Edward Said: Bankruptcy of explaining imperialism with cultural tools

There is no doubt that this article, which deals with dry theoretical issues related to imperialism, tests the patience of the reader, especially in African and Arab countries, who focus most of his attention on following the political conflicts and bloody wars raging around him-;- but addressing these issues is important because they are intrinsically linked to the current unprecedented violent expansion of colonial powers in the world with the aim of consolidating hegemony over poor countries. It is incomprehensible to understand the causes and objectives behind the wars, which are widespread in the Middle East and Africa, with a narrow localized national view which hinders effective confrontation of imperialism and defeating its pernicious goals. The subject of imperialism is -dir-ectly related to current events.
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In his book "Culture and Imperialism"- published in 1993, Professor Edward Said presents an extensive study of Western thought produced during the past two centuries and read it using a methodology that he himself designed. His reading also includes literary and intellectual works that appeared after the Second World War, by writers from the Third World, in which they presented a critique of the ideas of former colonizers. This article is a critique of the author s approach to the study of imperialism in the context of the idea that imperialism is essentially the product of a cultural process-;- the critique includes the ideas that Said came up with through the aforementioned method. To accomplish this task, the article does not address Said s views through a literary critique of the ideas contained in "Culture and Imperialism", but only a critique, from a Marxist-Leninist perspective, of his ideas concerning the nature and -function-ing of imperialism as a political movement linked to economics and sociology.

In “ Culture and Imperialism” Said continues to examine the relationship between culture and imperialism more comprehensively than his presentation in “Orientalism (1978)”, in which he examines the Orientalist movement as a cultural tool used by the West to reproduce the East in the political, military, etc. spheres. In "Culture and Imperialism", imperialism is seen - during the period from the eighteenth to the twentieth century- as a natural expansion of Western colonial powers and its extension over the wide swath of land, and its relationship to the other, whom the West considers as inferior compared to a transcendent and superior West.

In dealing with “Culture and Imperialism”, this article will focus on three themes: first, a critique of the author s approach to the study of imperialism that is radically opposed to the dialectical materialist method-;- second, the absence of a clear definition of imperialism brought about by a lack of awareness of its nature as a product of the emergence of capitalist monopolies which replaced free competition in the late nineteenth century-;- and third, ignoring Marxist thought related to issues of national liberation that changed the face of the world when translated into major political liberation movements in the twentieth century.

In commenting on the topics referred to above, we will rely on many quotations from "Culture and Imperialism" and in some detail dictated by the need to present Said’s method of analysis in his own words, for the sake of clarity, since the method is a new one presented by the author to analyze topics related to imperialism. On closer examination, the methodology adopted in “culture and imperialism" is less clear than many (even liberal) approaches that look at the analysis of imperialism from cultural point of view. The ideas contained in "Culture and Imperialism", is mere repetition, in one form´-or-another, of ideas that have long been popular in history, literature, anthropology, etc., that dealt with the relationship of culture to domination and colonial conquest and imperialist plunder. -see, Aijaz Ahmad, "Between Orientalism and Historicism", Studies in History, 7, 1, n.s., 1991, sections 2-5

Said s method is nothing new, but what is new is its presentation in "Culture and Imperialism" in new expressive linguistic templates and a captivating style, based on the writer s strong mastery of the prevailing methods of literary criticism, his possession of an unparalleled expressive linguistic skill and an encyclopedic culture. Said has been a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University for 40 years, and as a visiting professor at many elite American universities (Ivy league) and in other international academic institutions. Said is an intellectual who has written in a variety of fields including criticism, comparative literature, cultural studies, anthropology, political science and ethnic studies, and is an accomplished critic and composer of music.

In “Culture and Imperialism," Said uses what he calls the “contrapuntal” method of reading the texts he wanted to analyze, a term that the writer borrowed from music in which he was good at playing and composing. Counterpoint is a type of music that has two melodic lines played at the same time. It is intended to combine two discordant things. The term " contrapuntal " is used by Said in a conceptual framework critical of fixed identities and then advocates the coexistence of disparate identities, such as the mixing of diverse musical melodies.

Said presents what he called contrapuntal reading as an alternative, he invented, to current methods, including the materialist dialectics, in the study of the phenomenon of imperialism-;- one of Said s main goals in "Culture and Imperialism" is to refute Marxism, which he considers an integral part of the hated Western culture that has put its production at the service of imperialist domination, he says:

"Most of Western Marxism, in its aesthetic and cultural departments, is similarly blinded to the matter of imperialism. ……. So, if European theory and Western Marxism as cultural co-efficients of liberation haven t in the main proved themselves to be reliable allies in the resistance to imperialism-on the contrary, one may suspect that they are part of the same invidious "universalism" that connected culture with imperialism for centuries-how has the liberationist anti-imperialism tried to break this shackling unity? First, by a new integrative´-or-contrapuntal orientation in history that sees Western and. non-Western experiences as belonging together because they are connected by imperialism. " - Said, 1994, pp. 278-279.

Said does not embrace Marxism and considers it as one of the Western cultural tools that contributed to imperialism-;- abut he does not pay attention to the orientation of Western Marxism and the extent to which it follows Marxist fundamental principles.

Said says he wants to examine how the processes of imperialism took place outside economic laws and political decisions, and how they manifested themselves in national culture thanks to the power of cultural formations that are pure, honorable and devoid of worldly affiliations, and by promoting imperialist culture as something distinct and purified in education, literature, visual and musical arts. Said wants to do this seeking guidance from the words of William Blake:

"It s art and science. Remove´-or-degrade them and the empire no longer exists. The empire follows art and not the other way around as the English assume." Said 1994, pp. 13-14

Said proposes, rather than the partial analysis offered by various national schools, the lines of contrapuntal reading to provide a holistic analysis, where secular texts and institutions are seen as working together, in which “Dickens” and “Thackeray” are read as London authors and also as writers whose long historical experience is guided by the colonial institutions of India and Australia ……. Said believes that the projects of separatist movements were exhausted and the "ecology" of the new and expanded meaning of literature cannot be linked to only one essence´-or-to a distinct idea of one thing, he says:

“But this global, contrapuntal analysis should be modelled not (as earlier notions of comparative literature were) on a symphony but rather on an atonal ensemble-;- we must take into account all sorts of spatial´-or-geographical and rhetorical practices-inflections,-limit-s, constraints, intrusions, inclusions, prohibitions--all of them tending to elucidate a complex and uneven topography. A gifted critic s intuitive synthesis, of the type volunteered by hermeneutic´-or-philological interpretation ………is still of value.” – Said 1994, p. 318.

Said s new approach, contrapuntal analysis, is based to some extent - as he did in his book “Orientalism” - on the ideas of Michel Foucault. What he took from Foucault was the use of Foucault s concept of “discourse”, i.e., he wanted to study the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized as a “discourse”, that is, to take the "discourse" as an analytical tool that sheds light on the phenomenon he is studying-;- this in the end can only be described as an idealistic philosophical method. Foucault argues that logical analysis lacks the creation of intellectual imagination, and that what analysis can explain is implicit in the concept with which we begin, i.e., it adds nothing.

Foucault s idealism is that he examines the dominance of "power" through its relationship to knowledge: the power of knowledge builds power, and the institutions of power in turn build knowledge. Although this relationship is dialectically correct, it prioritizes knowledge over power, as well as looking at history in the abstract. Foucault s idealism lies in his belief that the different stages of history are driven by one thing: Knowledge. Thus, his method of analysis is at odds with dialectical materialism, which considers the engine of history to be class struggle which is based on concrete economic basis.

Said says he finds in Foucault s writings a disillusionment with the politics of emancipation. Foucault turned his attention away from the opposing forces of modern society that he had studied for their unwavering resistance to exclusion.... He decided that since power was everywhere, it was better to focus on the microcosm of the local nature of power that surrounded the individual. Therefore, the self had to be studied, developed and, if necessary, reshaped .... A narrative that assumes an "empowering” starting point and a justified goal is no longer suitable for charting the human path in society. Said says that in the writings of Foucault we find:

“precisely the same trope employed to explain the disappointment in the politics of liberation: narrative, which posits an enabling beginning point and a vindicating goal, is no longer adequate for plotting the human trajectory in society. There is nothing to look forward to, we are stuck within our circle. And now the line is enclosed by a circle. After years of support for anti-colonial struggles in Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam, Palestine, Iran, which came to represent for many Western intellectuals their deepest engagement in the politics and philosophy of anti-imperialist decolonization, a moment of exhaustion and disappointment was reached. One began to hear and read how futile it was to support revolutions, how barbaric were the new regimes that came to power, how-this an extreme case--decolonization had benefitted ´world communism´.” -Said 1994, pp. 26-27.

Thus Said, disparages theoretical work as the starting point empowering national liberation movements to illuminates their path of struggle. Instead, he seeks to rely on pragmatism based on ideological perceptions and fantasies taken from literary works and presented to people as what is called the contrapuntal method-;- thus, this pragmatism does not start from a materialistic position in the analysis of phenomena ending up freezing it at the level of its surface, and consequently transformed into useless dogma.

Without theoretical work, the capacity for liberation and triumph over foreign domination is lacking-;- theoretical work guides the process of concrete analysis of concrete reality and that represents the essence of the dialectical materialist method. Also, theoretical work identifies the social groups objectively charged with undertaking change-;- in addition, it aims at studying the objective reality for the purpose of revealing class contradictions and the real social relations. Finally, it represents the scientific method that would give the masses a high awareness that would lead them to get rid of outdated ideas that shackle their movement, and thus be able to organize themselves into a revolutionary movement that achieves the defeat of foreign domination.

Since Said s view is that culture is the driving force of imperialism, he says in describing the attitudes of writers and thinkers in the context of their relationship with the colonizers:

“My method is to focus as much as possible on individual works, to read them first as great products of the creative´-or-interpretative imagination, and then to show them as part of the relationship between culture and empire. I do not believe that authors are mechanically determined by ideology, class,´-or-economic history, but authors are, I also believe, very much in the history of their societies, shaping and shaped by that history and their social experience in different measure. Culture and the aesthetic forms it contain derive from historical experience, which in effect is one of the main subjects of this book.” Said 1994, p. xxii

Thus, it is clear that Said was not helped by his contrapuntal method when he moves in the book to explain the relationship of culture to empire and imperialism-;- he does not show how the contrapuntal method would help in clarifying the nature of that relationship, and only resorts to generalizations. In defining imperialism, Said says:

“imperialism means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory-;- "colonialism," which is almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory……..Imperialism is simply the process´-or-policy of establishing´-or-maintaining an empire. ….. -dir-ect colonialism has largely ended-;- imperialism, as we shall see, lingers it has always been, in a kind of general cultural sphere as well as in specific political, ideological, economic, and social practices. Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation and acquisition. Both are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations that include notions that certain territories and people require and beseech domination, as well as forms of knowledge affiliated with domination: the vocabulary of classic nineteenth-century imperial culture is plentiful with words and concepts like "inferior"´-or-"subject races," "subordinate peoples," "dependency," "expansion," and ´authority. ´” – Said 1994, P 9-;- and this struggle “is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.” —Said 1994, p. 7.

Said argues that imperialism does not seek "accumulation and acquisition” but is driven by "ideological formations" that include, among other things, some peoples are asking to be colonized. Thus, Said views imperialism as remaining as it has always existed in a general cultural form as well as in specific political, ideological, economic and social practices-;- and when he says, "neither imperialism nor colonialism", he does not differentiate between the motives of old colonialism and imperialism, both of which are only hegemony and geographical expansion!! He writes:

“Everything about human history is rooted in the earth, which has meant that we must think about habitation, but it has also meant that people have planned to have more territory and therefore must do something about its indigenous residents. At some very basic level, imperialism means thinking about, settling on, controlling land that you do not possess, that is distant, that is lived on and owned by others. For all kinds of reasons, it attracts some people and often involves untold misery for others. Yet it is generally true that literary historians who study the great sixteenth-century poet Edmund Spenser, for example, do not connect his bloodthirsty plans for Ireland, where he imagined a British army virtually exterminating the native inhabitants, with his poetic achievement´-or-with the history of British rule over Ireland, which continues today ………..For the purposes of this book, I have maintained a focus on actual contests over land and the land s people. What I have tried to do is a kind of geographical inquiry into historical experience, and I have kept in mind the idea that the earth is in effect one world, in which empty, uninhabited spaces virtually do not exist.” – Said 1994, P7.

It should be noted that Said s tendency does not differentiate between the different motives for capitalism to morph as colonization extending in the world-;- for him the motive for (Britain s control of Ireland in the fifteenth century) is the acquisition of land just as imperialism does as an advanced stage of capitalist development at the end of the nineteenth century.

In his definition of imperialism, Said goes beyond the idea that culture is the formal expression of content which is the economic factor: the cultural dimension is the form, and the economy represents the content. For Said, writers are the product of history predetermined by one thing: knowledge. Marxism acknowledges and advocates the need for studying how a culture is formed as a result of material conditions and may in turn be influential in determining the -dir-ection of developments in reality (content). However, Said s thesis characterized by subjective idealism, which prioritized culture, stands on its head, and thus needs to be turned upside down in order to walk on its feet!!

The contrapuntal method is defeated by the dialectical materialist method that Said tried to underestimate its role in the study of phenomena. The understanding of the relationship between the imperialist states and the underdeveloped countries can only be understood on the basis of applying the law of "contradiction" which is the law of the unity of the two opposites and represents the basic law of materialist dialectics versus formal logic. Instead of formal logic based on fixed and ahistorical metaphysical thinking, which does not reflect the movement of reality, the dialectical logic of materialism shows that contradiction exists in the interior of anything and determines its movement and development-;- the contradictory elements present in the thing give it its existence. But these elements grow and cause the thing to change and become a different thing with new contradictions. Thus, everything is a process, not something immovable and absolutely inanimate-;- anything was something else and will turn into something different and new since there is nothing fixed and not in motion.

Thus, imperialism is a contradictory (political) movement that includes a major contradiction from which secondary contradictions branch. The main contradiction in imperialism is realized in the economy. Exporting capital is the motive for Imperialism is to dominate other countries in order to exploit their cheap resources and make exorbitant profits-;- thus, the main contradiction in imperialism is between the colonizer (capitalism) and mainly the poor countries, that is, between countries with advanced systems of commodity production and pre-capitalist societies with underdeveloped economies. On the other hand, imperialism produces secondary contradictions, between the social forces within both the imperialist countries and the colonialized states, which are shaped by the attitude towards imperialism, whether pro-´-or-against.

The contrapuntal method is a mere (exercise) supposed to make humanity realize that coexistence, which transcends hostile contradictions in the world between imperialism and the peoples of countries struggling for liberation from its domination, is the solution to ending the bloody global conflicts. Thus, this method ends by giving the idea of coexistence an independent reality that drives the movement and development of the world, and consequently becomes a dogmatic idea and an abstract dogma that is useless.

On the idea of achieving coexistence between colonizer and colonized, Said states that it contrasts with some "post-imperialist" experiences on the grounds that it stems from the-limit-ed attempts to deal with polarized and radically unequal relations, which are remembered and expressed differently. Even when there is little space for common ground, it provides no more than what can be called a blame speech. He wants to consider the realities of the common and contradictory intellectual terrain in "post-imperialist" public discourse, especially the focus on what leads in this discourse to the emergence and encouragement of blame discourse and policies. Thus, he uses the methods and opinions of what might be called the comparative literature of imperialism and considers the ways in which "post-imperialist" thought could be reconsidered in order to expand the overlap between urban and formerly colonized societies.

“I want first to consider the actualities of the intellectual terrains both common and discrepant in post-imperial public discourse, especially concentrating on what in this discourse gives rise to and encourages the rhetoric and politics of blame. Then, using the perspectives and methods of what might be called a comparative literature of imperialism, I shall consider the ways in which a reconsidered´-or-revised notion of how a post-imperial intellectual attitude· might expand the overlapping community between metropolitan and formerly colonized societies. By looking at the different experiences contrapuntally, as making up a set of what I call intertWined and overlapping histories, I shall try to formulate an alternative both to a politics of blame and to the even more destructive politics of confrontation and hostility. ”Said 1994, p. 18.

Thus, Said proposes to revise the ideas of "post-imperialism" to end this conflict by creating a heterogeneous model:

“A comparative or, better, a contrapuntal perspective is required …. That is, we must be able to think through and interpret together experiences that are discrepant, each with its particular agenda and pace of development, its own internal formations, its internal coherence and system of external relationships, all of them coexisting and interacting with others.” Said 1994, p. 18.

According to Said, since this contrapuntal perspective – an alternative to conflicts – seeks to reflect on and interpret divergent experiences and discover common areas, a "post-imperialist" intellectual position can expand those areas between urban and colonized societies by:

“looking at the different experiences contrapuntally, as making up a set of what I call intertwined and overlapping histories, I shall try to formulate an alternative both to a politics of blame and to the even more destructive politics of confrontation and hostility. A more interesting type of secular interpretation can emerge, altogether more rewarding than the denunciations of the past.”– Said 1994, p. 18.

Thus, Saad believes that the paradoxical relationship in imperialism - specifically the insistence of some people on their primacy under the pretext of racial purity and superiority - is solved by creating a (heterogeneous model) of coexistence and non-polarization between opposing parties, just like the mixing of two musical melodies into one immortal melody. Said says:

The world is a crowded place, and . . . if everyone were to insist on the radical purity´-or-priority of one’s own voice, all we would have would be the awful din of unending strife, and a bloody political mess” -Said 1994 P xxi -;- and “A new and in my opinion appalling tribalism is fracturing societies, separating peoples, promoting greed, bloody conflict, and uninteresting assertions of minor ethnic´-or-group particularity” -said 1994 P 20-;- in addition, there are two histories “one linear and subsuming, the other contrapuntal …….. My argument is that only the second perspective is fully sensitive to the reality of historical experience. partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another-;- none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and un-monolithic”- Said 1994, P xxv.

Said s idea of achieving coexistence through the model of a heterogeneous entity, stems from the failure of colonialism to subjugate peoples on the one hand, and on the other hand the inability of national liberation movements to establish societies that enjoy justice after the immediate evacuation of colonialism.

In the case of imperialism, the white masters were once in unchallenged control but were eventually expelled. Also, at the present:

“there are really no big empty spaces, no expanding frontiers, no exciting new settlements to establish …. Anyone with even a vague consciousness of this …. is alarmed at how such remorselessly selfish and narrow interests - patriotism, chauvinism, ethnic, religious, and racial hatreds - can in fact lead to mass destructiveness. The world simply cannot afford this many more times.” - Said 1994, p. 20.

Thus, Said s believes that the obstacles faced by imperialism in subjugating peoples will make it open to coexist with them because the world cannot withstand new cycles of conflict. But Said’s belief involves an innocent idea that underestimates serious issues whose repercussions determine the fate of the world. In terms of contradictions, between colonial powers vying for world domination, they are becoming increasingly hostile in today s world and almost unsolvable. In fact the way for a world war is being paved by the current intense political struggles between the major colonial powers to redivide the regions of the world a third time (after 1914 and 1939)-;- the idea of globalization of capital in a single global "trust" is therefore not realistic in today s world, and the theoretical basis for the impossibility of realizing this conception was defined by Lenin when he states, in one of his essays, that:

“Imperialism is moribund capitalism, capitalism which is dying but not dead. The essential feature of imperialism, by and large, is not monopolies pure and simple, but monopolies in conjunction with exchange, markets, competition, crises. It is therefore theoretically wrong to -delete-an analysis of exchange, commodity production, crises, etc., in general and to “replace” it by an analysis of imperialism as a whole. There is no such whole.” -
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/reviprog/index.htm

Saied s major omission is that he chose not to view imperialism as a stage in the development of capitalism and not just a single political act, so that the task of removing it is to change the policies and emotional intentions of the rulers, not to oppose it as an integrated economic system. Said totally discount the fact that opposing imperialism means confronting capitalism.

Moreover, Said did not distinguish between colonialism as a phenomenon rooted in capitalism that in the past, at the stage of free competition (laissez-faire), tended to expand beyond the borders of its countries only with the aim of developing and expanding capital, and imperialism, which represents the tendency of capitalism to export capital surpluses to poor countries at the stage of the predominance of monopoly financial capital. Before the advent of monopoly capital, capitalist countries were content to export goods and trade in general (e.g., the British East India Company "1600", which traded in silk and cotton). while imperialism means capitalism, which tends to have total economic control over the countries to which capital is sourced.

It is worth noting that despite the excessive rhetorical perceptions that Said resorted to in "Culture and Imperialism" to define imperialism, his work is devoid of an integrated treatment of theories of imperialism, including the Marxist theory of imperialism, to which Said only makes brief references, not without cynicism, contempt, as well as ignoring Lenin by not referring to his great theoretical contribution in defining the nature of imperialism. To omit the theory of imperialism of Marxism-Leninism in a book on the subject is akin to neglecting to mention the works of Voltaire´-or-Jean-Jacques Rousseau when talking about the ideas of Enlightenment and philosophers and theorists. Thus, instead of making serious in - depth analysis of imperialism, Said merely preaches to the colonizers:

“If you tell Arabs´-or-Africans while sitting in Oxford, Paris´-or-New York that they belong to a fundamentally sick´-or-non-renewable culture, you are unlikely to convince them. Even if you triumph over them, they will not give you your fundamental superiority´-or-the right to rule them despite your apparent wealth and power.”-Said 1994, p. 19.

Now, turning to the peoples of the national liberation zones, Said says:

“On the other hand, blaming the Europeans sweepingly for the misfortunes of the present is not much of an alternative. What we need to do is to look at these matters as a network of interdependent histories that it would be inaccurate and senseless to repress, useful and interesting to understand.” – Said 1994, p. 19.

Said describes peoples subjected to colonization as falling prey to despair after the failure of the decolonization process to change their lives for the better, and therefore believes that the way ahead is to discover what removes the difference between them and the colonial aggressors, and that voices, calling for coexistence and integration within liberation movements, must be accepted-;- he says that multiculturalism does not necessarily always lead to domination, but rather to participation and transcending borders and to common and intersecting histories-;- and that decolonization remains, tragically, unaccomplished when national independence leaders set stand-alone goals-;- modern history shows the appearance in the world that was once colonized of dictatorial governments hostile to democracy in societies where cultural drought prevails. Said says he tried to show that within the national resistance to imperialism, almost everywhere, there was a critical movement that saw the dangers inherent in the unilateralism of the struggle-limit-ed to national liberation. – Said, 1994, p. 27.

Thus, after defeating -dir-ect colonial control, indigenous people soon found that they needed the West, and that:

“the idea of total independence was a nationalist fiction designed mainly for what Fanon calls the ´nationalist bourgeoisie, ´ who in tum often ran the new countries with a callous, exploitative tyranny reminiscent of the departed masters.” —Said 1994, pp. 10-20.

Thus, Said calls on national liberation movements to accept voices calling for co-existence:

“What does need to be remembered is that narratives of emancipation and enlightenment in their strongest form were also narratives of integration not separation, the stories of people who had been excluded from the main group but who were now fighting for a place in it. And if the old and habitual ideas of the main group were not flexible´-or-generous enough to admit new groups, then these ideas need changing, a far better thing to do than reject the emerging groups.”—Said 1994, pp. xxvi.

Said also states that those calling for liberation must confront the collective feelings often harnessed to movements of national domination and national coercion, even in studies and disciplines that claim to be humanitarian, and that he likes to challenge their power.

“In standing up to and challenging their power, we should try to enlist what we can truly comprehend of other cultures and periods. For the trained scholar of comparative literature, a field whose origin and purpose is to move beyond insularity and provincialism and to see several cultures and literatures together, contrapuntally, there is an already considerable investment in precisely this kind of antidote to reductive nationalism and uncritical dogma: after all, the constitution and early aims of comparative literature were to get a perspective beyond one s own nation, to see some son of whole instead of the defensive little patch offered by one s own culture, literature, and history. I suggest that we look first at what comparative literature originally was, as vision and as practice-;- ironically, as we shall see, the study of “comparative literature" originated in the period of high European imperialism and is irrecusably linked to it. Then we can draw out of comparative literature s subsequent trajectory a better sense of what it can do in modern culture and politics, which imperialism continues to influence.”—Said 1994, pp. 42-43.

But such an approach does not reflect the reality of the history and the present of national liberation movements. Said tended in his book to overlook the theoretical additions and lessons provided by the great liberation movements of the twentieth century in Asia, Africa and south America-;- and how the national liberation, led by the Marxist-Leninist parties, showed that national struggle was doomed to failure mainly because it was not carried out in the framework of a (comprehensive) struggle against capitalism of which imperialism is a phase of its development. Benita Parry writes:

“Said wrote with passionate intensity about imperial aggression without referring to the analyses of Lenin´-or-Luxemburg,´-or-the many articulations of outrage from other eminent figures on the Marxist left. He distinguished between anti-colonial nationalism and liberation movements without alluding to the communist orientation of the latter´-or-the class interests of either, and he placed economic and political machinery and territorial aggrandizement at the center of modern empire without specifying this center as capitalism s world system.” – Benita Parry, "Edward Said and Third-World Marxism"- From: College Literature -Volume 40, Number 4, Fall 2013- pp. 105-126

In conclusion, Said s critique of imperialism is a critique of colonialism in general, not as a stage of capitalist development. Imperialist domination of the world has created two worlds: an advanced world whose capitalist system of production imposed the need to trap another world in the abyss of a pre-capitalist economy in order to be strengthened by its raw cheap labour, raw materials and other means of production through plunder and unequal trade relations. Therefore, the two worlds are engaged in violent confrontations the extent of which cannot be overcome solely and totally through negotiations and coexistence-;- global capital cannot (objectively) achieve sustainability without extending beyond its countries. Another relevant feature is that social groups of the two worlds are not each united in a monolithic body, for in the capitalist world there is an increasingly hostile contradiction between the politically dominant bourgeoisie and the broad base of workers exploited for the surplus value necessary for the accumulation and expansion of capital. Meanwhile, the people of poor countries’ societies, dominated by colonial powers, are subjected to wide scale violence exerted by ruling comprador classes as part of their service to perpetuate foreign domination.

Said wanted to devise a new way to address the issues of imperialism by extracting what he called the contrapuntal method of analysis from the world of music. Said wants to utilize this method to analyze the increasingly complex subject of imperialism characterized by increasing contradictions between the colonial powers in their current frantic move to redivide spheres of influence´-or-preserve the existing ones, and that between the imperialist countries and the poor countries targeted. But Said’s method extracted from music, by combining several independent musical melodies to create a single music melody, ended up being a subjective analytical tool that its analysis does not tackle and understand the contradictions existing in reality and thus helping in designing correct political perceptions.

The contradictions of imperialism, represented by its inherent tendency to exclude the other, are irreconcilable and historically being met with stubborn resistance by its victims-;- the empirical experiences of national liberation movements confirmed this.

Said s method is an attempt to design a tool for promotion of co-existence between colonizers and colonized within the idea of the primacy of culture in the occurrence of imperialist expansion. Thus, methodologically, Said’s approach is similar to the old method based on discovery of a "third way" based on the idea of prioritization of culture-;- but this only serves to maintain a conservative view of imperialism imbued with illusions and unawareness of its nature as a policy dictated by economic necessity.

The search for signs of lasting "congruence" in relationships related to imperialism, as a contradictory political movement, is doomed to fail when it collides with reality’s rough terrain.


Note: All quotes from the book "Culture and Imperialism" are taken from the English version (1994 edition):
Edward W. Said, “Culture and Imperialism”, Vintage-;- Re-print- edition (May 31, 1994).

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