Centuries of plunder — the material foundation of British and French capitalism
The wealth of Britain and France was not built by the genius of their ruling classes. It was built on the stolen labour and plundered resources of hundreds of millions of colonised people across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific.
The transatlantic slave trade, the plantation system, the extraction of raw materials, the destruction of indigenous industries, the imposition of unequal trade — these are the true foundations of Western capitalist development. Without colonialism, there would have been no industrial revolution in Britain and no bourgeois republic in France.
Colonialism was not an aberration of capitalism. It was its necessary condition. The primitive accumulation of capital required the violent dispossession of peoples worldwide. Marx documented this process in Capital — the expropriation of the agricultural population, the theft of the commons, the slave trade as the pedestal of bourgeois industry.
The largest empire in human history. At its height, it ruled over 400 million people — a quarter of the world's population. India alone was systematically deindustrialised: its textile industry destroyed to serve Lancashire mills. Famines in India, Ireland, and Africa killed tens of millions under British rule.
France colonised vast territories across Africa, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. The brutal exploitation of Algeria, the plunder of West Africa, the suppression of the Vietnamese independence movement, and the Haitian debt — all testify to French imperialism's violence.
Britain and France were the two largest slave-trading nations in history. Millions of Africans were kidnapped, transported in horrific conditions, and worked to death on plantations. The profits of slavery financed the industrial revolution and built the banking systems of London and Paris.
Formal colonialism ended, but exploitation continues through debt, structural adjustment, military bases, and unequal trade. The CFA franc system still binds fourteen African nations to French monetary control. British arms sales fuel wars across the Middle East and Africa.
"Europe is literally the creation of the Third World."
— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)Marxist-Leninists demand the complete and unconditional end to all forms of neocolonial exploitation. We support the right of all nations to self-determination and independence. We demand reparations for centuries of colonial plunder — not as charity, but as the return of stolen wealth.
We oppose the hypocrisy of Western governments that lecture the world about human rights while continuing to exploit, bomb, and destabilise nations across the Global South. NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO are instruments of imperialist domination that must be dismantled.
The working class of Britain and France has no interest in defending empire. Our enemies are not the peoples of the world — they are the capitalist class at home. International solidarity with the oppressed nations is not optional. It is a fundamental duty of every communist.
The struggle against imperialism is inseparable from the struggle for socialism. Join the fight.