Reverend Jan Scholtz published a “mouth-watering” and highly-reflective musing in the 2 September 2022 edition of the New Era newspaper under the above heading. His piece reminds me of our youth activism in the seventies and eighties when we used to call imperialism by name. 

The asymmetrical metropole-satellite or centre-periphery relations between the developed north and the global developing south is what imperialism is all about.

A rejoinder does not necessarily imply a negative critique; it can also mean joining the debate by agreeing with the original writer of a piece. The good reverend Scholtz’s piece was, for all intents and purposes, a well-articulated leftist scholarly piece. Given the fact that neo-liberalism has won the day as the global agenda, his piece is even more relevant today. The consequences of this agenda are very clear to all who care to see. These are poverty, unemployment, illiteracy and poor health conditions in the global south or the satellite/peripheral states. 

Reverend Scholtz states: “…the primary role of the satellite is to transfer economic surplus to the metropole.” However, I would have loved him to be more specific by stating that we are mainly the producers and exporters of raw materials and consumers of finished products from the global north; perhaps global north/east, now that China has become a big player in Africa. 

The right reverend brought up very pertinent issues to underpin his argument. For example, he argues: “Whereas today’s developed countries may have lacked development, i.e. being under-developed, this situation was not a product of external relations with more advanced societies. On the contrary, however, today’s under-development is a direct product of external relations with the more developed capitalist west.”  He goes on to reason: “Today’s developing countries are not undeveloped, but they are under-developed.” In other words, the west deliberately underdeveloped Africa, for example. That is why Walter Rodney’s book: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (first published in 1972), is still relevant today.

Apart from the unequal economic relations, the western countries have also contributed to the instability of many developing countries through their covert and overt military interventions as well as economic strangulation. Syria, Libya and Iraq are all recent case studies of these types of interventions.  

After the Taliban toppled the pro-western government in Kabul (Afghanistan) about a year ago, the Americans are still refusing to release US$7 billion of that country’s foreign exchange reserves that are held in the US. The point here is not whether we agree with the Taliban government or not, the point is that they are the de facto government, and this resource belongs to their country. This is a clear example of economic strangulation.

The costs of the slave trade, colonialism, neo-colonial arrangements as well as the instability caused by the west on the African continent through coups and countercoups need to be calculated and quantified before we make sweeping statements about the failure of Africa. During the Cold War period (1947 – 1991), a good number of these coups and counter-coups were engineered from outside the African continent.

We also need to factor in cultural imperialism into this neo-colonial equation. This is even more damaging because the average citizen of many a developing country is a victim of “mental capture” by this cultural imperialism, and he/she can therefore not transcend this state of being to challenge the status quo. This is why Paulo Freire remarked that:’….it is practically impossible for the oppressed to achieve critical awareness, as long as they are submerged in their condition...’

Cultural imperialism finds concrete expression in the entertainment industry, consumerism, literature, Euro-centric media narratives, western values and norms, and the presentation of the western narrative as the “master narrative” in general. Some of the critical voices against cultural imperialism were people like Ali Mazrui, the prodigious Edward Said, etc.

It is only on one fundamental issue that I beg to differ with the good reverend. Drawing lessons from the proponents of the under-development/dependency school, he argues, and I paraphrase: …development for developing countries within the metropole-satellite relationship is not possible unless these exploitative relations are broken…

This is where the advocates of the dependency theoretical model have always hit the brick wall, and this is where I part ways with them. The question is, how do we break away from these exploitative relations? 

For me, that line of reasoning borders on academic romanticism. 

The bottomline is, even during the heyday of communist rule in eastern Europe, socialism was never a world system any aspiring socialist-oriented developing country could enter by totally cutting links with the west. Socialism was, at best, just a global process, but that has now been forced on the backfoot since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe in the early nineties. 

Since the advent of the Industrial Revolution from about 1760, the capitalist mode of production has always defined the world market. Given that the world market is governed by market forces of supply and demand, it follows that capitalism has always been the only global system.

Lest I be misunderstood, I am not implying that the centre-periphery relations are not exploitative. My point is, we need a practical roadmap on how to break away from these relations. How and with who are we going to trade, if we break away from the global capitalist system? 

I agree that we need to devise strategies on how to fight from within the belly of the empire, but I do not think breaking away is a practical solution at this point in time; unless someone educates me on the “how”.

Reacting to the failure of communism in Eastern Europe, Rosa Luxembourg, a Polish Marxist scholar of Jewish ancestry once argued: ‘…capitalism is in crisis, but there does not seem to be any alternative in sight…’ She went on to say: ‘…without the free competition of ideas, life dies…’ I hope and pray that the good reverend will take my positive critique, of his otherwise rich theoretical masterpiece, in that spirit; it is not meant to be a personal attack.