A chapter from a book on Imperialism that was never completed

(When the late Mark Jones suggested a joint project on imperialism, I agreed to write half the book including this chapter on issues posed by Hardt-Negri's "Empire".)

Recent protests against "globalization" not only present a formidable challenge to the capitalist class., they also challenge some of the fundamental premises of Marxism. When the Communist Manifesto states that "the bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part," what kind of Marxist would disagree? And if the "bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society," is it reactionary to oppose free trade agreements such as the WTO, or leading-edge scientific techniques such as genetically modified food? Perhaps the endangered sea turtle, whose puppet likeness is ubiquitous to these protests, is the perfect symbol for a kind of rear guard romanticism that Marx and Engels would have condemned.

The coverleaf of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's "Empire" tells us that the book is "an unabashedly utopian work of political philosophy, a new Communist Manifesto." Leaving aside the question of whether utopian is an appropriate term for those seeking to write a "new Communist Manifesto," there is little doubt that the authors still regard the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class. While in 1848 the Communist Manifesto gave it credit for "far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals," "Empire" points to the contemporary wonders of something they call "postmodernization" or "informatization." Essentially, this refers to the widespread use of computer networks that similarly inspired Lyotard's "The Postmodern Condition" or the Toffler's "Third Age." With an "informational economy," all that is old will become new again: "Just as the processes of industrialization transformed agriculture and made it more productive, so too the informational revolution will transform industry by redefining and rejuvenating manufacturing processes." (Empire, p. 285)

The logical next step for Hardt-Negri is to suggest that "globalization" might not be so bad after all, if one of the unintended consequences is to diffuse such technology to underdeveloped countries just as British colonialism brought telegraphs and railroads to a backward-looking India.

For 'orthodox' support of this analysis, they offer as testimony some articles that Marx wrote for the NY Daily Tribune in 1853 on British rule in India. In these articles, Marx--while not exactly championing British colonialism--regards the destruction of village communities as necessary since they have always been "the solid foundation of Oriental despotism...the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath the traditional rules depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies."

How then can one remain a bona fide Marxist while protesting assaults on agrarian village communities today? If Marx marveled at the revolutionary consequences of free trade in the Communist Manifesto, why shouldn't we? While the youth in the streets of Seattle and Quebec might be well-intentioned, a higher level of global interaction and communication incarnated as fast food chains and cable television could be just what the doctor ordered for remote, superstitious outposts in tropical rainforests.

As much as one-sided readings of the Tribune articles reinforce the sort of soft-core imperialist apologetics found throughout Hardt and Negri's work, they gently admit that "Marx was limited by his scant knowledge of India's present and past." This must be a reference to the fact that the theory of Oriental despotism, with all its outdated conjecture about large-scale irrigation systems leading to backward-looking dynasties, is false. As Aijaz Ahmad points out, whatever Marx knew about India derives mostly from travel writings by François Bernier (In Theory, p. 231), while J.M. Blaut states that the theory of Oriental despotism was advanced only "very tentatively by Marx and Engels, and...it appears that Engels rejected it altogether in his later writings."(Colonizer's Model, p. 142)

Hardt and Negri's reading of Marx is very much a one-sided affair. It fails to account for Marx's letter to Danielson, a Russian populist and translator of Capital, that describes British rule as a "bleeding process with a vengeance." Nor does it account for Engels' enthusiastic support for the Taipei rebellion:

"There is evidently a different spirit among the Chinese now. . . . The mass of people take an active, nay, a fanatical part in the struggle against the foreigners. They poison the bread of the European community at Hongkong by wholesale, and with the coolest meditation. . . . The very coolies emigrating to foreign countries rise in mutiny, and as if by concert, on board every emigrant ship, fight for its possession.. . . Civilization mongers who throw hot shell on a defenseless city and add rape to murder, may call the system cowardly, barbarous, atrocious; but what matter it to the Chinese if it be but successful? . . . We had better recognize that this is a war 'pro aris et focis,' a popular war for the maintenance of Chinese nationality." (In Theory, p. 229)

For Hardt and Negri, on the other hand, national liberation is a "poisoned gift." Although their analysis is couched in obscure postcolonialist syntax, the basic message is that in the face of "global capitalist hierarchy," genuine liberation is impossible. They write that "while...nationalism seeks to liberate the multitude from foreign domination, it erects domestic structures of domination that are just as severe." Thus, once stripped of its self-conscious ironies, "Empire" concludes with the message heard in other quarters that There Is No Alternative. (Empire, p. 133)

Despite all the attempts to cloak themselves in the mantle of the Communist Manifesto, there is little support for their arguments there, despite Marx's grudging respect for the bourgeoisie in the early 1800s. Ultimately for Marx, the only revolutionary class of importance was the proletariat whose significance lies in its social power to overthrow the bourgeoisie and all its wondrous works.

In Hardt-Negri's postmodernist world, there is little support for a proletarian orientation since logically the consummation of an "informational economy" would minimize the role of factory workers. As labor moves outside the factory walls, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the "fiction" that the assembly line and the working day are useful reference points. So instead of conceiving factories as the front line in a battle to transform society, Hardt and Negri are content to raise such reformist slogans as "a social wage and a guaranteed income for all." (p. 403)

Furthermore, instead of considering ways that traditional forms of workers power such as Soviets can be fostered in a contemporary setting, they look instead to "posses," an organizational form that is appropriate for the shifting, deracinated social fabric of a postmodernist world. As they put it, "Posse is the standpoint that best allows us to grasp the multitude as singular subjectivity: posse constitutes its mode of production and its being." Underneath the inflated jargon, it turns out that the authors are referring to rap music groups.

While Michael Hardt has led a rather conventional academic career, Antonio Negri's lurid career as a "revolutionary" has lent their book a certain cachet in the bourgeois press always on the lookout for a story. Now under house arrest, Negri is a founding father of "Autonomist Marxism" that received its inspiration from a loosely organized grass-roots movement in Italy during the 1970s.

"Autonomia" referred to a belief that workers and students should take direction action against the capitalist system 'autonomously', like not paying for a ride on a bus, etc. When Italy failed to respond to the autonomist movement, the activists became frustrated and turned to Red Brigade terrorism. Negri was charged with aiding the Red Brigades and sentenced to a long prison term. Although he denied any direct involvement, he refused to disassociate himself politically from the aims of the Red Brigades. The judge in the case, who interestingly enough was sympathetic to the Communist Party, decided that even though no direct links between the "autonomists" and the brigades could be proven, there was heavily circumstantial evidence that they had overlapping memberships and that Negri was a link between the two movements.

As is well understood in Marxist circles, populists of the Narodnik type often turn to the right when the system can not be overthrown through kidnappings, assassination, etc. Many a Russian middle-class radical who could not overthrow Czarism through the "propaganda of the deed" became transformed into Social Revolutionaries, who were revolutionary in name only. Kerensky was their leader.

In Italy, a similar phenomenon took place. And Negri apparently was swept up by the rightward boomerang, as indicated by his decision to run for office on the Radical Party ticket. This party positioned itself as an alternative to the big capitalist parties and the working-class parties as well. In Marxist terms, it would be described as a quintessential middle-class formation.

Hardt and Negri are not the first to have championed the diffusion of capitalist property relations and technology into the underdeveloped world in the name of Marx and Engels. While the more well-known aspect of the "revisionist debate" in the German Social Democracy from 1896 to 1898 centers on Eduard Bernstein's opposition to working class revolution, his tendency also believed in the civilizing role of colonialism, even using the Communist Manifesto for 'orthodox' support. Since the years in which these debates took place overlap with the full flowering of the imperialist system, it is not surprising that the 1890s Social Democracy would reflect immense pressures from capitalist society.

In a January 5, 1898 article titled "The Struggle of Social Democracy and the Social Revolution," Bernstein makes the case for colonial rule over Morocco. Drawing from English socialist Cunningham Graham's travel writings, Bernstein states there is absolutely nothing admirable about Morocco. In such countries where feudalism is mixed with slavery, a firm hand is necessary to drag the brutes into the civilized world:

"There is a great deal of sound evidence to support the view that, in the present state of public opinion in Europe, the subjection of natives to the authority of European administration does not always entail a worsening of their condition, but often means the opposite. However much violence, fraud, and other unworthy actions accompanied the spread of European rule in earlier centuries, as they often still do today, the other side of the picture is that, under direct European rule, savages are *without exception better off* than they were before.

"However much violence, fraud, and other unworthy actions accompanied the spread of European rule in earlier centuries, as they often still do today, the other side of the picture is that, under direct European rule, savages are without exception better off than they were before. Even before the arrival of Europeans in Africa, brutal wars, robbery, and slavery were not unknown. Indeed, they were the regular order of the day. What was unknown was the degree of peace and legal protection made possible by European institutions and the consequent sharp rise in food resources...

"Am I, because I acknowledge all this, an 'adulator' of the present? If so, let me refer Bax to The Communist Manifesto, which opens with an 'adulation' of the bourgeoisie which no hired hack of the latter could have written more impressively. However, in the fifty years since the Manifesto was written the world has advanced rather than regressed; and the revolutions which have been accomplished in public life since then, especially the rise of modern democracy, have not been without influence on the doctrine of social obligation." (Marxism and Social Democracy, p. 153-154)

Perhaps owing to the under-representation of citizens from the colonial world in the Second International, there are few rejoinders to Bernstein on these points other than from the Englishman Belfort Bax. Bax, an undeservedly obscure figure today, was one of the earliest converts to Marxism in England. In 1881 he published an article titled "Leaders of Modern Thought" that praised Marx. Marx, who was in the last days of his life, told his wife how happy the article made him feel. (Marxism and Social Democracy, p. 11-12). Eventually Bax drifted away from the revolutionary movement, but his polemics on colonialism have a timeless quality.

In a December 21, 1897 Neue Zeit article (Colonial Policy and Chauvinism), Bax rejected the idea that capitalism would benefit the "savage and barbaric races." (Unfortunately, the use of such terms was made acceptable by their presence in Engels's "Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State.") What are the consequences of the penetration of capitalism into precapitalist societies? Bax, who if alive today would have likely protested in Seattle or Quebec, writes:

"To begin with, let us ask what might actually be meant by the expansion of modern civilisation which Bernstein, in concert with the average bourgeois Philistine, commends so highly.’ It means, firstly, the sudden advance of the capitalist form of economy, usually in its crudest form, and the simultaneous suppression of the indigenous agricultural economy and civilisation — first and foremost, of course, the suppression of the prevailing mode of production and the current method of exchange. The old ways of organising labour are, as a rule, forcibly destroyed. A variety of religious and philanthropic pretexts are used to eliminate the structures of the old economy as well as the old religious practices and folk customs." (Marxism and Social Democracy, p. 140-141)

Furthermore, in anticipation of arguments more fully elaborated in Rosa Luxemburg's "Accumulation of Capital," Bax urges socialists to oppose colonialism not just for moral reasons, but because "the one sheet-anchor of the modern capitalist system is the possibility of expanding its area of activity." When capitalism finds new noncapitalist areas of the world to exploit, it relieves pressure on itself in countries where the profit rate is declining. Although couched in terms of "backward races," Bax's arguments are much closer to those that prevailed in revolutionary socialism throughout the twentieth century. It is a sign of our times that they need to be stated once again in reply to Hardt and Negri's defense of Empire on the cusp of a new century.

In a few short years the fight against Social Democratic revisionism would reach a climax with the outbreak of WWI and the October 1917 revolution in Russia. One's attitude toward the war and the new workers state became a litmus test for one's class loyalties. While the theoretical disputes in the Second International often had an abstract character, the death of millions of soldiers in trench warfare transformed them into immediate life-and-death questions.

No other work of revolutionary literature would succeed better at defining these underlying issues than Lenin's "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism." For Hardt and Negri, the work leads directly to their theory of Empire. This claim must be taken with a grain of salt since their interpretation of Lenin's theory of imperialism is one of a "structural stage in the evolution of the modern state" rather than a clarion call to wage class war in the face of war and other catastrophes.

Since Lenin's treatise on imperialism has taken on an iconic quality, as much of his writings have due to the nature of an official "Marxism-Leninist" movement, it would be useful to place the work in its historic context. As Lenin once said about "What is to be Done," the work was obsolete not five years after it was written. Did Lenin intend that "Imperialism" to be a work for the ages, as some orthodox Marxists have understood it to be? Nothing could be further from the truth, since everything that Lenin ever wrote was geared to the exigencies of the class struggle at a given time and in a given place.

On August 4 1914, while Russian troops prepared for an assault into East Prussia, German armies invaded Belgium and swept toward France. That day, August 4, was also the day that socialist members of the French and German parliaments voted to support emergency war appropriations. These socialists became known as 'defensists'. They wanted to postpone socialism until their own armies had successfully defended their own nation against the "barbarians" of the opposing nation. In reality, the socialist labor leaders and parliamentarians had become completely "bourgeoisified". They failed to defend the interests of the working-class against the nationalist fury whipped up by the warmakers in each nation.

Against the class traitors, Lenin spearheaded the formation of the Zimmerwald left. It advocated a "defeatist" policy of revolution and civil war inside each warring country. Other socialists, including Trotsky, considered Lenin extreme at first, but events conspired to make Lenin look reasonable. Germany pushed into France and the armies of the two nations fought along the Meuse River over a 6-month period in 1916, while more than a million soldiers died. On July 1, the British and French launched a counteroffensive on the Somme River in Belgium. In their initial assault some 60,000 soldiers perished in a single day, a sum equivalent to all of the US deaths during the 8-year Vietnam war.

While the blood-letting continued apace, Lenin sat down and wrote "Imperialism the Final Stage of Capitalism." This work is not merely an economic dissertation. It also serves as a foundation for the political line defended by the Zimmerwald left. Lenin zeroed in on the bankruptcy of social democratic reformism, the existence of an objectively revolutionary situation in the warring nations, the relationship of the World War to the crisis of imperialism, the link between struggles for national self-determination and socialism, and, finally, the need for a Third International.

With respect to the economic analysis itself, it mainly seeks to show that the growth of monopolies in the advanced industrial societies had not resolved the contradictions of the capitalist system, but merely raised them to a higher level. Kautsky, who found himself on the same side as Belfort Bax and Rosa Luxemburg in the 1896-1898 fight, had fallen prey to the same sorts of illusions. It was against these illusions that Lenin took aim, drawing from literature from both socialist and bourgeois sources with Rudolf Hilferding and John Hobson supplying much of the research.

For Lenin, the merger of bank capital and industrial capital took on paramount significance. With the growth of financial trusts, industry itself becomes ever more concentrated. When the national states compete with each other for profitable arenas for the export of capital, commercial rivalry soon turns into border skirmishes which in turn can and did turn into a full-scale conflagration.

Lenin's differences with Kautsky were of a different sort than those found in the Bax-Bernstein debate. Kautsky never believed that capitalism was on some kind of civilizing mission. Instead he believed that there was some fundamental difference between capitalism and imperialism, which he tended to regard as a "policy" that the ruling class preferred for reasons not intrinsic to the laws of capital accumulation. Lenin sought to root the development of imperialism in exactly those laws.

Lost in the debate was the impact of capitalism in the underdeveloped world itself, which for obvious reasons was secondary in face of the horrible cataclysm engulfing Europe, which presented the Marxist left with an urgent political challenge. As germane as Lenin's pamphlet was to those times, it does not exactly address the concerns of those who are on the receiving end at the time in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Leaving aside the question the imperialist slaughter in Europe, the issue of whether imperialist penetration of Africa, Asia and Latin America could produce beneficial economic growth--despite the cruelty that went along with it as night follows day--was never really addressed by Lenin. In other words, was there any merit to the sort of arguments found in Marx's Tribune articles on India?

Since in the eyes of many, Trotsky represents some kind of "revolutionary continuity" going back through Lenin to Marx and Engels, it is interesting to discover that he did find some benefit in imperialist domination:

"In contrast to the economic systems which preceded it, capitalism inherently and constantly aims at economic expansion, at the penetration of new territories, the surmounting of economic differences, the conversion of self-sufficient provincial and national economies into a system of financial interrelationships. Thereby it brings about their rapprochment and equalizes the economic and cultural levels of the most progressive and the most backward countries. Without this main process, it would be impossible to conceive of the levelling out, first, of Europe with Great Britain, and then, of America with Europe; the industrialization of the colonies, the diminishing gap between India and Great Britain." (Third International After Lenin, p. 38-39)

The notion of a "diminishing gap" between Great Britain and India is offered without any supporting evidence. Perhaps it is a legacy of the Tribune articles, since the late Marx referred to British role in India as a "bleeding process with a vengeance." Although Trotsky's theory of combined and uneven development tried to explain the persistence of precapitalist institutions, it really did not really address the question of whether their replacement by capitalist institutions would facilitate development, even on a capitalist basis. Although generally identified with a kind of socialist ultimatism, it appeared that Trotsky was not immune from beliefs in the "revolutionary" character of capitalist development.

For obvious reasons, the question of the role of capitalism in the colonial world did not receive an inordinate amount of attention between the two world wars. Despite the presence of thinkers such as M.N. Roy in the early Communist movement, very few were likely to share his analysis that "colonial capitalism" would have only a "retrograde effect" on India. Indeed, Roy's 1921 "India in Transition" has been described as very close to Paul Baran's "development of underdevelopment" theory. (Development Theory in Transition, p. 127) Not only was the revolutionary movement consumed with the problems of resisting fascism, challenges to colonialism that came down on the wrong side of the great alliance against Hitler were given short shrift. It was only after WWII when countries such as India, Egypt and Indonesia became formally independent that questions of capitalist "progress" in the South became paramount.

After WWII, development economists were forced to confront the question of whether imperialist penetration, despite the attendant brutality, could deliver the kind of dynamic growth that was described in the Communist Manifesto. As many would soon conclude, capitalism in the third world would retain the worst features of feudalism with none of the improvements promised by capitalism. Rather than uprooting feudal-like institutions such as debt peonage, colonialism or neo-colonialism would use them to maximize profits on latifundias run as agri-export enterprises. In Somoza's Nicaragua, for example, cattle ranches used computers and airplanes while ranch hands were little more than indentured servants.

Ironically one of the first challenges to stagism in Latin America originated within the UN through the auspices of the Economic Commission on Latin America (ECLA). In the late 1940s they decided that the free trade export model prevailing in Latin America put their countries at a disadvantage. Raul Prebisch, an Argentinian, was a key ECLA figure. He argued that import substitution and rapid industrialization was necessary. (Eventually the CP's of Latin America fell in line with the ECLA model.)

Another ECLA economist named Andé Gunder Frank shifted radically to the left and concluded that Latin America was subject to the structural problems identified by Monthly Review author Paul Baran in "Political Economy of Growth". According to Baran, early colonization by Europe had left Asia (except for Japan), Africa and Latin America in a disadvantageous position. Stagnation rather than the kind of explosive growth depicted in Marx's early writings was typical. Since the third world bourgeoisie was parasitic in nature, it was left to workers and peasants to break with imperialism and move the nation toward social equality and progress. It was no accident that the MR became strongly identified with the Cuban and Chinese revolutions, which put these theories to the test and seemed to confirm them.

Since "dependency theory" was focused on contradictions between the imperialist North and the "periphery," it became vulnerable to the charge that it lacked a sufficient grounding in the kind of class analysis that was necessary to transform an underdeveloped country. In the eyes of their critics, Monthly Review dependency theory had to be replaced by classical Marxism. Unfortunately, this kind of Marxism was one that predated the Russian Revolution. Essentially, it tried to resurrect the Marxism of the 1853 Tribune articles.

At the extreme pole you found the late Bill Warren who believed that imperialism was actually raising the living standards of third world countries. Ernesto Laclau, who would eventually abandon Marxism altogether for radical democracy, stated in a 1971 New Left Review article that Latin America's problem is the persistence of feudal relations. To develop, it would obviously require the expansion of capitalist relations, presumably even they arrived in the form of a multinational mining company or agri-export business. Another key figure was Robert Brenner, who appended Laclau-like arguments to his theory of the unique origin of capitalism in the British countryside in the 1500s.

Since many of the critics of the dependency school as well as its adherents came from the middle-class, it is not surprising that they would at a disadvantage to conceive of a truly Marxist solution to development, namely proletarian revolution. A job as a visiting lecturer at a university or in a United Nations think-tank hardly puts you in a position to see social contradictions from below, as a trade union activist or peasant leader would. For privileged foreigners, the colonial man and woman of the subordinate classes becomes a subject for study rather than an independent actor on a par with their observer.

The most interesting example of this sort of evolution is Colin Leys, who transformed himself from dependency theorist into critic all within the span of a year. Written in 1975, "Underdevelopment in Kenya: the Political Economy of Neo-Colonialism" puts forward views similar to those found in Samir Amin. Only a year after the publication of the book, Leys had changed his mind completely and affiliated himself with critics such as Robert Brenner, Bill Warren and Ernesto Laclau. What had changed his mind?

Evidently, other students of Kenyan society--also scholars from outside--had decided that not only was capital accumulation proceeding apace in the country, but that it predated imperialist control of the country which had been removed through revolutionary force in the 1950s. Reading their arguments, Colin Leys did a self-correction and announced that the local bourgeoisie was not so decadent and beholden to imperialism after all.

You can find his post-conversion views in a 1978 Socialist Register article titled "Capital Accumulation, Class Formation and Dependency: the Significance of the Kenyan Case." To start with, Leys tries to find some value in the writings of the wretched imperialist apologist Bill Warren:

"The conclusion which Warren's critics drew. . .was that the manufacturing growth rates of these countries were not evidence of 'autonomous industrial growth' in the Third World, as Warren believed. But this is a case of too much zeal. Britain, too, was once an 'exceptional' case."

After making a place at the table for Bill Warren, Leys then proceeds to declare on behalf of the Brenner thesis:

"Brenner, correctly in my view, stresses the centrality of the class relations which [Adam] Smith took as given. On this view, what is decisive for the development of capitalist production relations is the prior configuration and character of classes--for instance, the availability or otherwise of 'free' labour, the respective political power of non-landed and landed classes affecting the possibility of capital investment in land, and so on."

All these theoretical declarations are merely a prelude to his main task, which is to demonstrate the vibrancy of Kenyan capitalism. His notion of the centrality of class relations is less about identifying and focusing attention on potential gravediggers of the system, but on how the system can "develop" under the auspices of the native ruling class.

He makes much of the transfer of expatriate-owned ranches and coffee plantations to African owners. "Passenger road transportation was also in African hands by 1977 as were tour companies, laundries and dry cleaning, and a rapidly growing share of the hotel and restaurant sectors." This leads Leys to endorse comments made by an unidentified Kenyan state official, "In 15 years, if the political climate of Kenya and the world economy stay stable, 90% of manufacturing will be Kenyan owned." In the conclusion to Leys's article, he states, "In less abstract terms, Kenya appears, from this analysis, as a modest example of a 'systematical combination of moments' conducive to the transition to the capitalist mode of production."

The "moments" Leys is referring to are those mentioned by Karl Marx in the chapter on the genesis of the industrial capitalist in volume one of Capital. Specifically, they are the different "moments" of primitive accumulation which are "systematically" combined at the end of the seventeenth century in England. They include colonial plunder, slavery, extermination of the American Indian, etc. Any connection between this kind of primitive accumulation and Kenyan ownership of laundries, etc., is tenuous at best.

When a Kenyan graduate student named John Enyang learned of Leys' views on an Internet mailing list, he offered these remarks:

"I'd like to make a tangential remark about the Kenyan bourgeoisie and it's rule. The most powerful elements in this group owe their positions to the largesse of one Johnson Kamau (aka Jomo Kenyatta). After independence in 1963 there were various schemes to "nationalise" the economy and reduce the grip of the British settlers, especially over the best agricultural land. And strangely enough, these schemes seemed to greatly enrich Kenyatta's family and his immediate coterie who gained at the occasional expense of the settlers. Many coffee farms in the highlands and wheat farms in the rift valley were "nationalised" in this way. Needless to say those who had borne the brunt of British repression during the Mau-Mau, which was after all a rebellion to recover lands which had been forcibly grabbed by British settlers over the previous seventy years, had to make do with the leavings from the table of this new bourgeoisie.

"As for the Kenyan industrial sector, it has never constituted more than a handful of knock-down car assembly plants (owned by foreign capital) and a few foreign owned factories which to this day supply the rest of East Africa with such items as toothpaste, cooking oil and soap.

"It's also interesting that Leys should be talking of the Kenya of the mid 1970's. This is about the time that Kenyatta was dealing with dissidents by such means as throwing them off the rift valley escarpment. If I remember correctly, one J.J. Kariuki, who had a reputation as a mildly progressive dissident in Kenyatta's regime, met such a fate. Another, Tom Mboya was mysteriously shot in broad daylight a few years before this.

"In short, I have to wonder how any observer could describe the Kenya of the mid-1970's as anything other than the actualization of the worst aspects of dependent capitalism."

Enyang's views come from an entirely different angle than either the "dependency" theorists or their critics. For Marxism to have relevance to a new generation of radicals, it will have to find ways to develop communications globally among those who reject capitalism. In the dawn of the twenty-first century we are facing many of the same questions that faced Lenin a hundred years ago. In order for an anti-capitalist (ie. communist) movement to go forward, it will have to grapple first of all with new versions of 'revisionism'. In a period of extended peace (excluding those countries sacrificed at the altar of 'low intensity' warfare) and rising prosperity, the same sorts of illusions are inevitable. Those who stand in awe of personal computers, online trading systems, e-commerce, cable television and all the rest would probably have genuflected before the financial and industrial trusts of the early 1900s whose tentacles extended worldwide.

It is the purpose of this book to revisit some of these questions and explore new ones. Has capitalism been raising the standard of living in the third world, as neoliberal apologists like Thomas Friedman claim? What is the nature of ecological imperialism? Many of the economic gains in such countries have come at the expense of destruction to the commons. Would Marx and Engels have accepted deforestation, desertification, the death of rivers and lakes and wildlife, as a necessary side effect of the revolutionary capitalist transformation of underdeveloped countries? Finally, is the question that confronted Lenin merely a historical question, namely does the conflict between imperialist countries over spheres of influence threaten world peace as it did in 1914? If it is not just a historical question, then the urgency to create a new Zimmerwaldist movement is greater than ever given the weapons of mass destruction that exist everywhere, including the underdeveloped world.

Sources:

1. Michael Hardt-Antonio Negri, "Empire", Harvard University Press, 2000

2. H. Tudor & J.M. Tudor (editors), "Marxism and Social Democracy: the Revisionist Debate 1896-1898", Cambridge University Press, 1988

3. Robert C. Tucker (editor), "The Marx-Engels Reader", W.W. Norton, 1978

4. J.M. Blaut, "Colonizer's Model of the World", Guilford Press, 1993

5. Aijaz Ahmad, "In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures", Verso Press, 1992

6. Magnus Blomström & Björn Hettne, "Development Theory in Transition", Zed Books, 1984

7. Leon Trotsky, "The Third International After Lenin", Pathfinder Press, 1996