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Against Empire is a short, 100-page book written by Dr. Michael Parenti, discussing Imperialism and "the pretexts and lies used to justify violent intervention and maldevelopment abroad." Note that some language which would be considered outdated by today's standards has been replaced, and spelling mistakes corrected.
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Acknowledgements
My heartfelt thanks to my valued friend Sally Soriano for her unwavering support in the writing of this book. Appreciation is also due to my research assistant Peggy Noton for her careful and crucial reading of the manuscript. A word of gratitude goes to my son, Christian Parenti, for furnishing me with useful sources and thoughtful criticisms. Kristin Nelson, Angela Bocage, and Ginger Walker also provided valuable assistance. Nancy J. Peters of City Lights Books provided an encouragement and enthusiasm that helped lighten my task, proving herself to be both a fine editor and good friend.
Chapter 1 - Imperialism 101
Imperialism has been the most powerful force in world history over the last four or five centuries, carving up whole continents while oppressing indigenous peoples and obliterating entire civilisations. Yet, empire as it exists today is seldom accorded any serious attention by our academics, media commentators, and political leaders. When not ignored outright, the subject of imperialism has been sanitised, so that empires are called "commonwealths," and colonies become "territories" or "dominions." Imperialist military interventions become matters of "national defence," "national security," or maintaining "stability" in one or another region. In this book I want to look at imperialism for what it really is.
Across the Entire Globe
By "imperialism" I mean the process whereby the dominant politico-economic interests of one nation expropriate for their own enrichment the land, labour, raw materials, and markets of another people.
The earliest victims of Western European imperialism were other Europeans. Some eight hundred years ago, Ireland became the first colony of what later became known as the British Empire. Today, a part of Ireland still remains under British occupation. Other early Caucasian victims included the Eastern Europeans. The people Charlemagne worked to death in his mines in the early part of the 9th Century were Slavs. So frequent and prolonged was the enslavement of Eastern Europeans that "Slav" became synonymous with servitude. Indeed, the word "slave" derives from "Slav." Eastern Europe was an early source of capital accumulation, having become wholly dependent on Western manufactures by the 17th Century.
A particularly pernicious example of intra-European imperialism was the Nazi aggression during World War II that gave the German business cartels and the Nazi state an opportunity to plunder the resources and exploit the labour of occupied Europe, including the slave labour of concentration camps.
The preponderant thrust of European, North American, and Japanese imperial powers has been directed against Africa, Asia, and Latin America. By the 19th Century, they saw the Third World as not only a source of raw materials and slaves but a market for manufactured goods. By the 20th Century, the industrial nations were exporting not only goods but capital, in the form of machinery, technology, investments, and loans. To say that we have entered the stage of capital export and investment is not to imply that the plunder of natural resources has ceased. If anything, the despoliation has accelerated.
Of the various notions about imperialism circulating today in the United States, the dominant one is that it no longer exists. Imperialism is not recognised as a legitimate concept, certainly not in regard to the United States. One may speak of "Soviet Imperialism" or "19th Century British Imperialism" but not of U.S. Imperialism. A graduate student in political science at most universities in this country would not be granted the opportunity to research U.S. Imperialism, on the grounds that such an undertaking would not be scholarly. [Chapter 10 deals in more detail the relationship between imperialism and academia.] While many people throughout the world charge the United States with being an imperialist power, in this country people who talk of U.S. imperialism are usually judged to be mouthing ideological blather.
The Dynamic of Capital Expansion
Imperialism is older than capitalism. The Persian, Macedonian, Roman, and Mongol Empires all existed centuries before the Rothschilds and Rockefellers. Emperors and conquistadors were interested mostly in plunder and tribute, gold and glory. Capitalist imperialism differs from these earlier forms in the way it systemically accumulates capital through the organised exploitation of labour and the penetration of overseas markets. Capitalist imperialism invests in other countries, dominating their economies, cultures, and political life, and integrating their productive structures into an international system of capital accumulation.
A central imperative of capitalism is expansion. Investors will not put their money into business ventures unless they can extract more than they invest. Increased earnings come only with growth in the enterprise. The capitalist ceaselessly searches for ways of making more money in order to make still more money. One must always invest to realise profits, gathering as much strength as possible in the face of competing forces and unpredictable markets.
Given its expansionist nature, capitalism has little inclination to stay home. Almost 150 years ago, Marx and Engels described a bourgeoisie that "chases over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. [...] It creates a world after its own image." The expansionists destroy whole societies. Self-sufficient peoples are forcibly transformed into disenfranchised wage workers. Indigenous communities and folk cultures are replaced by mass-market, mass-media, consumer societies. Cooperative lands are supplanted by agribusiness factory farms, villages by desolate shantytowns, autonomous regions by centralised autocracies.
Consider one of a thousand such instances. A few years ago the Los Angeles Times carried a special report on the rainforests of Borneo in the South Pacific. By their own testimony, the people there lived contented lives. They hunted, fished, and raised food in their jungle orchards and groves. But their entire way of life was ruthlessly wiped out by a few giant companies that destroyed the rainforest in order to harvest the hardwood for quick profits. Their lands were turned into ecological disaster areas and they themselves were transformed into disenfranchised shantytown dwellers, forced to work for subsistence wages – when fortunate enough to find employment.
North American and European corporations have acquired control of more than ¾ths of the known mineral resources in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But the pursuit of natural resources is not the only reason for Capitalist overseas expansion. There is the additional need to cut production costs and maximise profits by investing in countries with plentiful supply of cheap labour. U.S. corporate foreign investment grew 84 percent from 1985 to 1990, with the most dramatic increase in cheap-labour countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Spain, and Singapore.
Because of low wages, low taxes, nonexistent work benefits, weak labour unions, and nonexistent occupational and environmental protections, U.S. corporate profit rates in the Third World are 50 percent greater than in developed countries. Citibank, one of the largest U.S. firms, earns about 75 percent of its profits from overseas operations. While profit margins at home sometimes have had a sluggish growth, earnings abroad have continued to rise dramatically, fostering the development of what has become known as the multinational or transnational corporation. Today some four hundred transnational companies control about 80 percent of the capital assets of the global free market and are extending their grasp into the ex-communist countries of Eastern Europe.
Transnationals have developed a global production line. General Motors has factories that produce cars, trucks, and a wide range of auto components in Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, Spain, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Nigeria, Singapore, the Philippines, South Africa, South Korea, and a dozen other countries. Such "multiple sourcing" enables GM to ride out strikes in one country by stepping up production in another, playing workers of various nations against one another in order to discourage wage and benefit demands and undermine labour union strategies.
Not Necessary, Just Compelling
Some writers question whether imperialism is a necessary condition for capitalism, pointing out that most Western capital is invested in Western nations, not in the Third World. If corporations lost all their Third World investments, they argue, many of them could still survive on their European and North American markets. In response, one should note that capitalism might be able to survive without imperialism – but it shows no inclination to do so. It manifests no desire to discard its enormously profitable Third World enterprises. Imperialism may not be a necessary condition for investor survival but it seems to be an inherent tendency and a natural outgrowth of advanced capitalism. Imperial relations may not be the only way to pursue profits, but they are the most lucrative way.
Whether imperialism is necessary for capitalism is really not the question. Many things that are not absolutely necessary are still highly desirable, therefore strongly preferred and vigorously pursued. Overseas investors find the Third World's cheap labor, vital natural recourses, and various other highly profitable conditions to be compellingly attractive. Superprofits may not be necessary for capitalism's survival but survival is not all that capitalists are interested in. Superprofits are strongly preferred to more modest earnings. That there may be no necessity between capitalism and imperialism does not mean there is no compelling linkage.
The same is true of other social dynamics. For instance, wealth does not necessarily have to lead to luxurious living. A higher portion of an owning class's riches could be used for investment rather than personal consumption. The very wealthy could survive on more modest sums but that is not how most of them prefer to live. Throughout history, wealthy classes generally have shown a preference for getting the best of everything. After all, the whole purpose of getting rich off other people's labor is to live well, avoiding all forms of thankless toil and drudgery, enjoying superior opportunities for lavish life-styles, medical care, education, travel, recreation, security, leisure, and opportunities for power and prestige. While none of these things are really ”necessary,” they are fervently clung to by those who possess them, as witnessed by the violent measures endorsed by advantaged classes whenever they feel the threat of an equalizing or leveling democratic force.
Myths of Underdevelopment
The impoverished lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are known to us as the "Third World," to distinguish them from the "First World" of industrialised Europe and North America and the now largely-defunct "Second World" of communist states. Third World poverty, now called "underdevelopment," is treated by most Western observers as an original historic condition. We are always asked to believe that it always existed, that poor countries are poor because their lands have always been infertile or their people underproductive.
In fact, the lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have long produced great treasures of foods, minerals, and other natural resources. That is why Europeans went through so much trouble to steal and plunder them. One does not go to poor places for self-enrichment. The Third World is rich. Only its people are poor – and it is because of the pillage they have endured.
The process of expropriating the natural resources of the Third World began centuries ago and continues to this day. First the colonisers extracted gold, silver, furs, silks, and spices; then flax, hemp, timber, molasses, sugar, rum, rubber, tobacco, calico, cocoa, coffee, cotton, copper, coal, palm oil, tin, ivory, ebony; and later on oil, zinc, manganese, mercury, platinum, cobalt, bauxite, aluminium, and uranium. Not to be overlooked is the most hellish of all expropriations: the abduction of millions of human beings into slave labour.
Through the centuries of colonisation, many self-serving imperialist theories have been spun. I was taught in school that people in tropical lands are slothful and do not work as hard as we denizens of the temperate zone. In fact, the inhabitants of warm climates have performed remarkably productive feats, building magnificent civilisations well before Europe emerged from the Dark Ages. And today, they often work long, hard hours for meager sums. Yet the early stereotype of the "lazy native" is still with us. In every Capitalist society, the poor, both domestic and overseas, regularly are blamed for their own condition.
We hear that Third World peoples are culturally backwards in their attitudes, customs, and technical abilities. It is a convenient notion embraced by those who want to depict Western investment as a rescue operation designed to help backward peoples help themselves. This myth of "cultural backwardness" goes back to ancient times, used by conquerors to justify the enslavement of indigenous peoples. It was used by European colonisers over the last five centuries for the same purpose.
What cultural supremacy could be claimed by the Europeans of yore? From the 15th to 19th Centuries Europe was "ahead" in such things as the number of hangings, murders, and other violent crimes; instances of venereal disease, smallpox, typhoid, tuberculosis, plagues, and other bodily afflictions; social inequality and poverty (both urban and rural); mistreatment of women and children; and frequency of famine, slavery, prostitution, piracy, religious massacre, and inquisitional torture. Those who believe the West has been the most advanced civilisation should keep such "achievements" in mind.
More seriously, we might note that Europe enjoyed a telling advantage in navigation and armaments. Muskets and cannons, Gatling guns and gunboats, and today missiles, helicopter gunships, and fighter bombers have been the deciding factors when West meets East and North meets South. Superior firepower, not superior culture, has brought the Europeans and Euro-Americans to positions of supremacy that today are still maintained by force, though not by force alone.
It was said that colonised peoples were biologically backward and less evolved than their colonisers. Their "savagery" and "lower" level of cultural evolution were emblematic of their inferior genetic evolution. But were they culturally inferior? In many parts of what is now considered the Third World, people developed impressive skills in architecture, horticulture, crafts, hunting, fishing, midwifery, medicine, and other such things. Their social customs were often far more gracious and humane and less autocratic and repressive than anything found in Europe at that time. Of course we must not romanticise these indigenous societies, some of which had a number of cruel and unusual practices of their own. But generally, their peoples enjoyed healthier, happier lives, with more leisure time, than did most of Europe's inhabitants.
Other theories enjoy wide currency. We hear that Third World poverty is due to overpopulation, too many people having too many children to feed. Actually, over the last several centuries, many Third World lands have been less densely populated than certain parts of Europe. India has fewer people per acre – but more poverty – than Holland, Wales, England, Japan, Italy, and a few other industrial countries. Furthermore, it is the industrialised nations of the First World, not the poor ones of the Third, that devour some 80 percent of the world's resources and pose the greatest threat to the planet's ecology.
That is not to deny that overpopulation is a real problem for the planet's ecosphere. Limiting population growth in all nations would help the global environment but it would not solve the problems of the poor – because overpopulation in itself is not the cause of poverty but one of its effects. The poor tend to have large families because children are a source of family labour and income and a support during old age.
Frances Moore Lappé and Rachel Schurman found that of seventy Third World countries, there were six – China, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Chile, Burma, and Cuba, and the state of Kerala in India – that had managed to lower their birthrates by one-third. They enjoyed neither dramatic industrial expansion nor high per capita incomes nor extensive family planning programmes. [The reference to China is prior to the 1979 modernisation and rapid growth and prior to the one-child family programme: see Food First Development Report no. 4, 1988.] The factors they had in common were public education and healthcare, a reduction of economic inequality, improvements in women's rights, food subsidies, and in some cases land reform. In other words, fertility rates were lowered not by capitalist investments and economic growth as such but by socio-economic betterment, even on a modest scale, accompanied by the emergence of women's rights.
Artificially Converted to Poverty
What is called "underdevelopment" is a set of social relations that has been forcefully imposed on countries. With the advent of Western colonisers, the peoples of the Third World were actually set back in their development, sometimes for centuries. British imperialism in India provides an instructive example. In 1810, India was exporting more textiles to England than England was exporting to India. By 1830, the trade flow was reversed. The British had put up prohibitive tariff barriers to shut out Indian finished goods and were dumping their commodities in India, a practice backed by British gunboats and military force. Within a matter of years, the great textile centres of Dacca and Madras were turned into ghost towns. The Indians were sent back to the land to raise the cotton used in British textile factories. In effect, India was reduced to being a cow milked by British financiers.
By 1850, India's debt had grown to £53 million. From 1850 to 1900, its per capita income dropped by almost two-thirds. The value of the raw materials and commodities the Indians were obliged to send to Britain during most of the 19th Century amounted yearly to more than the total income of the sixty million Indian agricultural and industrial workers. The massive poverty we associate with India was not that country's original historic condition. British imperialism did two things: first, it ended India's development, then it forcibly underdeveloped that country.
Similar bleeding processes occurred throughout the Third World. The enormous wealth extracted should remind us that there originally were few really poor nations. Countries like Brazil, Indonesia, Chile, Bolivia, Zaire, Mexico, Malaysia, and the Philippines were and in some cases still are rich in resources. Some lands have been so thoroughly plundered as to be desolate in all respects. However, most of the Third World is not "underdeveloped" but overexploited. Western colonisation and investments have created a lower rather than a higher living standard.
Referring to what the English colonisers did to the Irish, Friedrich Engels wrote in 1856: "How often have the Irish started out to achieve something, and every time they have been crushed politically and industrially. By consistent oppression they have artificially converted into an utterly impoverished nation." So with most of the Third World. The Mayan Indians in Guatemala had a more nutritious and varied diet and better conditions of health in the early 16th Century before the Europeans arrived than they have today. They had more craftspeople, architects, artisans, and horticulturists than today. What is called underdevelopment is a product of imperialism's superexploitation. Underdevelopment is itself a development.
Imperialism has created what I have termed "maldevelopment;" modern office buildings and luxury hotels in the capital city instead of housing for the poor; cosmetic surgery clinics for the affluent instead of hospitals for workers, cash export crops for agribusiness instead of food for local markets, highways that go from the mines and latifundios to the refineries and ports instead of roads in the back country for those who might hope to see a doctor or a teacher.
Wealth is transferred from Third World peoples to the economic elites of Europe and North America (and more recently Japan) by direct plunder, by expropriation of natural resources, the imposition of ruinous taxes and land rents, the payment of poverty wages, and the forced importation of finished goods at highly inflated prices. The colonised country is denied the freedom of trade and the opportunity to develop its own natural resources, markets, and industrial capacity. Self-sustenance and self-employment give way to wage labour. From 1970 to 1980, the number of wage workers in the Third World grew from 72 million to 120 million, and the rate is accelerating.
Hundreds of millions of Third World peoples now live in destitution in remote villages and congested urban slums, suffering hunger, disease, and illiteracy, often because the land they once tilled is now controlled by agribusiness firms that use it for mining or for commercial export crops such as coffee, sugar, and beef, instead of beans, rice, and corn for home consumption. A study of twenty of the poorest countries, compiled from official statistics, found that the number of people living in what is called "absolute poverty" or rock-bottom destitution, the poorest of the poor, is rising 70,000 a day and should reach 1.5 billion by the year 2000 (San Francisco Examiner, 8 June 1994.)
Imperialism forces millions of children around the world to live nightmarish lives, their mental and physical health severely damaged by endless exploitation. A documentary film on the Discovery Channel (24 April 1994) reported that in countries like Russia, Thailand, and the Philippines, large numbers of minors are sold into prostitution to help their desperate families survive. In countries like Mexico, India, Colombia, and Egypt, children are dragooned into health-shattering, dawn-to-dusk labour on farms and in factories and mines for pennies an hour, with no opportunity for play, schooling, or medical care.
In India, 55 million children are pressed into the work force. Tens of thousands labour in glass factories in temperatures as high as 40 degrees. In one plant, four-year-olds toil from five o'clock in the morning until the dead of night, inhaling fumes and contracting emphysema, tuberculosis, and other respiratory diseases. In the Philippines and Malaysia corporations have lobbied to drop age restrictions for labour recruitment. The pursuit of profit becomes a pursuit of evil.
Development Theory
When we say a country is "underdeveloped," we are implying that it is backward and hindered in some way, that its people have shown little capacity to achieve and evolve. The negative connotations of "underdevelopment" have caused the United Nations, The Wall Street Journal, and parties of various political persuasions to refer to Third World countries as "developing" nations, a term somewhat less insulting than "underdeveloped" but equally misleading. I prefer to use "Third World" because "developing" seems to be just a euphemistic way of saying "underdeveloped but belatedly starting to do something about it." It still implies that poverty was an original historic condition and not something imposed by Imperialists. It also falsely suggests that these countries are developing when actually their economic conditions are usually worsening.
The dominant theory of the last half century, enunciated repeatedly by writers like Barbara Ward and W. W. Rostow and afforded wide currency, maintains that it is up to the rich nations of the North to help uplift the "backward" nations of the South, bringing them technology and proper work habits. This is an updated version of "the white man's burden," a favourite imperialist fantasy.
According to the development scenario, with the introduction of Western investments, workers in the poor nations will find more productive employment in the modern sector at higher wages. As capital accumulates, business will reinvest its profits, thus creating still more products, jobs, buying power, and markets. Eventually a more prosperous economy evolves.
This "development theory" or "modernisation theory," as it is sometimes called, bears little relation to reality. What has emerged in the Third World is an intensely exploitative form of dependent capitalism. Economic conditions have worsened drastically with the growth of transnational corporate investment. The problem is not poor lands or unproductive populations but foreign exploitation and class inequality. Investors go into a country not to uplift it but to enrich themselves. People in these countries do not need to be taught how to farm. They need the land and the implements to farm. They do not need to be taught how to fish. They need the boats and the nets and access to shore frontage, bays, and oceans. They need industrial plants to cease dumping toxic effusions into the waters. They do not need to be convinced that they should use hygienic standards. They do not need a Peace Corps volunteer to tell them to boil their water, especially when they cannot afford fuel or have no access to firewood. They need the conditions that will allow them to have clean drinking water and clean clothes and homes. They do not need advice about balanced diets from North Americans. They usually know what foods best serve their nutritional requirements. They need to be given back their land and labour so that they might work for themselves and grow food for their own consumption.
The legacy of imperial domination is not only misery and strife, but an economic structure dominated by a network of international corporations which themselves are beholden to parent companies based in North America, Europe, and Japan. If there is any harmonisation or integration, it occurs among the global investor classes, not among the indigenous economies of these countries. Third World economies remain fragmented and unintegrated within themselves and among one another, both in the flow of capital and goods and in technology and organisation. In sum, what we have is a world economy that has little to do with the economic needs of the world's people.
Neoimperialism: Skimming the Cream
Sometimes imperial domination is explained as arising from an innate desire for domination and expansion, a "territorial imperative." In fact, territorial imperialism is no longer the prevailing mode. Compared to the 19th and early 20th Centuries, when the European powers carved up the world among themselves, today there is almost no colonial dominion left. Colonel Blimp is dead and buried, replaced by men in business suits. Rather than being directly colonised by the imperial power, the weaker countries have been granted the trappings of sovereignty while Western finance capital retains control of the lion's share of their profitable resources. This relationship has gone under various names: "informal empire," "colonialism without colonies," "neocolonialism," and "neoimperialism."
U.S. political and business leaders were among the earliest practitioners of this new kind of empire, most notably in Cuba at the beginning of the 20th Century. Having forcibly wrested the island from Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898, they eventually gave Cuba its formal independence. The Cubans now had their own government, constitution, flag, currency, and security force. But major foreign policy decisions remained in U.S. hands as did the island's wealth, including it's sugar, tobacco, and tourist industries, and major imports and exports.
Historically U.S. capitalist interests have been less interested in acquiring more colonies than in acquiring more wealth, preferring to make off with the treasure of other nations without bothering to own and administer the nations themselves. Under neoimperialism, the flag stays home, while the dollar goes everywhere – frequently assisted by the sword.
After World War II, European powers like Britain and France adopted a strategy of neoimperialism. Financially depleted by years of warfare, and facing intensified popular resistance from within the Third World itself, they reluctantly decided that indirect economic hegemony was less costly and politically more expedient than outright colonial rule. They discovered that the removal of a conspicuously intrusive colonial rule made it more difficult for nationalist elements within previously colonised countries to mobilise anti-imperialist sentiments.
Though the newly-established government might be far from completely independent, it usually enjoyed more legitimacy in the eyes of its populace than a colonial administration controlled by the imperial power. Furthermore, under neoimperialism the native government takes up the costs of administering the country while the imperialist interests are free to concentrate on accumulating capital, which is all they really want to do.
After years of colonialism, the Third World country finds it extremely difficult to extricate itself from the unequal relationship with its former coloniser and impossible to depart from the global capitalist sphere. Those countries that try to make a break are subjected to punishing economic and military treatment by one or another major power, nowadays usually the United States.
The leaders of the new nations may voice revolutionary slogans, yet they find themselves locked into the global capitalist orbit, cooperating perforce with the First World nations for investment, trade, and aid. So we witnessed the curious phenomenon of leaders of newly-independent Third World nations denouncing imperialism as the source of their countries' ills, while dissidents in these countries denounce these same leaders as collaborators of imperialism.
In many instances a comprador class emerged or was installed as a first condition for independence. A comprador class is one that cooperates in turning its own country into a client state for foreign interests. A client state is one that is open to investments on terms that are decidedly favourable to the foreign investors. In a client state, corporate investors enjoy direct subsidies and land grants, access to raw materials and cheap labour, light or nonexistent taxes, few effective labour unions, no minimum wage or child labour or occupational safety laws, and no consumer or environmental protections to speak of. The protective laws that do exist go largely unenforced.
In all, the Third World is something of a capitalist paradise, offering life as it was in Europe and the United States during the 19th Century, with a rate of profit vastly higher than what might be earned today in a country with strong economic regulations. The comprador class is well recompensed for its cooperation. Its leaders enjoy opportunities to line their pockets with the foreign aid sent by the U.S. government. Stability is assured with the establishment of security forces, armed and trained by the United States in the latest technologies of terror and repression.
Still, neoimperialism carries risks. The achievement of de jure independence eventually fosters expectations of de facto independence. The forms of self rule incite a desire for the fruits of self rule. Sometimes a national leader emerges who is a patriot and reformer rather than a comprador collaborator. Therefore, the changeover from colonialism to neocolonialism is not without problems for the imperialists and represents a net gain for popular forces in the world.
Chapter 2 - Imperial Domination Updated
In this chapter we will look at the major methods and effects of present-day imperial domination, including market and financial controls, foreign aid, political repression, and military violence – all of which leave a growing legacy of poverty and maldevelopment.
Market Inequality
The economy of Third World nations typically is concentrated on exporting a few raw materials or labour-intensive commodities. Since it is such a buyer's market, a poor nation finds itself in acute competition with other impoverished nations for the markets of more prosperous industrial countries. The latter are able to set trading terms that are highly favourable to themselves, playing one poor country off against another.
Attempts by Third World countries to overcome their vulnerability by forming trade cartels are usually unsuccessful, for they seldom are able to maintain a solid front, given their political differences, overall economic dependency, and lack of alternative markets. Trade among Third World countries themselves is increasingly hindered. In Africa, only about 6 percent of all international trade is among African countries – the rest is with European, Japanese, and North American firms.
Third World countries are underpaid for their exports and regularly overcharged for the goods they import from the industrial world. Thus, their coffee, cotton, meat, tin, copper, and oil are sold to foreign corporations at low prices in order to obtain – at painfully high prices – various manufactured goods, machinery, and spare parts. According to a former president of Venezuela, Carlos Andrés Perez: "This has resulted in a constant and growing outflow of capital and impoverishment of our countries."
Raw materials that are unavailable or in short supply in the United States are usually allowed into this country duty free, while goods that have been processed are subjected to tariffs. Thus coffee beans and raw timber are admitted with no charge, while processed coffee and sawed lumber face import duties. The industrial powers also prohibit the transfer of technology and credit to native-owned enterprises by threatening trade embargoes against Third World countries that have the temerity to develop an industrial product. Multinational corporations crowd out local businesses through superior financing, high-powered marketing, monopoly patents, and greater managerial resources. The more profitable the area of investment, the more likely is the local entrepreneur to be squeezed out by foreign investors.
Debt Domination
In many poor countries over half the manufacturing assets are owned or controlled by foreign companies. Even in instances when the multinationals have only a minority interest, they often retain a veto control. Even when the host nation owns the enterprise in its entirety, the multinationals will enjoy such benefits through their near-monopoly of technology and international marketing. Such is the case with oil, an industry in which the giant companies own only about 38 percent of the world's crude petroleum production but control almost all the refining capacity and distribution.
Given these disadvantageous trade and investment relations, Third World nations have found it expedient to borrow heavily from Western banks and from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which is controlled by the United States and other Western member-nations. By the 1990s, the Third World debt was approaching $2 trillion, an unpayable sum. The greater a nation's debt, the greater the pressure to borrow still more to meet deficits – often at still higher interest rates and on tighter payment terms.
An increasingly large portion of the earnings of indebted nations go to servicing the debt, leaving still less for domestic consumption. The debts of some nations have grown so enormous that the interest accumulates faster than payments can be met. The debt develops a self-feeding momentum of its own, consuming more and more of the debtor nation's wealth.
By the late 1980s, in a country like Paraguay, 80 percent of export earnings went to pay the interest on foreign debt. Most debtor countries devote anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of their export earnings to servicing their debts. As early as 1983, the interest collected by foreign banks on Third World debts was three times higher than the profits from direct Third World investments.
To further exacerbate the problem, the national currencies of poorer nations are undervalued. As the economist Arjun Makhijani has noted, present exchange rates between prosperous and poor nations are not based on the comparative productivity of their labour forces and the domestic purchasing power of their currencies but are artificially pegged by the Western financial centres so as to undervalue the earnings of Third World inhabitants.
One might wish that the poorer nations would liberate themselves from this financial peonage by unilaterally cancelling their debts. Fidel Castro urged them to do as much. But nations that default on their debts run the risk of being unable to qualify for short-term credit to fund imports. They risk having their overseas accounts frozen, their overseas assets seized, and their export markets closed.
To avoid default, the poor naitons keep borrowing. But to qualify for more loans, a country must agree to the IMF's restructuring terms. It must cut back on domestic consumption while producing more for export in order to pay off more of the debt. The debtor nation must penalise its own population with cuts in food subsidies, housing, and other already insufficiently-funded human services. It must devalue its currency, freeze wages, and raise prices so that its populace will work even harder and consume less. And it must offer generous tax concessions to foreign companies and eliminate subsidies to locally-owned and state-owned enterprises. Debt payments today represent a substantial net transfer of wealth from the working poor of the Third World to the coffers of international finance capital.
Foreign Aid as a Weapon
Most U.S. aid commits the recipient nation to buy U.S. goods at U.S. prices, to be transported in U.S. ships. In keeping with its commitment to capitalism, the U.S. government does not grant assistance to state-owned enterprises in Third World nations, only to the private sector. Most foreign aid never reaches the needy segments of the recipient nations. Much of it is used to subsidise U.S. corporate investment and a substantial amount finds its way into the coffers of corrupt comprador rulers. Some of it subsidises the cash-crop exports of agribusiness at the expense of small farmers who grow food for local markets.
The net result of foreign aid, as with most overseas investment, is a greater concentration of wealth for the few and deeper poverty for the many. A large sum of money cannot be injected into a class society in a class-neutral way. It goes either to the rich or the poor, in most cases, the rich.
Aid is also a powerful means of political control. It is withheld when poorer nations dare to effect genuine reforms that might tamper with the distribution of wealth and power. Thus in 1970 when the democratically-elected Allende government in Chile initiated reforms that benefitted the working class and enroached upon the privileges of wealthy investors, all U.S. aid was cut off – except assistance to the Chilean military, which was increased. In some instances, aid is used deliberately to debilitate local production, as when Washington dumped sorghum and frozen chickens onto the Nicaraguan market to undercut cooperative farms and undermine land reform, or when it sent corn to Somalia to undercut local production and cripple independent village economies. It should be remembered that these corporate agricultural exports are themselves heavily subsidised by the U.S. government.
A key instrument of class-biased aid is the World Bank, an interlocking, international consortium of bankers and economists who spend billions of dollars – much of it from U.S. taxpayers – to finance projects that shore up repressive right-wing regimes and subsidise corporate investors at the expense of the poor and the environment. For instance, in the 1980s the World Bank built a highway into northwest Brazil's rain forests, then levelled millions of acres so that wealthy Brazilian ranchers could enjoy cheap grazing lands. Brazil also sent some of its urban poor down that highway to settle the land and further deplete it. Within ten years, the region was denuded and riddled with disease and poverty. As Jim Hightower put it: "All the world's bank robbers combined have not done one-tenth of one percent of the harm that the World Bank has in just fifty years."
With Rational Violence
Along with poverty and maldevelopment, the other legacy of imperialist economic domination is unspeakable political repression and state terror. In the history of imperialism there have been few if any peaceable colonisations. Only by establishing an overwhelming and often brutal military supremacy were the invaders able to take the lands of other peoples, extort tribute, undermine their cultures, destroy their townships, eliminate their crafts and industries, and indenture or enslave their labour. Such was done by the Spaniards in South and Central America; the Portuguese in Angola, Mozambique, and Brazil; the Belgians in the Congo; the Germans in Southwest Africa; the Italians in Libya, Ethiopia, and Somalia; the Dutch in the East Indies; the French in North Africa, Madagascar, and Indochina; the British in Ireland, China, India, Africa, and the Middle East; the Japanese in Korea, Manchuria, and China; and the Americans in North America (against Native Americans), the Philippines, Central America, the Caribbean, and Indochina. And this is hardly a complete listing.
Carving up the world has often been treated by the apologists of imperialism as a natural phenomenon, involving an "international specialisation of production." In fact, what is distinct about imperialism is its highly *un*natural quality, its repeated reliance upon armed coercion and repression. Empires do not emerge naturally and innocently "in a fit of absentmindedness," as was said of the British Empire. They are welded together with deliberate deceit, greed, and ruthless violence. They are built upon the sword, the whip, and the gun. The history of imperialism is about the enslavement and slaughter of millions of innocents, a history no less dreadful for remaining conveniently untaught in most of our schools.
Terror remains one of the common instruments of imperialist domination. With the financial and technical assistance of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other such units, military and security police throughout various client states are schooled in the fine arts of surveillance, interrogation, torture, intimidation, and assassination. The U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA) at Fort Benning, Georgia, known throughout Latin America as the "School of Assassins," trains military officers from U.S. client states in the latest methods of repression. In a country like El Salvador, a majority of the officers implicated in village massacres and other atrocities are SOA graduates.
The comprador repressors have forced victims to witness the torture of friends and relatives, including children. They have raped women in the presence of family members, burned sexual organs with acid or scalding water, placed rats in women's vaginas and into the mouth of prisoners, and mutilated, punctured, and cut off various parts of victim's bodies, including genitalia, eyes, and tongues. They have injected air into women's breasts and into veins, causing slow painful death, shoved bayonets and clubs into the vagina or, in the case of men, into the anus causing rupture and death. [I offer more detailed and documented instances in my *The Sword and the Dollar; Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms Race*. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988.]
In countries that have had anticapitalist revolutionary governments, which redistributed economic resources to the many rather than the few, such as Nicaragua, Mozambique, Angola, and Afghanistan, the U.S. national security state has supported antigovernment mercenary forces in wars of attrition that destroy schools, farm cooperatives, health clinics, and whole villages. Women and girls are raped and tens of thousands are maimed, murdered, or psychologically shattered. Thousands of young boys are kidnapped and conscripted into the U.S.-backed counterrevolutionary forces. Millions of citizens are deracinated, ending in refugee camps. These wars of attrition extract horrific tolls on human life and eventually force the revolutionary government to discard its programmes.
In procapitalist countries like El Salvador and Guatemala, the U.S. national security state is on the side of the government, rendering indispensable counterinsurgency assistance in order to suppress popular liberation forces. By the "U.S. national security state" I mean to the Executive Office of the White House, the National Security Council, (NSC), National Security Administration, Central Intelligence Agency, Pentagon, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other such units that are engaged in surveillance, suppression, covert action, and forceful interventions abroad and at home.
The protracted war waged against the people of El Salvador is one of the many tragic examples of U.S.-backed counterinsurgency against the people fighting for social justice. U.S.-trained and equipped Salvadoran troops massacred, as at El Mozote, whole villages suspected of being sympathetic to the guerrillas. Between 1978 and 1994 some 70,000 Salvadorans had been killed, mostly by government forces. Some 540,000 had fled into exile. Another quarter of a million were displaced for forced into resettlement camps by the military. All this in a country of only four million people.
In neighbouring Guatemala, the loss of life due to the CIA-sponsored thirty-five-year-old conflict was estimated at 100,000 by 1994, with an additional 60,000 disappeared. Some 440 villages suspected of sympathising with the guerrillas have been destroyed and most of their residents massacred. Almost a million people have fled the country and another million have become internal migrants, forced from their homes in widespread counterinsurgency actions. The killings continue.
In Colombia, thousands were murdered by government forces in a long guerrilla war. In the years of armistice that followed, more than a thousand anticapitalist or reformist politicians and activists were killed by right-wing paramilitary groups, including two presidential candidates of the Patriotic Union and a member of the Colombian Senate who was head of the Communist Party. The killings continue there also – without a murmur of protest from the United States, which continues to send military aid to Colombia.
In Indonesia, the U.S.-backed military killed anywhere from 500,000 to one million people in 1965, destroying the Indonesian Communist Party and most of its suspected sympathisers in what even *The New York Times* (12 March 1966) called "one of the most savage mass slaughters of modern political history." Ten years later, the same Indonesian military invaded East Timor, overthrew its reformist government and killed between 100,000 and 200,000 out of a population of about 600,000. The aggression was launched the day after President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger concluded a visit to Indonesia. Philip Liechty, a CIA official there at the same time, recently commented (*The New York Times*, 12 August 1994) that General Soeharto of Indonesia "was explicitly given the green light to do what he did." Liechty noted that most of the weapons used by the Indonesian military, as well as ammunition and food, were from the United States.
Military force is in even greater evidence today than during the era of colonial conquest and occupation. The United States maintains the most powerful military machine on earth. Its supposed purpose was to protect democracy from communist aggression, but the U.S. military's actual mission – as demonstrated in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Pama – has been not to ward off Russian or Cuban invasions but to prevent indigenous anticapitalist, revolutionary, or populist-nationalist governments from prevailing.
U.S. military force is also applied indirectly, by sponsoring Third World armies, gendarmerie, and intelligence and security units – including death squads. Their purpose is not to safeguard their autocratic governments from a nonexistent communist invasion but to suppress and terrorise rebellious elements within their own populations or in adjacent countries – as Morocco does in the Western Sahara and Indonesia in East Timor.
In addition to financing Third World counterintelligence and internal security forces, the U.S. government is involved in advancing and upscaling the military forces of a dozen or so client-state nations, including South Korea, Turkey, Indonesia, Argentina, and Taiwan, with jet fighters, helicopter gunships, tanks, armoured fighting vehicles, artillery systems, frigates, and guided missiles.
The planners and practitioners of imperialism find it necessary to resort to extreme measures of coercion in order to implement their policies of politico-economic domination. The disreputable henchmen, enlisted to do the actual dirty work of assassination and torture, are not born sadists and executioners. They are trained in the necessary techniques by their CIA advisors. Government torturers in Latin America themselves have stated that they are "professionals," whose task is to elicit information from *subversivos*, so as better to prosecute the war against them. Likewise, death squads do not kill people in random frenzies. They carefully target political opponents, labour leaders, student protestors, reform-minded clergy, and journalists who get too critical.
Of course, the CIA personnel who devise these violent programmes do not consider themselves involved in anything less noble than the defence of U.S. interests abroad. They may admit that certain of their methods are unsavory but they are quick to point out the necessity of fighting fire with fire, emphasising that a communist victory is a far greater evil than whatever repressive expediencies they are compelled to utilise. So they justify their crimes by saying that their victims are criminals. The national security warriors do not support torturers and death squads arbitrarily, but as part of a process of extermination and repression in defence of specific socio-economic interests.
Imperialism must build a state-supported security system to safeguard private overseas interests. Sometimes the state stakes out a claim on behalf of private interests well before investors are prepared to do so for themselves. Almost a century ago, President Woodrow Wilson made this clear when he observed that the government "must open these [overseas] gates of trade, and open them wide, open them before it is altogether profitable to open them, or altogether reasonable to ask private capital to open them at a venture."
The state must protect not only the overseas investments of particular firms but the entire capital accumulation process itself. This entails the systematic suppression of revolutionary and populist-nationalist movements that seek to build alternative economic systems along more egalitarian, collectivist lines.
Low Intensity Imperialism
It was with domestic opinion in mind that the U.S. imperialists developed the method of "low intensity conflict" to wreak death and destruction upon countries or guerrilla movements that pursued an alternative course of development. This approach recognises that Third World guerrilla forces have seldom, if ever, been able to achieve all-out military victory over the occupying army of an industrial power or its comprador army. The best the guerrillas can hope to do is wage a war of attrition, depriving the imperialist country of a final victory, until the latter's own production grows weary of the costs and begins to challenge the overseas commitment. The war then becomes *politically* too costly for the imperialists to prosecute.
The national liberation resistance in Algeria never came close to defeating the French, yet it prevailed long enough to cause the Fourth Republic to fall and force France to concede independence. The wars that Portugal waged in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique proved so protracted and costly that the Salazar dictatorship was destabilised and eventually overthrown. In the United States, the seemingly endless Vietnam War caused the country to be torn by mass demonstrations, sit-ins, riots, draft evasion, and other radicalising acts of resistance.
To avoid stirring up such political opposition at home, Washington policymakers have developed the technique of low intensity conflict, a mode of warfare that avoids all-out, high-visibility, military engagements and thereby minimises the use and loss of U.S. military personnel. A low-intensity war is a proxy war, using the mercenary troops of the U.S.-backed Third World government. With Washington providing military trainers and advisors, superior firepower, surveillance and communications assistance, and generous funds, these forces are able to persist indefinitely, destroying a little at a time, with quick sorties into the countryside and death-squad assassinations in the cities and villages. They forgo an all-out sweep against guerrilla forces that is likely to fall short of victory and invite criticism of its futility and savagery.
The war pursued by the Reagan and Bush administrations against Nicaragua was prosecuted for almost a decade. The counterinsurgency war in El Salvador lasted over fifteen years; in the Philippines over twenty years; in Colombia, over thirty years; and in Guatemala, thirty-five years. Once low-intensity conflict is adopted there are no more big massacres, no massive military engagements, no dramatic victories or dramatic setbacks, no Điện Biên Phủ or Tet Offensive.
The U.S. public is not galvanised to opposition because not much seems to be happening and the intervention drops from the news. Like the guerrillas themselves, the interventionists pursue a war of attrition but *against* the people rather than with their support. Their purpose is to demonstrate that they have endless time and resources, that they will be able to outlast the guerrilla forces not only militarily, but also politically, because there is now scant pressure for withdrawal from their own populace back home.
At the same time, the guerrilla force cannot exist without the support of its own people, who themselves become increasingly demoralised by the human costs of the conflict. The growing war weariness of the Salvadoran people was one of the considerations that led the FMLN liberation forces to risk a negotiated peace with a treacherous Salvadoran government and its U.S. sponsors.
The Guatemalan and Salvadoran guerrillas were never completely defeated but they were militarily contained, leaving them in an increasingly difficult political situation. Even when the FMLN demonstrated with diminishing frequency that it still had the ability to launch attacks, the outcome was of limited significance and often costly. With low-intensity conflict, guerrilla forces experience the loss of their greatest strategic weapon: the ability to sustain greater losses for a longer time than can the imperialists, the ability to outlast them politically. But now the imperialist forces can remain in the field indefinitely. Low-intensity warfare is as much a political strategy as a military one.
In Nicaragua, Mozambique, Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and other countries, the imperialist intervention consisted not of a government counterinsurgency against guerrillas but a brutal campaign by U.S.-backed mercenary forces against the "soft targets" of an aspiring revolutionary society, the rural clinics, towns, cooperative farms, and the vulnerable, poorly defended population. The targeted populace is bled and battered until it feels it can take no more. The cry for peace comes not from the people in the imperialist country but from the people in the victimised land, who eventually are forced to submit to their batterers' economic and political agenda.
Globalisation by GATT
Among the recent undertakings by politico-economic elites are the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the 1993 Uruguayan Round of the Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which represent attempts to circumvent the sovereignty of nation-states in favour of the transnational corporations. As presented to the public, NAFTA and GATT will break down tariff walls, integrate national economies into a global system, and benefit the peoples of all nations with increased trade. This "globalisation" process is treated as a benign and natural historical development that supposedly has taken us from regional to national and now to international market relations.
The goal of the transnational corporation is to become truly transnational, poised above the sovereign power of any particular nation, while being serviced by the sovereign powers of all nations. A decade ago, General Motors announced it was a global company, rather than merely an American one, because of its investments around the world. As if to bring the point home, GM continued to close its stateside factories and open new ones abroad. In a similar spirit, Cyril Siewert, chief financial officer of Colgate Palmolive Company, was quoted in *The New York Times* (21 May 1989) as saying, "The United States doesn't have an automatic call on our [corporation's] recourses. There is no mindset that puts this country first." Years ago, Dow Chemical admitted it had been thinking of becoming an *anational* firm, one that had no allegiance – and therefore no obligations or accountability – to any country. Dow was considering buying a Caribbean island and chartering itself to the island as a power unto itself.
With GATT, there will be no need for corporate island kingdoms. The corporate power will be elevated above the sovereign powers of all nation states. The GATT agreements create a World Trade Organization (WTO), an international association of over 120 signatory nations, with the same legal status as the United Nations. WTO has the authority to prevent, overrule, or dilute the environmental, social, consumer, and labour laws of any nation. It sets up panels composed of nonelected trade specialists who act as judges over economic issues, placing them beyond the reach of national sovereignty and popular control, thereby ensuring that community interests will be subordinated to finance capital.
Confirmed by no elective body and limited by no conflict-of-interest provisions, these panelists can have financial stakes in the very issues they adjudicate. They meet in secret, do not publicise their proceedings, and are not subejcted to administrative appeal. Their function is to create a world in which the only regulators and producers are the transnational corporations themselves. As Kim Moody observes (*Labor Notes*, February 1994), GATT's 500 pages of rules are not directed against business trade and investment but against governments. Signatory governments must lower tariffs, end farm subsidies, treat foreign companies the same as domestic ones, honour all corporate patent claims, and obey the rulings of a permanent elite bureaucracy, the WTO. Should a country refuse to change its laws when a WTO panel so dictates, GATT can impose international trade sanctions, depriving the resistant country of needed markets and materials. GATT will benefit strong nations at the expense of weaker ones, and rich interests at the expense of the rest of us.
Under GATT, some countries have already argued that mandatory nutritional labeling on food products, marine-life protection laws, fuel economy and emission standards for cars, the ban on asbestos, the ban on import products made by child labour, and the ban on endangered-species products and on dangerous pesticides constitute "unfair non-tariff trade barriers." Citizens acting at the local, state, and national levels have become something of a hindrance to corporations acting at the global level. In a June 1994 statement, Ralph Nader noted that the WTO "would greatly reduce citizen involvement in matters of commerce," undermining present U.S. regulatory laws by circumventing what little popular sovereignty we have been able to achieve.
Under the guise of protecting "intellectual property rights," GATT allows multinationals to impose compulsory licensing and monopoly property rights on indigenous and communal agriculture. In this way GATT strengthens corporate ability to penetrate locally self-sufficient communities and monopolise their resources. Nader gives the examples of the neem tree, whose extracts contain natural pesticidal, medicinal, and other valuable properties. Cultivated for centuries in India, the tree has attracted the attention of various pharmaceutical companies, who have started filing monopoly patents, causing mass protest by Indian farmers. Armed with the patents, as legislated by the WTO, the pharmaceuticals will gain monopoly control over the marekting of neem tree products.
Generally, GATT advances the massive corporate acquisition of publicy owned property and the holdings of local owners and worker collectives. Deprived of tariff protections, many small family farms in North America and Europe will go under, and the self-sufficient village agricultural economies of much of Asia and Africa will be destroyed. As Kim Moody notes, "Third World peasant producers will be driven from the land by the millions, as is already happening in Mexico [under NAFTA]."
We are told that to remain competitive under GATT, we in North America will have to increase our productivity while reducing our labour and production costs. We will have to spend less on social services and introduce more wage concessions, more restructuring, deregulation, and privatisation. Only then might we cope with the impersonal forces sweeping us along. In fact, there is nothing impersonal about these forces. GATT was consciously planned by business and governmental elites over a period of years, by interests that have explicitly pursued a deregulated world economy and have opposed all democratic checks upon business practices.
As capital becomes ever more mobile and unaccountable under plans like NAFTA and GATT, the people of any province, state, or nation will find it increasingly difficult to get their government to impose protective regulations or develop new forms of public sector production. To offer one instances: Under the free-trade agreements between Canada and the United States, the single-payer auto insurance programme adopted by the province of Ontario was declared "unfair competition" by U.S. insurance companies. The citizens of Ontario were not allowed to exercise their sovereign power to institute an alternative not-for-profit insurance system.
Over the last two decades, in Latin America, Asia, and even in Europe and North America, conservative forces have pushed hard to take publicly owned not-for-profit industries and services (mines, factories, oil wells, banks, railroads, telephone companies, utilities, television systems, postal services, healthcare, and insurance firms) and sell them off at bargain prices to private interests to be operated for profit.
In India, as in a few other countries, nationally oriented leaders attempted with some success to push out Western companies, exclude foreign investors from its stock exchanges, build up the public sector, and create homemade consumer goods for local markets. India's economic links with the Soviet Union bolstered such efforts. But with the collapse of the USSR, the advent of GATT, and a newly installed conservative government in New Delhi, India is headed for recolonisation. By the early 1990s, previously excluded western companies like Coca-Cola had returned; Western investments were surging; entire industries and consumer markets were once more completely under foreign control; and government-owned industries were being privatised, against the protests of their employees and with inevitable cuts in wages and jobs. A similar process is taking place in the Eastern European countries whose economies had been heavily subsidised by the Soviet Union.
Designed to leave the world's economic destiny to the tender mercy of bankers and multinational corporations, globalisation is a logical extention of imperialism, a victory of empire over republic, international finance capital over democracy.