Indigenous governments and capitalist development
The dismantling of the European colonial empires was a fact of immense importance for something like half the world's people who had lived under their thumb. It also raised very important questions for those who had, in one way or another, fought against the hold of those empires. What happened to imperialism-and the fight against it-if empires no longer existed?
The reaction of many social democrats and liberals in the West was to say that imperialism no longer existed. This was, for instance, the conclusion drawn by John Strachey. In End of Empire (1959) he argued that rising living standards meant businesses no longer needed colonies to absorb the surplus and prevent overproduction. In effect, he was saying that Hobson's alternative to imperialism, a reflation of the domestic economy, had prevailed and solved the system's problems.
An important section of the left rejected such reasoning. They could see that the former colonial countries were still plagued by poverty and hunger-and that the Western firms that had benefited from empire remained entrenched in them. What is more, the end of the European empires was not the end to the violence inflicted on the peoples of Third World, as the US state picked up the cudgel of the departing Europeans.
Yet rejection of facile talk about an end to imperialism was often accompanied by quotes, parrot fashion, from Lenin's 1916 analysis without recognising the changes that had occurred since it was written. His insistence that the great Western powers were driven to divide and redivide the world between them through direct colonial rule hardly fitted a situation in which colonies had gained independence. The response of most of the left was quietly to redefine imperialism to mean simply the exploitation of the Third World by Western capitalist classes, dropping the drive towards war between imperialist powers so central to Lenin's theory for what was in reality a version of Kautsky's ultra-imperialism. At the same time they simply replaced talk of colonialism with talk of "neo-colonies" or "semi-colonies".
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Capitalism in the 20th Century