The interview conducted with John Smith touched on several important points with regards to understanding modern imperialism and its political implications. However, there were several important scientifically erroneous or politically questionable moments.
First of all, Smith’s assessment of the work of Arghiri Emmanuel. Emmanuel was the economist whose work probed deepest into explaining the roots –which lay in global class struggle– of the division of the world into an overdeveloped minority of nations and an underdeveloped majority. Smith claims he was a proponent of ‘dependency studies’, which is plainly false for anyone who has read Emmanuel. I refer the reader to his essay ‘Myths of development, myths of underdevelopment’, and to his important book Appropriate or Underdeveloped Technology (pages 30-31, and ‘Concluding Remarks’) for his powerful critique of dependency theory. If we turn to an actual representative of dependency theory, such as Andre Gunder Frank, he displayed the usual vitriolic attitude towards Emmanuel’s work. Gunder Frank (Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, 1967) and Paul Baran (The Political Economy of Growth) –another key representative of the dependency tradition– were explicitly uninterested in the terms of trade as a mechanism of imperialist exploitation, in contrast to Emmanuel, for whom this was its primary mechanism (See Brolin, 217-231 for Baran and Frank’s views and their debates or differences with Emmanuel) On a related note, it is also frustrating to hear the work of Samir Amin referred to as identical to Emmanuel’s, considering their major politico-economic disagreements, summarized best by Brolin (Brolin, p295-308). I also do not know how Amin’s famous earlier work could be considered to be that of a bourgeois nationalist, given his praise at that time for Maoist China and Democratic Kampuchea.
Dismissal of Emmanuel as a ‘bourgeois nationalist’ and a ‘Stalinist’ who believed in ‘stageism’ is also strange. It is true that Emmanuel addressed his work to a variety of readers, including bourgeois nationalists in the third world, not only Marxists. This was outrageous for many first world Marxists, such as Bettelheim, who found it absurd that one might try to express a theory using words other than those Marx used. But all of Emmanuel’s works are ultimately dedicated to showing the superiority, for low-wage nations, of a planned economy to a capitalist economy, since capital finds low-wage nations unattractive for investments due to the low level of internal demand. After having compared the possibilities for reaching a high mass living standard through capitalism as opposed to a planned economy, Emmanuel concluded (in Unequal Exchange, p156-7, 378) that the capitalist path is simply impossible for the majority of nations. It is true that he did not deny its possibility for a minority of nations, a prediction which has obvious support in historical facts, and whose denial, incidentally, was a major factor in discrediting the dependency tradition. Certainly, there are critiques that can be made of some of Emmanuel’s views on socialist construction, but I do not find his dismissal as a ‘bourgeois nationalist’ or ‘Stalinist stageist’ to be constructive whatsoever.
As often happens for those who dismiss Emmanuel’s foundational work, Smith’s own conception of the economic mechanisms of imperialism turns out to be questionable. In this interview Smith summarizes imperialism as ‘the capture of a disproportionately large amount of globally produced value by the capitalists of one nation’. Is Smith therefore implying that there is no tendency towards an equalization of the rate of profits in the global capitalist economy, which would thereby allow, through some obscure mechanism, the capitalists of rich nations to enjoy astronomically higher rates of profit and thereby appropriate more value? Why does Smith gloss over the fact that it is not only the capitalists of the rich nations who appropriate more of globally produced value, but also the working classes of said rich nations? It is impossible to acknowledge the fact, as Smith does, that the working classes of rich nations enjoy wages 10 to 30 times higher than the wages of the rest of the world, and disagree with the argument that this labor aristocracy is therefore responsible for its nations’ greater appropriation of global value than low-wage nations. If we acknowledge the tendency towards equalization of the rate of profit on a global scale, we can return to Emmanuel’s powerful and simple model – wage differentials between nations combined with a roughly equal rate of profit across all nations means that the rich nations appropriate a disproportionately large quantity of total global revenues.
Armed with this vague and illogical conception of economic imperialism which ignores the role of the working classes in imperialism, Smith goes on to claim that the working classes of the high-wage nations are less racist than ever. He cites the participation of white people in rich nations in the black lives matters protests as evidence for this. I will not comment on the relevance or significance of this event. But what of the fact that support for anti-immigration measures are as high as ever in high-wage nations? Or the rise in popularity of openly fascist politicians in countries such as France and even Germany, whose racist, islamophobic rhetoric greatly appeals to white workers economically threatened by migrant workers? The fact of participation in progressive protests has not changed the structure of the world economy, whereby massive wage differentials systematically reproduce and enforce the gap between rich and poor nations.
I do not know why he claims that ‘the theory of the labour aristocracy involves writing off the intelligence of first world workers’. To argue that members of a class agree with policies which increase their economic well-being instead means to acknowledge the ‘intelligence’ of such individuals. Banning immigration from low-wage nations and pushing for increased imports of consumer goods from low-wage nations in order to cheapen the cost of living of the masses, are policies which the workers of rich nations, and their political representatives like the British Labour Party, have always had the intelligence to agitate for.
Finally, I found his closing speech on the historical significance of ‘Islamism’ to be quite questionable. The blanket description of third world Islamist movements as ‘fascist groups sponsored by the imperialists to beat Third World Marxists’ finds plenty of exceptions in reality. Hezbollah, for instance, was created both under the impetus of existing Shia political traditions and a brutal ‘Israeli’ occupation of majority Shia regions of south Lebanon (see Amal Saad-Ghorayeb’s book Hiz’bullah: Politics and Religion). Among its original members were also some former communists1. The armed resistance by the mujahiden in Afghanistan, mentioned by Smith as another fascistic extension of the imperialists, was certainly sponsored by them, but it also had plenty of reason behind its resistance, given the terroristic violence inflicted on the masses by the Soviet military occupation. The rise of Hamas in Palestine was largely due to its embrace of armed struggle in a period when the Marxist/secular nationalist PLO began openly collaborating with the occupying entity, becoming a hyper-corrupt repressive extension of the occupying entity. The military failure of Arab nationalism in the 6-day war, and the general politico-economic decline or stagnation of Arab nationalist states such as Nasserist Egypt was also an important factor in the rise of political Islam in the Arab world.
Smith repeats the idea that Hamas was originally sponsored by the occupying entity to displace Marxist options. Whatever happened in the late 1980s, the fact is that as things stand today, Hamas is by far the strongest force which is practically moving forward the cause of Palestinian national self-determination, in stark opposition to the collaborationist, reformist tactics of the ‘secular’ PLO. An entity can change quite greatly over time, and our politics should be determined by the balance of forces in the present (for more on the early period of Hamas and the factors leading to its popularity and the discrediting of its secular opponents, see Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza by Sara Roy, and The Palestinian Left and its Decline by Francesco Leopardi). Personally, I have often seen Marxist acquiantances who live in or sympathize with the occupying entity cite this supposed ‘shin bet puppet’ status of Hamas as the reason why there is no need to support it, and by extension the Palestinian armed struggle as a whole.
Continuing with the theme of Palestine, I was most disappointed to hear Smith’s thoughts on how to solve this key political question of our era. Smith says that due to ‘rising anti-semitism’, the ‘Israeli’ state is ‘very different’ to the South African one. As a result, it is apparently a ‘complex question’ as to whether sanctions should be placed against this genocidal settler colonial entity. If Smith hesitates even before the elementary political step of sanctions, I wonder how he feels about the war of national liberation being waged by the Palestinian forces of resistance.
Comradely,
