His understanding of how economies influence polities would no doubt be very insightful. I wonder if Rodney's ideas would have changed had he not been assassinated and had lived through the last 50 years. I can see his disdain for the capitalism that has definitely destroyed and continues to destroy the lives and livelihoods of so many millions of people in the pursuit of money and the power that money brings, but his admiration of the communist/socialist worldview seems naive at best in hindsight. The cognitive dissonance of having lived through the downfall of so many communist/socialist societies and the collapse of the US economy into an ogliarchy makes it hard to accept some of Rodney's premises. That being said, this book has aged poorly over the last 50 years because the facade on North Korea has cracked so revealingly, the the USSR has broken into it's component parts and is a capitalist oligarchy much like the United States, and China's socialism/communism is an capitalist force to be reckoned with. The USSR was still extant as a world power and the make-up was still fresh on the Soviet, North Korean, and Chinese economies. It is very important realize that Rodney was writing within this milieu. At the time of publication (1972), African nations were coming out of years of capitalist colonial exploitation and purposeful destabilization of their governments by the US and Europe, the devastation of which we are still seeing to this day fifty years after publication (2022).
I did learn many things about WHY the author wrote as he did. This meticulously researched analysis of the abiding repercussions of European colonialism on the continent of Africa has not only informed decades of scholarship and activism, it remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today. In his magnum opus, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the West and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. His deportation catalyzed 20th-century Jamaica's most significant rebellion, the 1968 Rodney riots, and his scholarship trained a generation how to think politics at an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated.
In each locale, Rodney found himself a lightning rod for working class Black Power. In his short life, the Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, South America, the African continent, and the Caribbean. The classic work of political, economic, and historical analysis, powerfully introduced by Angela Davis.
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