Lenin: 1916/ni-lam: SCHULZE-GAEVERNITZ, BRITISH IMPERIALISM (original) (raw)

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

NOTEBOOK “λ”

(“LAMBDA”)

SCHULZE-GAEVERNITZ, BRITISH IMPERIALISM

Dr. G. von Schulze-Gaevernitz, British Imperialism and English Free Trade at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century, Leipzig, 1906 (477 pp.).

Introduction describes the “foundations of British world power”—the struggle against Holland, France ... the important role of puritanism, religious feeling ((especially)), sexual discipline, etc., etc.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the British Empire’s appetite was insatiable: Burma, Baluchistan, Egypt, the Sudan, Uganda, Rhodesia, the South African republics were being devoured” (87).

(p. 217) United Kingdom exports, in £ mill.

...Incidentally, imperialist trends are strengthened by the fact that “some of these [foreign] protectionist states gain possession of ever more extensive raw-material areas and monopolise them for their own highly protected industry and shipping....

The following quotations are from Robert Giffen, Economic Enquiries and Studies, 1904, Vol. II, p. 412 [and Fabian Tract No. 7].

The income from foreign capital investments in 1898 was from £90 million (Giffen)
and up to £118 million. Not less than £100 million (p. 251):

(A) = Europe and United States. (B) = South America, Asia and Africa = “non-European raw-material areas.” (C) = British colonies.

(The tropics and subtropics are mostly in British hands.)

((but, he adds, not only economics: also ideas, religion, and so on and so forth))

“The number of rentiers in Great Britain can be reckoned at about a million” (323).

=“a decline in the proportion of productively employed workers to the total population”[8] ((p. 323))....

“The creditor state is laying a deep imprint on some parts of Great Britain. Free trade or financial reform is, in a certain way, an issue of struggle between the industrial state and the creditor state, but, at the same time, it represents the contradiction between the ‘suburbia’ of Southern England with its villas, where industry and agriculture have been forced into second place, and the productive factory regions of the North. Scotland, too, has been largely taken over by the rentier class and shaped to serve the needs of people who go there for three to four months in the year to play golf, travel in cars and yachts, shoot grouse and fish for salmon. Scotland is the world’s most aristocratic ‘playground’; it, as has been said with some exaggeration, lives on its past and Mr. Carnegie”[9] (324) ((here, as in many other places, the author quotes Hobson)).

This is from §5 (of Chapter III), headed: “The Rentier State.”

§6 is headed: “Capitalist Enervation.” Author sets out facts showing Great Britain’s lag (behind Germany) in industrial development.

Cites following figures inter alia:

Patents were granted (p. 347):

[Author does not give totals.]

Sport. The Puritans waged a struggle against it. Sport is the sole occupation of “members of the idle, rich class” (362).

“Characteristically, the favourite forms of national sport have a strongly plutocratic stamp” (362).

“They [these forms of sport] assume the existence of a breed of aristocrats who live on the labour of Negroes, Chinese and Indians, on interest and ground-rent flowing in from all over the world, and who value the land of their own country only as a luxury item” (363).

...“The rentier stratum is essentially without culture. It lives on past and others’ labour and, as William Morris said, it stifles in luxury” (363).

“For Great Britain, the question is whether the rentier class has a sufficiently strong neck to bear the social and political yoke which socialism would like to impose on it. Do the British rentiers already possess enough wealth to be bled for the honour of consuming goods produced by British workers, who have an eight-hour day and a ‘living wage’?” (374)

“The social protective tariff”, the idea behind it: the worker is interested in high prices (Fabian Tract No. 116)—p. 375—so that the country should be richer and able to give the worker a greater share.

Idealism in the service of imperialism:

“Economic activity as such does not raise man above the ‘animal world’; this is achieved only by subordinating economic life to supra-economic aims. Thereby, and only thereby, does the simple workman, as also the world ruler, become civilised man in the economic sphere. Idealistic population policy, idealistic national policy, and idealistic social policy require a broad economic foundation, which is thus included in the ‘realm of aims’; they present expanding claims for which the stagnated and fettered type of economy of the previous period does not suffice. In order to cope with our cultural tasks, we need the broad shoulders of the forward-storming Titan called modern capitalism” (401).

End

Literature sources:

Richard Jebb, Studies in Colonial Nationalism, London, 1905.

A. F. W. Ingram, Work in Great Cities, London (year?)

Cobden was against the Crimean War (p. 70 in Schulze-Gaevernitz).

John Morley, Life of Cobden, London, 1896, Vols. 1 and 2.

De Thierry, Imperialism, London, 1898.

G. P. Gooch, The Heart of the Empire, London, 1902 (a Liberal criticism of imperialism).

Doerkes-Boppard, History of the Constitution of the Australian Colonies, Munich, 1903.

Baron von Oppenheimer, British Imperialism, Vienna, 1905.

“England’s alliance with Japan guarantees Japanese aid to enable her to hold India in subjection, and she seeks American help to keep Ireland and South Africa down”....

On the “oppositional tone of the Indian press” ....

Meredith Townsend, Asia and Europe, 3rd edition, 1905.

Of the many books about Cecil Rhodes, the author mentions a “highly amusing lampoon” (note No. 171):

Africander, “Cecil Rhodes—Colonist and Imperialist” in The Contemporary Review, 1896, March.

Paul Jason, Development of Income Distribution in Great Britain, Heidelberg, 1905.

R. Giffen, Economic Enquiries, London, 1904. Two vols. (“extremely optimistic”) (p. 458, note No. 342).

E. Bernstein, “British Workers and the Imperialism of Tariffs Policy” in Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft, Vol. XIX, p. 134.

L. G. Chiozza-Money, British Trade and the Zollverein Issue, London, 1902.

End

Multatuli.

Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century (1913).

Notes

[1] See present edition, Vol. 22, p. 278.—Ed.

[2] See present edition, Vol. 22, p. 281.—Ed.

[3] See present edition, Vol. 22, p. 282.—Ed.

[4] Ibid., p. 282.—Ed.

[5] See present edition, Vol. 22, p. 281.—Ed.

[6] Ibid., p. 263.—Ed.

[7] Ibid., pp. 277-78.—Ed.

[8] See present edition, Vol. 22, p. 282.—Ed.

[9] Ibid.—Ed.

[10] Ibid.—Ed.

[11] _Volksraad_—the Boer parliament.