some intense debate where the
scales tilted decisively in favor of
one side; it is not a theoretically
self-conscious silence. Nor can it
be held that the world has so
changed in the last decade and a
half that to talk of imperialism has
become
an
obvious
an-
achronism.17”
At the time, Patnaik attributed
the change in left perspectives in
the United States to absence of a
major war, such as the Vietnam
War, in the 1975–90 period. But of
equal importance in the 1980s and
early ’90s, governing the mood in
radical circles, was the evolving
economic situation, with the U.S.
economy, along with that of the
other
advanced
capitalist
countries, experiencing deepening
economic stagnation in contrast to
faster growth in some parts of Asia.
On this shaky basis, the depen-
dency thesis of the “development
of underdevelopment,” made
famous especially by Andre
Gunder Frank, writing in Monthly
Review, was designated as
erroneous even by many on the
left—in spite of the fact that the gap
in national income between the
leading imperial countries and the
developing world as a whole
continued to widen, with the share
of world income received by the top
20 percent of the world’s
population (divided into nation-
states) rising from 66 percent in
1965 to 83 percent in 1990.18
Marxist theorist Bill Warren
argued as early as 1973 in
“Imperialism and Capitalist
Industrialization” in New Left Review
that dependency in poor countries
was in “irreversible decline” due to
“a major upsurge” in capitalist
development in the third world.
According to Warren, Marx, in
articles such as “The British Rule
in India,” had seen colonialism/
imperialism as playing a
constructive role in under-
developed countries. This was later
mistakenly “reversed” by Lenin in
June,July - 2019
his Imperialism, which represented
an “about-turn” in Marxist theory,
giving rise to dependency theory.
The problems of development
facing the poorer countries,
Warren argued, were not primarily
external, as
depicted
by
dependistas, but could be traced
to “internal contradictions.” This
outlook, though not widespread in
the 1970s when Warren first
introduced it, was to gain
considerable influence within the
Western left by 1980, when his
posthumous
Imperialism:
P i o n e e r o f C a pi t a l i s m was
published.19
A quite different departure
from classical theories of
imperialism appeared in the
afterword to the 1983 edition of
Giovanni Arrighi’s The Geometry
of Imperialism. A leading Marxian-
inspired world-systems theorist,
Arrighi ended up abandoning the
theory of imperialism, which he no
longer considered relevant,
replacing it with a more limited
conception of struggles over world
hegem ony. The model of the
capitalist world-system with its
shifting hegemonies was seen by
Arrighi as an adequate substitute
for the more complex notion of
imperialism. The decline of the
nation-state in the wake of
globalization meant that the old
theories of imperialism had become
“obsolete,” and the theory of
monopoly capitalism was likewise
seen as dated. What remained was
a world-system and the jostling for
hegemony.20
However, the m ost far-
reaching left rejections of the
Marxian critique of imperialism
were to await the present century.
In 2000, Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri published Empire, arguing
that imperialism was now a thing of
the past—with the Vietnam War
representing “the final moment of
the imperialist tendency”—only to
be replaced by a new deterrito-
rialized global constitutional order
and world market modeled on U.S.
political-economic relations, in a left
version of Francis Fukuyama’s
“end of history.” The hierarchical
imperialism of old, Hardt and Negri
argued, had been succeeded by
the “smooth space of the capitalist
world market”—a view that
anticipated by five years neoliberal
globalization pundit Thomas L.
Friedman’s claim that “the world is
flat.” Hence, it was “no longer
possible,” they wrote, “to
demarcate large geographical
zones as center and periphery,
North
and
South.”
This
transcendence of imperialism in
favor of the stateless, borderless
sovereignty of Empire, based in a
world market consisting of mere
network relations without a center
and periphery, was seen as
emerging out of the inner logic of
capitalism itself. “Imperialism,” Hardt
and Negri stated, “actually creates
a straitjacket for capital,” the inner
logic of which ultimately requires a
“smooth space” or flat world in
which to operate.21
Such ideas were hardly novel,
except within Marxian circles. What
was innovative was the use of
Marxian
and
postmodern
terminology to boost views long
promoted within establishment U.S.
foreign policy, which resulted in
Hardt and Negri’s work being highly
praised by the New York Times,
Time magazine, Foreign Affairs,
and other mainstream publications.
It was this that led Ellen Meiksins
Wood to refer to Hardt and Negri’s
Empire as, in effect, “a manifesto
on behalf of global capital.”22
Hardt and Negri’s rejection of
any continuity with classical
Marxian theories of imperialism
opened the way to various
sometimes insightful, but one-
dimensional, approaches on the
left, converging with mainstream
ideology. In The Making of Global
Capitalism in 2013, Leo Panitch
and Sam Gindin stressed the ability
of the U.S. state, primarily through
9