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Karnataka
Whatever happened to imperialism?
The collapse of major financial institutions in the U.S. poses fresh challenges to imperialism
The answer to the question, which is the title of a collection of twelve densely argued essays on India’s political economy and, more broadly, on the political development of underdevelopment, by Prabhat Patnaik (Tulika, Delhi, 1995) is self-evident: The author’s argument, offered in an essay first published in 1990, in the immediate context of retreat of socialism in Eastern Europe, is that Imperialism is well and thriving, though he also notes that it had cea sed to be central to the discourse on political economy.
This is not because imperialism had by then become an ‘obvious anachronism’, nor because there had been any serious and convincing theorising against the concept of imperialism. Despite the defeat of U.S. imperialism in Vietnam (and the setback to socialism and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union), the situation in respect of the underdeveloped countries at the beginning of the 1990s, by when the peaceful and negotiated processes of de-colonisation had long been completed, and even the recalcitrant apartheid regime in South Africa had begun to see the inevitable, was not fundamentally different than what it been before, at least in the period after the Second World War when the decolonisation process was launched.
Half a century on, the underdeveloped countries, part of the so-called Third World, sold on the rhetoric and promises of a New International Economic Order, were still trying to secure changes in the fundamentally unequal international economic relations. Not merely have these efforts made little headway, today there has been a systematic ‘rolling back’ of all such efforts.
Writing in the beginning of the 1990s, this is how the author sees these efforts at securing a more equitable international economic order without any radical challenge to the capitalist order:
The third world Group of Seventy-Seven is a shambles. Commodity prices continue to be at a disastrous low, forcing the underdeveloped countries to dissolve their united stand and appear before the Group of Seven advanced capitalist countries as individual supplicants. The low commodity prices have contributed much towards the ’successful control’ of inflation in advanced capitalist countries, just as they have contributed much towards an aggravation of malnutrition over large tracts of the third world, most noticeably in Africa….And what is more, a new anew offensive is on to force open third world markets not just for goods, as Rosa Luxemburg had noted, but for services as well. Underdeveloped countries which had taken the lead in opposing the inclusion of services in the GATT agenda have been singled out for pressure from the US administration.
The numbers and nomenclatures may have changed. G-7 became G-14 and is now apparently G-20, with the new entrants still not part of the original high table. GATT is now WTO. But the essence of the relationship, of being supplicants, and the futility of the efforts to resist predatory inroads by advanced capitalist countries into markets of the underdeveloped countries have not changed. Imperialism, true to its description as the highest stage of capitalism, marches on.
Have these realities changed in the world post the attack of the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 September 2001? Hardly. Many people who have historically been victims of imperialism came to identify itself themselves with the U.S. following the attacks. ‘We are all Americans now’ was the feel-good phrase that was systematically propagated by the media. The feeling of solidarity was not in the least affected by the aggression in Afghanistan and the renewal of the war against Iraq. Instead, countries whose people and leadership had vigorously protested against U.S. wars in SE Asia now willingly joined forces with the US in Afghanistan and Iraq, reflecting the sea change that has taken place not merely in Eastern Europe but also a country like Denmark, all partners of a Coalition of the Willing.
Not merely is Imperialism doing well, even colonialism in more sophisticated forms than neo-colonialism is returning to areas where it once ruled. In this scenario, recolonisation does not necessarily mean physical re-occupation of countries and territories by the erstwhile colonial power. The increasing legitimacy that is being acquired by concepts like borderless states and shared sovereignties, all proposed for third world countries faced with severe problems of nation building and reconstruction that are actually a legacy of colonial rule, but never canvassed for economically advanced countries that too are beset, though not as severely with corresponding problems, is only one aspect of this process of recolonisation.
A necessary condition for such recolonisation is the collapse of the state, even admitting that the ‘existing state’ is a terribly flawed, almost non-functioning structure. This process too is going on in many third world countries, though debate continues whether this debilitation of the ‘existing states’ has been assisted by factors internal to the state or by extraneous factors.
It is true that the recent collapse of major financial institutions in the U.S. poses fresh challenges to imperialism. However, as noted by the author in another essay in this collection, the Great Depression of 1929 while ruinous to the U.S. had serious political repercussions outside the United States, in Mexico and the rest of Latin America. The re-thinking on market fundamentalism reflected in the calls in the US for state intervention to save the markets that were supposed to be the ultimate leveller is bound to further strengthen imperialism.
M.S. PRABHAKARA
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