Belfort Bax

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

(I was extremely pleased to discover that www.marxists.org has a Bax 
archive. He and Rosa Luxemburg were two of the main critics of Eduard 
Bernstein's pro-imperialist apologetics, which had much in common with 
the arguments of people like Christopher Hitchens today. This is an 
excerpt from his "The True Aims of 'Imperial Extension' and 'Colonial 
Enterprise'". His articles are clearly in the tradition of Marx's 
writings on the Boxer Rebellion, Trotsky and CLR James's partisanship on 
behalf of Ethiopia in the 1930s, etc.)

This higher Communism, in which the work of the world will be carried on 
by all in the interest of all, and not by one class in the interest of 
another class, is what modern civilisation has before it as its 
inevitable outcome, but the result may be retarded, the present system 
of exploitation and wage-slavery may be maintained for a generation or 
longer yet by the sweeping away of the independence of the savage and 
barbaric peoples of the earth and the opening-up of their territories to 
European earth and the opening-up of their territories to European 
commerce and industry. Just as the one hope of the slave-holding states 
of North America of maintaining the system of negro-slavery lay in the 
formation of new slave states out of the fresh territories that were 
being opened-up on the eve of the American civil war, so the one hope of 
maintaining the present system of wage-slavery is to extend its sphere 
of operations. In order to continue to exist it must destroy primitive 
societies all the world over, together with earlier methods of the 
exploitation of human labour – above all, chattel slavery. Hence its 
sham humanitarian zeal! Its enemies, therefore, are two, one in the rear 
and one in the front Barbarism and Socialism.

This being so, it is clearly the interest of Socialists and of the 
working class movement generally to make common cause with these 
primitive peoples – barbarian or savage, as we term them – who are 
resisting the invasion of their ancestral tribal lands and the 
overturning of their old social customs and constitution by hordes of 
hired ruffians and buccaneers sent by European Governments to clear the 
way for Capitalism with maxims and new-pattern rifles. There are many 
ways in which a spoke may be put in the wheels of these forces of 
aggressive Capitalism. Those of an adventurous turn, instead of joining 
the hordes of chartered companies, might do good service in the 
organisation of native resistance in drilling, and in teaching the 
effective use of firearms. Those who remain at home can similarly do 
good service in stirring up working-class public opinion till it becomes 
as much as a Cabinet’s place is worth to engage in “military operations” 
of this description. In Italy a beginning seems to have been already 
made in this direction.

full: http://marxists.org/archive/bax/1896/05/trueaims.htm

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