With the death of Amiya Kumar Bagchi on November 28, 2024, at age 88, the world as a whole has lost one of its most outstanding economic analysts (and Marxist political economists). A lifelong critic of capitalist development, he provided two magisterial contributions to the theory of imperialism: The Political Economy of Underdevelopment (Cambridge University Press, 1982) and Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital (Rowman and Littlefield, 2005). Written in the decades when imperialism theory was waning in the West, these works did not receive the attention they deserved at the time, but merit careful study today.
Bagchi was born in West Bengal, India, in 1936. He received his college education at Presidency College, Kolkata, and went on to do doctoral studies at Trinity College, Cambridge University, in the United Kingdom. There, he became close friends with Cambridge economists Joan Robinson and Maurice Dobb. After teaching economics at Cambridge for a number of years, he resigned in 1969 in order to return to India and take up a position at Presidency College. In 1974, he joined the newly established Centre for the Studies of Social Sciences, Calcutta, where he became the director. After serving as a member and then vice chair of the West Bengal State Planning Board under the Left Front government, he assumed the position of professor and director of the Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata.
The Political Economy of Underdevelopment was a Marxist critique of imperialism in the tradition of Paul A. Baran’s The Political Economy of Growth (Monthly Review Press, 1957). In his remarkable work, Bagchi provided, as the basis of his analysis, a treatment of how imperialist exploitation related to Karl Marx’s theory of exploitation of labor power, stating,
The process of extracting a surplus from the third world countries by the ruling class—in particular the capitalist class—of the European and North American capitalist countries (and later on also of Japan) will be termed “exploitation” in this book. We shall often qualify this as “colonial” or “imperialistic” exploitation of labour in order to distinguish it from the exploitation of labour within the same country. “Exploitation of labour” in Marxian economics has a precise meaning…. Exploitation means the extraction of surplus [value] by the owners of the means of production, over and above [the value of labour power, that is] the wages of labour.… When we talk about exploitation in the international context, it means ultimately the appropriation of labour power of the exploited country by paying it less than the full value it produces. (15–16)
In Perilous Passage, Bagchi produced a multifaceted work of economic theory and economic history that challenged Eurocentric explanations of the “European Economic Miracle,” which had traced capitalist development and the Industrial Revolution to European cultural superiority from the ancient Greeks and Romans to the present. Instead, Bagchi highlighted the role of imperialism as “armed, competitive competition,” from the earliest phases of European expansion to late monopoly capitalism. Here he emphasized “intercontinental resource flows” and imperialistic exploitation. He also replaced a narrow conception of economic development with one of human development.
In May 2003, Bagchi was a keynote speaker at the “Imperialism Today” Conference in Burlington, Vermont, organized by Monthly Review in honor of MR editor Harry Magdoff’s ninetieth birthday. Bagchi traveled from India for the event, presenting a talk on “The Parameters of Resistance.” Here he focused on the deep division that had developed in the anti-imperialist movement between those who were moral resisters, opposed to relying on the state in resisting imperialism since it violated moral registers (in line with the notion of the state as inherently “evil”), and those who were political resisters, who saw organization in relation to the state as key to building an effective popular revolt against imperialism. Although clearly preferring the latter group, Bagchi’s emphasis was on how these two elements in the anti-imperialist movement could be brought together. He illustrated this by examining the new demands of struggles against ecological imperialism. In the capstone to his talk, he pointed to a renewed worldwide phenomenon of “capitalism-gone-fascist.” This was visible in the “state sponsored genocide in Gujarat” state in India in 2002 (where Hindutva-based fascism imposed untold death and destruction on the Muslim population), and in the merciless attacks then being carried out by U.S. and British forces on the state and people of Iraq. For Bagchi, this demanded altogether new strategies of collective resistance on the part of the global left (Amiya Kumar Bagchi, “Parameters of Resistance,” Monthly Review 55, no. 3 [July–August 2003]: 136–143).
Bagchi met a number of times with friends and representatives of MR in India in the 1990s. As Prabhat Patnaik wrote in a eulogy for him, legions of students, colleagues, and friends “held him in great affection and admiration,” extending throughout the world. “All of them will miss his warmth, generosity, immense scholarship, and passionate commitment to socialism” (Prabhat Patnaik, “Amiya Kumar Bagchi,” Peoples Democracy, December 8, 2024, peoplesdemocracy.in).
Correction
In the “Notes from the Editors” in the December 2024 issue, on the inside back cover, third line from the end of the block quote, the citation for the UN Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices should be for the Seventy-Ninth Session of the United Nations.
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