Ernest Mandel

The Laws of Uneven

Development
(December 1969)

From New Left Review I/59, January-February 1970.
Copied with thanks from Louis Proyects Marxism Mailing List (September
2007).
Marked up by Einde OCallaghan for the Marxists Internet Archive.

Before answering Martin Nicolauss critique of Where is
America going?, the origins and intended function of
that article should be explained. It is the transcript of a
speech given to a seminar of Finnish students at
Helsinki, in the framework of a symposium on American
imperialism today. It was not intended to be a global
analysis of the contradictions of American imperialism,
still less a broad outline of American or world
perspectives, in the coming decades. I do not consider
myself an expert on US capitalism; there are Marxists
who are much better equipped to tackle such an analysis,
among them close friends of mine in the USA. It is
sufficient to recall the origin of this transcribed speech to
understand the limitations of the subject with which it
dealt, arising out of the needs of an elementary division
of labour. Other speakers, in the first place Perry
Anderson, dealt at that same symposium with the
phenomenon of American imperialism, its industrial-
financial-military infrastructure and its repercussions at
home and abroad. To myself fell the task of outlining
trends inside American society which were slowly
eroding its previous relative social and political stability.
It was taken for granted that the worldwide activity of
American imperialism, and its contradictions, had been
analysed by previous speakers and assimilated by the
audience. For this reason I mentioned them only in
passing. [1] Surely, even the harshest critic could not
believe that I underestimate the stupendous effects of
the Vietnamese war on social political and ideological
developments in the USA.
What was the political purpose of my speech? It was,
obviously, to oppose the fallacies of that Third
Worldism which, from Franz Fanon and Lin Piao to
Baran and Sweezys Monopoly Capital and Herbert
Marcuses One-Dimensional Man, writes the
American working class off any medium-term
revolutionary perspective. [2] It is clear that only the
most mechanistic and undialectical marxists would
deny that the national liberation movements in colonial
and semi-colonial countries, and their potential
development into socialist revolutions (under adequate
proletarian leadership), are part and parcel of the
process of world revolution as it has unfolded for 40
years, since the second Chinese revolution of 1925
27. [3] This mean that the inter-relationship between the
colonial revolution and the socialist revolution in the
West (as well as the inter-relationship between the
colonial revolution and the political anti-bureaucratic
revolution in the so-called socialist countries) is complex
and manifold.
The difference between revolutionary Marxists and
supporters of Third Worldism does not lie in the fact
the first deny this inter-relationship and the second
uphold it. It lies in two basically distinct approaches to
the nature of that inter-relationship. Revolutionary
Marxists do not believe in a fatal time-sequence, whereas
Third Worldists do believe that imperialism has first to
be overthrown in all, or the most important
underdeveloped countries, before socialist revolution is
on the agenda again in the West. Lin Piaos famous
thesis that the countryside will have to encircle the
cities is the most striking expression of this idea.
Revolutionary Marxists do not believe that the loss of an
important or even a decisive part of foreign colonial
domains will automatically create a revolutionary
situation inside the imperialist countries; they believe
that these losses will only have revolutionary effects if
they first trigger off internal material changes inside
imperialist society itself. Between world politics and
revolution in the West there is a necessary mediation:
changes in the function of the economy, changes in the
relationship of forces between classes, changes in the
consciousness and militancy of different social groups.
It is now possible to clear up a misunderstanding
which permeates all of Nicolauss critique. When I spoke
of internal developments as against external effects
upon US society, I did not have a geographical but a
social context in mind. The very argument which
Nicolaus attacks most strongly our thesis that inter-
imperialist competition is already and will be
increasingly one of the forces upsetting the relative
internal stability of US imperialism should have shown
him this. After all, geographically, competition from
Western European and Japanese imperialism is not an
internal but an external factor in the USA. Why did I
treat it the way I did? Because I was looking for effects of
world developments on social forces, on classes and
layers inside imperialist society. Without this necessary
mediation, historical materialism ceases to be a guide to
action and becomes an empty economism and fatalism.

1. The Universal Contradiction and Concrete Class
Struggle
From this point of view, to speak of the world as one
society, as one single framework for political action, is an
impermissible metaphysical abstraction. It is quite true
that imperialism has woven all countries and societies of
the world into a single net of world market and world
exploitation (with the exception of those countries
which, through a socialist revolution, have been able to
break out of this net). It is also true that monopoly
capital of the imperialist countries exploits in various
forms and to various extents the workers of its own
country; workers of foreign imperialist countries where
it invests capital; workers of underdeveloped countries;
poor and middle peasants of these same countries;
peasants and artisans of its own country;
nonmonopolized sectors of the capitalist class of its own
and foreign imperialist countries; and practically the
whole ruling class of underdeveloped countries. But to
draw from this the conclusion that the differences in
form and degree of this exploitation have become
secondary and insignificant or to argue that because
exploitation is universal, it is also homogeneous, is to
have a completely lopsided view of world reality under
imperialism, yesterday as well as to-day, and to open the
road to disastrous analytical and political mistakes.
The historical specificity of imperialism in this respect
lies in the fact that although it unites the world economy
into a single world market, it does not unify world
society into a homogeneous capitalist milieu. Although
monopoly capital succeeds in extracting super-profits,
directly or indirectly, out of most of the people on earth,
it does not transform most people in the world into
industrial producers of surplus-value. In short: although
it submits all classes and all nations (except those which
have broken out of its realm) to various forms of
common exploitation, it maintains and strengthens to
the utmost the differences between these societies.
Although the United States and India are more closely
interwoven today than at any time in the past, the
distance which separates their technology, their life-
expectancy, their average culture, the way of living and
of working of their inhabitants, is much wider today than
it was a century ago, when there were hardly any
relations at all between these two countries.
Only if we understand that imperialism brings to its
widest possible application the universal law of uneven
and combined development, can we understand world
history in the 20th century. Only if we understand this
law of uneven and combined development can we
understand why, because of an integrated world market,
the first victorious socialist revolutions could break out
in three underdeveloped backward countries, Russia,
Yugoslavia and China. Only if we understand how this
same law continues to operate today can we understand
that the decisive battle for world socialism can only be
fought by the German, British, Japanese, French, Italian
and American workers.
In this day and age of imperialism, more than in any
previous epoch, the contradiction between labour and
capital emerges in a universal form. The days when it
was possible for that contradiction to show itself only
within a national ... sphere, are far behind us, writes
Martin Nicolaus. Permit me to point out the mistake in
the first sentence, and the non-sequitur of the second
one. The contradiction between labour and capital
emerged in a universal form, tendentially from the
beginning of the capitalist mode of production (see in
this respect the significant passages of
Marxs Grundrisse, well-known to Martin Nicolaus),
and factually from the beginning of the age of
imperialism, more than three-quarters of a century ago.
In that sense, neither the Russian Revolution, nor the
Spanish Revolution, nor the Chinese Revolution (to cite
two victories and one defeat) were any more national
than the Vietnamese Revolution; all of them were both
expressions and focal points of the universal
contradiction, which did not manifest itself only in this
day and age. But to conclude from the universal
character of class contradictions to the necessary
universal form of class struggle is to presume immediate
and total correspondence between objective socio-
economic developments and human action, i.e. to
eliminate from the picture the whole problem of national
pecularities, political forms, social relationship of forces,
varieties of consciousness and rle of organizations, in
other words, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and a lot of
Marx and Engels too!
Polemicizing with Bukharin precisely on this subject,
Lenin had this to say during the 8th Congress of the
Russian Communist Party:
In order to understand in what situation we find
outselves, it is necessary to say how we marched, and
what led us to the socialist revolution. It is
imperialism which led us to it, it is (also) capitalism in
its primitive forms of (simple) commodity economy. It
is necessary to understand all this, for only if we take
reality into consideration, will we be able to solve
questions like, for instance, that of our attitude
towards the middle peasants. In fact, whence did this
middle peasant arise in the epoch of a purely
imperialist capitalism? For he didnt even exist in the
properly speaking capitalist countries. If we connect
the question of our attitude towards this nearly
medieval phenomenon of the middle peasantry
exclusively to the point of view of imperialism and of
the dictatorship of the proletariat, we shall never
arrive at making ends meet, and we shall only get
bruises and bumps. If, on the contrary, we have to
change our attitude with regard to the middle peasant,
please make the effort to say, in the theoretical part of
the programme, whence he arises and what he is. He is
a petty commodity producer. This is the ABC of
capitalism which we have to state, because we have
not yet got out of it. [4]
Lenin summarizes his position by stating that
imperialism is a superstructure of capitalism, and when
it crumbles, the whole capitalist foundation still subsists.
Imperialism, in other words, is a combined form of social
development, locking together the most backward and
the most modern forms of economic activity,
exploitation and sociopolitical life, in variable forms, in
different countries. For that reason, socialist world
revolution, under imperialism, cannot be an
instantaneous, simultaneous, synchronized event in all
or most countries of the world. It can only be a process in
which the imperialist chain is broken first in its weakest
links. In order to determine what link is the weakest in
each determinate phase of development, it is necessary
precisely to study the economic, social, political, cultural,
historical differences between various countries in the
last analysis: the different correlations of socio-political
forces in these countries which survive in spite of the
universal form of contradiction between labour and
capital.

2. Class Consciousness and Socio-Economic
Contradictions
Martin Nicolaus writes: There are no more local
contradictions, and no more economic contradictions
in the sense that is usually meant; all our contradictions
and the deeper they are, the truer this is, have universal
causes and universal effects; one baby in one room in
one town who cries from hunger throws the entire
history of the world into question. This is quite true, and
nicely said. It is not new, for it was true also a century
ago. But it begs the real question. For the question which
I was discussing, the point of view against which
Nicolaus polemicizes is not whether the world economy
has objectively been united and socialized (this is ABC
for Marxists, and I have myself written this dozens of
times). The question which I was asking is this: when,
why and how will the great majority of the American
working class (the white working class) revolt against all
these infants crying >from hunger in the world, and will
stop that hunger by making a socialist revolution.
To refer us back, in answer to that question, to the
objective causal relations, is misleading. After all, infants
have been crying for many decades, and have not
American workers let them cry? Have not most of the
American New Left argued, till very recently, that the
American working class would never revolt against
capitalism, for various reasons (because it was
corrupted; because it was integrated; because of the
mass media; because of its lack of revolutionary
tradition)? Nicolaus should admit that even for
somebody who agrees entirely that capitalist exploitation
and alienation have universal causes and universal
effects, this question has still to be answered, by
something more than mere pious incantations (When (!)
this contradiction finally comes home to roost ...) or
blind faith.
Now in the history of the world socialist movement,
there are only three fundamental answers to this
question. One is the answer given by utopian socialists,
and various propaganda sects of very different colours
and origins, who all agree on one basic point: that the
working class (or mankind for that matter) will never
move towards socialism as long as it has not seen the
light i.e. let itself be persuaded by the particular creed
of the particular sect in question. The second answer,
diametrically opposed but parallel to the first one (and as
fundamentally wrong) is that when objective conditions
are ripe (when the productive forces have ceased to
grow; or when misery has become unbearable; there
are many variations of fatalism), the workers will
become socialists and make a revolution. The third and
correct answer, that of the classical socialist movement,
perfected by Lenin, says that workers will make a
revolution when (a) socialist consciousness has been
introduced in their midst by an organized vanguard; (b)
this consciousness merges with a growing militancy of
the whole class, which is a function of growing social
contradictions, and (c) that militancy emerges into an
objective situation of sudden and extreme instability of
the ruling class (a pre-revolutionary situation, a
revolutionary crisis).
Attempts to introduce socialist consciousness into the
American working class have been manifold and
uninterrupted for a century now. Sometimes they were
broader, sometimes they were more limited; sometimes
they were effective and sometimes miserably inadequate,
but they never ceased. What has obviously declined since
the period of the great upsurge of the cio and the sit-
down strikes (or, if one prefers, since the postwar strike
wave) is the militancy of the American working class, i.e.
the objective class struggle itself. In order not to stumble
into the dual pitfalls of utopianism and fatalism, one has
to ask the question: what factors could determine a new
rise of proletarian class militancy and struggle, after
more than two decades of relative quiescence in the
USA? [5] What factors are already upsetting and will
increasingly upset the relative social and political
equilibrium which the American capitalist class enjoyed
between the Second World War and the mid-sixties?
When we examine the question of the relative
quiescence of the working class in the richest imperialist
country of the world, we have at least to take that basic
fact into consideration. It cannot be an accident that the
leading imperialist country has the weakest development
of socialist class consciousness in the working class. The
precedent which inevitably leaps to the mind is that of
19th century Britain. The comments of Engels and of
Lenin on that situation are well-known. It may be useful
to reproduce Engels opinion in full, in order to examine
whether there is an analogy between the English
situation of that time and the US situation to-day:
As long as Englands industrial monopoly lasted, the
English working class has participated to a certain
degree in the benefits of that monopoly. These benefits
have been divided among it in a very unequal way; the
privileged minority appropriated the largest part, but
even the great mass received at least temporarily
sometimes its part. That is the reason why there has
been no socialism in England since the withering away
of Owenism. With the collapse of the monopoly, the
English working class will lose this privileged position.
It will find itself one day reduced including the
privileged and leading minority to the same level as
their working colleagues of foreign countries. That is
the reason why there will again be socialism in
England. [6]
Industrial monopoly means of course a monopoly in
advanced industrial productivity of labour; there was no
absolute industrial monopoly of Britain, either in 1885 or
even in 1845. Once we refine Engels reasoning in this
sense, the analogy with the situation of the USA since the
Second World War is evident. It is hard to deny that
American workers participated to a certain degree in
the benefits of US imperialisms monopoly of advanced
industrial productivity (technology). It is even harder for
a Marxist to deny that there is at least a partial causal
link between this participation i.e. the fact that the
American working class enjoys the highest standard of
living of the world proletariat and the absence of
socialist class consciousness of that same class.
Now when Martin Nicolaus himself examines the
probable causes for the re-emergence of the
contradiction between capital and labour in the United
States, he enumerates 14 factors, no less than 10 of which
are of a subjective nature, i.e. concern phenomena of
superstructure, and are therefore obviously begging the
question. To give only one example: why should growing
involvement of conscripted young soldiers in reactionary
wars abroad automatically lead to an opposition of a
socialist nature? Were not these soldiers also conscripted
during the Korean War? Did this involvement lead to a
powerful socialist mass movement of soldiers, to a rise of
proletarian class consciousness of the American working
class? Of the four remaining factors, only two, the
growing industrialization of the South and the rapid
decline of the farmers, are objective processes which
change relations of forces to the advantage of the
proletariat, but which do not lead directly to increasing
socialist class consciousness either. So there only remain
two basic factors on which Nicolaus can count
fundamentally to upset the relative social and political
quiescence of the white proletariat in the USA: absolute
impoverishment and increasing insecurity and
instability of employment.
But these two factors suddenly fall from the sky,
completely unrelated to the economic analysis which
preceeds them. They are even in opposition to the main
thesis of Nicolauss article, i.e. the thesis that the
absolute superiority of US imperialism in the capitalist
world is growing, and not declining. Surely, if this were
so, monopolist super-profits flowing to US capital would
increase and not decrease and its capacity to corrupt
the American working class would grow, and not decline.
Surely, if US imperialism were all-powerful in the realm
of international capital, it would endeavour to export
instability of employment first to its weaker competitors,
and unemployment would consequently be lower in USA
than in, say, Germany, Britain and Japan.
Nicolaus speaks darkly about an import of colonial
conditions into the US metropolis, and a process of
intensification of all exploitation, of reduction of all
labour to the status of colonial labour. Let us leave aside
the obvious exaggeration and over-simplification
contained in this sentence: long before the American
working class saw its standard of living depressed to the
level of colonial labour, it would undoubtedly be ready
to make a socialist revolution! What is missing in this
sentence, and in the reasoning based upon it which
involves all the fourteen points, is the socio-economic
rationale of US monopolists behaviour. After all, they do
not intensify exploitation out of sheer wickedness, or
because they are secretly conspiring to make America
ripe for communism. If, after having enjoyed for three
decades a situation of relative political and social
stability in their country, these monopolists suddenly act
in a way to upset that equilibrium, one cannot seriously
assume that they do this without being compelled to act
in that sense. Now what compels them to behave in that
way? Once we formulate that question, we are happily
back where we started in the first place and where
Nicolaus assumed lightmindedly we should not have
started: the specific inner contradictions of US
imperialism in a given span of time, i.e. in the new phase
of postwar development opened up somewhere around
1965 and not the universal contradiction between capital
and labour, or the general contradictions of the epoch of
imperialism.

3. The Laws of Motion of Capitalism in This
Century
There is only one basic driving force which compels
capital in general to step up capital accumulation,
extraction of surplus value and exploitation of labour,
and feverishly to look for profits, over and above average
profit: this is competition.
It is true that there is not only competition between
capitalists, but also competition between capital and
labour as well, i.e. the attempt of capitalists to replace
living labour by labour-saving equipment, whenever
there is full employment and the rate of exploitation (of
surplus-value) starts to decline as a result of a more
favourable relationship of forces between wage-labour
and employers. But capitalists attempts to stop this
decline in the rate of surplus-value is again not caused by
their fundamentally evil or anti-labour character, but
by the compulsion of competition. If they let labour get
away with excessive wage increases, their own rate of
capital accumulation will decline, they will fall behind in
the competitive race and be unable to introduce the most
modern technology and finally be destroyed by their
competitors.
Todays world is no longer a purely capitalist world,
and politicalmilitary considerations have played an
important rle in motivating some of the key decisions of
US imperialism during the last decades. Imperialism
feels threatened by the spread of social revolution and
wants to stop it by all means, including open warfare as
in Korea and Vietnam. On the other hand, a purely
politico-military explanation of the world involvement of
US imperialism misses two important economic points:
first, that the very nature of capital accumulation, under
monopoly capitalism even more than under laissez-faire
capitalism, creates an economic compulsion to world-
wide expansion for capital; second, that the emergence
of a capital surplus, inevitably linked with monopoly
capitalism itself in the leading imperialist nations,
creates a strong economic compulsion for building up a
powerful arms industry and military establishment. The
existence of noncapitalist states and of a powerful
revolutionary upsurge in the colonial world gave these
processes a specific form; but in themselves, they existed
before the Second World War, and before the October
revolution at that.
Two questions related to our subject arise from this
summary repetition of some of the basic origins and
features of imperialism. What are the effects of
international capital accumulation upon imperialist
competition and rivalry, under the specific
circumstances of present-day world developments?
What are their effects on class relations inside the USA?
The answer to the first question can be read in all
statistics relative to basic international capital
movements since the end of the Second World War. For
20 years now, capital export has been larger and more
powerful than ever before, but it has been flowing
primarily between imperialist countries, and not from
imperialist to under-developed countries. [7] The
worldwide upsurge of liberation movements in the
colonial and semi-colonial countries has created a risk of
loss of capital, which apparently more than offsets the
still higher rate of profit which foreign capital enjoys in
these countries. [8] Inasmuch as the world domain of
imperialism has been shrinking and not expanding, such
a powerful international flow of capital, and in general
the stepping up of capital accumulation during the past
two decades (or, what is the same thing under
capitalism, the higher rate of economic growth) could
only lead to an intensification of competition, as well as
to its necessary corollary, an intensification of capital
concentration. The emergence of the multinational
corporation, as the leading form of organization of
monopoly capitalism to-day, testifies both to stronger
international competition and greater international
concentration of capital.
The answer to the second question is less obvious and
more controversial. But the inner logic of capitalism
leads us to the inescapable conclusion that as long as
competition clearly and unilaterally operates in favour of
US imperialism, it can neither threaten the standard of
living of the working class, not shatter the relative
stability of employment. It is just not true to write, as
Nicolaus does: Short of a general Soviet capitulation to
capitalist investment-penetration, and short of collapse
of the Chinese revolution, both improbable, capitalism
has reached its limits and has no place to go but inward,
in the direction of greater intensification of all
exploitation within its boundaries. Nicolaus, after
seeming to forget that the Third World has been
thoroughly penetrated not just since 1965 or 1945, but
since 1900; after seeming to forget that this penetration
is still far from complete, however, and that even in
imperialist countries, there is even today a powerful
movement of industrialization going on, is carried away
by his manipulation of the abstraction capitalism, and
loses sight of the most important form of expansion of
imperialist powers since the beginning of this century:
their attempt to expand at the expense of their
competitors. After all, that is why two World Wars have
broken out, and why the history of the 20th century has
been what it is.
Thus US monopolists would much sooner conquer
their competitors markets and undermine employment
there, than to have huge overproduction and
unemployment inside the USA. If a point is reached
where the US is forced to intensify exploitation of
American workers, it can only be because this alternative
course of action is being increasingly closed to it. Yet this
again can only be explained because the correlation of
competitive forces has become such that export of
intensified exploitation is increasingly impossible.
Nicolaus introduces a few additional facts to explain
the need of intensified exploitation of American workers
by reasons other than those emanating from increased
international competition. He mentions inflation and
taxation. [9] But here again, he is begging the question.
Inflation has been present in the USA since the mid-
thirties. Why hasnt it prevented a rise of the standard of
living of the American workers, before it started to lead
to a decline? Taxation has been steadily increasing for a
long time; why has it had to be stepped up the the point
where it starts cutting down real wages? Surely these two
questions are interrelated, arent they? Surely the
pressure of foreign imperialists to cut down the deficit of
the US balance of payments has something to do with
them? Surely the relative decline of the competitive
position of US imperialism is expressed in the fact that,
whereas for a whole period (including that of the Korean
war) US imperialism could pay itself the luxury of a large
deficit in its balance of payments, a huge military
establishment, and large-scale military and economic
outlays abroad, while keeping a strongly positive trade
account, today the mutual effects of inflation at home
and military outlays abroad have reduced the trade
surplus to the point where it might disappear altogether?
Nicolaus correctly mentions the rising cost of
maintaining the existing boundaries of the capitalist
world, and the rising trend to socialize (i.e. impose
upon the backs of the American workers) the costs of
interventions and wars abroad. But he forgets that again
we are dealing here with relative and not with absolute
aggregates. An imperialist country can have a rising
military budget and a rising cost of living, while at the
same time real capital accumulation and real income of
the workers are still increasing instead of being reduced
(this happened in the early forties, the early fifties and
the early sixties in the USA). What is needed for this
conjunction is a rise in real output and national income
making possible all these increases simultaneously. Only
if the rate of economic growth declines (or the rate of
inflation and military outlays increases in a much greater
proportion than real output) does military intervention
abroad imply increased exploitation of workers at home.
This again depends on how the capitalist world economy
behaves, and what share of its international market
accrues to US imperialism. Even with a stagnant world
market, increased military outlays in the USA do not
automatically mean a declining standard of living for
American workers, as long as US imperialism has the
possibility of receiving a growing share of that market, at
the expense of its competitors. By eliminating inter-
imperialist competition, Nicolaus takes all logic out of
his assessment of increasing exploitation of the
American working class.

4. Back to the Fallacy of Ultra-Imperialism?
In order to deny any major role for inter-imperialist
competitions today, Martin Nicolaus has to contend:
a. that from the viewpoint of the major
corporations in industry and finance, national
boundaries have long ceased to be obstacles ... They
naturally resist the pressures toward protectionism
and capitalist nationalism emanating from the non-
imperial or backward industries, chiefly from the
smaller manufacturers among them.
b. that no major of whatever internal economic
structure sits idly by while another power masses its
forces for an attack on its industry ... On the two
previous occasions in this century when major
national capitalisms have entered into major export
conflicts, the competition between them
necessarily rapidly escalates into protectionism,
embargos, financial blockades, colonial wars, and
finally the First and Second World Wars ... The
threat which Mandel depicts, if it had the
magnitude he ascribes to it, would clearly be a casus
belli.
c. that Mandels procedure of equating the
economic sphere of US capital with the territorial
area of the USA is highly misleading ... The sphere
of US capital is not confined to the territorial
nation, but of course extends in varying degrees
throughout Canada, Japan, the states of Europe and
the Third World.
d. that US banking capital is predominant.
The role of banks in competitive battles is crucial,
and becomes more so as the production advantages
of one antagonist over the other diminish ... The
ability of European industry to force a crisis on US
industry thus depends on the relative strength of
the respective privately-controlled capital reserves
and credits ... These financial powers are based in
US imperialism.
At first glance, these arguments are at least partially in
contradiction with each other and self-eliminating. If all
major corporations systematically and definitively resist
pressures toward protectionism and capitalist
nationalism, how can one then explain that major export
conflicts, which Nicolaus modestly assigns to major
national capitalisms but in reality have always involved
major monopolistic corporations and imperialist powers,
could break out at all? Was it perhaps smaller
manufacturers, and not Messrs. Krupp and Thyssen,
Vickers-Armstrong and Deterding, Morgan and
Rockefeller, who were responsible for the First and
Second World Wars? If the economic spheres of
influence of imperialism are not tied up with national
state powers (the notion of territoriality is dragged in
here by the hair; what is involved is the key role of states
in these conflicts!), how can one then explain the very
same protectionism, embargos, financial blockades,
colonial wars and First and Second World Wars we have
been talking about? Is capital export and foreign capital
investment a new phenomenon? Wasnt it already well
developed before and during the First World War so
much so in fact that innumerable liberal pacifists and
opportunist Social-Democrats were convinced that
imperialist wars would become impossible? [10] How
can US banking capital be predominant i.e. US
imperialism control most of the financial resources of
the world and at the same time, firstly be forced to
neutralize the reduction of productive advantage of US
capitalists (where did the European and Japanese
capitalists get the capital for financing their huge outlays
of productive investment? They didnt borrow them from
US bankers!) and secondly be increasingly dependent for
borrowing capital on the European capital market?
Nicolaus also alleges that the wage-costs of American
corporations should be calculated on world averages,
given the fact they transfer a growing part of their
operations abroad. In this, he seems to have lost his
sense of proportion. What is the fraction of total output
of US industry produced abroad in competition withus
units of production at home excluding activities
complementary to domestic production, such as oil
extraction? Obviously, only a marginal proportion. What
is the fraction of total manpower employed by US
industry beyond the frontiers of the USA? Again, only a
marginal one. Indeed, if US monopolies were ever to
succeed in transferring 30, 40 or 50 per cent of their
output of, say, automobiles, computers, airplanes and
turbines, this could only lead to a massive increase of
unemployment in the USA itself. What would be the
consequence (and purpose) of this unemployment? To
erode the wage differentials between the USA and
Europe (or even the USA and Japan) by lowering the
standard of living of the American working class. Why
would US monopolies ever embark on such a course in
the first place, if not under the compulsion of
international competition?
The methodological toots of Nicolauss mistakes lie in
an inability to distinguish quantitative from qualitative
changes, relative from absolute superiority, the
beginning from the final outcome of a process. They are
connected with a gross underestimation of the State as
the major instrument of defence of the capitalist class
interests today (against their class enemies, against
foreign competitors, and against the menacingly
explosive nature of the inner contradictions of the
system).
The relationship of forces between various imperialist
powers can develop greatly to the advantage of one and
at the expense of another. A massive relative superiority
on the European continent was possessed by Germany,
in the periods 1900-1916, and 1937-1944, and by France
in the period 1919-1923. But that does not transform the
competitors of the predominant power into semi-
colonial nations, which have lost control over the means
of production of their country. Such semicolonial nations
only arise when in fact the key industries and banks in
the country are owned or controlled by foreign
capitalists, and when for that reason, the State itself
fundamentally protects the interests of the foreign
imperialist class, as against those of the native
bourgeoisie. That is the situation in Greece, Brazil,
Ghana or Iran today. It is obviously not the situation in
France, Britain or Italy, not to speak of Japan or Western
Germany. Quantitative changes in the relationship of
forces between imperialist powers are one thing; a
qualitative change in status, the transformation of an
imperialist country into a semicolonial country (as could
have happened in France, if Germany had won the
Second World War, or as could have happened in West
Germany, if the 1945-47 trend had been maintained and
the Cold War had not broken out) is quite another
thing. There is not the slightest evidence to show that US
imperialism controls more than 10 per cent of the
industrial means of production, and much less of the
financial means of exchange, of any other imperialist
power (with the exception of Canada, which is indeed a
border case). There is for that reason not the slightest
evidence that these powers have lost their basic
independence as imperialist powers, and have become
US semi-colonies.
In fact, if one studies the evolution of the inter-
relationship of forces between US imperialism and its
main foreign competitors, one has to conclude that the
USA reached the zenith of its power at the end of the
Second World War, and that its hegemony has ever since
been in decline. Of course, it still retains a great relative
superiority. This relative superiority might even increase
again, if there is no sufficient international
interpenetration of capital on a European scale, if
European multinational corporations are not
established for systematic competition with US-based
multinational corporations on relatively equal terms.
But independent ownership of capital, independent
control of the internal market and independent use of
State power, are still basic characteristics of European
and Japanese imperialists. [11]
But what about US military superiority? What of the
possibility of new inter-imperialist wars? US military
superiority over its main competitors is, indeed, much
more striking than its relative economic superiority. But
precisely because there has come about a contradiction
between the resurgence of independent financial and
industrial power of Western European and Japanese
imperialism, and their continuous military dependence
on the USA, the NATO and Nippo-American alliances
are in deep and permanent crisis. There is only one way
in which this crisis can be solved, in the long run
(inasmuch as imperialism survives and the present trend
in relationship of forces is not fundamentally altered): an
adaptation of the military relationship of forces to
economic reality, the re-emergence of independent
military strength in Western Europe and Japan in the
last analysis, the emergence of independent nuclear
deterrents in Western Europe (Franco-British, or
Franco-German-British, or even on a broader scale) and
Japan.
As for new inter-imperialist wars, which the late
Joseph Stalin predicted in his political testament, they
are indeed extremely unlikely to break out, but not for
reasons of US supremacy, but because all imperialist
powers are threatened by a much more deadly menace
then inter-imperialist competition: the menace of the
non-capitalist part of the world expanding through new
victorious revolutions. Against the so-called socialist
countries and new revolutions, imperialist powers
indeed have an attitude of collective solidarity, which
makes the NATO and Nippo-American alliances real
alliances, in the common interest of the capitalist class
everywhere, and not simply stooge sets for US
expansion.
Imperialist competition continues, and will continue,
including some very ruthless developments indeed; but it
will unfurl within the framework of that collective
solidarity towards the common enemy. Yet within that
framework, the law of uneven development continues to
operate inexorably, causing the relative decline of
previously supreme powers and the emergence of newly
strengthened imperialist forces. The fate of US
imperialisms supremacy will be decided neither on the
battle-field nor in the Third World at least in the
coming years. [12] It will be decided by the capacity of
Western European imperialists (and Japanese
imperialists) to set up colossal corporations, equivalent
in financial power and industrial strength to that of their
US competitors. I do not say that this development has
already taken place on a sufficient scale or that it is
inevitable. I have elsewhere made clear the obstacles and
resistances towards that process. I only state that, if it
takes place, it will force US imperialism greatly to
intensify the exploitation of the American working class,
under the pressure of competition.
The discussion on ultra-imperialism is, in fact, an old
one. It was initiated by Kautsky after the outbreak of the
First World War, and received at that time a scathing
reply by Lenin. It was revived during the mid-twenties
by various Social-Democrats (Hilferding, Vandervelde
and others), celebrating the constitution of the world
steel cartel as a triumph of ultra-imperialism and
peaceful development; the rebuff which history inflicted
a few years later to that illusion is still well known by
everybody.
Lenins answer to the fallacy of ultra-imperialism can
be summarized in one formula: the law of uneven
development.
It is sufficient to pose the question clearly to see that
the answer can only be negative. For one couldnt
conceive, under capitalism, any other basis for the
division in zones of influence, of interests, of colonies
etc., than the strength of the participants of that
partition, their economic, financial, military strength
etc. Now among these participants of partition, that
strength changes in a different way, for under
capitalism, even development of enterprises, of trusts,
of industries, of countries, is impossible.</>
Lenin adds:
But if one speaks about the purely economic
conditions of the epoch of finance capital, as about a
concrete historical epoch situated in the beginning of
the XXth century, the best answer to the dead
abstractions about ultra-imperialism... is to oppose
to them the concrete economic reality of the present-
day world economy. Kautskys theory of ultra-
imperialism is completely void of meaning and can
only, among other things, encourage the deeply
mistaken idea ... that the domination of finance capital
reduces the inequalities and contradictions of the
world economy, whereas in reality it strengthens
them. [13]
The developments of the last year to go no further into
the recent past are a perfect illustration of the fact that
the law of uneven and combined development,
strengthening the inequalities and contradiction of the
world economy, operates today as it operated 50 years
ago. In 1958, West Germanys exports of machinery and
transport equipment amounted to $3.9 billion, those of
the United States amounted to $6.3 billion, 62 per cent
more than the West German figure. In 1968, West
German exports of machinery and transport equipment
had risen to $11.3 billion, as against $14.5 billion by
USA; the difference had declined to less than 30 per
cent. In 1969, the two figures will practically meet at
somewhere near $15 billion. Total West German exports
were half of US exports in 1958; in 1969, they will
amount to more than two-thirds of that figure.
This industrial power is by no means without relation
to capital accumulation and financial strength. The
revaluation of the Deutsche Mark (in fact: the
devaluation of the dollar compared to the main
European currency) is correlated with a tremendous
export of German capital. Net long-term private capital
export was $1 billion in 1967; $2.4 billion in 1968 and
probably more than $5 billion at the new exchange
rate in 1969, i.e. already more in absolute figures than
US capital exports! In fact, during the first semester of
1969 there were more bonds issued in dm (including by
US corporations) than in dollars, on the international
capital market.
The sapping of the dollars strength by foreign military
outlays has so changed the financial relationship of
forces in favour of other major imperialist powers, that
the US government now undertakes systematic efforts to
force them... to spend more on rearmament (i.e. to
redivide and so the speak internationalize the common
burden of defending the borders of the capitalist world).
But this is inconceivable without a military
strengthening of these powers (the strengthening of
Japan is now on the agenda, after that of Western
Germany), which again shifts the inter-imperialist
relationship of forces at the expense of US imperialism.
5. The Politics of the Debate
The most astonishing passages of Martin Nicolauss
polemic are these in which he accuses me of making
sense only if I assume the pacification of the Soviet
Union, a military alliance between European capital and
the ussr, and peaceful coexistence. In other words, he
seems to imply that beneath Mandel lies de Gaulle.
Here we have again a typical example of how Martin
Nicolaus is led astray by operating too much with
metaphysical abstractions, instead of understanding
real, contradictory social forces at work and in conflict
with each other.
The competition between Western European and US
imperialism is a fact, visible for anybody who studies not
only trade statistics but polemics and debates in all
capitalist circles on both sides of the Atlantic. What did
Gaullism represent in this debate? An attempt to
strengthen Western European imperialism by
outmoded techniques of 19th-century diplomacy (18th-
century dynastic diplomacy would perhaps be a more
correct, if more severe assessment, at that). The attempt
to establish European independence under the
hegemony of one of its economically weakest imperialist
powers, France, was condemned to fail, independent
deterrent or not, as I pointed out in the early sixties. It
could only lead to a deterioration of the relative position
of French imperialism as compared with German and
Italian imperialism, for the capital squandered by De-
Gaulle in his force de frappe determined a growing
antiquation of French industrial equipment compared to
Italian and German plant and a growing exacerbations of
social tensions in France itself. His attempt at a
diplomatic and economic flirtation with Moscow was
equally condemned to failure, because over and above
the obvious importance of commercial expansion
towards Eastern Europe, common to all European
capitalists (and for which German, British and Italian
groups were often better equipped than their French
competitors), there was the staunch class consciousness
of the French bourgeoisie, which could not but consider
the Soviet Union, in spite of all the conservatism of its
leaders and the reformism of the French CP, as a class
enemy with whom no alliance was possible in the present
world context.
In fact, the only durable change which occurred in the
French economy under de Gaulle, occurred in spite of de
Gaulle: it was the constantly growing integration of
France into the Common Market. Today, 45 per cent of
French exports are directed to these countries, as against
22 per cent before 1958. This economic fact was strong
enough to create so much opposition inside the French
bourgeoisie against de Gaulles particular views on
capitalist Western European integration that it actually
caused his downfall. I predicted this years ago in the
same way as I predicted that de Gaulle was blindly
working pour le roi de Prusse, for German hegemony in
a Common Market limited to six countries.
Now what is the main social and political ideology of
the advocates of European independence in Western
European capitalist and pettybourgeois circles? Is it
Mandels thesis of inter-imperialist competition? Not at
all! It is an ideology very close indeed to that of Martin
Nicolaus and the thesis of ultra-imperialism. Europe is
in danger of being colonized by the USA. This
colonization is irresistible, unless Europe unites. In my
book on the Common Market, shortly to appear in
English, I have exposed the ideological function of this
propaganda: it is to use the endemic anti-Americanism
of the European working class as a means to tune down
the class struggle in Europe, to disarm this working class
against capital concentration and capitalist
rationalization, and to collaborate with its own exploiters
against the common enemy: US imperialism.
The idea of complete US imperialist supremacy on a
world scale, and the idea of Western Europe and Japan
being slowly but surely reduced to the status of semi-
colonial powers, logically leads to such conclusions. For
after all doesnt Marxism-Leninism teach that there is a
basic difference between an inter-imperialist conflict,
and a conflict between an imperialist power and an
oppressed and exploited semicolonial bourgeoisie? So it
is the theory of absolute US hegemony which leads to
capitulation before the class enemy and to class
collaboration, and not at all the classical Leninist
concept of inter-imperialist competition, which I
continue to uphold. This theoretical prediction has
already been borne out in practice, at least twice: in the
early fifties, when the French CP (and, to a lesser degree,
other CPs in Western Europe) were making a block with
Gaullists and speaking on the same platform with them
against US imperialism and the abandonment of
national sovereignty, as if France were a semi-colonial
power, and not one competing gang in the international
brotherhood of robber barons and imperialists
plunderers; and in the early sixties, when, starting from
that very same assumption, certain Maoist groups
proposed to support De Gaulle in the Presidential
elections against Mitterrand, using the justification that
de Gaulle was more anti-American than Mitterrand.
Our theory, at the contrary, does not lead to the
subordination of any sector of the international working
class to any sector of world capitalism. We stand for
independent class struggle of the working class in all
capitalist countries, We stand for independent
organisation of the working class, defending its own class
interests and bent upon a socialist revolution. We do not
preach to American workers that they should ally
themselves with any sector of the ruling class, nor do we
propose anything of the kind to European workers. To
say that bourgeois ideas lie underneath such a clear
strategy of independent working-class struggle is
somewhat preposterous.
There is a lot in Martin Nicolaus article with which we
can agree. There is no doubt that we are living in an
epoch of tremendous socialization and
internationalization of productive forces, on a scale
unexpected even by Lenin or in Lenins time. [14] There
is no doubt that the basic contradiction in such an epoch
is the contradiction between capital and labour, in the
process of production itself, and that the direct road of
the working class towards a socialist revolution in the
industrialized imperialist countries will be not through a
fight for wages, but through objective challenges against
capitalist relations of production. We have been writing
this for many years, and there is no reason to assume
that this will not be true in the United States too.
It is also evident that the very supremacy of US
imperialism at the end of the Second World War tended
to involve the ruling class of the USA with all world
contradictions of imperialism, and tended to introduce
all these contradictions in some form into American
society Itself. In spite of all its accumulated wealth and
reserves, even US imperialism has proved itself unable in
the long run to pay, at one and the same time, the costs
of playing world gendarme, of introducing reforms into
US society in order to avoid an exacerbation of social
tensions, and of financing a constant modernization of
equipment to assure a rate of productive capital
accumulation which would enable it to maintain its
technological advance on all its competitors. It is obvious
that the origin of all the strains and tensions,
increasingly visible in US society since the early sixties,
are linked to world developments. We ourselves have
pointed out many times how great the impact of the
colonial revolution and of the Vietnamese war has been
on the formation of a new revolutionary youth vanguard
in the USA, on the politicization of the Blacks, on the
emergence of a new radicalism among intellectuals,
technicians and public service employees. So we see no
reason suddenly to deny these evidences now. One
should add that a new wave of objectively revolutionary
militancy of the West European working class, as well as
militant struggles of Eastern European workers, students
and intellectuals for socialist democracy not to speak
of a parallel rise of political revolution in the ussr could
not fail likewise to strengthen the rise of a new
revolutionary vanguard and an upsurge of mass
radicalism in the USA.
All these factors as well as many of those which
Nicolaus cites contribute to shake the relative political
and social stability of the USA, to stir up against class
consciousness in advanced American workers, and to
facilitate the eruption of a sweeping radicalization and
massive class struggles of the proletariat in that country.
But all these subjective factors, reacting from the social
superstructure on class relations, cannot be the main
cause of a new mass radicalization of that working class.
The main cause can only be found in a change of
material conditions. The growing crisis of American
imperialism can only transform itself into a decisive
crisis of American society through the mediation of a
growing instability of the American economy. This is our
key thesis. In this growing instability of the American
economy, the loss of US suzerainty over the whole
imperialist world, the relative decline of US economic
superiority vis-`-vis its imperialist competitors, and the
sharpening competition and redivision of the
international capitalist market of which the internal
market of the USA is the most important single sector
will play an important role.
In Where is America going? I did not predict that the
re-emergence of the contradiction between labour and
capital in the USA would present itself as a re-run of
some textbook accounts of the contract-bargaining
sessions between Reuther and GM. I only predicted that
the American working class, which today has trade-
unionist but not socialist class consciousness, would
become radicalized from the moment the capitalist
system showed itself less and less able to deliver the
goods, i.e. to guarantee regular increases in real wages
and a high level of employment. For I argued that the
relative stability of American society during the past 30
years was basically not due to some ideological factor
(the alleged anti-communism of the working class) but to
this capacity of the system to deliver the goods.
Nicolaus agrees with me that this capacity is now
declining, and that the roots of that decline are to be
found in the deterioration of the world situation of
American imperialism. It is hard to deny, under these
conditions, that the weakening of the competitive
position of US imperialism on the world market has
something to do with that deterioration.
December 5 1969

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Notes
1. In the first paragraph of Where is America going?
NLR 54, p.3.
2. The latest attempt to give a supposedly Marxist
rationalization to Third Worldism has been offered by
Pierre Jale in his book Limperialisms en
1970 (Maspero, Paris 1969). This is based on the
assumption that the contradiction between imperialism
and the peoples of the Third World is the main
contradiction today (one can see here the havoc this
undialectical formula of Lin Piao has caused among
sincere and capable Marxists), while workers actions in
the West remain reformist, both because of the capacity
of the system to guarantee for a long time to come a high
rate of growth (declining fluctuations of the industrial
cycle and a low level of unemployment) and because of
the predominance of rightist forces in the labour
movement. How this theory can be reconciled with the
reality of the class struggles in France May 1968 and
Italy 1969, which obviously tend more and more to
outgrow the limits of reformism and to challenge
capitalist relations of production, or with the reality of
the world economy, characterized since 1965 by a
declining rate of growth, an increase in unemployment,
and the appearance in nearly all key sectors of industry
of growing over-capacity of production, is hard for me to
understand.
3. It is useful to stress that Trotsky rejected any notion
that the peoples of the underdeveloped world had to
wait till the Western proletariat made its revolution,
just as he opposed any Third-World illusions. In his
political testament, the May 1940 Manifesto of the
Fourth International on The Imperialist War
and the Proletarian Revolution, he wrote:
The perspective of permanent revolution in no case
signifies that the backward countries must await the
signal from the advanced ones, or that the colonial
peoples should patiently wait for the proletariat of the
metropolitan centres to free them. Help comes to him
who helps himself. Workers must develop the
revolutionary struggle in every country, colonial or
imperialist, where favourable conditions have been
established, and through this set an example for the
workers of other countries.
It will interest our readers that this was not a new position of
Trotskys, only acquired after the sad experiences of European
working-class defeats in the thirties. As early as August 5th, 1919, in a
secret message to the Central Committee of the Russian Communist
Party, he wrote as follows:
There is no doubt at all that our Red Army constitutes
an incomparably more powerful force in the Asian
terrain of world politics than in the European terrain.
Here there opens up before us an undoubted
possibility not merely of a lengthy wait to see how
events develop in Europe, but of conducting activity in
the Asian field. The road to India may prove at the
given moment to be more readily passable and shorter
for us than the road to Soviet Hungary. The sort of
army which at the moment can be of no great
significance in the European scales can upset the
unstable balance of Asian relationships of colonial
dependence, give a direct push to an uprising on the
part of the oppressed masses and assure the triumph
of such a rising in Asia. (The Trotsky Papers, I,
1917-22, p.623, The Hague 1964).
4. Lenin, uvres, tome 29, pp.167-8, Editions Sociales,
Paris, 1962 my own translation.
5. When I speak of relative quiescence I do not deny that
there have been strikes during these decades. But
obviously, nothing occurred on the scale of the post-war
strikes, not to speak of the 1936-37 sit-down wave.
6. Engels: England 1845 and 1885, article published
in Commonweal, March 1, 1885 I quote from Marx-
Engels Werke, vol.21, pp.196-7, Dietz-Verlag, Berlin
1962, and have retranslated the text myself from German
into English.
7. This applies of course only to private capital outflows.
I do not have to deal here with the phenomenon of the
so-called public help to Third-World countries in fact
the creation, by the imperialist states, of purchasing
power for the heavy industry export monopolies of their
own countries.
8. According to figures quoted by E.L. Nelson and F.
Cutler in The International Investment Position of the
United States in 1967 (Survey of Current Business,
vol.48, no.10, 1968, pp.24-25), the rate of profit
calculated by capitalist firms on USA direct capital
investment in 1967 amounted to 12.3 per cent in Latin-
America, 14 per cent in Asia and 19.7 per cent in Africa,
as against only 10.1 per cent for direct capital
investments in imperialist countries (Canada, Western
Europe, Australia).
9. It should be noted that, after having poked fun at me
in the beginning of his article for using the categories of
technological revolution, and inflation to explain some
of the causes of growing instability in American society,
Nicolaus comes back to exactly the same factors when he
projects, in part IV of his article, the development of a
general crisis of overproduction. We can easily drop the
backlog of unfulfilled demand created by the devastation
of the Second World War; by no stretch of imagination
can this explain a seven or eight-year boom in the US
economy in the sixties. He is then left with only two
explanations: (i) No epoch-making technological
innovations have materialized, which would imply that
the high rate of expansion of the last two decades was
due after all epoch-making technological innovations in
the electronics, nuclear energy, petrochemical and
computer industries as I contended. (ii) Both
investment and demand become problematic without the
artificial and necessarily temporary stimulus of
inflation. Lets not start a dispute as to the necessarily
temporary character of inflation. But its key role in
attempts to avoid a major crisis of over-production I
pointed out long ago (see Marxist Economic Theory,
vol.II, pp.526-36, Merlin Press, London 1968).
10. While imperialism necessitates a war of capitalists of
one country against those of all (?) other countries, it is
unable to realise such a war. The imperialists of each big
power were forced ... to arrive at an understanding with
the imperialists of another, or several other big powers,
and to conclude an alliance with them. But by doing so,
they have already started on the road of a very important
modification of imperialism itself ... It is not at all
excluded that the present war will end with an
understanding between the leading big powers of both
camps for the partition and exploitation of the world. We
have even to take into account the possibility that the
world will see the spectacle, of which we should be
ashamed, that the imperialist International will become
a reality sooner than the International of the socialist
parties. Karl Kautsky, Die Neue Zeit, February 16th,
1917.
11. All this is explained in much more detail in my
forthcoming Europe versus America?
Contradictions of Imperialism (NLB).
12. I mean by this that the economic repercussions of
Third World liberation movements in the coming years
cannot by themselves cause a major upheaval in the US
economy. In fact, during the last 20 years these
movements, which implied the loss for capitalism of the
biggest country in the world China as a field of
capital investment, coincided with a big increase in the
rate of growth of the imperialist economy. This does, not
of course, mean that the political, social and subjective
effects of Third World liberation struggles do not make a
very important contribution to shaking the equilibrium
of imperialist society.
13. Lenin: uvres Choisies, I, pp.874, 852-3, Editions
en Langues Etrangres, Moscou 1946.
14. But Nicolaus is mistaken when he assumes that
national boundaries and nation States have ceased to be
obstacles for this movement of internationalization of
capital. On the contrary: the more this movement
increases, the stronger becomes the contradiction
between the survival of the nation state and the tendency
of productive forces to outgrow it. Nicolaus shows a
similar inability to understand the contradictory,
dialectical process of social change, in his polemic on the
question of black employment. My figure of the
reduction of unskilled jobs in the USA comes from
Secretary of Labour Wirtz, (quoted in Baran-
Sweezy: Monopoly Capital, p.267, Monthly Review
Press, 1966). The official statistics of black employment
in 1960 3.6 million employed. Of these only 1 million
were unskilled labourers (among which a quarter of a
million farm laborers), as against 887,000 semi-skilled
workers, 357,000 craftsmen and foremen, and 292,000
technicians, professionals and clerically employed. The
basic process in American industry has been to displace
labourers by semi-skilled operatives. But at the same
time, in the American economy clerical jobs, and jobs of
technicians and professionals, have risen even more
quickly (the number of professional, technical and
clerical jobs increased from 117 million in 1940 to 21
millions in 1965, whereas the number of semi-skilled
operatives and kindred workers only rose from 95 to 14
millions). So it is perfectly possible that, at one and the
same time, there are many fewer jobs as labourers, there
are many more blacks employed in industry and services
as semi-skilled operatives, there are proportionally many
more black unemployed than white and there is a
growing inter-racial income gap and occupational
segregation, which has a powerful radicalizing impact on
the black population.