Once More on Minerals and Imperialism
Prabhat Patnaik
THE Industrial Revolution which inaugurated industrial capitalism in the world had occurred in Britain in cotton textiles; but neither Britain nor other North European countries could grow any raw cotton at all. The very coming into being of industrial capitalism in short was dependent upon the metropolis obtaining a steady supply of raw materials from wherever they happened to be produced. This situation has not changed one iota in all these years. The composition of output in metropolitan capitalism has changed over time with new products replacing old ones; along with this change, the composition of the required raw materials too has changed. But a substantial proportion of these raw materials continue to lie outside the domain of metropolitan capitalism and a steady supply of these materials has to be obtained by it on an assured basis; the need for ensuring such a steady supply provides a powerful motive for imperialist control over the “outside” world by metropolitan capitalism.
Traditional bourgeois economics visualises such supplies being made available to the metropolis through normal commodity exchange. These raw materials in other words are assumed to be already produced as commodities; and their supply in adequate quantities for meeting the demand for them is assumed to be ensured through price variations, obviating any necessity for exercising imperialist control. This however assumes that all production of all raw materials is already being conducted under capitalist conditions, presumably through raw material companies from the metropolis. This argument thus denies the need for imperialism by assuming in effect that imperialism already pervades the world. Or, to put it differently, it postulates that there is no distinction between the metropolis and the “outside”, since the “outside” is supposed to have been already annexed and assimilated by the metropolis. The irony here lies in the fact that bourgeois economics seeks to argue against the existence of imperialism by implicitly assuming that it is already pervasively prevalent.
There is a second argument that is often put forward by bourgeois economics against capitalism’s drive for imperialism. Many authors draw attention to the extremely small share that such raw materials from “outside” have in the total value of output of the metropolis. It is absurd, they argue, to suggest that metropolitan capitalism would make the extraordinary effort of engaging in a quest for imperialist world domination just for procuring raw materials that account for such a tiny proportion of its total output value.
The reply to this claim was provided by Harry Magdoff in his book The Age of Imperialism, where he made the crucial point that one cannot have any manufacturing whatsoever without the use of inputs as use-values; and this is so, no matter how small the exchange value of these inputs may be relative to the total exchange value of the product. Since exchange values are socially determined, the exchange value of raw materials can be pushed down even to zero owing to the power of metropolitan capital; but the physical use of inputs for production is naturally determined and simply cannot be avoided. And obtaining these physical inputs from “outside” is a paramount necessity for metropolitan capitalism. To argue from the relatively small size of the exchange value embodied in the raw materials that their significance for production is negligible, or that acquisition of control over their sources of supply is of secondary importance, constitutes a grievous error.
While both agricultural raw materials and food crops are important requirements for metropolitan capitalism for which it wants to control the pattern of land-use all over the world, so that its demands and those of the population resident within its domain are met, we shall focus in what follows on the case of minerals only. In fact, the critical nature of the dependence of the metropolis on mineral imports from “outside” was demonstrated recently by the American experience with regard to rare earths.
Against Trump’s threat to raise tariffs against imports from China, the Chinese government announced a temporary moratorium on the export of certain rare earth elements to the US. Since China is the largest producer of rare earths in the world, accounting for about 70 per cent of total world output, and has an even larger share, around 90 per cent, of the world’s rare earths processing capacity, the Chinese suspension of exports to the US put the latter in a real bind. Not only could it not get rare earths from China, but it could not also get sufficient rare earths from any other country to replace Chinese supplies, since no other country produces anywhere near China’s output. The US was forced therefore to negotiate with China on tariffs in return for the resumption of rare earths supplies from the latter.
The point to note however is this: the total value of US rare earths imports in 2024 was just $170 million. The total value of US imports of all goods and services in 2024 being $ 4.11 trillion, the imports of rare earths alone accounted for only around .004 per cent of its total imports. The divergence between use value and exchange value could not be sharper than in this case: certain mineral elements constituting just .004 per cent of imports are nonetheless of such critical importance in a whole range of industries from electronics to automotives to wind turbines to high performance magnets to medical equipment, that even a temporary disruption in their supplies becomes a matter of great concern.
The motivation this provides for imperialist expansion is also clear from this instance. In order to reduce reliance on Chinese supplies of rare earths, the US is exploring other possible supply sources such as Greenland. Of course, American interest in Greenland is for a whole range of other mineral products as well, not just for rare earth elements; but an edge to this imperialist quest for Greenland has been imparted by China’s temporary disruption of rare earths supplies. These alternative sources of supply can never supplant China fully, since China has about half of the world’s reserves of rare earth elements; but this instance captures in a nutshell a crucial motivation for capitalist imperialism.
This, to be sure, is not the only motivation. Rosa Luxemburg had rightly underscored the market motive for imperialism, the fact that sustained capital accumulation within the metropolis is impossible without its making inroads into pre-capitalist markets lying outside of it, for which imperialist annexations of these outside territories becomes necessary. But while it is possible to visualise external stimuli for the capitalist sector other than pre-capitalist markets, such as for instance the demand arising from the capitalist state located within this mode of production itself (though the importance of this alternative stimulus declines in the era of globalisation), there can be no substitute sources of all the raw materials required by metropolitan capitalism within metropolitan capitalism itself. The quest for raw materials, including minerals, provides therefore an abiding motive for capitalist imperialism.
It is not surprising that the really intense struggle launched by the advanced capitalist countries against the countries of the global South was when the latter, following their political decolonisation, sought to achieve economic decolonisation by acquiring control over their natural resources, including their mineral wealth. The coup d’etats engineered by imperialism against Mossadegh in Iran, Arbenz in Guatemala, Allende in Chile, and Lumumba in Congo were linked to these leaders’ plans to acquire control over their respective countries’ natural resources, including in most cases mineral wealth.
The imposition of neoliberal regimes on the global South, under which control over the latter’s natural resources passed back in many instances to metropolitan capital, provided a more stable and reliable imperial arrangement. It obviated to an extent the necessity for such coups; structural constraints imposed on these countries now started playing the role that changes in government had played earlier. But with the neoliberal order running into a crisis, and the attempt on the part of US imperialism to cope with this crisis by imposing a one-way “beggar-thy-neighbour” policy on other countries, especially those in the global South, things are beginning to change. The anti-imperialist resistance of these countries will become stronger in this new situation; and their struggle for the reacquisition of control over their natural resources, including minerals, will become more powerful in the coming days. The crisis of capitalism thus makes imperialism more vulnerable, and hence also even more vicious.
