by TORKIL LAUESEN
The Context
To paraphrase Mao Zedong: Where do ideas come from? Do they drop from the sky? No, they come from social practice, the struggle for production, the class struggle, and scientific work.1 There is a close link between what goes on in the world—historical development—the project of classes and states, and theoretical and political debates.
What characterized the historical development of the long 1960s (1955–75) that brought forth the theory of unequal exchange? One major factor was the decolonization process in the wake of the Second World War. The two world wars were essential for the soon-to-be new hegemon after the decline of the British Empire: the United States. The decline of the British Empire and the rise of the Soviet Union as a balancing force against the rise of the United States created a window of opportunity for liberation movements in the colonies, in what became the Third World.
The postwar United States pushed for decolonization to open the former European colonies for U.S. investment and trade—the transformation from colonialism to neocolonialism. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union saw the creation of new states opposed to colonialism as possible new allies against Western capitalism.
The Asian and African countries from the first wave of decolonization participated in the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955. They stressed the importance of independence from both East and West and the development of their national economies. The Bandung Conference was not a new Communist International that strived for the socialist world revolution like COMINTERN in 1919, but the expression of the national liberation struggle against colonialism, which in some instances meant communism taking the lead.
The United States, as the new global hegemon, had to make sure that the decolonization process ended in “free enterprise” for U.S. capital and not socialist-orientated states linked to the socialist bloc. Therefore, from around 1965 to 1975, the main contradiction in the world was between the United States and the different anti-imperialist liberation movement and socialist-orientated states. In this struggle, the Vietnam War became the symbol of this contradiction.
The rise of socialist-orientated projects in the Third World from China and Vietnam in the East to Cuba and Chile in the West produced new theoretical and political debates, most prominently around the Chinese interpretation of Marxism in the form of Maoism, but also from other Third World revolutionaries. These included Che Guevara and Fidel Castro in Cuba, Frantz Fanon in Algiers, Ho Chi-Minh and Nguyen Giap in Vietnam, Amílcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau, and Eduardo Mondlane in Mozambique.
The revolutionary spirit of China, Vietnam, Cuba, and other countries had a strong impact on anti-imperialist theory. Before the 1960s, the Marxist understanding of imperialism was almost exclusively based on V. I. Lenin’s writing from around the First World War, especially “Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” from 1914.2 Then, things began to change. New perspectives emerged, both from Third World revolutionaries and from academics. The latter were mostly connected to the New Left and criticized both the capitalist world system and existing socialist projects.
An important representative was Paul Baran, a professor at Stanford University and a leading figure in the journal Monthly Review, founded in 1949. Baran defined monopoly capitalism as a transnational rather than a national phenomenon. This reflected the development of capitalism in the United States after the Second World War. A special feature of transnational monopoly capitalism was the underdevelopment of the Third World. In 1957, Baran’s book The Political Economy of Growth was published. In 1966, Monopoly Capital was released, written by Baran together with Monthly Review editor Paul Sweezy.
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