Blessed capitalism! It announces nothing and never promises.
No manifesto or twenty-point declaration programming the
turnkey happiness. He crushes you, guts you, enslaves you, torments you — in short, does it disappoints you? You have the right to be unhappy but not not disappointed, because disappointment presupposes a betrayed commitment.
Those who announce a more just, shining future expose themselves to the accusation
of deception when the attempt sinks into an awful cacophony.
Capitalism, on the other hand, wisely conducts with the present. It is. The future? He willingly abandons it to dreamers, ideologues, and ecologists. And so its crimes are almost perfect. No written record establishing premeditation.
For the Terror of 1793, it is easy for those who do not like revolutions to imagine its culprits: the Enlightenment and the unreasonable will to order society according to reasoning reason.
For communism, libraries crumble under the incriminating works. Nothing like this for capitalism. It is not to it that we can reproach manufacturing misfortune by pretending to bring happiness. It agrees to be judged only on this which has always motivated it: the search for maximal profit in minimal time. The others are interested in man; It only concerns itself with goods.
Have we ever seen happy or unhappy goods? The only worthwhile reviews are balance sheets. To speak about crimes is irrelevant. Let us talk about natural disasters. We tell you enough:
capitalism is the natural state of humanity. Humanity is in capitalism like a fish in the air. It takes the futile arrogance of ideologues to want to change the order of things, with the sad cyclical consequences that we know: revolution, repression, disappointment, contrition. This is the true original sin of man: that perpetual agitation that leads him to shake the yoke, the lyrical illusion of a future freed from exploitation, the claim to change the natural order.
Don't move: capitalism moves for you. But hey, nature has its disasters; capitalism too. Would you look for those responsible for an earthquake, a tidal wave? Furthermore, crime involves criminals.
For communism, the anthropometrics cards are easy to establish: two bearded guys, a goatee, some four-eyes, a mustache having man, one that crosses the Yangtze River by swimming, a cigar lover, etc. We can hate these faces. They incarnate.
When it comes to capitalism, there are only indexes: Dow Jones, CAC 40, Nikkei, etc. Just try to hate an index. The Evil Empire still has a geographical area, capitals. It is trackable. Capitalism is everywhere and nowhere. To whom should summonses be sent before a possible Nuremberg tribunal?
Capitalism? Cheesy archaism! Get up to date and use the right word: liberalism. The Littré defines "liberal" as "that which is worthy of a free man." Doesn't that sound good? And The Petit Robert gives us a convincing list of antonyms: "stingy, autocrat, dictatorial, dirigiste, fascist, totalitarian. You may have found excuses to define yourself as anti-capitalist, but admit that it would take vice to proclaim yourself anti-liberal.
So what is this black book of capitalism all about?
Can't you see the madness in this project's excesses?
The worst mass murderer in history, we grant you, but an assassin without a face or genetic code and who has been operating with impunity since centuries on five continents… We wish you a lot of fun. And what's the point? Haven't you heard the final gong announcing at the same time the end of the match and the end of history? It won. It monopolizes in its robust mafia-like version the remains of its enemies. Which credible opponent on the horizon?
Which opponent? The immense people of the civil parties to the trial. The dead and the living. The innumerable crowd of those who were deported from Africa to the Americas, chopped in the trenches of a foolish war, grilled alive by napalm, tortured to death in the jails of capitalism's watchdogs, shot at the Federated Wall, shot at Fourmies, shot at Setif, massacred by hundreds of thousands in Indonesia, almost eradicated like the American Indians, massively murdered in China to ensure the free circulation of opium…
Of all these, the hands of the living have received the torch of revolt of the man whose dignity have been denied. Soon inert hands of those children of the Third World whom malnutrition, every day, kills by tens of thousands, emaciated hands of the peoples condemned to repay the interest on a debt whose capital their puppet leaders have stolen, trembling hands of the excluded ever more numerous to camp on the margins of opulence.
Hands tragically weak, and disunited for now. But they cannot but join one day. And on that day, the torch that they carry will set the world ablaze.
Gilles Perrault
\chapter{Introduction}
\section{THE TOTALITARIAN LIBERALISM}
The world dominated by capitalism is the free world, capitalism, which is now called only liberalism, is the modern world.
It is the only model of society, if not ideal, at least satisfactory. There is and will never be another.
This is the unanimous song sung not only by economic leaders and most politicians,
but also intellectuals and journalists with access to the mainstream media: television, press, large publishers, usually in the hands of industrial or financial groups.
Dissident thought is not forbidden (liberalism obliges!) but channeled into a quasi-clandestine way.
So much for the freedom of expression that the proponents of our liberal system gargle about.
The virtue of capitalism is in its economic efficiency. But for whose benefit and at what cost?
In Western countries, which are the showcase of capitalism while the rest of the world is rather its back room, let us look at the facts.
After its great period of expansion in the nineteenth century, due to industrialization and the ferocious exploitation of workers, the movement that has accelerated over the last few decades has led to the virtual disappearance of the small peasantry devoured by large farms, with the consequence of pollution, the destruction of landscapes and the degradation of the quality of products (and this taxpayer's money since agriculture has not ceased to be subsidized), the virtual disappearance of small local shops, particularly food outlets, in favour of large retailers and hypermarkets, the concentration of industries into large national and then transnational firms which take on such proportions that they sometimes have larger treasuries than those of states and make the law (or claim to do so), taking steps to strengthen their power
without control, such as with the Multinational Agreement on Investment (MAI) over states. (United Fruit is the patron of several Latin American states.)
The capitalist leaders could fear that the disappearance of the small peasantry,
of the crafts and the industrial and commercial petty bourgeoisie would strengthen the ranks of the proletariat.
But "modernism" has provided them with the parade with automation, miniaturization, computing.
After the depopulation of the fields, we are witnessing the depopulation of factories and offices.
As capitalism does neither know or wants to share profit and work (we see this with the indecent and hysterical reactions of the bosses on the 35 hours, a measure that is nevertheless very meek) we inevitably arrive at unemployment and its cohort of social disasters.
The more unemployed, the less compensation is paid and the shorter the time. The fewer workers there are, the more pensions are planned.
This seems logical and inevitable. Yes, if solidarity is distributed over wages.
But if we take into account the gross national product which has increased by more than 40\% in less than twenty years while the wage bill has continued to decrease, it is quite different!
But this is not in the capitalist logic! Nearly twenty million unemployed in Europe, this is the positive result of capitalism!
And the worst is yet to come. Major European and American firms whose profits have never been so prosperous announce
layoffs by the hundreds of thousands. It is necessary to "rationalize" production, competition obliges!
The increase in foreign investment in France is applauded.
In addition to the dangers to national independence, it is questionable whether it is not the fall in wages that encourages investors.
The French champions of liberalism — of "modernism"! — (see Alain Madelin!) swear by England and the United States
who would be the champions of economic success and the fight against unemployment.
If the destruction of social protections, the precariousness of employment,
low wages and the short-term non-compensation of the unemployed which makes them disappear from the statistics are Mr Madelin's ideal,
I do not think it is the ideal of the workers of this country.
In the USA, a paradise of capitalism, 30 million inhabitants (more than 10\% of the population) live below the poverty line, and among these blacks are in the majority.
The supremacy of the United States in the world, the imperialist and standardizing spread of its way of life and culture can only satisfy servile spirits.
Europe would do well to be careful and react, as it still has the economic means to do so. But it would also need the political will.
To assist productive investment in industry or services, capitalism has the will to make them competitive in the face of short-term financial and speculative investments.
How so? By taxing the latter? Not at all, we lower salaries and social charges!
It is also a way of making the West competitive with the Third World. In Great Britain, they started to make children work again.
The vassal of the United States, nor his overlord, has not ratified the charter prohibiting child labor.
Caught in the infernal circle of competition, the Third World will have to lower costs and push its inhabitants a little further into misery, then it will be the turn of the West again…
Until the whole world is in the hands of a few transnationals, mostly American, and that we hardly need any more workers, except an elite of technicians…
The problem then will be for capitalism to find consumers beyond this elite and its shareholders… and to maintain delinquency born of poverty.
The accumulation of money—which is only an abstraction—prevents the production of capital goods and elementary goods useful to all.
The black book of capitalism is already written before us in its "paradise". What about his hell, the Third World?\footnote{In the dictionary of the twentieth century (Fayard), Jacques Attali puts forward the figure of one in four people living in the US below the poverty line. Worldwide, nearly 3 billion people have less than \$2 per day, 13 million die of hunger every year and two-thirds of the world's hands do not benefit from any social protection.}
The ravages of colonialism and neo-colonialism in a century and a half are incalculable, nor can the millions of deaths attributable to it be quantified.
All the major European countries and the United States are guilty.
Slavery, ruthless repression, torture, appropriation, theft of land and natural resources by major Western, American or transnational companies or by local potentates in their pay, creation or artificial carving up of countries, imposition of dictatorships, monoculture replacing traditional food crops, destruction of ancestral ways of life and cultures, deforestation and desertification, ecological disasters, famine, exile of populations to megacities where unemployment and misery await them.
The structures that the international community has set up to regulate the development of industries or trade are entirely in the hands and at the service of capitalism:
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization.
These bodies have only served to indebt the countries of the Third World and to impose on them the liberal creed.
If they have allowed the development of insolent local fortunes, they have only increased the misery of the populations\footnote{Read Philippe Panure, Le Village monde et son château (World village and its castle), le Temps des Cerises, 1995.}.
In a few decades, international capitalism will hardly need labor anymore, automation obliges!
American laboratories study in vitro cultures, which will definitively ruin the agricultural Third World (and perhaps French agriculture, the world's second largest exporter).
Instead of sharing the goods, it will be unemployment that workers around the world will definitively share\footnote{Read Jeremy Rifjin, La fin du travail (The End of Work), La Découverte, 1996.}.
Yet essential services concerning education, health, environment, culture, mutual assistance will not be provided or will no longer be provided because they do not generate profits and are of no interest to the private sector, because they can only be provided by the States or the community of citizens to whom liberalism wants to remove all power and all means.
What are the means of expansion and accumulation of capitalism?
War (or protection, like the mafia), repression, dispossession, exploitation, usury, corruption, propaganda.
The war against indocile countries that do not respect Western interests.
What was once the prerogative of England and France, Africa and Asia (the last upheavals of colonialism in India, Madagascar, Indochina, Algeria caused millions of deaths), is today that of the USA, a nation that claims to rule the world.
To this end, the United States has not ceased to practice a policy of over-armament (which it forbids to others).
We have seen this imperialism exercised in all direct or indirect interventions of the United States in Latin America and particularly in Central America. (Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Grenada), Asia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Timor (genocide proportionally greater than that of khmer rouge in Cambodia — nearly two-thirds of the population — genocide perpetrated in indifference — if not with complicity — of the West), Gulf War, etc.\footnote{Read Noam Chomsky, Les Dessous de la politique de l'Oncle Sam (Uncle Sam's backstage of politics), Écosociété, EPO, le Temps des Cerises, 1996.}.
War is not only fought by arms but can take new forms:for example, the United States did not hesitate to help the Moon sect in Korea to fight against communism, the fascists in post-war Italy, they have not hesitated to arm or subsidize Islamic fundamentalists like the Muslim Brotherhood or the Taliban in Afghanistan.War can also take the form of embargoes against indocile states (Cuba, Libya, Iraq), oh so deadly for the populations (several hundred thousand, even millions of dead in Iraq).
Spoliation is the obvious reason of the use of force. If you want to rob a house where the inhabitants are, it is better to have a weapon.
The practices of capitalism are close to those of the mafia, which is probably why the latter proliferates so well in its the former's soil.
Like the mafia, capitalism protects docile rulers who shamelessly let their country be exploited by large American and transnational corporations.
It thus consolidates — when it does not set them up — dictatorships, which are more effective in protecting corporate assets than democracies.
Its weapons are indifferently democracy or dictatorship, trading or gangsterism, intimidation or murder.
Thus, the CIA is arguably the largest criminal organization in the world.
Usury, another mafia process: like the mafia lends to the merchant who can never pay his debt and ends up losing his shop (or life),
countries are encouraged to invest, often artificially, and weapons are sold to them to help fight indocile states,
and they must repay eternally the accumulated interest on the debt, this way you become master of their economy.
Repression and exploitation go hand in hand: anti-union repression (which was once legal), now unacknowledged but still practised in companies,
repressive surveillance, criminal employers' militias\footnote{Read Marcel Caille, Les Truands du patronat (Bosses's thugs), Éditions sociales, 1977.}, unions initiated by the bosses (CFT) and repression against any radical workers' protest\footnote{Read Maurice Rajsfus, La police hors la loi (The Outlaw Police). Le Cherche-midi, 1996.}.
This is the price to pay to make exploitation possible.
And we know, since Marx, that the exploitation of labor is the engine of capitalism.
Western economies benefit from slavery in the Third World and from the serfdom of illegal immigrants in Western countries.
Corruption: Multinationals have such financial or political influence or pressure on all public or private officials that they stifle all resistance in their octopus tentacles.
Propaganda: to impose its creed and justify weapon stockpiling, its criminal acts and its bloody crimes, capitalism always invokes generous ideals:
defense of democracy, freedom, struggle against the "communist" dictatorship, defense of the values of the West,
while it most often defends only the interests of a propertied class, that it wants to seize raw materials,
govern oil production or control strategic locations.
This propaganda is propagated by economic and political rulers, a servile press and media.
These are the watchdogs already denounced by Nizan, the Betrayal of the clerics vilified by Julien Benda\footnote{Read Serge Halimi, Les Nouveaux Chiens de garde, Liber — Raison d'agir, 1997.}.
Supporters of liberalism, lauders of the United States, I have not heard your voice speak out against the destruction of Vietnam, the Indonesian genocid,
the atrocities perpetrated in the name of liberalism in Latin America, against American aid to Pinochet's coup d'état, which was one of the bloodiest in history\footnote{Read Chili, Le Dossier noir, (Chile, the black file) Gallimard, 1974.},
the killing of Turkish trade unionists; your indignation was somewhat selective, Solidarność but not the Disk, Budapest but not Algeria, Prague but not Santiago, Afghanistan but not Timor,
I did not see you indignant when communists or simply those who wanted to give power to the people or defend the poor were killed.
For your complicity or silence, I do not hear you asking for forgiveness.
It was during the nineteenth century that capitalism, based on wage labour, became the dominant mode of production, first in
Western Europe and the United States, then subordinating the whole world, by either indirect or direct forms of domination (colonization).
Its genesis essentially ran its course over the previous three centuries (sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries).
This is, to use adam Smith's terminology, taken up by Marx, the era of "primitive accumulation." (or better, to make Adam Smith's term more accurate, "Previous accumulation").
How will capitalists (who possess the wealth likely to be converted into means of production (machines, raw materials, etc.)) and "proletarians",
(devoid of any autonomous means of subsistence and reduced, in order to survive, to become the wage-earners of the previous ones) will end up facing one another?
Bourgeois ideology, which is expressed among political "thinkers" and vulgar economists of the nineteenth century, tells us that originally, society has been divided into two categories:
Some are laborious, intelligent, thrifty
Some others lazy, squandering.
%«
"It goes without saying that some piled treasure on treasure, while the others soon found themselves devoid of everything."\footnote{Capital, book I, tome III, Paris, Éditions sociales, 1950, p. 153.}
%»
Karl Marx cites, among the authors developing this thesis, M. Thiers\footnote{Ibid., p. 153. Adolphe Thiers, De la propriété, Paris, 1848.}.
In the twentieth century, the good doctor Alexis Carrel, Nobel Prize in medicine and supporter of Pétain, will explain in L'homme, cet inconnu (Man, the unknown)'\footnote{Dr Alexis Carrel, Man, the unknown, Paris, Plon, 1935.} that the former were genetically superior, and the latter, inferior.
And Karl Marx observes: "In the annals of real history, it is conquest, enslavement, the reign of brute force that has always prevailed."\footnote{Karl Marx, op. cit. cit., p. 164.}
To study this period, which began with the great maritime discoveries at the end of the fifteenth century, we will use two major sources:
An old one, the one provided by Karl Marx's Capital in its development on "primitive accumulation" (Book I, VIIIth section)\footnote{Karl Marx, op. cit. cit., pp. 153-22.}.
The other, more recent, certainly richer in information and more "up-to-date", will be provided by the great work of Fernand Braudel: Material Civilization, Economy and Capitalism, fifteenth-eighteenth century\footnote{Paris, Armand Colin, 3 volumes, 544, 600 and 608 p.}.
Braudel's point of view, like that of Marx, pays particular attention to the socio-economic infrastructure of history, but differs from it because it does not give a central place to the division of society into opposing classes.
The confrontation of the two points of view could have been exciting: it is unfortunately absent from the work of Braudel, who obviously had not read Marx (at least that part of Capital that covered the same subject)\footnote{Cf. J. Suret-Canale, "Braudel as seen by Pierre Daix", La Pensée n° 307, 3rd trimester 1996, pp. 160-161.}.
\section{The market, and the 'antediluvian' forms of Capital}
The class societies that preceded capitalism were characterized by a personal bond from the dominant to the dominated (slave, tributary, serf, etc.).
The dominated was, of course, exploited, and often in the most brutal way, but the exploitation was "justified", at least ideologically, by a certain reciprocity:
duty of protection on the part of the dominant, even assistance, often under a patriarchal mask.
With capitalism, social relations take on an increasingly abstract, anonymous aspect. And thereby taking on a dehumanized aspect.
Capitalism develops on the basis of commodity production, and presupposes its generalization.
Unlike previous modes of production, more or less based on an economy of self-subsistence, capitalist production is turned, from the start, towards the market: the capitalist produces to sell.
And the very relationship between the capitalist and the wage-earner is in the form of market exchange: the capitalist presents himself as a buyer of labor power, the wage earner as a seller.
The market, the commodity, the commodity production appear very early in the most diverse societies.
But they are not the exclusive, let alone initial, forms of exchange:
archaic societies present "non-market" forms of exchange, highlighted since Durkheim.
Karl Polanyi had the merit of stressing the specificity of these exchanges in relation to market exchange\footnote{Karl Polanyi, Primitive, Archaïc and Modern Economies, (Ed. George Dalton) Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.}.
In "simple" market production, the agricultural or artisanal producer owns his means of production.
It produces in part or in whole, no longer to directly cover its own needs, but to sell, on a market where products are exchanged
through monetary equivalents, with producers specializing according to a social division of labor.
With productive capitalism, the capitalist, owner of the means of production (land, machinery, raw materials, etc.)
"buys" from the worker the use of his labor power for a wage that roughly corresponds to the amount necessary for the reconstitution and reproduction of this labor power;
This amount being less than what's produced by the implementation of this labour power.
The supplement thus emerging (Marx's "surplus value" or "surplus value") belongs to the capitalist.
The capital advanced and implemented in production by the capitalist is thus at the end of the cycle reproduced and increased by a supplement.
The capitalist can use this supplement for personal consumption, but he can also "accumulate" it in order to increase the mass of his capital. This is "expanded" reproduction.
In earlier societies, the product of exploitation (of the slave, the tributary, the feudal dependent — serf or villain)
was mainly consumed by the privileged classes and relatively little "reinvested".
The productive cycle was repeated more or less on the same scale. "Growth," to the extent that it existed, was very slow and almost imperceptible.
In contemporary (productive) capitalism that is being set up thanks to the industrial revolution, with the widespread use of mechanical energy,
advances in labour productivity will allow for "expanded reproduction" on an increasingly broad scale, in short, "growth."
This productive capitalism appeared as early as the Middle Ages, in an embryonic form, in Italian cities in the form of "manufacture"
("Factory" practicing in the same place the manual division of labor, or work at home, the capitalist providing the raw material,
for example the thread to the weaver, and buying the manufactured product from him).
But, until the end of the eighteenth century, capital was essentially in forms that Marx called "antediluvian",
market capital or finance capital (usurious) forms that had appeared as early as antiquity.
In these forms, there is also accumulation, but not through the creation of wealth: capital here just to take its tithe from existing production.
The advent of productive capitalism, essentially industrial, in addition to the technical conditions already mentioned, presupposes economic and social conditions.
\section{The 'liberation' of the workforce: impoverishment and exploitation of the peasantry}
The first condition is the existence of a "free" workforce, that is to say, free from feudal or seigneurial obligations and servitudes;
but also devoid of any autonomous means of subsistence (and in particular land).
This "liberation" took place in England at the end of the fourteenth century and ended during the first Revolution, that of Cromwell, in the seventeenth century.
In France, it will take place with the Revolution of 1789, and, later, in the rest of Europe, under the direct or indirect influence of revolutionary and Napoleonic conquests.
This "liberation" is inseparable from a massive impoverishment and the expropriation of the small peasantry.
In England, this phenomenon began during the reign of the Tudors and was amplified in the eighteenth century; it is slower and more limited on the mainland.
The peasants thus "liberated" and expropriated constitute a growing mass of wanderers and destitute people,
subjected in England to the ferocious legislation on the Poor laws, ready-madeworkforce, when the time comes, for the capitalist industrial enterprise.
The rural exodus will feed, in the nineteenth century, urban and industrial growth and emigration to America or to the "temperate" colonies.
Let us return to the English example, studied by Karl Marx. Serfdom disappeared there at the end of the fourteenth century.
Most of the peasant population was then made up of small independent, relatively well-off tenants.
The end of the Wars of the Roses (civil war between feudal clans) and the advent of the Tudor dynasty were accompanied by two phenomena:
the dismissal of the feudal "suites" maintained by the nobles (fallen or ruined) threw on the roads a first mass of people without fire or place;
on the other hand the parvenus who overtook the place of the old ruined or extinct nobility undertook to "assert" their domains by expelling
massively the peasants holding their land to convert it into sheep pastures:
the rise of the wool factory of Flanders, of which England had long supplied the raw material, the resulting rise in the price of wool encouraged this speculation.
In vain, laws of Henry VII (1489) and Henry VIII prohibited the demolition of peasant houses and tried to limit the extension of pastures.
The Reformation and the confiscation of the property of the clergy - including suppressed religious orders - a quarter to a third of the lands of the kingdom,
distributed by Henry VIII to favorites, led to an acceleration of the phenomenon:
all those parvenus who had become "gentlemen" continued to expel the peasants.
The small and medium-sized peasants, the "yeomen", still provided the bulk of the troops of Cromwell's English Revolution.
But by 1750, the evolution was complete:
the small English peasantry was virtually eliminated in favour of the "Landlords", the large landowners, replaced by capitalist farmers, or, in Ireland, by tenants, precarious, expellable at will.
\begin{displayquote}
The creation of the proletariat without fire or place — dismissed from the great feudal lords and farmers victims of violent and repeated expropriations —,
was necessarily going faster than its absorption by the nascent factories… So a mass of beggars, thieves, vagrants came out.\footnote{Karl Marx, op. cit. cit., p. 175.}
\end{displayquote}
Hence, from the end of the fifteenth century, a fierce legislation against the poor.
A law of Henry VIII stipulated that robust vagrants would be condemned to the whip; tied up behind a cart, they would be whipped until blood trickles down from their bodies.
After which, they would be imprisoned. A subsequent law of the same king aggravates the penalties by additional clauses:
in case of recurrence, the vagrant must be whipped again and have half of the ear cut off; on the second recurrence, he will be hanged.
In 1572, Queen Elizabeth renewed this legislation:
\begin{displayquote}
Under the almost maternal reign of Queen Bess tramps were hanged in batches, arranged in long lines.
Not a year passed that there were not three or four hundred hanging on the gallows in one place or another, says Strype in his Annals.
According to him, Somersetshire alone counted in one year forty executed, thirty-five marked with red iron, thirty-seven whipped and one hundred and eighty-three —
"incorrigible scoundrels" — released… "Thanks to the nonchalance of the justices of the peace and the foolish compassion of the people," adds the commentator.\footnote{Ibidem, p. 177}
\end{displayquote}
The "law on the poor" of the same queen (1597) made the indigent a burden on the parishes.
The "assistance" of the parishes consisted in locking up the needy in hospices or "Workhouses".
These are actually prisons where they will be subjected to exhausting work and barely fed.
The Law on the Poor was not repealed until 1834… But only because the English bourgeoisie finds it intolerable to have to pay a tax to maintain "slackers".
The destitute will continue to be sent to hospices where they work at least 18 hours a day and where they're carefully given clothes and food only at a lower level than that of the lowest paid worker!
\section{Slavery and mercantile colonization}
Another prerequisite for the advent of capitalism was the extension and generalization of market relations.
They are realized from the sixteenth century with the extension to the whole world of European maritime trade, with the appearance, for the first time in history, of a real world market.
The discovery of America by Christopher Columbus (1492) for the benefit of the crown of Spain, led to the conquest of the continent.
The two main states that exist there, the Aztec Empire in Mexico and the Inca Empire in Peru were destroyed in 1519 and 1532 respectively.
The conquerors, who had initially thought they had found India, were looking for spices (they did not find any) and gold.
They found some, but in small quantities; after the looting of local treasures, gold panning will give little and its resources will be exhausted before 1550.
But soon the Spaniards discovered and exploited very rich deposits of silver, in Mexico (New Spain) and Peru (present-day Peru and Bolivia).
Trade with America is a royal monopoly. It was subcontracted to a privileged merchant company based in Seville.
It is done by a fleet of galleons, grouped for security reasons (they are often attacked and looted by privateers, English in particular).
This fleet departs every year from Seville, then Cadiz, to Havana, a fortified place that serves as its first port of call.
Then it leaves for the Vera Cruz (to serve New Spain) or for the Isthmus of Panama, where men and products are transshipped on the Pacific shore.
There a fleet took them to Callao, serving Peru and the Andean countries.
Some ships go to the port of Cartagena, to serve New Granada (colombia and Venezuela today).
This fleet brings from Spain manufactured products and supplies.
Any importation by other stakeholders is deemed to be contraband ("interlope" trade).
It is through America that Spain communicates with its only Asian possession, the Philippine Islands:
every year, a galleon departs from Acapulco, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, to Manila; he brings money there, and in return takes away the products of China.
America exports little except money.
The Spanish settlers, concerned to make a quick fortune, while living "nobly" (without working with their hands) subjected the Amerindian population to a frenzied exploitation,
accompanied by barbaric treatment (torture, mutilation) to rule by terror.
The population of the Antilles, the first lands reached by the discoverers, who could not bear slavery and forced labor, was decimated by ill-treatment,
sometimes leading to collective suicides, and by diseases introduced by Europeans and to which it was not immune.
The population of Hispaniola (Haiti), estimated at half a million in 1492, was reduced to 30,000 in 1514, practically wiped out during the sixteenth century.
In general, the population of the Antilles will be the object of an almost complete genocide:
in the nineteenth century, the last Caribbean (a few dozen) will be deported to the island of Dominica where they will lose the practice of their traditions and their language.
On the continent, the Amerindian population will not be annihilated, but will be terribly affected for the same reasons:
in New Spain (Mexico) the population, estimated at 25 million in 1520, fell to 7 million in 1548, and was reduced to less than one and a half million in 1595-1605, a decrease of 95\% in three quarters of a century.
In Peru, work in the silver mines of Potosi is fueled by the "mita", the chore, an institution borrowed from the ancient Inca Empire, but which then leads to a distant deportation, at more than 3,000 meters above sea level, to work underground.
The working conditions are such that few come back: the required people, before departure, are invited to follow the Mass of the dead…
The demographic collapse would have been less in Peru than in New Spain, but would have reached 20 to 30\% between 1530 and 1660.
In total, the population of Spanish America, which was of the order of 50 million at the end of the fifteenth century, decreased to 9-10 million in 1570 and to 4 or 5 million in the middle of the seventeenth century.
It was not until the end of the seventeenth century and the eighteenth century that a slow demographic recovery was achieved.
In North America, a land of temperate colonization, the repression or annihilation of the Indians was from the beginning a condition of European settlement:
in 1703 the Puritans of New England granted by decree a bounty of 40 pounds sterling per Indian scalp or for each Redskin taken prisoner.
In 1720 the bounty was raised to 100 pounds.
\section{The Black Slave Trade\footnote{\label{foot18}For an overview: Serge Daget, La traite des Noirs (The Black slave trade), Éditions Ouest-France Université, 1990, 300 p. For details: De la Traite à l'esclavage (From Slave trade to slavery) (Actes du colloque international de Nantes, 1985), Paris, 1988, 2 volumes, XXXII-551 and 733 p.}}
Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas, was outraged by the treatment to which the Amerindians were subjected.
He denounced it in particular in his Brevissima Relation de la Destrución de las Indias.
In 1542 he obtained the prohibition of the slavery of the Indians (which did not change much to their fate) and proposed to replace them with African slaves.
He had to repent of it afterwards.
In fact, the employment of black slaves imported from Africa had already started.
During the fifteenth century, the Portuguese had gradually recognized the coasts of Africa to the west of the continent.
They will find some gold (gold that was previously exported, by the Saharan way, towards the Arab world).
They will also bring back slaves. But this export will only take on its full dimension when it is directed to America.
In fact, the blacks will only replace the Indians in the regions where they have been practically exterminated,
the coastal plains of the Gulf of Mexico, the West Indies, and especially the Brazilian Northeast, colonized by the Portuguese.
And the development of African slavery will be closely associated with that of the sugar plantation.
The cultivation and processing of sugar cane, which came from India, was introduced in the late Middle Ages to the islands of the Mediterranean.
colonized by Venice and Genoa (Chio, Cyprus, Crete) then in Sicily and Andalusia.
At the end of the fifteenth century, they were introduced to the Atlantic islands: Madeira, Canary Islands, Saõ Tomé.
The production of cane sugar is from the outset a real agro-industry:
planting and cutting cane, crushing in sugar mills, clarification and concentration of sugar in boilers,
crystallization, then refining, leaving as a by-product molasses, consumed as such or distilled for the production of alcohol (rums and tafias).
It cannot work with artisanal production: it required large numbers and strict discipline of work that only slavery could provide at that time.
Slaves were employed in the Mediterranean plantations.
In the early sixteenth century, the cane was introduced to the Spanish West Indies, but its development was limited by the lack of manpower.
It was Portuguese Brazil that first imported African slaves on a large scale: around 1580 it became the first producer of cane sugar.
In the Lesser Antilles, partly abandoned by the Spanish and colonized by the English, French and Dutch,
colonization was primarily the work of Europeans who employed a workforce of "indentured labourers";
thoses labourers pay for their journey through a "commitment" of work of 3 to 7 years for the benefit of those who recruited them.
This systemworked poorly; servitude, even temporary, had disappeared from European habits; recruited from among the marginalized, the committed had little aptitude for agriculture, let alone tropical agriculture.
During the seventeenth century, they will be replaced by black slaves, and the crops performed so far (tobacco, indigo) will be marginalized in favor of the sugar plantation.
During the temporary occupation of Brazil by the Dutch, the latter were introduced to the sugar agribusiness:
expelled after the Portuguese reconquest, they will introduce sugar cane in the Lesser Antilles.
During the second half of the seventeenth century, the slave population became the majority:
thus, in Barbados (British) whites were still in the majority in 1645 (three quarters of the population);
in 1667, the proportion was reversed: whites made up only a tenth of the population.
The sugar plantation was from the outset a capitalist enterprise: it required large investments in land development, industrial equipment (mills, boilers, etc.) and the purchase of slaves.
Due to the length of the crossings, cash inflows are long-term.
The capitalist is here the merchant (often also a shipowner) either by investing directly in the plantations or by financing the planters by advances.
The plantation economy is in complete dependence on foreign trade:
almost everything it produces (mainly sugar, incidentally tobacco, indigo, coffee), is intended for export to Europe;
almost everything it consumes, tools, clothing, and even food, is imported.
The plots allocated to slaves for food crops, for which they are granted a maximum of one day a week, are not enough to support them.
Flour and wines from Europe, dried or salted cod from North America, are imported.
The American demand for slaves, linked to the development of the plantation economy, caused the rise of the slave trade; the slave trade takes the form of the "triangular" trade;
the slave ship, at first, brings to the coast of Africa "trade goods" (textiles, hardware, bimbeloterie, alcohols, then powder and firearms), all products intended for the consumption of privileged layers of African society, organizers and beneficiaries of trafficking.
From the coast of Africa, the slave ship left with its cargo of slaves for America, and exchanged its slaves for colonial goods (sugar, tobacco, coffee, etc.).
However, since the price of the cargo of a slave ship is equivalent to the loading of four ships in colonial goods, much of the trade is done in "droiture", tools and goods from Europe against colonial goods.
One exception: Portuguese Brazil directly trades its imported slaves for tobacco and rum.
Growing rapidly in the second half of the eighteenth century, the slave trade will become, until the first quarter of the nineteenth century,
the dominant form of trade between Europe and Africa.
Europeans will quickly give up penetrating the interior of Africa: coastal states specialize in the role of intermediary, providing them with the human commodity,
and defending their fruitful monopoly both against the Europeans and against the African populations of the Interior.
It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that explorations into the interior of the continent began, with the idea of direct access to the African market.
\section{The human drain of the slave trade and the treatment of slaves}
How many Africans were transported across the Atlantic, from the early sixteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century
(the slave trade continued for several decades after its prohibition, in 1815 north of Ecuador, in 1842 for the South Atlantic)?
The most recent estimates put the number of people transported at between 10 and 15 million.
But to this demographic bloodletting must be added all the human victims resulting from the hunting of slaves and their transport.
The hunt for slaves had become, for the ruling strata of African states, the most lucrative activity:
for a captive taken prisoner, how many deaths were made during the raids on the villages?
How many then died along the way, in the convoys leading the prisoners to the coast, sometimes for hundreds of kilometers?
How many dead in "repositories" on the coast? How many deaths at sea during transport?
Because they were often numerous, especially when an epidemic broke out on board, due to overcrowding, hygiene and food conditions, during a crossing of several weeks.
To this should be added, in Africa itself, the consequences of the permanent insecurity resulting from the hunt for slaves:
populations reduced to famine by the destruction of their villages and crops, forced to take refuge in areas of difficult access but deprived of resources.
To assess it, it would be necessary to multiply the number of transported by a coefficient of several units, which it is impossible to specify:
50 million? 100 million? In America itself, until the end of the eighteenth century, the demographic evolution of the slave population was negative:
in the French part of Saint-Domingue (now the Republic of Haiti), in 1789, 2.2 million slaves had been imported in 50 years: only 500,000 remained.
Fénelon, governor of Martinique, in a 11 April 1764 letter to the minister , was surprised by this negative development and highlighted the causes of this depopulation, which forces the constant import of new slaves:
bad food, excess work, imposed even on pregnant women, very frequent diseases of children.
The slave trader Degrandpré, quoted by the R.P. Dieudonné Rinchon acknowledges:
\begin{displayquote}
Admittedly, we were speculating about the excess of their work and we were not afraid of making them die of fatigue, if the price we get from their sweat equals the price of their purchase.\footnote{R. P. Dieudonné Rinchon: The slave trade and slavery of the Congolese by the Europeans, Paris, Vanelsche, 1929, pp. 97-98.}
\end{displayquote}
Hilliard d'Auberteuil (quoted by Gaston Martin\footnote{Gaston-Martin, Histoire de l'esclavage dans les colonies françaises, Paris, P.U.F., 1949, pp. 124-125.}), who resided twelve years in Saint-Domingue, wrote (in 1776):
\begin{displayquote}
One third of the Negroes of Guinea usually die in the first three years of transplantation, and the laborious life of a negro, made in the country, cannot be estimated at more than fifteen years.
\end{displayquote}
The expression "to work like a nigger" has remained in french language.
It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that the servile population stabilized and began to grow naturally:
various factors led to this: the rise in the cost of slaves, the interruption of the slave trade during the Napoleonic Wars,
the great fear aroused among the slavers by the revolt in Santo Domingo (Haiti).
Slave owners will be interested in maintaining and reproducing their labor.
To maintain the discipline of their slaves, the owners had to impose a regime of discrimination and terror.
The "Black Code" enacted in 1685, during the reign of Louis XIV, collection of regulations concerning the government, the administration of justice, police, discipline and trade of negroes in the French colonies\footnote{The Black Code... In Paris, at Prault, Imprimeur-libraire, 1767. Reproduction in facsimile: Basse-Terre, Société d'histoire de la Guadeloupe; Fort-De-France, Société d'histoire de la Martinique, 1980.} in force until 1848
(with the exception of the colonies where the abolition of slavery decreed by the Convention was applied from 1794 to 1802), laid down the official rules.
It punishes with death any assault by a slave against his master or against free persons, as well as the theft of horses or oxen;
If a slave is fugitive for more than a month they will have their ears cut off and will be marked with a red iron with a fleur-de-lis on his shoulder;
if they reoffends, they will have their shank cut and will be marked with a fleur-de-lis on the other shoulder; the third time he will be punished with death.
The tortures (marks and mutilations) were not abolished until 1833.
Masters have the right to have their slaves chained and whipped "when they believe that the slaves deserved it."
Except in the cases provided, it is in principle forbidden for masters to torture, maim or kill their slaves.
But in fact, the masters, whatever they do, are never punished:
the courts, in the hands of the settlers, had as their principle that a master could never be convicted on the complaint of a slave, for fear of jeopardizing the authority of the slave regime.
In his report on the Troubles of Santo Domingo, the conventional Garran notes that there is no example of a master brought to justice for killing or maiming a slave.
An ordinance of 1784 which limited to 50 the number of lashes that a master could inflict on a slave "was recorded with great difficulty" and was not executed\footnote{Garran-Coulon report, Paris, Imprimerie nationale, An V, tome 1, p. 25.}.
Marriage and sexual relations between settlers and slaves are in principle prohibited: in fact, the settlers took slave concubines and, very quickly, a layer of mestizos was formed, hierarchized according to their proportion of "white" blood.
In 1789, in the French part of Saint-Domingue (now the Republic of Haiti) there were 35,440 whites, 509,642 slaves, and 26,666 freedmen and "colored people."
Freedmen and free men of color could own plantations and slaves but were subject to strict discrimination: in 1789, the settlers denied them political rights.
In a pamphlet published in 1814, Vastey, secretary to King Christophe (Henri 1st, immortalized by aimé Césaire's play) lists the tortures inflicted by the settlers on the slaves, especially during their insurrection:
slaves burned alive or impaled, limbs sawn, tongue, ears, teeth, lips cut or torn off, hung upside down, drowned, crucified on boards, buried alive,
tied on anthills, thrown alive into sugar boilers, thrown down slopes in barrels bristling with nails inside, finally, given alive to be devoured by dogs trained for this purpose\footnote{Notes to Baron Malouet, Minister of Marine and Colonies…Au Cap Henry, chez P. Roux, imprimeur du Roi, October 1814, pp. 11-12.}.
Rochambeau Jr., commander after the death of General Leclerc of the expeditionary force sent by Bonaparte to reconquer Saint-Domingue and re-establish slavery, buyed dogs in Cuba specially trained for this purpose.
It goes without saying that the example given here of the French colonies, for the treatment of slaves, can be extended to all the other colonies.
\section{The slave trade and slavery in the nineteenth century}
The prohibition of the trade, despite the repression of the British squadrons, was not enforced and it was not until around 1860 that the traffic ended.
After a "great fear" of the slavers due to the insurrection of the slaves in the French part of Saint-Domingue, which led in 1804 to the independence of the Black Republic of Haiti,
the first half of the nineteenth century saw a new boom in American slave plantations.
This time no longer in the context of mercantilism, but of the market dominated by modern, industrial capitalism:
the rise in the south of the United States of the slave plantation, to supply raw materials to the English factories of Manchester and its region;
the rise of slavery in Cuba (for sugar production) and in Brazil (sugar and cocoa) for European consumption.
Slavery was not abolished until 1833 in the English colonies, in 1848 in the French colonies,
in 1866 in the United States (after the defeat of the Southerners in the American Civil War), in 1886 in Cuba (Spanish colony) and in 1888 in Brazil.
Forbidden in the Atlantic, the slave trade will experience a new development in the nineteenth century in East Africa, especially in Sudan (dependence on Egypt) and in the Sultanate of Zanzibar.
The Sultanate of Zanzibar, created by the Arabs of Oman, controlled from the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba the entire coast of the Indian Ocean, from Somalia to Mozambique\footnote{See Abdul Sheriff, Slaves, Spices and Ivory in Zanzibar. Integration of an East African Business Empire into the World Economy (1770-1873), Ohio University Press, 1987, 320 p. and G. Clarence-Smith (Ed.), The Economies of the Indian Ocean. Slave Trade in the Nineteenth Century, London: F.Cass, 1989.}.
This "Arab" slave trade was sometimes put forward to try to "excuse" the European slave trade, on the theme "We were not the only ones".
The problem is that this "Arab" slave trade was driven by the demand of the European capitalist market.
Indeed, its main objective was the search for ivory: by the slaughter of elephants, but especially by the looting of the "treasures" in elephant spikes accumulated by the chiefdoms of Central Africa.
Parts of the Nile or Zanzibar, looting expeditions destroyed villages, massacred or enslaved the population, the captives being destined to play the role of porters, to transport the ivory.
Slavery was a kind of "by-product" of ivory plundering: the slaves who survived were sold to the Middle East where domestic slavery remained,
or used as labour in the clove plantations of Zanzibar, the main supplier to the world clove market, controlled by the British.
The European market was indeed demanding ivory, solicited by the consumption of the wealthy classes: billiard balls, piano keys, knife handles for Sheffield cutlery.
We can estimate the number of slaves exported to Asia, through the Indian Ocean, in the nineteenth century, at 400,000\footnote{François Renault, Problems of research on the trans-Saharan and Eastern slave trade in Africa in De la Traite à l'esclavage, already quoted in footnote \vref{foot18}, tome 1, pp. 37-53.};
The number of slaves "produced" by the Sudanese slave trade can be estimated at 750,000 (plus 10 to 30 per cent of "losses" during transport, and an unevaluable proportion of losses at the time of capture)\footnote{Gérard Prunier, La traite soudanaise (The Sudanese Black trade) (1820-1885); ibid., volume 2, pp. 521-535.}.
\section{The Road to India and Asian Colonization}
While the Spaniards, after believing they were reaching the Indies from the west, colonized America, the Portuguese explored and opened, at about the same time, the eastern route, bypassing the African continent from the south.
Vasco da Gama reached India (the real one) in 1498.
The eastern colonization will first be the fact of the Portuguese, following the principle of the royal monopoly, then of the Dutch, the English, the French, who competed with them.
With some exceptions, and at least until the second half of the eighteenth century, the territorial possessions of the colonizers were limited to coastal trading posts.
Europeans come to India, incidentally to Indonesia, China and Japan, for luxury goods:
spices (pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg, etc.) and oriental handicraft products (luxury textiles: muslins, cashmere, and Indian (painted cotton canvases), silks, lacquers and porcelain from China).
Impossible to offer in return European manufactured items: Asians do better and cheaper.
We must resign ourselves to paying off purchases in cash. It is American silver that balances the purchases of Asian trade.
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, one-third, perhaps even half of the silver provided by America, was absorbed by China\footnote{F. Braudel, op. cit, volume 2, p. 169.}.
The latter tightly controls its entrances and only the Portuguese have been able to establish a trading post in Macau.
Japan, on the other hand, closed itself in 1638 to European trade, with the exception of limited and controlled access to the port of Nagasaki, reserved for the Dutch only.
However, from the seventeenth century, the Dutch, to ensure the monopoly of spices take control, directly or by interposed local sovereigns, of the Moluccas, then Java where they established the capital of their commercial empire, Batavia (now Jakarta).
During the eighteenth century, French and English undertook to consolidate their trading posts by a territorial hold.
Dupleix's French attempt was considered a personal initiative and disavowed by the French East India Company.
This attempt was abandoned following the French defeat in the Seven Years' War (1763). The British East India Company took over.
Plassey's victory (1757) resulted in the company's takeover of Bengal. The style of colonization and commercial relations will then change radically.
To trade, the company adds as a source of profits the fiscal exploitation of the conquered territories. Then begins the "repatriation" of money and other wealth accumulated in India.
At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the movement began that would transform India from a supplier of manufactured and luxury goods to a supplier of raw materials for British industry (cotton, jute).
This will also transformt India into a buyer of manufactured products of English industry, resulting in the ruin of traditional craftsmanship.
For China, it is even later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that the reversal takes place: to settle the purchases of Chinese products (silks, tea) silver is gradually replaced by opium imported into China by the East India Company.
It was around 1820 approximately that the balance reversed to the detriment of China.
The "Opium War" (1839-1842) forced China to open five ports, cede Hong Kong, and especially the import of opium that the Chinese government had tried to prohibit.
In Braudel's words: "Here is China paid in smoke, and what smoke!"\footnote{F. Braudel, ibid., p. 191.}
\section{What consequences for peoples?}
For the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) the history of the colonial administration of the Dutch "unfolds a picture of murders, of betrayals, corruption and baseness that will never be equalled"\footnote{Thomas Stanford Raffles, The History of Java and its dependencies, London, 1818, quoted by Marx, op. cit., p. 194.}.
The author of this judgment is the governor whom the English appointed during their occupation, during the Napoleonic Wars.
Looting, enslavement, extortion, all means are good to ensure the Dutch East India Company which exploits Indonesia until the end of the eighteenth century record profits.
The state, in the nineteenth century, will do even better: from 1830, Governor Van den Bosch establishes the "system" that bears his name: forced cultures, forced labor.
Peasants have to provide one-fifth of their best land, one-fifth of their working time to provide free export products. Forced crops and forced labour will often go far beyond official boundaries:
we will go so far as to demand a third or even half of the land, and in working time from 66 to 240 days a year\footnote{Charles Robequain, Le monde malais (the malese world), Paris, Payot, 1946, p. 351.}. At the same time, the property tax doubles.
Later the establishment of plantations (tobacco, rubber trees, oil palms, etc.), will lead to the recruitment of "contractual" labor, actually forced laborers treated worse than slaves.
In India, the English will find the support of certain social strata – in particular merchants and bankers – who will become intermediaries of British trade.
In 1793, by a simple regulation, the administration of the East India Company changed the status of the "Zamindars", who were tax farmers in the Mughal Empire.
The "Zamindars" then became large landowners, British-style Landlords, in the territories in which where they were responsible for collecting taxes whereas peasants were reduced to the condition of precarious tenants.
Monopolies of salt, opium, betel, and other products were granted to senior employees of the company, who made quick fortunes.
But the worst was yet to come, with the destruction of handicrafts: India's economic equilibrium was based on the association of agriculture and handicrafts (textiles in particular).
From 1814 to 1835, imports of "Indians" into Britain fell by three-quarters; conversely, imports of British industrial cotton into India are multiplied by 50!
The ruined craftsmen had to retreat to the work of the land, already overloaded. A governor-general of India could thus say that the bones of the weavers whitened the plains of India.
Periodic famines became a feature of India:
18 famines from 1875 to 1900 caused 26 million deaths\footnote{J. Chesneaux, L'Asie orientale au XIXe et XXe siècles, Paris, PUF, 1966, p.189.}. There will be others in the twentieth century (that of Bengal, in 1943, will make 3 to 4 million deaths).
For China, the first opium war will be followed by other European military interventions aimed at imposing the law of great capitalist powers, which will be awarded port "concessions".
Since 1842, they have required China to limit customs duties on imported foreign goods to 5\%.
We will witness a dislocation of the traditional economic circuits, a worsening of misery that will lead to peasant insurrections, the most important of which was that of the Taï-Pings (1851-1864).
We can summarize with Marx:
\begin{displayquote}
The discovery of the gold and silver countries of America, the enslavement of the natives, their imprisonment in mines or extermination, the beginnings of conquest and plunder in the East Indies,
the transformation of Africa into a kind of commercial garenne for the hunt for black skin, these are the idyllic processes of primitive accumulation that signal the capitalist era at its dawn\footnote{Karl Marx, op. cit., p. 193.}.
\end{displayquote}
\section{Eastern Europe and the "second serfdom"}
Dependency and exploitation through the global market of America, Asia and Africa have also affected the Middle East and Eastern Europe.
The Ottoman Empire was gradually penetrated by Western trade.
Since the sixteenth century, the French, followed by the English, have benefited for their counters, the "ladders of the Levant", from exterritoriality.
In Eastern Europe (roughly, east of the Elbe) the local aristocracy, to purchase luxury goods from Western Europe (clothingfurniture, wine, etc.) intensified its exploitation of the peasantry.
By taking ownership of the land and generalizing serfdom.
This is what historians call the "second serfdom" that is developing in Eastern Europe (Russia, Poland, Prussia) at the very moment when serfdom is disappearing from Western Europe.
It will reach its peak in Russia at the end of the eighteenth century, under the reign of Catherine II, and will take forms close to slavery pure and simple.
It will make possible this classified ad in a St. Petersburg newspaper:
"For sale, a wig maker and a cow of good breed". This reinforced exploitation of the peasantry allows the large owners to make money by massively exporting food and raw materials to Western Europe: cereals, flax, wood, etc.
The maritime cities of the Hansa (German and Baltic), then the Dutch, finally the English, will be the intermediaries and beneficiaries of this trade.
\section{Market capital and financial capital (usurious). From mercantilism to liberalism}
The colonial system of the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries is based on monopoly:
royal monopoly at first for Spain and Portugal, then monopoly of privileged companies such as the various companies of the Indies (Dutch, English, French).
The doctrine of foreign trade is mercantilism, advocated by Colbert:
the enrichment of the king (and the kingdom) is considered to be linked to the acquisition of the maximum amount of monetary cash; for which it is necessary to import at least as possible and export as much as possible.
Hence a protectionist customs policy.
Competition between trading nations will often take on a violent course: piracy (privateering) and abuses of all kinds. It will often lead to wars:
in the wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, alongside dynastic rivalries, economic motivations took an increasing place:
thus, in the war waged by Holland (the "United Provinces") revolted against Spain, in the Anglo-Dutch and Franco-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century,
in the War of the Spanish Succession, in the Seven Years' War, in the Anglo-French conflict under the Revolution and the Empire.
The advent of industrial capitalism was accompanied by the promotion of "liberal" ideology.
Industrial capitalism comes into conflict with previous institutions: criticism of monopolies, corporate regulations, colonial "Exclusive"
(a rule that forbade the colonies to trade with foreign nations, and to produce manufactured goods whose supply was to be reserved for the metropolis),
criticism of protectionism, trafficking and slavery.
However, this liberal ideology is of variable geometry:
it triumphed in nineteenth-century England with the repeal, in 1846, of the protectionist laws on wheat.
These laws responded to the interests of the "landlords", but embarrassed the industrialists by bidding the price of bread and the level of wages.
But in contradiction with the principles of "free trade", the same England imposes on India a discriminatory customs policy.
It penalizes Indian exports of manufactured goods, and encourages imports of British industrial products.
England fought the slave trade through her Atlantic surveillance squadron, but supported the Southerners slave owners, their cotton suppliers, during the American Civil War…
The United States and Germany will achieve their industrialization under the aegis of a protectionist policy.
The end of the nineteenth century saw the triumph, including in England, of imperial protectionism.
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, colonial trade fueled finance capital (usurious):
the bank in fact at that time did not practice productive investments, but lent to the States, to the sovereigns.
Those who pay are the subjects, subject to tax obligations, that is to say in the final analysis especially the peasants.
The financial centers are successively Genoa which changes the money of the King of Spain into gold coins necessary for the pay of his mercenaries.
Genoa will finally be a victim of the bankruptcy of the Spanish state
Then, the trade in colonial products was concentrated in Antwerp, which was until 1575 the first financial center in Europe.
The insurrection of the Dutch against the King of Spain ruined Antwerp and brought amsterdam to the center of great commerce and finance.
In the eighteenth century, this function passed to London.
In colonial trade, monarchical states and, of course, bourgeois states like the Netherlands, are linked by their interests to the merchant and financial bourgeoisie.
Colonial policy was conducted with the means of the State.
This association, sometimes conflictual, is also manifested by the development of public debt and taxation.
Public debt and taxation that contribute powerfully to the exploitation and impoverishment of the peasantry, and constitute one of the levers of primitive accumulation.
Sovereigns, to immediately obtain the money they need and save themselves the burdens and delays of collecting taxes,
To finance the collection of certain taxes, according to a practice that dates back to antiquity.
This is what the "fermiers généraux" will do in France, who immediately provide the king with the money he needs.
These tax farmers are remunerated by collecting certain taxes on the soverign's behalf.
With a profit margin that sometimes reaches 100\% and is never less than 30\% (notoriously usurious margin).
Moreover, governments borrow, first from bankers and then directly from the public.
François 1st launched in 1522 the first public state loan by asking the bourgeois of Paris to lend him 200,000 pounds, for interest.
These were the first "rents on the town hall", guaranteed by the revenues of certain municipal taxes.
\begin{displayquote}
Public debt operates as one of the most energetic agents of primitive accumulation.\footnote{Karl Marx, op. cit, p. 196.}
\end{displayquote}
This method of plundering state resources for the benefit of the rich is flourishing today more than ever. (the Pinay and Giscard borrowings provide the contemporary illustration).
Colonial system, fiscal abuses, public debt, impoverishment and expropriation of peasants are preparing, in various ways, the advent of industrial capitalism.
All these means, however, were not sufficient, at first, to provide the manpower that nascent industrial capitalism needed.
It will be provided for in England by the use of the children of the "workhouses".
Lancashire, for its spinning and weaving, needed "small and agile fingers".
\begin{displayquote}
Immediately the custom of procuring so-called 'apprentices', workhouses belonging to the various parishes of London, Birmingham and elsewhere, was born.
Thousands of these poor abandoned children, aged seven to fourteen, were thus sent north.
The master (the child thief) was responsible for dressing, feeding and housing his apprentices in an "ad hoc" house near the factory.
During the work, they were under the eye of the guards.
It was in the interest of these prison warden to make these children work to excess.
Because their own pay decreased or increased depending on the quantity of products they knew how to extract from thoses children.
The mistreatment was the natural consequence…
In many manufacturing districts, mainly in Lancashire, these innocent beings, without friends or supporters, who had been handed over to the masters of the factory, were subjected to the most horrific tortures.
Exhausted by the excess of work… they were whipped, chained, tormented with the most studied refinements.
Often, when hunger twisted them the hardest, the whip kept them at work.\footnote{John Fielden, The Curse of the Factory System, London, 1836. Quoted by Karl Marx, op. cit. cit., p. 200.}
\end{displayquote}
These practices, contemporary "liberalism" has extended them to tens of millions of children, in Brazil, Pakistan, Thailand and elsewhere.
Thus came to the world the triumphant Capital, "sweating blood and mud through all pores"\footnote{Karl Marx, op. cit. cit., p. 202}.
\section{Jean Suret-Canale}
Jean Suret-Canale, volunteer veteran of the Resistance, interned resistance fighter, clandestine militant of the communist youth from 1939 to 1944,
former member of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party, is an honorary lecturer at the University of Paris VII.
A geographer and historian, he is the author of a dozen books on black Africa and the Third World.
