robbery, fraud, and force, values were extracted from the colonial nations, and were transmuted into profit for the sharks of European and American financial capital. The stronger the position of any State capitalist trust in the world market, the larger were the profits it could derive from the exploitation of the colonies. Out of these surplus profits the trust could afford to pay its wage slaves a trifle more than the ordinary wages of labour. Not of course to all the wage workers, but only to those who are usually spoken of as skilled workers. These strata of the working class are thereby won over to the side of capital. Their reasoning runs as follows: “If ‘our’ industry finds a market in the African colonies, so much the better; it will flourish all the more; the boss will make larger profits, and we shall have a finger in the pie.” Thus capital fetters its wage slaves to its own State, buying one section of them, who are attracted by a share in the colonial plunder.
The founders of scientific communism had already taken note of this phenomenon. Engels, for example, in a letter to Kautsky, wrote in the year 1882: “You ask me what the British workers think about colonial policy. Very much the same as what they think about politics in general. Here there does not yet exist a labour party; there are only conservatives and liberal radicals; while the workers gladly participate in those advantages which accrue to the British in virtue of their monopoly on the world market and in the colonies.” Upon this soil has flourished a peculiar form of servility, an attachment of the workers to the bourgeoisie of their own country, an abasement before them. Engels wrote in 1889: “The most repulsive phenomenon here in England is the bourgeois respectability which soaks into the very marrow of the workers. . . . So deeply rooted is this inborn respect for ‘betters’ and ‘superiors’ that Mr. Bourgeois finds it an easy matter to catch the workers in his nets. I really believe that, at the bottom of his heart, John Burns is more flattered by his popularity with Cardinal Manning and other notables, with the bourgeoisie generally, than by his popularity with his own class.”