on third world theories of imperialism (thomas hodgkin):
[along what lines have these theorists criticised the presuppositions of western imperial historians and apologists in general?] ...against the classic Western (particularly Western missionary) thesis that imperialism has meant the substitution of ´civilised´for ´barbarous´ systems of government, society, values, etc., these theorists asserted the antithesis that imperialism has in fact meant the destruction of valid African, or non-Western, civilisations and the substitution of new forms of Western barbarism. (103)
(...) A second element in this reinterpretation of the civilisation/barbarism antithesis is the proposition that there is no necessary connection between the level of a people´s technological development and the quality of its civilisation. This is, essentially, the cultural relativist view, which Blyden did much to foster, that terms such as ´higher´and ´lower´can be applied to levels of technological or economic development but not to civilisations that no set of criteria exists on the basis of which one can rationally argue that the civilisation of the French bourgeoisie under the their republic was qualitatively superior to, say, the civilisation of the Segu empire under Ahmadu Shehu... This view can be pushed further and developed into a Narodnik theory of the nastiness and undesirability of ´high´ civilizations in general [see Emile Faure] (105)
(...) [How far do the dominant ideas of these African and third-world theorists fit with the broad lines of Marxist, and more specifically Leninist, theory?] One [of 4 themes of disagreement/contributions] is their emphasis on the communal, anti-capitalist (and not merely precapitalist), cooperative, democratic, fraternal values and institutions of African, or non-Western, precolonial societies, ´systematically destroyed by imperialism´; their rejection of theories which assert or imply the idea of unilinear progress from ´lower´to ´higher´stages of social organisation, and thus of those interpretations (or distortions or vulgarisations?) of Marxism which fall within this category. [see Aimé Césaire] (109-110)
(...) A second theme is the notion of the dehumanising effects of imperialism on the colonised societies and the reimportation of the ideas and attitudes and institutions and techniques which have been used by the bourgeoisie of the colonising countries to impose and maintain their domination over the colonised into the metropolitan societies for use against their own people. This idea, of the specially corrupting effects of imperialism on the social and political life of the imperialists, was of course present and important in Marx and his successors... But for third-world theorists like Césaire and Fanon the idea of the terrible feedback effects of imperialism has a new and pivotal significance. (111)
(...) A third theme is the idea of a necessary, continuing, irreconcilable antagonism (in the context of a world in which imperialism remains a dominant force) between the interests of the advanced, Western, and predominantly ´white´, colonising societies and the interests of the proletarian, non-Western, and predominantly ´non-white, colonial and semicolonial societies. In a sense this means taking the contradiction between the imperialist countries and the colonial peoples and insisting that it has priority over all other contradictions, blurring (from a more ´orthodox´ Marxist point of view) the internal contradictions within both colonising and colonised societies. Thus Sultan Galiyev argued that ´since almost all classes in Muslim society have been oppressed formerly by the colonialists, all are entitled to be called proletarian... The Muslim peoples are proletarian peoples.´
(...) Towards the [Leninist conception of the essential interdependence of the interests of the working classes in the advanced capitalist countries and the exploited masses in the colonial and semicolonial countries]...these third-world theorists have tended to take up and attitude of methodical doubt... [expressing] a belief in the necessity for the colonial and former colonial peoples of the world to recover the historical initiative, and for the direction, character, pace and methods of change within the third world to be primarily their responsibility, not the responsibility of even the most radical or revolutionary sectors of the populations of the advanced countries; a new emphasis on the importance of the idea of creating wider alliances among the peoples of the third world. (113)
[in Studies in the Theory of Imperialism, eds. Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe, 1972]