Eric Stokes on imperialism In some .170 pages or so

of text George Lichtheim has served up a snack on imperial- ism cafeteria style. Those who partook of the rich repast contained in his Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study will be inclined to comment with the -undergradu- ate who munches his self-service meal in hall after taking lunch earlier with his tutor: one could scarcely credit the dishes came from the same kitchen, Why a man whose

essential genius lies in the explication of modern political theory should choose the method of potted history, ranging from Roman through mediaeval and early modern times before he comes to grips with the phenomenon which the ordinary reader understands as imperialism, is never pro- perly explained;' especially when at the out- set he declares that his essay 'is not intended as an intellectual exercise but as a contribu- tion to an ongoing political discussion'. At his best Lichtheim is always a gnomic, ellip- tical writer, but here he simply lets his mind go slack until quite late in the book. An established scholar is entitled to discourse at large outside the limits of his expertise, but

he has no business to lose grip on his over- all argument. Schumpeter in his Sociology °f Imperialism cut an equally wide swathe through time but held the whole together with his theory that political systems always lag a century or more behind their economic base, so that anachronistically in the modern Period men continued—in Keynes's phrase --to tyrannise over their fellow men instead "f tyrannising over their bank balances. l-ichtheim eschews overarching theory of this kind : and the reader may be pardoned for thinking he is being asked to make his way through a trackless wilderness of digres- sions so that he throws up the book in dis- gust. This is a pity since if he has patience to reach the final chapters he will find that Lichtheim is saying something both import- ant and profound.

Those who have studied Lichtheim's earlier writings will know that his purpose has been to save the historic Marx for Western intellectual thought. This means not °IllY disowning the whole Marxist catena from Lenin onwards; it means recapturing Marx's specific historicity and confining him firmly within it. In Lichtheim's view Marx Made an analysis of the society of his time that although defective and polemical was outstanding in its reach and originality. In canonising Marx's teachings and attemoting to apply them to later and totally novel his- torical situations his followers succeeded in Merely perverting theirs and falling victim to tragic illusion. The Leninist and Maoist doctrines of imperialism are/ a classic in- stance. Although Lenin's pamphlet of 19164 imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capital- ism is regarded as the central statement of

Marxist doctrine. Lichtheim declares it to have so unoriginal and plagiarist that it would

nave been quickly forgotten had not Lenin subsequently achieved fame• in the Bolshevik

however, of the following year. Politically, nowever, it marked a departure of the greatest importance. The thinkers from whom Leni'n drew his ideas—Kautsky,

Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg—saw the root of imperialism in the increasing tendency of capitalism to outgrow small- scale national units. Its principal manifesta- tion was bellicose nationalism and expansionism in Europe, with overseas colonialism merely as one of its by-products. Rut after the First War the problems of defending socialism in one country led Lenin and Stalin to equate imnerialism in- creasingly with colonialism and to see the reserve army of the Soviets not in the advanced proletariat of the Western capital- ist countries but in the national liberation Movements of the underdeveloped world. It was small wonder that while the Bolsheviks were out bathing in Eastern waters Mao should have stolen their clothes.

Lichtheim maintains that neither the '3viet nor the Chinese version of imperial- 'stn has anything to do with Marxism. They are both in different ways expressive of societies in the grip of nationalist populism where vast masses are in the process of modernisation by a dictatorship of intel- lectuals. With Maoism the theory of im- perialism has been totally transmuted. 'Thus nationalism is identified with socialism. the Peasantry with the proletariat, anti-imperial- !Sin with anti-capitalism, until all the distinc- tions painfully elaborated in Marxist litera-

ture for a century are cast overboard in

favour of a simple dichotomy : Western

imperialism versus the starving masses of the Third World.'

Lichtheim dismisses as fatuous the Maoist claim that the third world has taken over the leadership of the proletarian struggle and stands in the vanguard of history : `no undeveloped country can reshape the global nexus of relationships which, taken together, constitute the modern world of industrial technology'. At most such countries can con- tract out and choose their own path of de- velopment; they cannot provide a model for more advanced societies. Despite the obvious desire of writers like Baran, Sweezy, Magda and others to prove Western eco- nomic exploitation, few pretend that the advanced economies are vitally dependent on the third world. The figures speak too elo- quently. US dollar imperialism has to be looked for, if at all, in the subordination of weaker mature economies like those of Western Europe or Canada. Why then does the old Hobson-Leninist theory of imperial- ism still exert influence in the West, at least among the New Left intelligentsia? It is plainly a case of an old cry being put to a new purpose. With the abolition of visible proletarian misery in the West, the New Left projects its surviving grievances against post- bourgeois capitalism, its mechanical routine and apparent spiritual vacuity, into a roman- tic mythology woven around Castro, Gue- vara, Ho Chih Minh, and Mao, looking to the noble third-world peasant rather than the bloated Western car worker as the new proletarian brother But the propensity of radical criticism when attacking established institutions and beliefs to fly to a time- honoured counter-authority like Marx ren- ders it also dependent on intellectual ana- chronisms like the theory of imperialism. Contrived for a totally different situation, it is stretched to fit new facts without any awareness of the intellectual self-deception involved.

There are two methods for rescuing politi- cal thought from its own occupational intl- . sions. One is to restore the historicity of a concept like imperialism by defining its em-

pirical meaning in its original world of dis- course and noting the point at which it changes its effective connotation. Koebner

(Empire, 1961) attempted this in his heavy

and rather wooden fashion. The other method is to examine afresh the phenomena the term purports to describe, which is what 1.ichtheim does in his whirligig historical survey. He comes up with a series of im- perialisms, by which term he means a political structure armed with an expansion- ist ideology. Of these the most enduring, with power to throw their shadow ahead, are those grounded in a primitive populist nationalism, such as the Germanic Holy

Roman Empire whose line of descent Lich- theim sees visible in Hitlerian imperialism, or the Russian Empire, or again the Chinese. For a man who has waded through so much

high Marxist doctrine it is a distinctly old- fashioned conclusion. The fact that the Russian and Chinese systems have borrowed and transmuted the foreign ideology sup- plied by Marx is of the highest significance in Lichtheim's view. For the doctrine is to be understood not by the message but by the medium.

Marxism down to Lenin—and here one can detect Lichtheim's pride in his own German background—was echt Deutsch: transposed to other settings, Russian, French, or Chinese, and to other epochs, it changed its meaning with its role. We are left with a darkly sceptical doctrine of historical rela- tivism, and the reversal of that expectation of Marx that the triumph of the proletariat would be the triumph of rationality. The industrialisation of China's peasant masses must present strains no Western nation has undergone, and the transformation of Asia with its attendant alteration in the balance of world power is unlikely to be achieved peaceably. The threat to peace comes not from the advanced world but the develop- ing; and in this inverted sense Mao's claim that the Third World must determine the future of the globe may be ominously true. Lenin broke out of the study quoting from Faust : 'Theory, my friend, is grey but green is the everlasting tree of life'. When Lich- theim in turn puts aside Marxist scholasti- cism like a child's toy and goes outside he is granted no comparable faith in the historical process, for his gaze only discovers that the sedge is wither'd from the lake and no birds sing.

Eric Stokes is Smuts Professor of the History of the British Commonwealth at Cambridge and author of The English Utilitarians and India'