THE PROMETHEAN VISION 113 The basic ideas of the Manifesto were developed by Karl Marx in Capital which sought to lay bare conceptually, the mechanism of class exploitation within an exchange economy in which labour appeared to be paid equitably in accordance with the capitalist laws of competitive exchange, by tracing the real origin of surplus value to the unpaid surplus labour of the workers. This conceptual breakthrough was of monumental significance in making the otherwise opaque and mystified mechanism of exploitation of workers mediated through markets, a completely transparent one at the conceptual level. There was one other contradiction, however, which has also been historically of overwhelming importance in the dynamics of the capitalist system, but which was not theoretically integrated into either the Manifesto or into the analysis of Capital by Marx in his own lifetime (although descriptive statements on it abound in his writings). This was the exploitation of colonised and subjugated peoples by the capitalist system of the metropoles. It was this gap with which, in their different ways, later both Luxemburg and Lenin were concerned; the former developed a theory of the imperative necessity for capitalism, in order to accumulate at all, to invade external markets and destroy the economy of small producers in the colonies. The latter integrated the exploited, pauperised peasantry as a class with which the proletariat entered into an alliance for the accomplishment of the democratic revolution, an idea which underlay also Lenin's innovative theorising on the national and colonial questions. The purpose of this paper is to argue that of the two fundamental contradictions generated by the capitalist system - that between capital and labour on the one hand, and that between the capital of the metropoles and people of the colonies and otherwise subjugated nations on the other, the theoretical focus on and understanding of the first contradiction without a corresponding theoretical focus on and understanding of the second contradiction, hence also the lack of a systematic analysis of the interaction between the two, has been perhaps the single greatest weakness of Marxist theory to date. It must be clarified that this is not intended as some kind of ahistorical criticism of Karl Marx himself; it is remarkable that both in the Manifesto co-authored with Engels, and more so in Capital, Marx attained the degree of rigorous insight that he did into the capitalist system's dynamics, and it is clear enough from the New York Daily Tribune articles, much read by scholars in third world countries, that he was fully aware of the question of colonial exploitation.