The Crisis of Colonialism: Marxist Theories & German Imperialism in Namibia (original) (raw)

The mind-boggling, aberrant nature of the colonization of Africa, the total domination of one people by another is unlike anything in world history. Many have tried to explain, or worse justify, this phenomenon. However, despite the methodological and ideological in-fighting, and subsequent schools of thought, none have gotten closer than the Marxist theories of imperialism. As the scholars and political economists who provided the theoretical foundations of Marxist theories of imperialism, Luxemburg, Hobson, Hilferding, Bukharin, and Lenin will be discussed to examine the explanatory power of these various ideas, all coalescing in Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. These works will be used to investigate the case of the German colonization of Namibia, formerly South-West Africa. By contextualizing the political and socioeconomic happenings that led to the German colonization of Namibia, and the succeeding quotidian colonial policies practiced in ruling and subduing the indigenous—this paper seeks to measure the extent to which Marxists, and more specifically Lenin, were accurate in explaining the aberration that is imperialist expansion.

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