems theory, and the traditional radical nationalist position of that has come down from Brian Fitzpatrick through Ted Wheelright (See Abe David and Ted Wheelright The Third Wave) to Frank Stillwell (The Accord and Beyond)
48 The difference in method between Marx and Ricardo is explained in the Chapter In Defence of Marxism.
49 Constructing...p153. The difference in method between Marx and Ricardo is explained in the Chapter In Defence of Marxism.
50 Constructing...p154. The difference is important in the history of left debates in Australia, since the class conciliation position is reformist, pointing to post settlements as justifying 'state socialist' or social democratic illusions, and future settlements where capital will allow its accumulation strategies to be compromised by assertive labour movements. The incorporation thesis, by contrast, makes it clear that labour was forced into a settlement because of its social relation to the means of production as exploited wage labour.
51 This question of the 'bourgeois revolution' is discussed in the chapters on Marx, Lenin and Trotsky on the Pacific, and Glorious Countries...
52 NZ's reason for not joining the Federation was its own deal with Britain for its share in the spoils of jackal imperialism. See Chapter on Marx in the Pacific.