Living with Nkrumahism. Jeffrey S. Ahlman
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its demands on Europe’s colonial governments.19 In doing so, representatives to the congress insisted upon a colonial system absent the exploitation, violence, and alienation that had characterized the first decades of colonial rule in Africa. This realignment of colonial rule, they argued, would ultimately require a commitment to such practices as holding African land and imperial capital investments in trust for the continent’s peoples, the regulation and taxation of extractive industries for the public good, and the abolition of forced labor in all its iterations. Even more importantly for the congress-goers, they also called for the granting of African peoples “the right to participate in the government as fast as their development permits,” and insisted “that, in time, Africa be ruled by consent of the Africans.”20
Such pan-African demands for imperial reform coincided with a range of emerging international critiques of European imperialism during the first decades of the twentieth century. In Europe, debates over the wisdom, ethics, costs, and consequences of empire had long dotted the metropolitan political scene, with many worrying about the range of effects imperialism could have, and had had, on life in the metropole.21 Just after the turn of the century, J. A. Hobson would extend aspects of these arguments further as he sought to dissect the operation of the imperial system as a whole.22 A London-born economist who three years earlier had reported on the Boer War for the Manchester Guardian, Hobson presented a model for understanding imperialism that extended beyond the rhetoric of progress and civilization employed by colonialism’s most fervent proponents as well as by those seeking reform. Instead, he tied the imperial project to capitalism’s continuous need for expansion. Published in 1902, his Imperialism: A Study in turn detailed a political and economic process by which Europe’s colonial ambitions in Africa and elsewhere aimed to extract new wealth from colonies abroad and create new markets within these colonies for the goods it produced at home.23
In a 1915 essay in the Atlantic Monthly, W. E. B. Du Bois published a similar critique of imperialism.24 Emphasizing the colonialist roots of the First World War, Du Bois moved the economics of empire to the center of a quasi-Marxist analysis of the conflict. In doing so, he presented a picture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a period marked by the increasing racialization of global extractive labor and of growing European consumerist demand. For him, the nationalisms that many saw as one of the war’s main causes, if not its primary cause, were in fact the direct result of a broader merging of interests between European capital and white labor over the last half of the nineteenth century. As a result, Du Bois argued that, through a period of labor reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, white labor had become increasingly expensive, as workers demanded higher wages and better working conditions. For many white workers, the result was the creation of new avenues through which to accumulate wealth. However, the African American intellectual also insisted that it was only through the emerging colonial system that European capital was able to fund the mounting cost of labor at home, while also meeting the rising expectations of what was becoming a bourgeois working class. To this end, the forced labor campaigns made infamous by Leopold’s Congo, but practiced to some degree in all the major powers’ African holdings, provided European capital with a markedly cheaper and almost invariably nonwhite labor force. Echoing Hobson, Du Bois contended that the emerging colonial project introduced new sites into a global economy through which European capital could extend its extractive reach for the benefit of European personal and industrial consumption.25
Thus, for Du Bois, the First World War had its origins in the fragile but colonially buttressed and racialized alliance between European capital and labor. Key to the survival of this alliance was each side’s ability to cater to the other’s impulse to consume, an arrangement requiring ever more resources to sustain itself. As a result, in the decades leading up to the war, Europe’s major powers competed with one another for greater control of the world’s labor and natural resources. The Berlin Conference and the imperial pie-slicing that came out of it were but one mechanism to help temporarily regulate these impulses. For Du Bois, the war represented the inevitable breakdown of these agreements and their attempts to contain the expanding needs of imperial capitalism. To those in African and other colonies, the results were social conditions in which Africans and other colonial subjects had little choice but to serve as pawns in the fight for global control over labor and resources. Moreover, Du Bois averred that, absent the implementation of a postwar agreement rooted in a notion of democracy that could “extend . . . to the yellow, brown, and black peoples,” any postwar peace had little chance of breaking free from the rapacious nature of European capitalism. He also predicted that, in time, “the colored peoples [would] not always submit passively to foreign domination” and would eventually push back against the exploitative nature of capitalist imperialism and the world system built around it.26
Two years later, in 1917, V. I. Lenin would offer an even more famous exegesis of imperialism in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which would influence anticolonial thought across the world well into the twentieth century. In significant part an addendum to Hobson, Lenin’s text centered on the growth and development of global finance capital and its role in the creation of the early twentieth-century world order.27 Like Du Bois, Lenin rejected the predominant interpretations of the First World War as arising from nationalism—or what Du Bois called “sentimental patriotism.”28 Lenin viewed such narratives as political distractions emerging out of a broader process by which global capital had begun to consolidate itself through the monopolization not only of markets, but also of industries and institutions. The goals of expanding finance capital went beyond merely exporting goods to new markets, according to Lenin. They included controlling “spheres of influence” whereby global markets could become key drivers of the systematic redistribution of wealth to the imperial metropole. As outlined by Lenin, banking institutions in particular were leading global capitalism beyond the struggle for resource control to an increasing reliance on the mechanisms of finance. As such, Lenin outlined an early twentieth-century world system founded upon the accumulation, control over, and continuous reproduction of profit.29
What Lenin sought to detail in Imperialism was a historical and theoretical model of an imperialism that had loosened the imperial powers of Europe from many of their liberal moorings. In doing so, he—like Du Bois—situated the violence of the First World War as the natural outgrowth of the global rise of European finance capitalism. Imperialism, as understood by Lenin and later returned to by many subsequent anticolonial intellectuals, thus served little purpose but to divide the world among its various capitalist powers. Europe’s African and Asian colonies were thus not only constructed to provide the labor, resources, and markets necessary for capitalist expansion. They also represented a new territorialized framework through which to manage each colonial power’s expansion in relation to the others. The stakes of this arrangement for the various powers, Lenin argued, were immense, in that they sought to control that which, much as Du Bois had noted two years earlier, was uncontrollable. “The more capitalism develops,” Lenin explained, “the more the need for raw materials arises, the more bitter competition becomes, and the more feverishly the hunt for raw materials proceeds throughout the whole world, the more desperate becomes the struggle for the acquisition of colonies.”30 As with his American contemporary, Lenin insisted that herein lay the roots of the instability of the twentieth-century world order, as global capital continued to mature out of its nineteenth-century adolescence and needed new spaces to grow on a map in which nearly all of the world’s land had already been partitioned.31
For colonized intellectuals and others, Lenin thus provided a model by which to both analyze and critique the liberal and capitalist underpinnings of the early twentieth-century international system. He also offered them a mechanism through which to internationalize Marxism, taking it beyond the confines of societies with already established industrial proletariats. In Central Asia, for instance, Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev turned to aspects of Lenin’s theoretical model in an attempt to extend the idea of the proletariat beyond social classes to entire dispossessed “nationalities,” arguing that all Muslim peoples should be regarded as part of the proletariat.32 For Sultan-Galiev, a Tatar who until his 1923 arrest was the most influential Muslim within the Soviet Union, such a framework allowed for the integration of Islam into the Marxist worldview on its own terms.33