As causas do Imperialismo

É preciso descobrir um texto de um historiador inglês (AJP Taylor sempre a demonstrar o seu carácter único) à esquerda para ver negada de forma notável o alegado carácter capitalista do Imperialismo. São os interesses económicos? Não. "Their measuring-stick was Power, not Profit.

A. J. P. Taylor, Economic Imperialism, (1952): "Ideas live longer than men, and the writer who can attach his name to an idea is safe for immortality. Darwin will live as long as Evolution, Marx be forgotten only when there are no class-struggles. In the same way, no survey of the international history of the twentieth century can be complete without the name of J A Hobson.

[a explicação que se tornou norma...]

He it was who found an economic motive for Imperialism. Lenin took over Hobson's explanation, which thus became the basis for Communist foreign policy to the present day. Non-Marxists were equally convinced, and contemporary history has been written largely in the light of Hobson's discovery. This discovery was an off-shoot from his general doctrine of under-consumption. The capitalists cannot spend their share of the national production. Saving makes their predicament worse. They demand openings for investment outside their saturated national market, and they find these openings in the undeveloped parts of the world. This is Imperialism. In Hobson's words, 'the modern foreign policy of Great Britain has been primarily a struggle for profitable markets of investment' - and what applied to Great Britain was equally true of France or Germany.(...)

This idea is now so embedded in our thought that we cannot imagine a time when it did not exist. Yet the earlier Radical opponents of Imperialism knew nothing of it. They supposed that Imperialism sprang from a primitive greed for territory or a lust for conquest.

[mas curioso é que...]

Previously Marxists had condemned capitalism as being pacific and particularly for preventing the great war of liberation against Russia. Now all wars became 'capitalistic', and war the inevitable outcome of the capitalist system. It is not surprising that, when the first world war had broken out, Lenin seized on Hobson's 'bourgeois-pacifist' theory and made it the cornerstone of neo-Marxism. Like most prophets he boasted of his foresight only when his visions had become facts.(...)

[mas na verdade ...]

Their measuring-stick was Power, not Profit. When they disputed over tropical African territory or scrambled for railway concessions in China, their aim was to strengthen their respective empires, not to benefit the financiers of the City.(...)

[E quem é que devemos temer? O capitalista?]

He knew that men love Power above all else. This, not Imperialism, is the besetting sin. (...)It is the high-minded and inspired, the missionaries not the capitalists, who cause most of the trouble. Worst of all the men of Power who are missionaries as well."

E missionários com vontade de usar o Poder para cumprir a sua missão ...