Establishing the Global Economic System: 1945-1955

With hindsight we can see that the first postwar decade was the period of the establishment of the system that would operate in the 1960s and reach crisis in the 1970 and 1980s.^[33] The United States emerged from the war with a revived and flourishing economy—the only one of the time—with a monopoly on the ultimate weapon.

U.S. strategy in Europe and Japan soon achieved total success, thanks to the unconditional recruitment of the entire bourgeoisie and all political parties, including socialist and social democratic parties. Communist parties were isolated after their exclusion from government in France and Italy in 1947. The Marshall Plan paved the way for a rapid rebuilding of Europe, where the United States encouraged reconciliation and a commitment to economic integration. The Organization for European Economic Cooperation was created, which became the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1961; it was followed by the Council of Europe in 1949, the European Coal and Steel Com­munity (ECSC) in 1951, and the Treaty of Rome in 1957. These bodies were not conceived to build a Europe able to compete with the United States and achieve autonomy, but to create a subsystem of an open worldwide system necessary for U.S.

From the start the strategy of U.S. hegemony was to establish an anti-Soviet military bloc with the United States in the political leadership role. The Truman doctrine (1947); the creation of NATO (1949); the admission into NATO of Turkey, Greece, and Germany (1952); the incorporation of Portugal (1951) and Spain (1953) into the U.S. military system, although these two countries remained fascist; and the San Francisco Treaty (1951), complemented later by the U.S.-Japan security pact (1960), were part of this dimension of military control within the U.S. hegemonic strategy.

In the face of this deployment, the USSR remained in isolation and on the defensive until the mid-1950s. It was obliged to join the arms race to end the U.S. monopoly in this field. At Yalta the USSR gained the right to establish a protective flank in Eastern Europe, but no more. The establishment of supporting regimes in the region created difficulties that were never really overcome. The anticapitalist and antifascist social forces were too weak to take power alone (Poland, Hungary, Rumania). Or the local Communists did take power by liberating their countries from the Fascist yoke (Yugoslavia and Albania) and had no intention of becoming agents of Soviet policy. However, we accepted the establishment of these regimes. What was the alternative? The terrible repression of Greek Communism (1945-1948) showed us that the West would not have established anything other than fascist regimes in Eastern Europe. Even the pro-Western populism of Kemal Atatiirk’s Turkey did not seem to suit them, and so imperialism imposed Menderes in 1950 through multiparty elections.

The creation of the Cominform in 1947 had the goal of legitimizing the defensive posture of the USSR by closing ranks around the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Zhdanov doctrine (1948) divided the world into two camps—capitalist and socialist—assigned the countries of the West and the East to each of the camps, and overlooked the third world liberation movement.

Moscow met difficulties in its strategy of consolidating its protective flank, as indicated by the series of trials against opponents from the right and left in the new people’s democracies (1947-1948), the condemnation of Titoism (1948), the attempted blockade of Berlin (1948-1949), and signs of revolt in Yugoslavia and Berlin (1951). The Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) was created in 1949 in response to the Marshall Plan, but it never really coordinated the development plans of countries in the region. The Warsaw Pact was formed in 1955 in response to NATO.

After the death of Stalin in 1953 and the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in 1956, the USSR embarked on a new strategy aimed at breaking the previous isolation through an alliance with the third world, whose emergence was signaled in the Bandung conference of 1955. The Soviet system began to catch up militarily (Sputnik was launched in 1957) but remained politically weak, as the uprisings in Poznan and Budapest showed.

The real obstacle to U.S. hegemony came from the Afro-Asian national liber­ation movement. The countries in these regions were determined to throw off the colonial yoke of the nineteenth century. Imperialism has never been able to make the social and political compromises necessary to install stable powers operating to its advantage in the countries of the capitalist periphery. I interpret this failure, about which I shall have more to say, as evidence that such compromise is objectively unattainable, that the polarization caused by capitalist expansion cre­ates in the periphery an objective situation that is by its very nature explosive and unstable, and potentially revolutionary.

Fifteen years after World War II the world political structure had been radically transformed.

The transformation came about through the national liberation struggles that mobilized all the peoples of Asia and Africa. Imperialism never made the slightest concession without a struggle. The formation of our current international system is not something that capitalism sought and planned for. On the contrary, it is the result of global capital’s successful short-term adjustment to changes forced on it. The hegemonic power of the postwar system—the United States—adapted more readily than the old colonial powers in decline, and in the case of the weakest national liberation movements surrendering to neocolonial compromise, it could sometimes even appear to support the evolution. Conversely, the United States led the imperialist fight against the strongest radical movements— those that were led by Communist parties (China, Vietnam, Cuba) or by determined nationalists supported by a radicalized popular movement (Nasserism, Arab and African socialism). The United States was our principal enemy. Naturally, Europe and Japan were in solidarity with the hegemonic power.

Of course the qualitative transformation in the world political system consid­ered here is not the ‘‘end of history,’’ nor does it guarantee any real stability.

There is no doubt that the great tide of national liberation (1945-1975) was marked by real gains for Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But the advances were inadequate since they fell short of their goal. By the end of the postwar cycle, third world states were turned back into a comprador role. It is of little interest to make a global assessment of the pluses and minuses. The ever present question was where and how far the movement could go to create the most favorable conditions for long-term change.

The most striking advances were made in China, then Vietnam and Korea, where the fight for national liberation was merged with the fight for socialism. From 1947 to 1949 I followed the progress of the People’s Liberation Army on the map of China. I read Mao Zedong’s On New Democracy (1940) in a French edition and accepted the view that the age was no longer one of bourgeois revo­lution because the colonial bourgeoisie had joined the imperialist project for expansion. Rather, it was the period of socialist revolution, developing in an unbroken succession on the periphery of the capitalist system. The democratic, anti-imperialist revolution was led by the proletariat and its (Communist) party in close alliance with the peasantry. It neutralized the national bourgeoisie and iso­lated the comprador feudal bloc. The circumstances were ripe for speedy passage to the building of socialism.

I saw that North Korea was engaged in a similar process. The local anti­imperialist front had liberated the country from Japanese colonialists, although it was later obliged by the military context of Japanese capitulation to surrender the southern part of the country to the dictatorship established by the U.S. occupying forces. I saw that Vietnam was also following this path after 1945. The appalling colonial war waged by France with US support until their defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 attested to imperialism’s determination to keep national liberation off the agenda.

The Korean war (1950-1953) was further evidence of the collective will of the imperialists to oppose the movement. The refusal to recognize the People’s Republic of China and the isolation imposed by the West were reminiscent of earlier imperialist attitudes toward the Russian Revolution.

The success of the national liberation movement was reckoned by its greatest advances. I believed that any liberation that did not go this far had not completed its task. I believed the objective conditions existed to complete the task throughout Asia and Africa, beginning with Egypt.

Like all young Egyptians of the time I was excited by the radicalization of the anti-imperialist and popular social movement, which culminated in the general strike of February 21, 1946, and by the success of the new Communist movement. The first Communist party, founded in the wake of the Russian Revolution, had been subject to severe repression and was virtually wiped out in the 1930s. Revived in World War II, it quickly won the respect of all those in Egypt with a patriotic and social conscience. It was the sole force opposing the monarchy that was loathed by politicized elements of the popular classes and the radicalized petty bourgeoisie. It seemed capable of leading a united front similar to those in China and Vietnam. Egypt had never enjoyed any genuine democracy in its modern history and repression was a constant. The exploiting classes and the imperialist powers feared Communism. This did not prevent the red flag from waving over the Nile Valley. A genuine bourgeois democracy at the time would have allowed the Communists to win mass support, and possibly even elections. Neither the bour­geoisie nor the Western powers could run that risk.

The establishment of the state of Israel and the first Palestine war in 1948 gave the local reactionary forces breathing space. The debate around the 1948 events ensured the collapse of the monarchy, the central political pillar of imperialist and reactionary domination. The Wafdist electoral victory in 1950, the demand to abrogate the unjust Anglo-Egyptian treaty of 1936, and the beginning of partisan action against the occupied Suez Canal zone gave hope that an antifeudal, anti­comprador revolution was feasible. The burning of Cairo (early 1952), the ousting of the Wafdist government, and the ensuing ungovernability of the country led to the Free Officers’ Coup in July 1952. This simultaneously raised hopes of possible social advance and cut the ground out from under the feet of the progressive forces.

Nasserism nurtured hopes of Western support. Egypt made all the necessary concessions, but ultimately it came to realize that it could expect nothing from the United States. After the tripartite declaration of 1950 (United States, Great Britain, and France), the United States sought to control the entire region through com­pliant regimes in Israel and Turkey. The United States required the Arabs to join military pacts (on the pretext of a nonexistent Soviet threat) and took over from the discomfited British and French protectorates. When Nasser refused to sign the Baghdad pact in 1954, Washington began an offensive to overthrow him. This was the precise moment of the crystallization of the Bandung front. The USSR arranged for a delivery of Czech weapons to Egypt. In response to Egypt’s support for the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) and the nationalization of the Suez Canal, France and Britain set out to bring Nasser down. The conservatives in London and the socialists in Paris were shoulder to shoulder, but they failed in this final colonial adventure because they had forgotten they could act only according to U.S. plans and instructions. This opened a new chapter for national liberation in Egypt under circumstances very different from those of the previous decade. The bourgeoisie in Egypt, and elsewhere, resumed or seemed to resume leadership of national liberation, in contradiction with the fundamental positions I had supported since 1945.

The Mashreq (West Asia) prepared to challenge the uneasy balances of the period between the world wars. The establishment of the Ba’ath Party, which would determine the fate of the region from the end of the 1950s on, did not go unnoticed, any more than the ideological competition between the Communist and Ba’ath movements. We were skeptical about the Ba’ath Party’s anti-imperialist stance and disturbed by its sometimes fascist style. After the riots at Setif in 1945 and in Tunisia in 1952, we knew that the days of colonial power in the Maghreb (northwest Africa) were numbered. But who would lead the liberation? Could neocolonial order be imposed by the Moroccan monarchy and the Tunisian bourgeoisie to whom France handed power in 1956? Would the powerful grass­roots movement of the Algerian FLN overcome the anticommunism of its leaders? The anticommunism was fueled, all too sadly, by the servile attitude of the Maghreb Communists to the French Communist Party (PCF), whose policy was at best ambiguous.

The apparent power of the Tudeh Party in Iran fueled our optimism, despite the Soviet abandonment of the autonomous republics of Azerbaijan and Kurdistan in 1945. The chauvinism the Shah exploited through this was short-lived. Mossadegh nationalized oil during his brief period in power (1951-1953), but with his overthrow, the Shah’s bloody dictatorship was ensured for a quarter of a century. In 1954, Iran and Turkey aligned with the United States, which was subjecting the entire region to its mania for pacts.

Because of the solidarity between our group of young Egyptians and black African students, I followed the embryonic sub-Saharan liberation struggles with great enthusiasm. The Rassemblement Democratique Africain (RDA) had just held its founding congress at Bamako, signalling the certain end of colonialism. In 1951 came the distressing ‘treachery’ of the RDA’s break with the PCF (although the latter’s policy of supporting the French Union also seemed to us ambiguous). Were there any social and political forces with more vision than these moderates, to whom the colonial powers would later entrust the task of managing neocolonial­ism? The ruthlessly quelled rebellion in Madagascar in 1947, the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in 1952, and the guerrilla action waged by the Union des Populations Camerounaises in Cameroon in 1955 all suggested that such forces existed. We were delighted by the foundation of the Parti Africain de Pindepen­dance (PAI) in Senegal in 1957. We did not think that imperialism was over and that Western ‘democracies’ had suddenly taken note of the intolerable injustice of colonialism when Ghana gained independence in 1957, when the All-African Peoples Conference met in Accra in 1958, when at last the French government envisaged autonomy for its colonies in a French community. We believed that the African peoples had forced the change and that imperialism was merely trying to preempt radicalization of their liberation struggle.

We were convinced that the Asian and African liberation struggles were in the foreground of the world scene after 1945. We also believed that we must count on our own resources, as the USSR and China in defensive isolation could offer only moral support. We did not expect much from the prevailing Western orthodoxy. The socialists and social democrats were renowned in all the colonial wars. Even the PCF, on its own and taking a brave stand over the Vietnam War, gradually succumbed to chauvinist pressures over Algeria and Africa. The Fourth Republic was brought down by a dogged Algerian people’s struggle and the equivocation of French democrats in the face of fascist agitation from the settlers. Would the new Gaullist regime take a tougher line on the Algerian war? We feared so—but we were wrong.

We judged national liberation by the standard of the victories in China and Vietnam. We attributed the same potential to the liberation and partisan wars throughout Southeast Asia after 1945—in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Thailand. In the early 1950s, the reactionary powers or local moderate nationalists took over and established a measure of internal order. We believed this was only a temporary setback. We thought that in the new Bandung era the conflict between imperialism and third world nations would take a different shape from before.

We also believed that the partition of India in 1947 and the establishment of Congress Party rule were major victories for imperialism. Imperialism had been able to call a brutal halt to a Chinese-style liberation war. The diplomatic rap­prochement between Nehru’s India and China and the signing of a treaty over Tibet in 1954 seemed to us positive, but our opinion of the Congress Party did not change. The year after Bandung things began to look different.

When I was at university, Latin America seemed a distant unknown. We had a better understanding of what was happening in the Caribbean—in Haiti, Jamaica, or Guadeloupe—than of the politics of Brazil, Mexico, or Argentina. I found out about the problems of Latin America when I read the first reports of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America under its mentor Raul Prebisch.

We had no awareness of the purpose and effect of Latin American populism of the 1930 and 1940s and saw it through the eyes of the Brazilian, Argentine, and Mexican Communist parties. If we saw populism as too moderate for the chal­lenge, the United States still saw it as an adversary to be conquered. Vargas was deposed by the Brazilian military in 1945. Batista seized power in Cuba and Peron was overthrown in Argentina in 1955.

These events showed that the United States could and would dominate the continent only through loathsome and obedient dictatorships, corralled together in 1948 in the Organization of American States. The OAS complemented the inter­American defense agreement signed at Rio de Janeiro in 1947—a new expression of the Monroe Doctrine. We were therefore only too ready to support the new liberation movement launched by Fidel Castro.

I have attempted here to portray the events of the first postwar decade as I experienced them at the time. I retain today the same overall perception of this evolution, although I obviously could not foresee that it would lead to the new Bandung phase of liberation and progress for our societies in Asia and Africa. As of that date the conflict was to be waged in very different circumstances.

Until the late 1950s and the Sino-Soviet split in 1956, I shared the prevailing Marxist-Leninist view of the basic nature of socialism and socialist construction in the USSR. I had not yet realized that the theory of capitalist polarization which I had begun to formulate in my doctoral thesis called for a rethinking of the chal­lenge posed by actually existing capitalism. On the other hand, some of us were not fooled by the idyllic image of a perfect society furnished by Soviet propa­ganda. We had traveled in ‘socialist’ countries, noted the absence of democracy, and read enough to be aware of brutal repression. But two other factors that Western Communists tended to overlook seemed to us more significant than the shortcomings of Sovietism.

The first was the intransigent hostility of the Western powers to the Soviet Union (I am thinking of McCarthyism, or 30 years later the Reagan and Bush image of the ‘‘Evil Empire’’). We knew that the Soviet Union was on the defen­sive, but the level of the West’s hostility led us to believe that the country’s system represented a real threat to capitalism. We never thought for a moment that any sane Western politician could believe that Stalin had any intention of invading Western Europe. Our solidarity with the USSR did not require total belief in the system. We had become used to the thought that since 1492 the Western powers had never intervened in any third world area for any justifiable cause, but always and without exception to harm the people. We believed almost spontaneously that imperialist capitalism could not allow any country to refuse its dictates. The West blamed the USSR for doing just that.

The second factor was that we had a much more radical critique of bourgeois democracy than did many Western progressives. We saw every day how such democracy was systematically denied our peoples and how Western diplomacy only sought democracy when it was in its tactical interests to do so. There has been no change in this. The argument for bourgeois ‘democracy’ has no psychological appeal. Socialism or any popular advance must be more democratic than any bourgeois democracy. We turned their argument on its head. However, when it came to our own countries we were justifiably strict about the democratic shortfall of the populist nationalist regimes. Our doubts and criticisms of Nasserism from the outset were on this score. We were right, but we should have seen that this argument also applied to the USSR.

About the general crisis of capitalism, as portrayed in the Soviet terminology of the time, we were highly optimistic. We believed that the objective conditions were essentially the same as China’s for all or nearly all third world countries. Hence radical national liberation struggles and the quest for socialist revolution were on the agenda. The later emergence from Bandung of a new national bourgeois initiative shows in retrospect that we oversimplified. We did not believe that socialist revo­lution was on the agenda except on the periphery of the system. This brought much soul-searching, especially in the relations between our overseas student movement (and our journal Etudiants Anticolonialistes) and a French Communist Party that sacrificed colonial independence on the altar of an illusory socialist reconstruction of France, which would sweep dependent territories into the revolution.

Of course I was particularly conscious of the struggles waged in Egypt and the Arab world between 1945 and 1957. Thejournal Moyen Orient, published in Paris from 1949 on was a faithful but partial mirror of our concerns of the time, as the emphasis in the magazine was on the international aspects of the conflicts.^[34] With hindsight, the analysis of the time seems to have hit the nail on the head.

The Palestine issue was always a major concern for us. In December 1947, the USSR supported the partition of Palestine, as did all the Communist parties of the time, including those in the Arab world. This provoked spirited debate and con­flict, followed by well-meant self-criticism which was, in my view, insufficiently grounded. The Third International and the Egyptian and Arab Communists have always condemned Zionism, not only as nationalist and racist but also because it promotes a settlement colony that denies indigenous Palestinians the right to existence. The Egyptian Communist movement may still be proud of supporting the anti-Zionist trend among progressive Jews in Egypt since the 1940s. It has no need of self-criticism on this point even if Zionist propaganda has been quick to confuse anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

The partition of Palestine deserves closer examination. What tends to be for­gotten is that the Soviet Union and the Arab, Palestinian, and Egyptian democratic forces sought independence for a unified, secular Palestinian state open to all its inhabitants, including recent Jewish immigrants. This last was no mean conces­sion. Zionists always rejected this solution. They were backed by the Western powers and allowed to collect weapons and form a state within a state while the Palestinian liberation movement was disarmed. The fait accompli benefitted Zionist expansion. It is debatable whether in these circumstances the partition proposal was the best or the worst tactic for damage control. Note that the UN resolution for partition was accepted by all the Western countries and all of the socialist bloc of the time, but it was rejected by all the African and Asian countries. Perhaps the Soviets had broad tactical reasons for backing partition. The USSR was extremely isolated and was trying desperately to break the U.S. monopoly on nuclear weapons. The recruitment of Egyptian Communists to this tactic was debatable. The subsequent one-sided self-criticism seems to be an oversimplifi­cation of the situation in 1947 and 1948.

The Egyptian Communist movement has always taken an intelligent stand on Arab unity. It has never accepted the proposition of a multiplicity of so-called Arab nations and of state recognition as the goal of liberation. It has similarly never ignored regional differences much further in history than imperialist parti­tion of the Arab world. It has never adopted idealist arguments of pan-Arab nationalism. The Egyptian (Wafd) and Sudanese (Umma) bourgeois nationalist movements clouded the character of Sudan. The Egyptian and Sudanese Com­munist movements defined a strategy of common struggle of two fraternal peoples against common external and internal enemies. Egypt and Syria formed a United Arab Republic in 1958 when progress in Arab unity seemed possible after the overthrow of the monarchy in Iraq. The Egyptian Communist movement did not hesitate to criticize the Nasser regime for its anti-democratic methods, which overlooked the specifics of the countries concerned. History has proved us right, as these methods were largely to blame for the failure of the union. Communist organizations on the ground took different stands, but the differences now seem marginal. The democratic movement for national liberation (Hadeto) held back its criticism of Nasser. The Egyptian Communist Party was more openly in support of the Iraqi prime minister of the time, Abdel Karim Kassem. In my view now, both positions were weak but fell within a broadly correct line.

From the time of the revival of Egyptian Communism (1942-1945) to the dis­solution of the two parties in 1965 there was a multiplicity of Communist organi­zations. Violent personal disputes between the organizations prevented sober consideration of real differences in analysis and strategy. I now wonder if the search for unity (or the alternative of a ‘victory’ snatched by one organization) was not the effect of the prevailing idea of the ‘party’ as the sole and essential defender of the ‘‘correct line.” A better approach to internal democracy within one or several parties would bring clearer debate without preventing a common front on many issues.

The multiplicity of organizations concealed a differing view of the broad rev­olutionary strategy on the historical agenda. For some national liberation came first. I may be stating this position in extreme terms but without wishing to be tenden­tious. According to this analysis, Egypt needed a democratic bourgeois national revolution. Others emphasized the need to move quickly from this phase to socialist construction. I do not think that the names of the various organizations can be pinned to the two lines, as they ran the gamut, even if the dogmatism of the time brought obscurity. Both sides cited as authorities the Soviet Union, Mao’s On New Democracy, and so on. The ambiguities of debate and personality clashes worked against the brief unity in 1958, although we were happy to see it at the time.

The Free Officers’ Coup of July 1952 and the emergence and evolution of Nasserism from 1955 to 1961 shifted the choice from the strategic to the imme­diate question: critical support or opposition to the new regime. Hindsight and a reexamination of the positions taken and the various justifications abound in the progressive Egyptian literature of today. It rarely grasps what I believe to be the essential point. Some activists in Hadeto argued that since they had been in the clandestine Free Officers’ Organization, their party was better able to make a correct assessment of the progressive character of Nasserism from its birth. This does not seem to be the real issue.

Since 1960 I have argued that Nasser’s program was essentially a bourgeois national proposal from the outset and never went any further. Its populist style did not contradict its content. It was the only possible way of implementing a bour­geois national proposal. The so-called liberal Egyptian national bourgeoisie was historically weak. Support of the popular classes was necessary and it was feared they would not fulfill the project (hence the stubborn anti-democratic side of Nasserism). The statist form of the proposal had nothing to do with the ‘‘transition to socialism,’’ but was the only effective way to implement it. Unfortunately the strategic alliance between the Soviet Union and third world national liberation movements after Bandung, combined with the statism of the Soviet Union, had the broad effect of confusing statism and socialism.

With hindsight I believe that history has proved me right. Nasserism gave way to Sadatism, just as Brezhnev gave way to Yeltsin, although neither of these abrupt changes can be described as counterrevolution. I see them rather as an acceleration of the internal tendencies of the two systems. The new bourgeois class formed within and by statism is obliged to normalize its status. I have also said and written that in neither case was the evolution inevitable. A leftward evolution was pos­sible, but it depended on a maturity of the socialist forces within these (and other) societies. In retrospect I feel quite comfortable in describing the bourgeois national project as utopian.

With this view I re-read the stands taken by the Egyptian Communist move­ment in a different way from the usual. I believe that Hadeto’s critical support, sometimes challenged by the anticommunism of the authorities, was a funda­mental mistake. It stemmed from the idea that a bourgeois national stage was essential and desirable and would be supplanted by socialism. My position is that actually existing capitalism as a polarizing world system makes any bourgeois plan essentially comprador. To deny this is to nurture the illusion of the bourgeois national utopia. I can now advance this position with greater clarity than 30 years ago, but I had an inkling even then.

I differ with the strong criticism that the Egyptian Communist Party, which I totally supported from 1950 to 1951, was fundamentally wrong about the character of the Nasserist proposal. The criticism has been shared by the Egyptian Com­munist Party since 1956 and is repeated ad nauseam today. It seems to me one­sided and coming out of a strategy that history has shown to be a failure. I leave aside secondary matters such as the ‘fascist’ nature of the regime and possible imperialist complicity. Was it a mistake to see in the proposal a bourgeois plan doomed to failure?

The leftist position of the 1950s contrasted two alternatives: either a socialist revolution unbroken into stages or a bourgeois national revolution. I can now say that this antithetical approach came from an analysis, common to both options, that underestimated the polarization inherent in capitalist expansion. I can now say that Marxism was gradually stifled for failing to take this aspect into account. The social democrats seeking bourgeois revolution or the Leninist-Maoists seeking socialist revolution miss the real point. What is the character of revolution on the agenda when polarization makes both bourgeois revolution and socialist revolution out of the question?

I started my doctoral thesis in 1954, immediately after gaining the necessary higher diplomas. I did not have to hunt for a topic. I had long since decided to contribute to a Marxist analysis of the origins and course of ‘underdevelopment.’

I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do: to examine the birth of underde­velopment and its implementation as a product of worldwide capitalist expan- sion—and not as a backward form of capitalist development. I chose as supervisor Maurice Bye. He and Frangois Perroux responded favorably to my first outline and were always strongly supportive. They made detailed comments and encouraged me to be more precise while respecting my strong methodological choices.

I wrote the thesis fairly quickly and have maintained this habit. As I said above, I do not take the academic approach of an illusory quest for ‘perfection’ sustained by an excess of footnotes. I prefer to be a militant whose writings aim to carry the debate forward. The work was well advanced in the autumn of 1955, and I vir­tually completed it in the first half of 1956. The Suez Canal was nationalized in July. Subsequent events, including the attack on Egypt in October, kept me fully occupied for a while, and I did not return to my manuscript until early 1957. I presented my thesis in June, married Isabelle in Paris in August, and returned to Egypt in September.

Without false modesty I may say that I am proud of my insights of the time. I had taken a position well ahead of its time. I argued that development and underdevelopment were two sides of the same coin: capitalist expansion. I chose a straightforward title for my thesis: ‘‘On the Origins of Underdevelopment: Capitalist Accumulation on a World Scale.” For reasons of academic propriety my supervisor persuaded me to substitute a more esoteric title.^[35]

Never before to my knowledge had underdevelopment been seen as a product of capitalism. The central idea was that an ‘underdeveloped’ economy did not exist of itself but was an element in the world capitalist economy. The societies of the periphery were subjected to a constant structural adjustment (the very term used in my thesis) to the demands of capital accumulation on a world scale. In other words, there was no answer to polarization within the framework of capitalism. This was a new idea. The desarrollismo theory was just being formulated. The criticism by the so-called Latin American dependency school did not emerge until the late 1960s. The methodological hypothesis of the so-called world economy school was formulated still later, in the 1970s. The opposite theory—Rostow’s ‘‘stages of economic growth’’—was not formulated until several years after I had written my thesis. My thesis was, I believe, a prior critique of Rostow.

The thesis was a substantial text of 629 pages. I was constrained by the examination requirements, as I prefer brief syntheses without a display of the background material. It was expected that conclusions would be given statistical backing, although statistics do not reveal much. I was then a beginner unaccus­tomed to a strict choice of the truly significant facts. I also had to outline the positions I wished to criticize—a good student exercise no doubt, but an encum­brance on the final text. I wanted to link the particular arguments to the funda­mental theories from which they derived. I decided to include a critical reading of conventional economics and the basic principles of the law of value, the system’s dynamic of accumulation and reproduction, money, the business cycle, interna­tional exchange, and so on.

After the thesis was written I put it away in a drawer. Much later when the dependency school popularized the ideas that I had pioneered, I was invited to publish the thesis, and did so as Accumulation a l'echelle mondiale in 1970 (published in English by Monthly Review Press as Accumulation on a World Scale in 1974).^[36]