Definition
A view has gained currency of late that ‘imperialism’, in the sense of a ‘world system of colonial oppression and financial strangulation of the overwhelming majority of the population of the world by a handful of “advanced countries”’ (Lenin 1977, p. 637), is no longer a useful category in the era of globalisation. The notion of imperialism, it is argued, has necessarily a ‘spatial’ dimension, captured for instance in Lenin’s reference to ‘a handful of advanced countries’ in the above remark; but, with ‘economic superpowers’ now emerging from within the ranks of the Third World, that spatial dichotomy has ceased to be relevant, which makes the concept of imperialism itself irrelevant.
On the one hand the monopoly capitalists in the emerging Third-World countries have been integrated into international finance capital; and on the other hand the oppression and dispossession of the non-monopoly segments of the population, not just the workers, is not confined to Third-World...
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Patnaik, P. (2020). Agriculture, Underdevelopment, and Imperialism. In: Ness, I., Cope, Z. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91206-6_184-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91206-6_184-1
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