Capitalism 7

The bourgeois reformers who wanted to carry out their social reforms to banish the revolution, but not at the expense of holy profit, their primary programme, had to look for another economic basis for the reforms. They found it outside their homeland, in the exploitation of colonised and semi-colonised peoples, whose ruthless, inhumane plunder and servitude brought in abnormal profits, out of which the capitalists paid the crumbs of union concessions and social reforms.

Clara Zetkin (1924): Die Intellektuellenfrage. In: Protokoll. Fünfter Kongress der Kommunistischen Internationale, Bd. II, S. 946-982.

Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) was a German Marxist, women's rights activist and KPD parliamentarian until 1933. She was a gifted orator and arch enemy of Paul von Hindenbrug, then President of the Reich, whom she described as a servant of capital. She died in exile in Moscow.

The workers’ movement put pressure on the German imperial government, especially in the 19th century. Chancellor Bismarck introduced reforms and improvements for workers in an attempt to placate them. As a Marxist, for Zetkin there was a connection between the prosperity and emancipation of workers in the Global North and the exploitation of workers in the Global South. Marxist historians like Silvia Federici and Walter Rodney further claim that the industrial revolution in Europe would not have been possible without slavery and the plantation system in the Global South, the enslaved workers and export-oriented production (Federici 2014: 129, German edition). Rodney described European workers as being bribed with “colonial profits” (Rodney 1972).

*Walter Rodney (1972): How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications. *Maria Mies (1986): Patriachy and Accumulation on a World Scale. Women in the International Division of Labour. London & New York: Zed Books. *Silvia Federici (2014): Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Automedia (auch in deutscher Übersetzung) *Anne McClintock (1995): Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge.

1924