Far from being the result of imperialist exploitation, poverty, it is claimed, is self-perpetuating: this is the ‘vicious circle of poverty’. In these countries – so this ‘theory’ goes – the capacity to save is low, precisely because incomes are low; and if they are low, it is because productivity is insufficient. Why? Because there is a lack of capital, and as its scarcity stems from the low capacity to save, the circle is complete.

In reality, there is no such thing as a ‘destiny’ for underdeveloped countries to remain underdeveloped, any more than there was in the last century in European countries, which at that time had already reached a level of industrialisation comparable to that of today’s ‘third world’. Quite the contrary, the relative stagnation of the formerly colonised countries is due directly to imperialism.

The theory of the vicious circle of underdevelopment is not new. Populist conceptions, although they were formulated for a completely different purpose, constitute a historical precedent. Russian populists argued, broadly speaking, that capitalism could not develop in Russia because the masses were becoming ever poorer and, as a result, the market was shrinking, leading to the abortion of capitalism. In various writings, Lenin demolished the foundations of this doctrine. If we must revisit the same arguments today, it is certainly not out of a mania for historiography, but because petty-bourgeois stupidity rarely changes.

The solution to the problem is to be found in the second book of Capital. In it, Marx examines how social production provides, on the one hand, the fraction of the total product intended to satisfy the needs of proletarians and capitalists, and, on the other, the fraction that feeds into the components of productive capital. To achieve this, it is not enough to consider capital in its constituent components from a general point of view; rather, the distribution of the product must be analysed according to its material composition. The whole of social production is thus divided into two categories: on one side, the production of the means of production (department I), that is to say, the commodities that are to be consumed productively (machinery, raw materials, etc.), on the other, the production of means of consumption which workers and capitalists consume individually (department II): foodstuffs, clothing, etc. However, capitalist accumulation is not accompanied by a balanced development of the two departments; but on the contrary, it necessarily leads to a predominance of the production of the means of production over that of the means of consumption. In the early stages of capitalist accumulation, the latter department may even undergo a temporary decline.

Not only, as Marx explains in Book I of Capital, does capitalist accumulation concentrate wealth ever more at one pole of society and poverty, suffering, ignorance, brutalisation, moral degradation, and slavery at the other pole; but furthermore, as is illustrated by the schemas of expanded reproduction in Book II, the spur of capitalist development being the development of the means of production, the gap and imbalance between department I and department II are constantly widening; underdeveloped countries are precisely those in which the department producing means of consumption remains predominant.

Capitalist growth may, during certain periods, coincide with a fall in the standard of living of very large sections of the population. The expropriation of a part of the peasant masses is one of the conditions for capitalist development, as it provides the basis for an increase in the wage-earning labour force.

In England, for example, this process of differentiation between the propertied and the proletarians took place within the country’s own borders, leading to the constitution of a powerful national capitalism. In the case of colonial or semi-colonial countries, however, it can be said that this same process straddles national borders: the pole of misery is located in underdeveloped countries, whilst that of wealth is concentrated in the colonising powers. According to bourgeois economic mythology, all countries must follow the same path of development, with merely a time lag; from this perspective, misery is simply the result of a lack of capitalist development rather than being the product of that development itself.

In short, this line of reasoning leads to the following assertion: in North America and Western Europe, where capitalism is highly developed, things are not doing too badly; by contrast, in India, where capitalism is little developed, people die of hunger. The law of growing misery set forth by Marx (which, incidentally, has nothing to do with the so-called law of ‘absolute’ pauperisation invented by poor Stalin!) would therefore be belied by the facts. In reality, here we have a typical example of anti-dialectical reasoning that divides a general phenomenon, comprehensible only on a global scale, into watertight compartments. It is the development of capitalism in England that created the famine in the Indies. To regard underdeveloped countries as external to capitalism (as the term ‘third world’ suggests, which we ourselves use for reasons of convenience) is, to say the least, naïve. These countries have already suffered all the evils of capitalism; from a certain point of view, they have even already undergone capitalist development, but only the pole of poverty, suffering, and ignorance is to be found there, whilst that of wealth lies in the imperialist metropolises.

In some of these countries, proletarianisation is rife, and the State – which it would be giving too much credit to call the ‘committee for the affairs of the bourgeoisie’, the local bourgeoisie being itself too... underdeveloped – contents itself with playing the role of gang leader by selling off the labour power of its own citizens wholesale. The emigration of hundreds of thousands of proletarians is, indeed often the only solution that these sub-States can offer to those they have… liberated from colonialism!

Very little progress can be made locally: in order to develop a local industry that is not a mere appendage of that of the metropolises, it would in fact be necessary to protect it from competition; yet the agreements between the ex-colonies and the imperialist countries invariably provide for free trade, which invariably leads to the ruin of any independent industry in underdeveloped countries. The financial clauses of these agreements are no less serious: the former colonies of France and England, for example, form part of the franc zone and the sterling zone respectively; their currencies are therefore pegged to those of the metropolises, and their banks are forced to adopt a deflationary policy that retards industrial development. Finally, the global market asserts its laws to the detriment of raw material producers.

A news journal recently wrote: ‘The average rate of growth in gross national product (total production of goods and services) in less developed countries during the period 1960–67 was 5% per annum. Around twenty of these countries even achieved annual rates in excess of 6%. If this rate were to be maintained for 60 or 70 years, product per capita would be quadrupled. But during the same period, developed countries will have made giant strides, and the gap between rich and poor will be deeper still’.

This fact is easy to explain. The average annual rate of increase in gross national product in the industrialised countries was 4.6% during the period 1960-67. This group of countries obviously comprises the major imperialist countries of the West and the East: the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R., as well as Federal Germany, England, France, Japan, and Italy. Over against them, the developing countries recorded an average rate of increase for the same period of 5% (4% for Africa; 4.1% for South Asia; 4.5% for Latin America; 5.6% for East Asia; and 7% for southern Europe and the Middle East). We can therefore see that the rates of increase are broadly the same for developed and underdeveloped countries (according to another source, the ‘UN Statistical Yearbook’, it is even the developed countries that are progressing the fastest: they rose from an index of 87 in 1960 – with a base of 100 in 1963 – to an index of 122 in 1967, whilst underdeveloped countries rose from an index of 88 to an index of 121 over the same period).

But, and this is the key point, these roughly identical rates apply to masses of products that are obviously very different depending on whether one considers industrialised or developed countries. The UN calculated that, for the year 1963, the distribution of global product across the various regions was as follows: 83.7% of the total product belongs to developed countries, compared with 16.3% to underdeveloped countries. It should also be noted that the UN excludes from this total the production of the countries of Eastern Europe, which it dubs ‘socialist’ but which must be counted amongst the developed capitalist countries. A few simple calculations lead to this conclusion: in 1963, the developed capitalist countries (the USSR included, as is only right) produced 88% of global product, compared with 12% for underdeveloped countries. If we take global product as 100 in 1963, the share of developed countries was therefore 88 and that of underdeveloped countries 12 (whilst the population of underdeveloped countries accounted for roughly 70% of the world population): the gap was therefore 76.

From 1963 to 1967, again according to the UN, the product of developed countries rose by 22%, increasing from 88 to 107; the product of underdeveloped countries for its part rose by 21%, rising from 12 to 14.5. The gap between the two groups of countries therefore widened from 76 in 1963 to 92.5 in 1967! Moreover, the phenomenon would not change even if underdeveloped countries were to grow faster than developed countries: a simple calculation shows that the average rate of increase in output in underdeveloped countries would have to be 7.4 times greater than in developed countries for the gap between the two groups of countries to merely remain constant, and that is without taking population into account, that is to say, by considering gross domestic product rather than product per capita. In other words, growth in underdeveloped countries would have to be 7.4% when that of developed countries is 1%, and 37% (a rate that is obviously out of reach) when that of the latter is 5%, as is actually the case on average!

And what about ‘aid’ to underdeveloped countries? The only kind that is granted with largesse is military aid (which, incidentally, aids the giver more than the recipient). European countries, the USA and the USSR are all vying with one another to sell to underdeveloped countries not only outdated weapons they no longer have any use for, but also the most modern vehicles of death.

After that, the newspapers in the pay of the imperialists may well continue ranting about the ‘xenophobia of the natives’. What a scandal! Young Indians, oblivious to the ‘cultural values’ of great England, are daubing tar over the English inscriptions! But the rejection of Western culture by oppressed peoples offers hope for a more radical rejection: that of capitalist ‘civilisation’. From the world of the corrupt and degenerate bourgeoisie, the peoples of the ‘third world’ have nothing to learn. Marxism alone, which foresees the collapse of the wretched capitalist civilisation, can be of use to them.