Marvin Gandall schreef:
It seems to me that leftists who continue to see the central
contradiction
of our time as the exploitation of the "periphery" by the "core",
together
with it's corrolary - ever greater privileges for workers in the West and
intensified pauperization of the masses in the rest of the world -
are, to
an ever increasing degree, living off old theory.
I also think that while conflicts will continue to be perceived as
national
ones and led by nationalists as excluded nations struggle to assume their
rightful place in the global economy by recovering their sovereignty from
imperialism, the trend towards greater international interdependence and
mobility could well see longer term lines drawn more on class than
national
ones.
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I don't see how the theory of imperialism necessarily presupposes that
the imperialists are always the same people though. Not only are there
and would there be anti-imperialist, particularly anti-colonial
movements which resist the logic of imperialism, but there will also be
struggle between the various imperialist bourgeoisies over the hegemony
over the system, and the bourgeoisies of the subjugated nations will at
some point quickly tire of their 'gatekeeper' position and want to stake
out a claim of their own. This is how I interpret the developments since
the 1960s, relying among other works on Vijay Prashad's book on the
Third World movement. The anti-colonial independence movements were
clearly directly anti-imperialist, both on the part of the African and
Asian workers involved as on their small local bourgeoisie; but if the
latter manage to defeat the former, as often happened, there is every
reason to expect the more powerful of those (or the ones in nations with
more potential power) to start out an imperialism of their own. One can
see this perhaps with the Soviet Union (although that's contested), but
certainly with Chinese activity in Africa today, with the very
traditional sort of territorial fights between Pakistan and India and
between India and China, one sees this most famously with the modern
history of Japan, and so forth. That formerly subjugated nations now
become powerful does not to me indicate that imperialism is at an end,
just that the imperialists are less white, to put it bluntly.
As for your second point, that may well be true, especially once it
becomes more clear that the color and language of the oppressor matters
practically very little, and all the more now the Cold War is over. I
sure hope that this will lead to a reinvigoration of class struggle.
Matthijs Krul
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