1

Progressive
.Imperialism
and,the Ut•pian Left
I
I ,.J,,
,.
The ·concept of imperialism has become the dominant
political dogi;na of our era. Together with its offspring, the
notion of 'neo-colonialism', it affords the great majonty,of
humanity a common view of the. world.as a whole. Not only
the Mattist-educated masses of,the.Communist world, but
also the millions of urban dwellers of Latin America, the
semi-politicized peasants. of A.sia1 and the highly literate
professional and" working ,classes of the industrialized
capitalist countries, are steeped in ,this.worid-view and its
ramifications. It represents, o(course, not simply a recogni-
tion of th.'eexistence o,fmodern empires; formal or informal,
and of th~ir,living heritage. Mor&impoJ1;ant, it embodies a
set of quite specific (albeit.often vaguely articulated) theses
about the :domination of ,imperialism in the affairs of the
in
human. race as~a whole and particular about the past and
present economic; political, and cultural disaster imperialism
has allegedly'inflicted and ·continues to inflict.on,the great
majority of mankind. ,
The powerful grip of this' view has, at one stage removed,
producea or transfoijhed almos_t.,equally widespread and
influential secondary ideologies (at least iii the West), most
notably that enc~psulated in the 'Aid Lobby'; its effect has
been to contribute towards a transmutation' of Weste~
liberaiism from a philosophy of forward-looking improve-
meµt based upon the past achievements of capitalism tO'a'.
philosophy of guilt and shame, increasingly forswearing
its own heritage and retreating to utopian, static, and
2
backward-looking perspectives. The progressive bourgeois
outlook of John Stuart Mill has been increasingly rejected by
the Western intelligentsia in favour of the reactionary petty-
bourgeois outlook of Proudhon. 1
The popular dominance of the anti-imperialist world-
outlook in the West (admittedly never complete) is a much
more.recent phenomenon t4an is commonly realized. Until
the Vietnam war in the 1960s, Western concern with
·imperialism was largely confined to a few academicians and
Marxist parties or sects; even for the latter, it was but one of a
number of more or less equally important topics. Analytical
Marxist works on imperialism after the Second World War
(and there were few non-Marxist works on imperialism qua
imperialism) were most remarkable for their forlorn isola-
tion: Palme Dutt, Baran, and Barrat Brown 2 stood out as
lonely as any district commissioner in the outposts of
Empire.
All that has since changed. An enormous mass of anti-
imperialist literature - analytical and 1>ropagandist, acad-
emic and political-sectarian, new left and hard-line 'Stalin-
ist', Third World nationalist and radical-liberal - has
poured from the press. 3 During th-e past decade bourgeois
publishers have devoted more resources to the topic of anti-
imperialism than to any other social, political, or economic
theme, with the possible exception of inflation. If to this we
add the Hterature of the masochistic modern version of the
White Man's "Burden, more or less tlirectly inspired by the
view of imperialism as uniformly disastrous, then Marxism
can record the greatest publication and propaganda
1. In this context, those liberals who remain within the genuine vibrant
liberal tradition are viewed !lfl right-wingers, sometimes even as fascists, by
a'socialist movement deeply impregnated by the'philosophy and superficial
propagandism. of this intelligentsia., ,
2. R.P. Dutt, The Crisis of ])ritain and the British Empire, London, 1953;
M.B. Brown, After Imperialism; P. Baran, The Political Economy of
Growth. (Fw.l details of these and other references may be found in the
bibliography.)
3. The first edition of an expensively produced, two-volume example of
this literature was, its author notes, sold out within a year. S. Amin,
Accumulation on·a World Scale,. Volume II, p. 589.
 Progressive Imperialism and the Utopian Left 3
triumph of its history. For the great bulk of this literature is
self-c.onsciously Marxist in origin or owes much of its
inteliectual inspiration to Marxist work in the gene_ralarea,
in the sense that it considers itself part of the Marxist
tradition of social analysis. 4 In no other field has Marxism
succeeded in so influencing - even dominating - the
thought of mankind.

1. For a Marxist Re-Evaluation

of the Theory of Imperialism
Marxism, in a multitude of guises, has become the principal
compass of investigation of imperialism, the penetration
and spread of the capitalist system into non-capitalist or
primitive capitalist areas of the world. 5 Any reassessment of
the relations between the advanced, industrialized capitalist
world and the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America
must therefore entail a reassessment of Marxism as an
intellectual current, and vice versa. Ironically, it is ·at the
apogee of Marxism's supreme propaganda achievement, the
theory of imperialism, that it has become clear that a re-
evaluation of Marxist analysis is not only urgent but long
overdue.
Perhaps the least important reason for such a re-
evaluation is that the bulk of current Marxist analyses of
and propaganda about imperialism actually reverse the
views of the founders of Marxism, who held that the
expansion of capitalism into pre-capitalist areas of the world
was desirable and ptogressive; moreover, the reversal is
generally effected in apparent ignorance of the fact. Indeed,
the Marxist movement has become deeply involved in the
stru~gle against imperialism. The theoretic;;i-1fulcrum of this
4. E.P. Thompson uses the term 'Marxist tradition' to describe his own
allegiance, defining this position in 'An ppen Letter to Leszek Kola~owski',
in The Socialist Register 1973, London, 1974, pp. 24 ff.
5. This definition will be used•throughout this work. Other definitions
will be considered later. "
4
reversal of the Marxist view is the theory of the advent of a
new and degenerate stage of capitalism (monopoly capital-
ism) that can no longer perform any positive social function,
even in those societies Marx and Engels regarded as
backward compared with the capitalist West during the
nineteenth century and most of which, by the same criteria,
are still backward today. The practical, political foundation
for this reversal was the quest by Marxists, especially the
Bolsheviks, for allies against the powerful centres of
capitalist state power. This quest became particularly
important in efforts to neutralize the threat such centres
presented to the precarious Soviet state.
But - and here we submit to the more crucial exigencies
dictating re-evaluation - the new, reactionary stage of
capitalism turned out to have immeasurably greater
econQmic vigour and capacity for technological innovation
than its, nineteenth-century predecessor. Ultimately, it
proved abl~ to extend the realm of political democracy far
wider than previously. In itself, this should not have b~n
surprising, since the major and most famous Marxist
theoretical work to elaborate the diagnosis of ~apitalism's
senility, Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capital-
ism, ignored the major analytical achievements of Marxist
economics in favour of a crude under-consumptionism
h1~ttressed by superficial observations by the bourgeois-
liberal propagandist Hobson. Nor did the guidance provided
b)t the polttjcaj_rNuirepients of the Russian revolution prove
adequate, in the long run, to the broader needs of the
socialist 'movement in, assessing imperialism and in
directing :its policie~ ac;cordingly. The 'world revolution'
against imperialism - a fusion of the movement of the
working class agaiµst its bourgeois rulers in the West and
the revolt of the colonial and semi-colonial peoples against
the major imperialist powers - turned out to be not a world
revolution against capitalism as such, but rather (to the
!:lxtentthat it was a world revolution at all 6) only a struggle
6. It was such a wor!d revolution only temporarily, patchily, and
superficially, the two movements achieving such limited links and
 Progressive Imperialism and the Utopian Left 5
. against particular capitalist countries. More precisely, the
struggle against imperialism, which Marxism expected
would, be synonymous with the struggle against capitalism,
actually confused two quit.e distinct movements: the socialist
working-class movement in the industrialized capitalist
countries and the intrinsically bourgeois movement of Third
World nationalism, the one striking at the state system of
Europe and North America in order to establish ~ocialism,
the other striking at the same target in order to promote the
faster and further growth of industrial capitalism. The
struggle for socialism and the struggle for a wider expansion
of capitalism were thereby combined in the notion of an anti:
imperialist movement. That the inherent logic of anti-
imperialist nationalism was the more rapid and extensive
development of capitalism throughout the world was not
necessarily or always understood by the nationalists
themselves, let alone the Marxists. It was implicit in Lenin's
own characterization of n,ationalism and the progressive
ro1e,
I
of the bourgeois nation-state 7 · that the Third World
would undergo vigorous capitalist development concurrent
with rising nationalism and national liberation: But it is
only now, decades· after the Second World War, that the
inadequacies of a theory of imperialism that involves the
working-class ·movement in a bourgeois movement -
incorrectly characterized as socialist because anti-imperial-
ist - can be clearly seen. Marxism's involvement in and
theoretical characterization of the anti-imperialist move-
ment has disarmed the working classes of much of Asia,
'
coordination as they did by dint of the orchestration of the Russian
revolution and the Comm.tern. The shadowy existence of the 'world
revolution' was a direct reflection of the contradictory but real substance of
the Soviet revolution, which itself fused a socialist and a national
revolution (not to mention a proto-bourgeois peasant revolution).
7. 'But there is no disputing the fact that, having awakened Asia,
capitalism has called forth national movements everywhere in that
continent too, that the tendency is towards the creation of national states in
Asia; that precisely this style of state ensures the best conditions for the
development of capitalism.' V.I. :tenin,. 'The Right of Nations to Self-
Determination' in The National Liberation Movement in the East, Moscow,
1962.
6
Africa, and Latin America in the struggle for their political
and cultural independence of the bourgeoisie, and especially
of bourgeois nationalism; it has strengthened the mechan-
ical economistic strain in Marxism that views the advent of
socialism in the West as the product not of conscious
political action, but of economic crisis orstagnation; 8 and it
has occasionally led Marxism into the morass of a
subjectivist voluntarism according to which socialism can
be achieved almost irrespective of objective economic or
cultural conditions, provided anti-in;iperialist fervour re-
mains white-hot. Above all, Marxism itself has acquired a
dual social tharacter: it has become the philosophy
simultaneously of socialism, of working-class hegemony in
a technologically and culturally advanced industrial society,
and of modernizing nationalism, vyhose, basic historical
function is pre-socialist and, for much of humanity,
specifically bourgeois.
The consequent intellectual dilution of Marxism may well
have been necessary for its survival and spread, and thus for
its future intellectual renewal. 9 Moreover, outside the
industrialized capitalist heartland in the twentieth century,
Marxism was certainly a more suitable industrializing
ideology than the ideologies of eighteenth~ and nineteenth-
century capitalist industrialization which, for various
reasons, were no longer entirely appropriate.
But whatever.. the gains of Marxism's profound involve-
ment in the anti-imperialist movement, the reassertion of its
role as the philosophy of socialism and the working class
requires re-examination of this involvement and of its
theoretical and historical foundations.

8. The prosperity of the West and the allegedly non-revolutionary

character of its working classes being the result, on this view, of imperialist
robbery of the colonies and semi-colonies.
9. As indeed Gramsci argued in.· a more global context: The Modern
Prince, in Selections from the-Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, p.164.
 Progressive Imperialism and the Utopian Left 7
2. Schematic Outline of the Argum·ents
The argument that follows is divided into two parts. The first
sketches the development of Marxist theory on imperialisin.,
analysing the intellectl!al and social-historic!al dimensions
of the reversal of Marx's own view of the progressive
character of imperialism. Some of my major contentions
may be summarized as follows.

1. The unique achievements of capitalism·, both.cultural and

material, must not be overlooked, particularly the fact·that
capitalism released·individual creativity and organized co-
operation in production. This E!mphasis on the role of
capitalism in human progress forms the basis of a critique of
anti-capitalist romanticism and of the ·separation for
propagandistic purposes of the material and cultural
aspects of capitalism's success. The important distinction
between anti-capitalist and socialist ideology -:between a
moral, a-historical and a socialist critique of capltalism -is
firmly established.

2. There is an important'connection between capitalism and /

parliamentary (bourgeois) democracy; the latter provides
the best political enviroflment for th~'socialist movement
and creates conditions ,that favour a,.. genuine learning·
process by the working class. In fact, the view that
capitalism serves as a bridge to socialism must be upheld.
The fact that the first successful socialist revolution took
place in a country at ·the early stages of capitalist
industrialization is by no means as destructive of tlre
traditional Marxist view as is frequently maintained.
Lenin's polemics against the N arodniks, his urtderstanding
and development of th0' concept of the progressiveness of
capitalism, were central to the elaboration of a successful
revolutionary strategy.

3. But it was Lenin himself, in his Imperialism: The Highest

Stage of Capitalism, who initiated the ideological process
 8
through which the view that capitalism could be an
~ instrument of social advance in pre-capitalist societies was
' erased from Marxism. The detailed critique of this pamphlet
presented here includes an examination of the abundant
evidence inconsistent with the theory that imperialism is
rooted primarily in an internal excess .of -capital in
imperialist countries. I will also argue that Lenin was wrong
about the alleged economically retrogressive effect in the
industrialized countries of monopolization betf een 1870
and 1914 (or between 1900 and 1914).Indeed, this period was
marked by rising overall growth rates, signifi~ant agri-
cultural advances, higher. living standards, 'and the
emergence of a new phase of technological ptogress.

4. The Marxist analysis of imperialism. was sacrificed to the

requirements of bourgeois anti-imperialist propaganda and,
indirectly, to what were thought to be the secu.rity
requirements of the encircled Soviet state. The surrender of
the classical position was formally completed at the Sixth
Congress of the Communist International in 1928. I will
examine the logic and the immediate historical background
of the Comintern's. rejection of even the token deference
Lenin's Imperialism had paid to Marx's position on these
matters, together with the claim that imperialism retarded,
industrialization and the development of the productive
forces in the 'r}iird World.

5. The more rece,nt theories of 'underdevelop-

ment' are best regarded as postwar versions of Lenin's
Imperialism, the theory of 'neo-colonialism' having pro-
vided a vehicle for the wholesale transfer of Lenin's theory
into the period of independence. Powerful new social and
political forces may be identified r-- principally burgeoning
Third World nation~ism after the Second World War-that
provide a reasonable explanation for the ideological
dominance of the underdevelopment fiction, since the
Leninist theory of imperialism, with its emphasis on
par,asitism and the pillage of the Third World, was perfectly
 Progressive Imperialism and the Utopian Left 9
suited to the psychological needs and political requirements
of Third World nationalists.

The second part of the book is devoted to a polemic against

widely ac::ceptedviews that imperialism (and subsequently
neo-colonialism) is and has been a socially retrogressive /
force preventing or distorting economic development and
thereby creating relationships of mounting subordination
and dependence between rich and poor countries. The major
theses of this section may be schematized as follows.

1. Contrary to current Marxist views, empirical evidence

suggests that the prospects for successful capitalist develop-
ment in many underdeveloped countries are quite favour-
able. This implies both substantial industrialization and the
capitalist transformation of traditional agriculture.

2. Empirical evidence further shows that substantial

advances al<,mg these lines have already been achieved,
especially in industrialization, while capitalist agriculture is
developing more slowly (although hete too there has been
significant progress). More specifically, the period since the
end of the Second World War has witnessed a major surge in
capitalist social relations and productive forces in the Third
World.

3. Direct colonialism, far from having retarded or distorted

indigenous capitalist development that might otherwise
a
have occurred, acted as powerful engine of progressive
social change, advancing capitalist development far more
rapidly than was conceivable in any other way, both by its
destructive effects on pre-capitalist social systems and by its
implantation of elements of capitalism. Indeed, although
introduced into the Third World externally, capitalism has
J
struck deep roots there and developed its own increasingly
vigorous internal dynamic.
 10
4. Insofar as there are obstacles to this development, they
originate not in current relationships between imperialism
and the Third World, but in the internal contradictions of the
Third World itself.

5. The. overall, net effect of the, policy of 'imperialist'

countries· and the general economic relationships of these
countries with the un.derdeveloped countries actually
favours the industrialization and general economic develop-
ment.of the latter.

6, Within,a context of growing economic interdependence,

the ties of' dependence' (or subordination) binding the Third
World and the imperialist world have been and are being
markedly loosened with the rise of indigenous capitalisms;
\
the distribution of political-economic power within the
capitalist world is thereby growing less uneven. Con-
' .
sequently, although one dimension o.f imperialism is the
domination and exploitation ofthenon•communist world by
a handful of major advanced capitalist countries (the United
States, West Germany, Britain, France, Japan, etc.), we are
nevertheless in an era of declining imperialism and
advancing capitalism.