Abstract
How does one craft an explicitly left theory of anti-imperialism that would animate an anti-imperialist praxis? World-systems analysis has a long history of engagement with theories of anti-imperialism from an explicitly Leninist perspective. For the founding fathers of World-Systems Analysis—Immanuel Wallerstein, Giovanni Arrighi, Samir Amin, and Andre Gunder Frank—anti-imperialism was an early central concern. Each of the four founders of world-systems analysis reads Lenin’s theory of imperialism seriously, but each has slightly different interpretations. One significant commonality they share is that they adopt Lenin’s periodization of imperialism, seeing imperialism as emergent in the late 19th century as part of a particular stage within the historical development of capitalism. However, as I will argue in this essay, perhaps it would be preferable to temporally expand Lenin’s concept of imperialism. Walter Rodney’s concept of “capitalist imperialism,” as I shall show in this essay, similarly calls Lenin’s periodization into question. Thereby, putting Rodney in conversation with Amin, Arrighi, Frank, and Wallerstein, leads me to further historicize world-systems’ theories of global imperialism thereby refining existing theories and levying that to build stronger praxis.
Highlights
This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press
While world-systems analysis has long recognized the importance of imperialism and class struggle as central to the historical development of capitalism, in this essay I have presented Rodney’s concept of “capitalist imperialism” to show how Rodney’s theoretical work, when put in conversation with the early work of other world-systems analysis founders, can bring theories of anti-imperialism back to the fore of world-systems analysis
Rodney’s theory of capitalist imperialism further historicizes and refines the important work the founding fathers of worldsystems analysis did on imperialism and anti-imperialism and Rodney should be given his rightful place in that cannon
Summary
Lenin expressed this admirably when he proposed the new formula: “Workers of the world and oppressed people unite”. The Dar es Salaam School was an important antecedent to world-systems analysis, but has long been foundational for Black diaspora studies and the New Indian Labor History as an important inspiration for historiographic methods that can help craft an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist historiography of the Global South (Plys 2019). With this new approach to historical social science research, Rodney innovated new pedagogical strategies. As Samir Amin (1976: 17) puts it, “la lutte des classes avant tout!”6 But making class struggle the central focus of histories of decolonization, Bhattacharya (1983) claims, is an obvious solution, even though it is one that
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