onized were absorbed by the social relations of estranged labor and Capital. The empire of Capital expanded.
This is precisely the process that does not accompany colonization during the last stages of capitalist development. The colonized are deprived of their previous social order, their previous form of humanity, and are transformed into sources of primitive accumulation. And they are left suspended in this Limbo. The process is not completed. Primitive accumulation does not give way to proper Capital accumulation. No longer integrated in a pre-capitalist social order, the colonized do not acquire the social relations of Capital. Colonization ceases to serve the capitalist purpose of expanding the social relations of estranged labor and Capital; it ceases to be a social form of development of productive forces. It is no longer the empire of Capital that expands, but a type of empire much older than Capital, an empire like Rome's, the empire of England, France, the United States.
During the period of capitalism's decrepitude, when its engagement with dynastic affairs all but replaces its historical character as a form of development of productive forces, colonization does not expand the social relations of Capital but the power of dynasties. It is not through colonization that the productive forces for which there is room in the dominant social order are developed. What expands is not Capital but 'western civilization,' a salad in which pre-capitalist prejudices and superstitions are combined with feudal forms of State power and spiced with commodities that embody estranged labor. Serving this salad to everyone in the world is experienced by English officials as a civilizing mission entrusted by destiny to tall, light-haired, pink-skinned Protestant Christians. Topped with French dressing the same salad becomes 'French Civilization' and by the time it is made in USA it is a complete and all-exclusive Way of Life. If an English gentleman had announced this civilizing mission only a short historical moment earlier, he would have been dismissed as a charlatan or an idiot; his pretensions would at best have provoked amusement; perhaps his mission would have been understood and pitied as a delusion of grandeur needed by a pathetic and unsuccessful English merchant who peddled industrially produced Indian cloth to the peasants and artisans of agrarian England. Yet after a few centuries of accumulation of Capital, the delusion becomes a comprehensive Weltanschauung, and the deluded merchant becomes a civilizing colonizer. Contrary to a widely held view, this pretension does not in itself constitute racism. It becomes racism only when it is internalized by the colonized, when the salad called "western civilization" is digested. Forcing the colonized to digest this salad becomes the great historical task of colonization during latter-day capitalism.
Ignorant of the sources of the colonizer's power precisely because the social relations of Capital are, and remain, unknown to them, the colonized acquire the illusion that they've been hit by a natural catastrophe. This was also true of the colonized peasants of England
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