In the past few
decades the world has undergone a radical change . The general crisis of capitalism has deepened . There has emerged and is growing the world system of socialist states . The disintegration of the colonial system is nearing completion . The new balance of forces is no longer giving imperialism a favourable nod . All this has had telescopic and deep going effects on US imperialism . The bungling , the mistakes .
The progressive development of mankind was determined by the further advance of the productive forces and , primarily , by the perfection of the instruments of labour . The remains of tools of fossil man were discovered in China , India , Ceylon , Burma , Algeria , Kenya , Uganda , Tanganyika and other regions of South Africa and Europe . In the U.S.S.R. the remains of fossil man and his tools were discovered in Armenia , the Crimea , along the Black Sea Coast of the Caucasus , in Central Asia and along the Dniester River .
Germany on the Eve of the Revolution In the 1840s there had as yet been no bourgeois revolution in Germany. The country was broken up into a number of independent states. The German Union formally unified 34 German states and four free cities. The supreme body of the Union was the Bundestag which exercised practically no power; It had no army, no legal rights and no diplomatic representatives abroad. The decisions of the Bundestag came into effect only after their approval by the heads of all the states and cities. In other words , no centralized state – basis for the development of capitalism – had as yet formed in Germany ; The country had no single internal market and the trade relations between the various German states were hampered by customs barriers. Under those conditions the development of capitalism in Germany encountered great difficulties . A customs union unifying 18 German states with a population of 23 million formed only in 1818-34 . The industry and cities developed slowly . For example , in the 1840s the 12 largest cities of Germany had a slightly larger population than Paris . In the middle of the 19th century the industrial revolution in Germany was only going through its initial stage. The German bourgeoisie was faced with the problem of carrying out a bourgeois revolution , creating a centralised state and winning power . However , the cowardly German bourgeoisie preferred not to raise the question of altering the political system , but to pursue a course of reforms . The German working class , which developed later than the working classes of England and France , began its struggle in the middle of the 19th century ; it tried to set up its own organisations and came out with its own demands . Owing to the severe police regime the German workers set up their organisations abroad , in Switzerland and England , where the political system was more democratic , and tried to guide the working – class movement from there . One of these organisations was the German People’s Union but , like the others , this organisation had weak ties with the workers of the German states and therefore could not exercise any practical guidance of the working – class movement . At the same time the workers began to struggle for their rights openly . The workers of Silesia ( the best developed area in Germany ) who lived under intolerable economic conditions rose against the capitalists in 1844 , but the government immediately dispatched troops to defend the interests of the exploiters . In the middle of the 19th century German industry advanced from the manufactory stage to machine produc tion , and its further development now depended on how rapidly feudalism was abolished in the country . Since the the necessary reforms , a government of the German Union was unwilling to carry out Germany . revolution was impending in Germany.
The import of large quantities of goods to the oppressed countries enlivened the commodity – money relations in them . The local feudal lords and tribal chiefs began to use the market increasingly more often . The result of that was an intensified exploitation of the peasantry , its pauperisation and often ruination . Under the direct pressure of foreign capital ists , the colonial administration and the country’s own feudal lords , middlemen and usurers , peasants had to produce raw materials and foodstuffs for the capitalist market and sell them at uncommonly low prices . The slightest fluctuation in the capitalist market affected the conditions of the peasants in the colonies and semicolonies . The flooding of the colonies and semicolonies with large quantities of industrial commodities from the parent states which were , of course , unable to compete with the industries led to a decline of the local handicrafts and manufactories of the advanced countries . Thus the marketing of the articles manufactured in the parent states impeded the industrial declined together with the handicrafts . Not only the peasants development of Asia , Africa and Latin America . Local trade and handicraftsmen , but even the local bourgeoisie was becoming impoverished , except the part of the bourgeoisie which began to play the role of an intermediary in the trade between the colonialists and the subjugated peoples ( the so – called comprador bourgeoisie ) . ” Free trade ” was the main , but not the only method of exploiting the colonies . Capitalism also developed a system of plantation economy ( West – Indies , Indonesia , India , etc. ) and organised land plunder of the colonies and their settle ment by way of ” free ” colonisation ( Algeria , South Africa , etc. ) . In the countries of plantation economy the English and French colonialists had to abolish slavery which had completely outlived itself , was unproductive and was incapable of making the plantations more profitable . But even after the abolition of slavery the former slaves and the new contract workers from China and India were subjected to monstrous exploitation , continued to live under inhuman conditions and died en masse of starvation and disease . Whereas after abolition of slavery the English and French planters used a system of labour contracts , the Dutch colonialists in Indonesia , where the local population was employed as labour power , introduced a system of forced labour . Usually 5-10 villages were attached to an enterprise which processed raw material . The population was forced to supply the enterprise with raw material and labour power . During the period of pre – monopoly capital , when the main form of economic relations between the parent states and the colonies was ” free trade ” , capitalist relations did not as yet develop in the colonies . At the same time , having been drawn into world trade , the colonies were becoming an exploited part of the forming world capitalist system .
The industrial revolution began first of all in England ( in the middle of the 18th century ) where it developed in its clearest form . In the 19th century the industrial revolution spread to other capitalist countries . It was not a mere accident that the industrial revolution began precisely in England . Prerequisites for a rapid development of industry were being created there over a period of several centuries . The early abolition of serfdom and dispossession of the peasants of their land led to the appearance of a mass of free labour hands and development of capitalist methods of agriculture . Both stimulated the growth of the internal market . The colonial seizures gave England guaranteed foreign markets and served as the source of creation of enormous wealth . Lastly , the bourgeois revolution of the 17th century eliminated many survivals of feudalism . The industrial revolution began in the branch of industry where the guild restrictions were felt the least , i.e. , in the cotton industry . Feudal England , as feudal Europe in general , did not have this branch of industry for it lacked raw material . England received cotton only as the result of seizing colonies , particularly India . Cotton fabrics soon began successfully to compete with woollen and linen fabrics . They had a greater mass of consumers and , consequently , a more stable market . This stimulated the development of the cotton industry to such an extent that the manufactories could no longer satisfy the continuously growing demand . Any innovations fostering an increase in production of cotton fabrics brought enormous profits . The invention of machinery began in the spinning industry . A mechanical spinning wheel – spinning jenny – was invented in 1765 , the water frame was invented in 1767 , and the mule was invented in 1779. The appearance of these machines radically altered the technology of cotton – spinning . Spinning factories employing hundreds of workers came into existence in the 1770s . By 1780 England had 20 such facto ries and 10 years later 150 of them . The development of machine technology in cotton – spinning resulted in a lag in weaving . Attempts to invent weaving machines were made and after long efforts succeeded .The first machines were driven by water wheels , which made them usable only near rivers . The need for a general purpose engine that could be used anywhere made itself felt increasingly more insistently . In the 1780s the cotton industry began to use Watt’s steam engine . That made it possible considerably to increase the volume of factory production , ensured the spread of factories over the country and the growth of industrial centres . The increase in the production of machines stimulated a greater need for metal , but the lack of charcoal limited the development of metallurgy . The production of metal began to grow rapidly only after Henry Cort invented the puddling furnace in 1784. Between 1785 and 1797 the production of iron in England was thus doubled . The use of coke instead of charcoal in the smelting of pig iron fostered an increase in coal mining : in 100 years it increased fourfold and by the end of the century amounted to 10 million tons . The introduction of machinery , which began in cotton spinning , subsequently spread to other branches of industry and led to the development of a number of associated branches , particularly the heavy industry . The development of heavy industry was consummated by the creation of the engineering industry . At first machines were produced in manufactories manually . They were very expensive and their production lagged behind the growing demand of industry . Only when mechanical engineering came into existence as a separate branch of industry was it possible to make the machines cheaper and hasten their production . The produc tion of machinery increased at so fast a rate that already in 1824 Parliament allowed machines to be exported from England . The first railway was built in England in 1825 and railway communication between Manchester and Liverpool was opened in 1830 , but by the middle of the 19th century England already had 10,000 kilometres of railways . The machine industry finally supplanted manual produc tion in England in the 1840s . Those were the years of con summation of the industrial revolution . England became the leading industrial country , the ” workshop of the world ” . In 1839 England mined four times as much coal as did France , Belgium and Prussia taken together . From 1826 to 1846 the export of iron and cast iron from England increased 7.5 – fold .
Capitalism Society 