The Ideology of Late Imperialism: The Return of the Geopolitics of the Second International<by Zhun XuIn 1990, when renowned Indian Marxian economist Prabhat Patnaik asked “Whatever Happened to Imperialism?,” once vibrant and influential schools of theories on imperialism were at a postwar historic low.1 When he left the West to return to India in 1974, imperialism was at the center of all Marxist discussions. But when he came back to the West merely fifteen years later, imperialism already seemed out of fashion. After all, the end of the Soviet Union and liberals’ declaration of the end of history were near.
Marxists’ inquiries into the question of imperialism began in the early twentieth century. During the time of V. I. Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, Marxists focused on two related questions regarding imperialism: (1) intercapitalist competition and war, and (2) the hierarchy within world capitalism and the relationship between the imperialist countries and the colonies/semicolonies. Since then, the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, the postwar anticolonial wave, and the Cold War have profoundly changed the context of imperialism. Following the last interimperialist war in the core in the 1940s, and with most colonies having gained independence, the political-economic relationship between the imperialist and nonimperialist countries became the key to theorizing imperialism.
Since the 1950s, Marxist scholars have greatly deepened our understanding of imperialism by exploring underdevelopment and the center-periphery, or dependency relationship, in world capitalism.2 Paul Baran’s The Political Economy of Growth is one of the earliest and best analyses of how feudal, imperialist, and comprador interests, as well as other unproductive uses of economic surplus, have kept back the third world. Later writers such as Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein each developed a distinct but related approach to the rise of capitalism. Instead of focusing on just Western Europe and the United States, they also explored how the global division of labor and the more general world system, or imperialist system, transferred surplus from the periphery to the center, thus creating both development and underdevelopment simultaneously.
Given this high tide of Marxist writings on imperialism in the 1960s and ’70s, the disappearance of imperialism from leftist d
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.