Imperialism

A poundshop Lloyd George?

“Principles mean nothing to him — never have. His mind doesn’t work that way. “It’s both his strength and his weakness”. That was how the Tory politician Arthur Balfour described David Lloyd George, prime minister 1916-22, a leading government minister 1906-16, and a dominant figure in Liberal Party politics for most of the first half of the 20th century. A minister who worked with Lloyd George saw him as having an “absolute contempt for detail” but a strange capacity to improvise and “pick up the essential details of a question by conversation”. A biographer described him as “always in a...

Peronism: not a model for socialists

In an interview featured in Tim Alberta’s new book American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump , President Donald Trump compared Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Eva Perón. Specifically, Trump remarked that Ocasio-Cortez has “talent”, but “doesn’t know anything”. This alludes to how Eva Perón went from popular radio and film actress to powerful symbol for the political movement spearheaded by her husband, Juan Perón. The latter was President of Argentina from June 1946 to September 1955, and again from October 1973 until his death in July...

Immanuel Wallerstein 1930-2019

Immanuel Wallerstein died at the age of 88 on 31 August. He was one of the last great exponents of the 1950s-60s theory of imperialism known as “dependency theory”, and continued to write until only a few years ago. He was born in New York, the son of Polish Jews fleeing antisemitism, and worked almost all his life in US universities. He named Marx first among those to whom he “acknowledged a continuing intellectual debt”. He described himself as one of a “gang of four” with Samir Amin, Giovanni Arrighi, and Andre Gunder Frank, all also now dead. Gunder Frank was the most prolific and...

UN votes for Chagos return

On 23 May, the United Nations General Assembly voted 116 to 6 for the UK to end its occupation of the Chagos Islands. Three years before ceding independence to Mauritius in 1968, the UK separated off the islands from the rest of Mauritius to keep control of them, deported the entire population, and leased the largest island, Diego Garcia, to the USA for a huge military base. The Chagossians have been fighting ever since then for the right to go back. A major force in that fight has been the Mauritius socialist group Lalit. Lalit comments: “So, the struggle that Lalit has been spearheading for...

Amritsar, a hundred years on

On 13 April 1919, in Amritsar in the Punjab, India, 50 soldiers under the command of the British General Dyer opened fire on a crowd gathering in the Jallainwala Bagh – a garden-cum-open area popular for meetings and social or religious gatherings. Many of the crowd were there to celebrate Vaisakhi, the Sikh New Year. No one was armed, there were no disturbances, it was peaceful. The British authorities put the number of dead at 379, with more than a thousand injured. The actual number of fatalities will never be known. After the shootings Dyer returned to British Military Headquarters in...

The oil profiteers and Libya

With the news that the forces of General Haftar have bombed Tripoli's Mitiga airport (8 April), the events in Libya have reached a critical stage. The conflict is not just about two men and their armed forces, General Haftar (former Gaddafi general, lived in USA for 20 years, warlord with military clout based in the east of Libya) and El Sarraj (head of the UN-backed nominal government, with little clout outside Tripoli). It is indirectly about the clash between two imperialist powers, France and Italy, both with a long and murderous history of involvement in Libya and Africa as a whole...

Rosa Luxemburg and imperialism

Rosa Luxemburg considered her most important contribution to be her book, The Accumulation of Capital, published in 1913. The legacy of the Polish­-German revolutionary socialist leader who was murdered by a right­-wing militia operating under the aegis of a Social­ Democratic government just over 100 years ago has come down to us through a haze of sentimental misrepresentation and selective republishing, but now can and should be reconsidered. For decades the two most widely ­available texts from Luxemburg were critical notes on the Bolshevik revolution, drafted in jail in 1918, and not...

Samir Amin, 1931-2018

Samir Amin, who died this year at the age of 87, was one of the foremost writers of the “dependency theory” which, in the 1960s and 70s came, many left-wing activists came to think was “the Marxist theory of imperialism”. Many even thought it was “Lenin’s theory”, although the whole structure of the theory was different. Amin, of Egyptian-French background, lived most of his life in France, and was in the French Communist Party then associated with Maoists. The basic idea of “dependency theory” was that ex-colonial countries were underdeveloped because of a drain of surplus to the richer...

Luxemburg, economics, crises, and the national question

This article seeks to review and reflect on the two volumes of Rosa Luxemburg's Complete Works published so far. Only a scattering - a much thicker scattering since the 1970s, but still a scattering - of Luxemburg's writings have been available in English until now. Since the 1970s there has been a "Collected Works" in German. Even that misses out a lot. The new Complete Works, edited by Peter Hudis, will be fourteen volumes. As Hudis explained in an article in Solidarity 356 (11/3/15: bit.ly/hudis-rl), "given the amount of time, care, and attention that she gave to developing her major...

Should we reverse history?

Sean Matgamna replies to Ashok Kumar's "National rights and the decolonial gaze" . More debate on the Right of Return here . Sometimes a person will have to do odd things for socialism. Trotsky recorded that when women induced the soldiers not to fire at the crowds at the outset of the February Revolution, they had to get at them by first crawling under the belly of Cossack horses. What Trotsky referred to so summarily loses much of its meaning in the minds of modern people who have no experience of horses. Your horse has a very small brain — the size of a chestnut, perhaps. A horse is...

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