NOTE 75 much towards an aggravation of malnutrition over large tracts of the third world, and most noticeably in Africa. (At a time when world foodstocks were at a record high, Africa was experiencing acute food shortage; international agencies like the Bank and much of the economics profession pontificated to the African countries on their domestic policy 'failures', which may of course have been there, but nobody talked of Africa's reduced purchasing power on account of the commodity price-collapse.) And what is more, now a new offensive is on to prise open third world markets, not just for goods, as Rosa Luxemburg had noted, but for services as well. Underdeveloped countries which had taken the lead in opposing the inclusion of services in the GATT agenda have been selectively arm-twisted under the new Super 301 clause by the US administration. It is unnecessary to go on. The point is not, as is often made out, whether the persistence of underdevelopment is because of imperialism or because of internal contradictions in the third world (which in any case represents an ill-formulated counterposing of the two); the point is not whether capitalism can survive without imperialism (a speculative question foreign to the Marxist method); the point is not even whether this or that view of imperialism is the correct view (that is hagiography not analysis). The point is the paradox that while the system of relations covered under the rubric of imperialism has not changed an iota over the last decade and a half, fundamental questions today are discussed, unlike earlier, even among Marxists without any reference to it. Yesterday's Marxists in Eastern Europe may have stopped talking about imperialism today for a variety of reasons. Mr. Gorbachev may have written a whole book called Perestroika without a single reference to imperialism. But why should American Marxists, who are under no constraints to emulate their Soviet and Eastern European counterparts, fall into the same deafening silence on the question? The reason, one is tempted to speculate, lies precisely, and paradoxically, in the very strengthening and consolidation of imperialism. Vietnam was a crisis for imperialism. The fact that the US had to send half a million troops to subdue a tiny country was itself an expression of a failure to 'manage' things there; the fact that it lost the war only underscored that failure. Since then however there has been no comparable crisis. Imperialism has learned to 'pnanage* things better: the very price the people of Vietnam had to pay to win the war has perhaps had a subduing influence on other third world countries. They have also learned that the odds are heavy against them in other ways as well. The emancipation of the third world, as almost everybody, whether in the first or the third world, realises now, resembles at the moment an obstacle race where the horse must fall at one of the pbstacles. First, the coming to power of a revolutionary government is itself blocked in several ways; if perchance it does come to power, an economic blockade is imposed upon it; the disaffection