In J.A. Hobson’s work Imperialism and E. Said’s Culture and Imperialism, a single dominant theme is grappled with: imperialism. By means of a perhaps overly-playful use of a musical metaphor in Said’s work, I will argue that imperialism as an historical phenomenon must be examined from a polyphonic perspective and that any examination that does not take into account the vast range of historical actors and actions is bound to be myopic and incomplete. This criticism, while obviously applicable to Hobson, will be extended to Said as well.
For Hobson, imperialism is the outgrowth of an unfortunate aberration within capitalism: underconsumption and oversavings. Hobson’s economic heterodoxy, as he called it, led him to criticize the excessive savings of the bourgeoisie. These savings, he argued, constituted “consuming power” which should be applied to the “effective demand for commodities.” (Hobson, 82) The bourgeoisie were not shopping enough. Goods, unconsumed, piled up at the market. Capital moldered, unspent, desperately seeking investment. This “economic condition of affairs … forms the taproot of Imperialism.” (Hobson, 81)
Capitalism itself, therefore, was not the source of imperialist ventures; rather, the failure of the bourgeoisie to consume, and their unfortunate fixation with savings, lead to imperialism. Deferred gratification had been taken too far and European capitalism was floundering. Imperialism provided the moth-eaten savings of the bourgeoisie a protected realm for investment. With only mild violence done to both Weber and Hobson, one might sardonically term this theory “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Imperialism.”
The blame that Hobson’s slightly less than heterodox political economy lays at the feet of underconsumption, could easily, and I would argue, more accurately, be placed squarely upon the shoulders of the cyclic crises of overproduction that inherently plague capitalism. Born of the anarchic compulsion of the unplanned economy, goods flooded the market; what followed was neither underconsumption nor oversavings, but overproduction. The all-too-invisible Smithian hand played deus absconditus. The result? Depression.
