Imperialism, Pioneer of Capitalism, by Bill Warren. Verso, £3.95 paperback.
AT THE end of the 19th century there appeared in Czarist Russia a group of brilliant intellectuals who embraced Marxism and developed a scientific [illegible] populists' dreams of agrarian socialism. However, their only conclusion was the progressive and beneficial role of capitalist development in Russia (as a precondition for any labour movement) — and hence the need to support the liberal bourgeoisie in industrialising the country. The absence of any revolutionary dimension in their ideas made them tolerable to the Czarist authorities; and for this reason they were given the nickname of 'Legal Marxists' by Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
Bill Warren's book is presented by its editors as 'original' and 'iconoclastic'. So it is, in a certain way. But it can also be seen as an up-to-date version of 'Legal Marxism'. [illegible] demonstrate the progressive role of capitalism. But Warren's brief goes much further: to show the immense benefits that colonialism and imperialism bestowed on the 'less developed countries'. Perhaps one [illegible] Marxism', since its aim is nothing less than a Marxist 'rehabilitation' of imperialism.
Some of Warren's arguments are quite cogent. For instance, he takes up the Stalinist conception of imperialism, developed for the first time by the Sixth Congress of the Communist International (1928), according to which imperialism is economically regressive in the colonies — retarding both industrialisation in particular and the development of the capitalist productive forces in general. This crude conception is still very popular, both in the Stalinised Communist parties and in various nationalist/populist movements in the dependent countries. Warren shows, through a vast amount of empirical evidence, that imperialism has developed capitalism, the productive forces and industry in the colonial and semi-colonial world, and that this development has generated some positive results in terms of rising per capita Gross National Product, improved welfare, etc. So far, so good.
The problem is that, in his enthusiasm to demonstrate the progressive nature of imperialism, Warren becomes frankly apologetic. His glorification of capitalism and of imperialist industrialisation of the Third World differs little from the classical arguments of the most typical bourgeois economists of the 'modernising' school (Walt Whitman Rostow, etc.). He systematically denies or downplays all the negative and sometimes catastrophic results of imperialist 'progress' in our century.
For instance, Warren argues that such horrors of modern imperialism (with its advanced technology) as the Nazi concentration camps were 'essentially a technical by-product', 'relatively equivalent in their impact' to the ravages of the Thirty Years War! Moreover, he denies that the Nazis' crimes were characteristic of 20th [illegible] since in Western Europe and North America they provoked a 'sense of moral outrage' stemming from 'the feeling that Germany had betrayed the Western heritage' (pp.22-3).
Presumably Hiroshima and the Vietnam were not such betrayals, since they provoked no 'moral outrage' in the ruling circles of the imperialist world. But Warren forgets to mention Hiroshima, and only incidentally mentions the Vietnam war, failing to see it as an organic expression of the imperialist system. Indeed, he generally prefers to close his eyes to the inhuman dimension of colonialism and imperialism: 'the colonial record, considering the immense numbers of people involved, was remarkably free of widespread brutality' (p.128).
I am not sure if this is a 'new' or 'original' view of modern history, but it cannot easily be squared with such well-known examples of 'widespread brutality' as the French colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria, the Italian colonial war in Ethiopia, the Portuguese colonial wars in Africa, the British colonial war in Kenya, and so on — where millions of 'natives' were killed, maimed, napalmed, tortured and bombed.