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Imperialism Reading Group - How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, by Walter Rodney - Week 3
(hexbear.net)
This is a weekly thread in which we read through books on and related to imperialism and geopolitics. Last week's thread is here.
The book we are currently reading through is How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Please comment or message me directly if you wish to be pinged for this group, or if you no longer wish to be pinged.
This week, we will be reading the second section, "Some Concrete Examples", of Chapter 2: How Africans Developed Before The Coming Of The Europeans - Up To The Fifteenth Century.
Next week, we will be reading all of Chapter 3: Africa's Contribution to European Capitalist Development - The Pre-Colonial Period.
Hey! I'm a bit late because I couldn't get to reading because of heavy workload and being sent to another country. I've finally read chapter 1 today so I'll leave my thoughts here.
I liked the analysis of the first chapter, it's patently Marxist and materialist, which is wonderful. It reads easily and clearly and doesn't fall into pompous or overly technical language, which is also great for someone like me who isn't a native speaker. Even the title is great, using the word "underdeveloped" not as an adjective but as a verb which has an actor (Europe) and an object (Africa). I think I'll make it a point to be explicit about using "underdeveloped" as a verb in that way more often.
I admit I normally fall into the purely economical analysis when it comes to discussing "development", but the first pages do a wonderful job of explaining that it's also in many more spheres which are comparably important.
It's also wonderful that it doesn't fall into the so-common pitfalls of the dominant neoliberal economics. Even when it talks of inequality in African nations and how a handful of bureaucrats reap most of the tax income, it makes it a point to explicit that it isn't taxes that develop a country, but labour and the generated surplus value. This is entirely compatible with a more MMT understanding of economics and state financing, in which levying taxes isn't a tool to "raise money" because most states create that very money at their own discretion. Just one more way in which MMT and Marxism give different explanations for a similar phenomenon, and both arrive to the correct answer from different points. Blew my mind a bit, never thought of it this way, and the book is from like the 70s!
I also found it very ideologically powerful that even in the introduction, on the section of "defining underdevelopment", it talks about a comparison of industrialized vs unindustrialized nations, and it makes it a point to separate right from this beginning the socialist nations from the camp of imperialist nations within the industrialized category. It's brilliant seeing how it's painfully obvious that socialist nations such as China and USSR at the time were simply not exerting imperialism in Africa by not engaging in market relations based on one-sided price setting and unequal exchange. This is super compatible with the idea that I had formed by reading "Is the Red Flag Flying" by Albert Szymanski, in the chapter in which he examines commercial relations between USSR and underdeveloped nations and reaches the exact same conclusion.
On the one hand, seeing how much I'm learning from a 50-year-old book makes me realize how dire the situation is regarding the knowledge of imperialism by westerners like me, and the fact that many of the relations briefly explained in the first chapter hold up today, makes me sad about the situation of ideology and imperialism. On the other hand, I'm stoked to be really engaged on the book, on the way it's written, and to really be able to examine imperialism in Africa over the past century from a Marxist perspective. Thanks to whoever recommended the book and made a reading club, can't wait to freaking dunk on the Trots at my org, who pretend to care about imperialism but decry every socialist country who either didn't engage in it or outright fought against it.