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 Note that some language which would be considered outdated by today's standards has been replaced, and spelling mistakes corrected.
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| First published | May 1995 |
| Type | Book |
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 unnatural 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 Panama – 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.
Chapter 3 – Intervention: Whose Gain? Whose Pain?
Today, the United States is the foremost proponent of recolonisation and leading antagonist of revolutionary change throughout the world. Emerging from World War II relatively unscathed and superior to all other industrial countries in wealth, productive capacity, and armed might, the United States became the prime purveyor and guardian of global capitalism. Judging by the size of its financial investments and military force, judging by every imperialist standard except direct colonisation, the U.S. empire is the most formidable in history, far greater than Great Britain in the nineteenth century or Rome during antiquity.
A Global Military Empire
The exercise of U.S. power is intended to preserve not only the international capitalist system but U.S. hegemony of that system. The Pentagon's "Defence Planning Guidance" draft (1992) urges the United States to continue to dominate the international system by "discouraging the advanced industrialised nations from challenging out leadership or even aspiring to a larger global or regional role." By maintaining this dominance, the Pentagon analysts assert, the United States can ensure "a market-oriented zone of peace and prosperity that encompasses more than two-thirds of the world's economy" [italics added].
This global power is immensely costly. Today, the United States spends more on military arms and other forms of "national security" than the rest of the world combined. U.S. leaders preside over a global military apparatus of a magnitude never before seen in human history. In 1993 it included almost a half-million troops stationed at over 395 major military bases and hundreds of minor installations in thirty-five foreign countries, and a fleet larger in total tonnage and firepower than all other navies of the world combined, consisting of missile cruisers, nuclear submarines, nuclear aircraft carriers, destroyers, and spy ships that sail every ocean and make port on every continent. U.S. bomber squadrons and long missiles can reach any target, carrying enough explosive force to destroy entire countries with an overkill capacity of more than 8,000 strategic nuclear weapons and 22,000 tactical ones. U.S. rapid deployment forces have a firepower in conventional weaponry vastly superior to any other nation's, with an ability to slaughter with impunity, as the massacre of Iraq demonstrated in 1990-91.
Since World War II, the U.S. government has given over $200 billion in military aid to train, equip, and subsidise more than 2.3 million troops and internal security forces in some eighty countries, the purpose being not to defend them from outside invasions but to protect ruling oligarchs and multinational corporate investors from the dangers of domestic anticapitalist insurgency. Among the recipients have been some of the most notorious military autocracies in history, countries that have tortured, killed, or otherwise maltreated large numbers of their citizens because of their dissenting political views, as in Turkey, Zaire, Chad, Pakistan, Morocco, Indonesia, Honduras, Peru, Colombia, El Salvador, Haiti, Cuba (under Batista), Nicaragua (under Somoza), Iran (under the Shah), the Philippines (under Marcos), and Portugal (under Salazar).
U.S. leaders profess a dedication to democracy. Yet over the past five decades, democratically-elected reformist governments in Guatemala, Guyana, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Syria, Indonesia (under Sukarno), Greece, Argentina, Bolivia, Haiti, and numerous other nations were overthrown by pro-capitalist militaries that were funded and aided by the U.S. national security state.
The U.S. national security state has participated in covert actions or proxy mercenary wars against revolutionary governments in Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Portugal, Nicaragua, Cambodia, East Timor, Western Sahara, and elsewhere, usually with dreadful devastation and loss of life for the indigenous populations. Hostile actions also have been directed against reformist governments in Egypt, Lebanon, Peru, Iran, Syria, Zaire, Jamaica, South Yemen, the Fiji Islands, and elsewhere.
Since World War II, U.S. forces have directly invaded or launched aerial attacks on Vietnam, the Dominican Republic, North Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Libya, Iraq, and Somalia, sowing varying degrees of death and destruction.
Before World War II, U.S. military forces waged a bloody and protracted war of conquest in the Philippines from 1899 to 1903. Along with fourteen other capitalist nations, the United States invaded and occupied parts of socialist Russia from 1918 to 1921. U.S. expeditionary forces fought in China along with other Western armies to suppress the Boxer Rebellion and keep the Chinese under the heel of European and North American colonisers. U.S. Marines invaded and occupied Nicaragua in 1912 and again from 1926 to 1933; Haiti, from 1915 to 1934; Cuba, from 1898 to 1902; Mexico, in 1914 and 1916. There were six invasions of Honduras between 1911 and 1925; Panama was occupied between 1903 and 1914.
Why Intervention?
Why has a professedly peace-loving, democratic nation found it necessary to use so much violence and repression against so many peoples in so many places? An important goal of U.S. policy is to make the world safe for the Fortune 500 and its global system of capital accumulation. Governments that strive for any kind of economic independence or any sort of populist redistributive politics, that attempt to take some of their economic surplus and apply it to not-for-profit services that benefit the people – such governments are the ones most likely to feel the wrath of U.S. intervention of invasion.
The designed "enemy" can be a reformist, populist, military government as in Panama under Torrijos (and even under Noriega), Egypt under Nasser, Peru under Velasco, and Portugal after Salazar; a Christian socialist government as in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas; a social democracy as in Chile under Allende, Jamaica under Manley, Greece under Papandreou, and the Dominican Republic under Bosch; a Marxist-Leninist government as in Cuba, Vietnam, and North Korea; an Islamic revolutionary order as in Libya under Qaddafi; or even a conservative militarist regime as in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, if it should get out of line on oil prices and oil quotas.
The public record shows that the United States is the foremost interventionist power in the world. There are varied and overlapping reasons for this:
Protect Direct Investments. In 1907, Woodrow Wilson recognised the support role played by the capitalist state on behalf of private capital:
"Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused."
Later, as President of the United States, Wilson noted that the United States was involved in a struggle to "command the economic fortunes of the world."
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, large U.S. investments in Central America and the Caribbean brought frequent military intercession, protracted war, prolonged occupation, or even direct territorial acquisition, as with Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Panama Canal Zone. The investments were often in the natural resources of the country: sugar, tobacco, cotton, and precious metals. In large part, the interventions in the Gulf in 1991 (see Chapter 6) and in Somalia in 1993 (Chapter 7) were respectively to protect oil profits and oil prospects.
In the post-Cold War era, Admiral Charles Larson noted that, although U.S. military forces have been reduced in some parts of the world, they remain at impressive levels in the Asia-Pacific are because U.S. trade in that region is greater than with either Europe or Latin America. Naval expert Charles Meconis also pointed to "the economic importance of the region" as the reason for a major U.S. military presence in the Pacific (see Daniel Schirmer, Monthly Review, July/August 1994). In these instances, the sword follows the dollar.
Create Opportunities for New Investments. Sometimes the dollar follows the sword, as when military power creates opportunities for new investments. Thus, in 1915, U.S. leaders, citing "political instability," invaded Haiti and crushed the popular militia. The troops stayed for nineteen years. During that period, French, German, and British investors were pushed out and U.S. firms tripled their investments in Haiti.
More recently, Taiwanese companies gave preference to U.S. firms over those from Japan because the U.S. military was protecting Taiwan. In 1993, Saudi Arabia signed a $6 billion contract for jet airliners exclusively with U.S. companies. Having been frozen out of the deal, a European consortium charged that Washington had pressured the Saudis, who had become reliant on Washington for their military security in the post-Gulf War era.
Preserving Politico-Economic Domination and the Capital Accumulation System. Specific investments are not the only imperialist concern. There is the overall commitment to safeguarding the global class system, keeping the world's land, labour, natural resources, and markets accessible to transnational investors. More important than particular holdings is the whole process of investment and profit. To defend that process the imperialist state thwarts and crushes those popular movements that attempt any kind of redistributive politics, sending a message to them and others that if they try to better themselves by infringing upon the prerogatives of corporate capital, they will pay a severe price.
In two of the most notable U.S. military interventions, Soviet Russia from 1918 to 1920 and Vietnam from 1954 to 1973, most of the investments were European, not American. In these and other such instances, the intent was to prevent the emergence of competing social orders and obliterate all workable alternatives to the capitalist client-state. That remains the goal to this day, the countries most recently targeted being South Yemen, North Korea, and Cuba.
Ronald Reagan was right when he avowed that his invasion of Grenada was not to protect the U.S. nutmeg supply. There was plenty of nutmeg to be got from Africa. He was acknowledging that Grenada's natural recourses were not crucial. Nor would the revolutionary collectivisation of a poor nation of 102,000 souls represent much of a threat or investment loss to global capitalism. But if enough countries follow that course, it eventually would put the global capitalist system at risk.
Reagan's invasion of Grenada served notice to all other Caribbean countries that this was the fate that awaited any nation that sought to get out from under its client-state status. So the invaders put an end to the New Jewel Movement's revolutionary programmes for land reform, healthcare, education, and cooperatives. Today, with its unemployment at new heights and its poverty at new depths, Grenada is once again firmly bound to the free market world. Everyone else in the region indeed has taken note.
The imperialist state's first concern is not to protect the direct investments of any particular company, although it sometimes does that, but to protect the global system of private accumulation from competing systems. The case of Cuba illustrates this point. It has been pointed out that Washington's embargo against Cuba is shutting out U.S. business from billions of dollars of attractive investment and trade opportunities. From this it is mistakenly concluded that U.S. policy is not propelled by economic interests. In fact, it demonstrates just the opposite, an unwillingness to tolerate those states that try to free themselves from the global capitalist system.
The purpose of the capitalist state is to do things for the advancement of the entire capitalist system that individual corporate interests cannot do. Left to their own competitive devices, business firms are not willing to abide by certain unwritten rules of common systematic interest. This is true within both the domestic economy and in foreign ventures. Like any good capitalist organisation, a business firm may have a general long-range interest in seeing Cuban socialism crushed, but it might have a more tempting immediate interest in doing a profitable business with the class enemy. It remains for the state to force individual companies back in line. [However, firms in Canada, Venezuela, Spain, and other countries that feel no commitment to U.S. global imperialism have been trading with Cuba, much to Washington's displeasure. U.S. law prevents foreign vessels that trade with Cuba from loading or unloading in the USA for six months, thus inflicting a substantial cost on Cuba and any trading partner.] What is at stake is not the investments within a particular Third World country but the long-range security of the entire system of transnational investment. No country that pursues an independent course of development shall be allowed to prevail as a dangerous example to other nations.
Common Confusions
Some critics have argued that economic factors have not exerted an important influence on U.S. interventionist policy because most interventions are in countries that have no great natural treasures and no large U.S. investments, such as Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Vietnam. This is like saying that police are not especially concerned about protecting wealth and property because most of their forceful actions take place in poor neighbourhoods. Interventionist forces do not go where capital exists as such; they go where capital is threatened. They have not intervened in affluent Switzerland, for instance, because capitalism in that country is relatively secure and unchallenged. But if leftist parties gained power in Bern and attempted to nationalise Swiss banks and major properties, it very likely would invite the strenuous attentions of Western industrial powers.
Some observers maintain that intervention is bred by the national-security apparatus itself, the State Department, the National Security Council, and the CIA. These agencies conjure up new enemies and crises because they need to justify their own existence and augment their budget allocations. This view avoids the realities of class interest and power. It suggests that policymakers serve no purpose other than policymaking for their own bureaucratic aggrandisement. Such a notion reverses cause and effect. It is a little like saying the horse is the cause of the horse race. It treats the national security state as the originator of intervention, when in fact it is but one of the major instruments. U.S. leaders were engaging in interventionist actions long before the CIA and NSC existed.
One of those who argues that the state is a self-generated aggrandiser is Richard Barnet, who dismisses the "more familiar and more sinister motives" of economic imperialism. Whatever their economic system, all large industrial states, he maintains, seek to project power and influence in a search for security and domination. To be sure, the search for security is a real consideration for every state. But the capital investments of multinational corporations expand in a far more dynamic way than the economic expansion manifested by socialist or precapitalist governments.
In fact, the case studies in Barnet's book Intervention and Revolution point to business, rather than the national security bureaucracies, as the primary motive of U.S. intervention. Anticommunism and the Soviet threat seem less a source for policy than a propaganda ploy to frighten the American public and rally support for overseas commitments. The very motives Barnet dismisses seem to be operative in his case studies of Greece, Iran, Lebanon, and the Dominican Republic, specifically the desire to secure access to markets and raw materials and the need, explicitly stated by various policymakers, to protect free enterprise throughout the world.
Some might complain that the foregoing analysis is "simplistic" because it ascribes all international events to purely economic and class motives and ignores other variables like geopolitics, culture, ethnicity, nationalism, ideology, and morality. But I do not argue that the struggle to maintain capitalist global hegemony explains everything about world politics nor even everything about U.S. foreign policy. However, it explains quite a lot; so is it not time we become aware of it? If mainstream opinion makers really want to portray political life in all its manifold complexities, then why are they so studiously reticent about the immense realities of imperialism?
The existence of other variables such as nationalism, militarism, the search for national security, and the pursuit of power and hegemonic dominance, neither compels us to dismiss economic realities, nor to treat these other variables as insulated from class interests. Thus the desire to extend U.S. strategic power into a particular region is impelled at least in part by a desire to stabilise the area along the lines that are favourable to politico-economic elite interests – which is why the region becomes a focus of concern in the first place.
In other words, various considerations work with circular effect upon one another. The growth in overseas investments invite a need for military protection. This, in turn, creates a need to secure bases and establish alliances with other nations. The alliances now expand the "defence" perimeter that must be maintained. So a particular country becomes not only an "essential" asset for our defence but must itself be defended, like any other asset.
Inventing Enemies
As noted in the previous chapter, the U.S. empire is neoimperialist in its operational mode. With the exception of a few territorial possessions, its overseas expansion has relied on indirect control rather than direct possession. That is not to say that U.S. leaders are strangers to annexation and conquest. Most of what is now the continental United States was forcibly wrested from Native American nations. California and all of the Southwest USA were taken from Mexico by war. Florida and Puerto Rico were seized from Spain.
U.S. leaders must convince the American people that the immense costs of empire are necessary for their security and survival. For years we were told that the great danger we faced was "the World Communist Menace with its headquarters in Moscow." The public accepted a crushing tax burden to win the superpower arms race and "contain Soviet aggression wherever it might arise." Since the demise of the USSR, our political leaders have been warning us that the world is full of other dangerous adversaries, who apparently had been previously overlooked.
Who are these evil adversaries who wait to spring upon the USA the moment we drop our guard or the moment we make real cuts in our gargantuan military budget? Why do they stalk us instead of, say, Denmark or Brazil? This scenario of a world of enemies was used by the rulers of the Roman Empire and by the nineteenth-century British imperialists. Enemies always had to be confronted, requiring more interventions and more expansion. And if enemies were not to be found, they were invented.
When Washington says "our" interests must be protected abroad, we might question whether all of us are represented by the goals pursued. Far-off countries, previously unknown to most Americans, suddenly become vital to "our" interests. To protect "our" oil in the Middle East and "our" resources and "our" markets elsewhere, our sons and daughters have to participate in overseas military ventures, and our taxes are needed to finance these ventures.
The next time "our" oil in the Middle East is in jeopardy, we might remember that relatively few of us own oil stock. Yet even portfolio-deprived Americans are presumed to have a common interest with Exxon and Mobil because they live in an economy dependent on oil. It is assumed that if the people of other lands wrested control of their oil away from the big U.S. companies, they would refuse to sell it to us. Supposedly they would prefer to drive us into the arms of competing producers and themselves into ruination, denying themselves the billions of dollars they might earn on the North American market.
In fact, nations that acquire control of their own resources do not act so strangely. Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, Libya, and others would be happy to have access to markets in this country, selling at prices equal to or lower than those offered by the giant multinationals. So when Third World peoples, through nationalisation, revolution, or both, reclaim the oil in their own land, or the copper, tin sugar, or other resources, it does not hurt the interests of the U.S. working populace. But it certainly hurts the multinational conglomerates that once profited so handsomely from these enterprises.
Who Pays? Who Profits?
We are made to believe that the people of the United States have a common interest with the giant multinationals, the very companies that desert our communities in pursuit of cheaper labour abroad. In truth, on almost every issue the people are not in the same boat with the big companies. Policy costs are not equally shared; benefits are not equally enjoyed. The "national" policies of an imperialist country reflect the interests of that country's dominant socio-economic class. Class rather than nation-state more often is the crucial unit of analysis in the study of imperialism.
The tendency to deny the existence of conflicting class interests when dealing with imperialism leads to some serious misunderstandings. For example, liberal writers like Kenneth Boulding and Richard Barnet have pointed out that empires cost more than they bring in, especially when wars are fought to maintain them. Thus, from 1950 to 1970, the U.S. government spent several billions of dollars to shore up a corrupt dictatorship in the Philippines, hoping to protect about $1 billion in U.S. investments in that country. At first glance it does not make sense to spend $3 billion to protect $1 billion. Saul Landau has made this same point in regard to the costs of U.S. interventions in Central America: they exceed actual U.S. investments. Barnet notes that "the cost of maintaining imperial privilege always exceed the gains." From this it has been concluded that empires simply are not worth all the expense and trouble. Long before Barnet, the Round Table imperialist policymakers in Great Britain wanted us to believe that the empire was not maintained because of profit; indeed "from a purely material point of view the Empire is a burden rather than a source of gain" (Round Table, vol. 1, 232-39, 411).
To be sure, empires do not come cheap. Burdensome expenditures are needed for military repression and prolonged occupation, for colonial administration, for bribes and arms to native collaborators, and for the development of a commercial infrastructure to facilitate extractive industries and capital penetration. But empires are not losing propositions for everyone. The governments of imperial nations may spend more than they take in, but the people who reap the benefits are not the same ones who foot the bill. As Thorstein Veblen pointed out in The Theory of the Business Enterprise (1904), the gains of empire flow directly into the hands of the privileged business class while the costs are extracted from "the industry of the rest of the people." The transnationals monopolise the private returns of empire while carrying little, if any, of the public cost. The expenditures needed in the way of armaments and aid to make the world safe for General Motors, General Dynamics, General Electric, and all the other generals are paid by the U.S. government, that is, by the taxpayers.
So it was with the British Empire in India, the costs of which, Marx noted a half-century before Veblen, were "paid out of the pockets of the people of England," and far exceeded what came back into the British treasury. He concluded that the advantage to Great Britain from her Indian Empire was limited to the "very considerable" profits which accrued to select individuals, mostly a coterie of stockholders and officers in the East India Company and the Bank of England.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century and carrying over into the twentieth, the German conquest of Southwest Africa "remained a loss-making enterprise for the German taxpayer," according to historian Horst Drechsler, yet "a number of monopolists still managed to squeeze huge profits out of the colony in the closing years of German colonial domination." And imperialism remains today in the service of the few monopolists, not the many taxpayers.
In sum, there is nothing irrational about spending three dollars of public money to protect one dollar of private investment – at least not from the perspective of the investors. To protect one dollar of their money they will spend three, four, and five dollars of our money. In fact, when it comes to protecting their money, our money is no object.
Furthermore, the cost of a particular U.S. intervention must be measured not against the value of U.S. investments in the country involved but against the value of the world investment system. It has been noted that the cost of apprehending a bank robber may occasionally exceed the sum that is stolen. But if robbers were allowed to go their way, this would encourage others to follow suit and would put the entire banking system in jeopardy.
At stake in these various wars of suppression, then, is not just the investments in any one country but the security of the whole international system of finance capital. No country is allowed to pursue an independent course of self-development. None is permitted to go unpunished and undeterred. None should serve as an inspiration or source of material support to other nations that might want to pursue a politico-economic path other than the maldevelopment offered by global capitalism.
The Myth of Popular Imperialism
Those who think of empire solely as an expression of national interests rather than class interests are bound to misinterpret the nature of imperialism. In his American Diplomacy 1900–1950, George Kennan describes U.S. imperialist expansion at the end of the nineteenth century as a product of popular aspiration: the American peopel "simply liked the smell of empire"; they wanted "to bask in the sunshine of recognition as one of the great imperial powers of the world."
In The Progressive (October 1984), the liberal writers John Buell and Matthew Rothschild comment that "the American psyche is pegged to being biggest, best, richest, and strongest. Just listen to the rhetoric of our politicians." But does the politician's rhetoric really reflect the sentiments of most Americans, who in fact come up decidedly noninterventionist in most opinion polls? Buell and Rothschild assert that "when a Third World nation – whether it be Cuba, Vietnam, Iran, or Nicaragua – spurns our way of doing things, our egos ache..." Actually, such countries spurn the ways of global corporate capitalism – and this is what U.S. politico-economic leaders will not tolerate. Psychologising about aching collective egos allows us to blame imperialism on ordinary U.S. citizens who are neither the creators nor beneficiaries of empire.
In like fashion, the historian William Appleman Williams, in his Empire As a Way of Life, scolds the American people for having become addicted to the conditions of empire. It seems "we" like empire. "We" live beyond our means and need empire as part of our way of life. "We" exploit the rest of the world and don't know how to get back to a simpler life. The implicatio is that "we" are profiting from the runaway firms that are exporting our jobs and exploiting Third World peopels. "We" decided to send troops into Central America, Vietnam, and the Middle East and thought to overthrow democratic governments in a dozen or more countries around the world. And "we" urged the building of a global network of counterinsurgency, police torturers, and death squads in numerous countries.
For Williams, imperialist policy is a product of mass thinking. In truth, ordinary Americans usually have opposed intervention or given only lukewarm support. Opinion polls during the Vietnam War showed that the public wanted a negotiated settlement and withdrawal of U.S. troops. The American people supported the idea of a coalition government in Vietnam that included the communists, and they supported elections even if the communists won them.
Pollster Louis Harris reported that, during 1982–84 Americans rejected increased military aid for El Salvador and its autocratic military machine by more than 3 to 1. Network surveys found that 80 percent opposed sending troops to that country; 67 percent were against the U.S. mining of Nicaragua's harbours; and 2 to 1 majorities opposed aid to the Nicaraguan Contras (the right-wing civilians). A 1983 The Washington Post/ABC News poll found that, by a 6 to 1 ratio, our citizens opposed any attempt by the United States to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. By more than 2 to 1 the public said that the greatest cause of unrest in Central America was not subversion from Cuba, Nicaragua, or the Soviet Union but "poverty and the lack of human rights in the area."
Even the public's superpatriotic yellow-ribbon binge during the more recent Gulf War of 1991 was not the cause of the war itself. It was only one of the disgusting and disheartening byproducts. Up to the eve of that conflict, opinion polls showed Americans favouring a negotiated withdrawal of Iraqi troops rather than direct U.S. military engagement. But once U.S. forces were committed to action, then the "support-our-troops" and "go for victory" mentality took hold of the public, pumped up as always by a jingoistic media propaganda machine.
Once war comes, especially with the promise of a quick and easy victory, some individuals suspend all critical judgement and respond on cue like mindless superpatriots. One can point to the small businessman in Massachusetts, who announced that he was a "strong supporter" of the U.S. military involvement in the Gulf War, yet admitted he was not sure what the war was about. "That's something I would like to know," he stated. "What are we fighting about?" (The New York Times, 15 November 1990).
In the afterglow of the Gulf triumph, George Bush had a 93 percent approval rating and was deemed unbeatable for reelection in 1992. Yet within a year, Americans had come down from their yellow-ribbon binge and experienced a postbellum depression, filled with worries about jobs, money, taxes, and other such realities. Bush's popularity all but evaporated and he was defeated by a scandal-plagued, relatively unknown governor from Arkansas.
Whether they support or oppose a particular intervention, the American people cannot be considered the motivating force of the war policy. They do not sweep their leaders into war on a tide of popular hysteria. It is the other way around. Their leaders take them for a ride and bring out the worst in them. Even then, there are hundreds of thousands who remain actively opposed and millions who correctly suspect that such ventures are not in their interest.
Cultural Imperialism
Imperialism exercises control over the communication universe. American movies, television shows, music, fashions, and consumer products inundate Latin America, Asia, and Africa, as well as Western and Eastern Europe. U.S. rock stars and other performers play before wildly enthusiastic audiences from Madrid to Moscow, from Rio to Bangkok. U.S. advertising agencies dominate the publicity and advertising industries of the world.
Millions of news reports, photographs, commentaries, editorials, syndicated columns, and feature stories from U.S. media saturate most other countries each year. Millions of comic books and magazines, condemning communism and boosting the wonders of the free market, are translated into dozens of languages and distributed by U.S. (dis)information agencies. The CIA alone owns outright over 200 newspapers, magazines, wire services, and publishing houses in countries throughout the world.
U.S. government-funded agencies like the National Endowment for Democracy and the Agency for International Development, along with the Ford Foundation and other such organisations, help maintain Third World universities, providing money for academic programmes, social science institutes, research, student scholarships, and textbooks supportive of a free market ideological perspective. Right-wing Christian missionary agencies preach political quiescence and anticommunism to native populations. The AFL-CIO's American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), with ample State Department funding, has actively infiltrated Third World labour organisations or built compliant unions that are more anticommunist than proworker. AIFLD graduates have been linked to coups and counterinsurgency work in various countries. Similar AFL-CIO undertakings operate in Africa and Asia.
The CIA has infiltrated important political organisations in numerous countries and maintains agents at the highest levels of various governments, including heads of state, military leaders, and major political parties. Washington has financed conservative political parties in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Western and Eastern Europe. Their major qualification is that they be friendly to Western capital penetration. While federal law prohibits foreigners from making campaign contributions to U.S. candidates, Washington policymakers reserve the right to interfere in the elections of other countries, such as Italy, the Dominican Republic, Panama, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, to name only a few. U.S. leaders feel free to intrude massively upon the economic, military, political, and cultural practices and institutions of any country they so choose. That's what it means to have an empire.
Chapter 4 – Strong Empire, Weak Republic
The success of the empire depends upon its ability to expropriate the resources of the republic. In the previous chapter we noted how the financial burdens of imperialism are sustained by the ordinary taxpayers, while the benefits accrue to the favoured few. There are additional ways that Americans pay the hidden costs of empire.
Exporting Jobs
As early as 1916, Lenin pointed out that as it advanced, capitalism would export not only its goods but its very capital, not only its products but its entire production process. Today, most giant U.S. firms do just that, exporting their technology, factories, and sales networks – and our jobs. It is well-known that General Motors has been closing down factories in the USA. Less well-known is that for many years GM has been spending millions of dollars abroad on new auto plants in countries where wages are far less than what American auto workers are paid. This means bigger profits for GM and more unemployment for Detroit.
Over the last twenty years, American firms have tripled their total outlay in other countries, their fastest growth rate being in the Third World. Nor is the trend likely to reverse itself. American capitalism is now producing abroad eight times more than it exports. Many firms have shifted all their manufacturing activities to foreign lands. All the cameras sold in the USA are made overseas, as are almost all the bicycles, tape recorders, radios, television sets, VCRs, and computers. One of every three workers now employed by U.S. multinational companies works in a foreign country. U.S. companies continue to export tens of thousands of stateside jobs each year. Management's threat to relocate a plant is often sufficient to blackmail U.S. workers into taking wage and benefit cuts and working longer hours.
We are victimised by economic imperialism not only as workers but as taxpayers and consumers. Multinationals do not have to pay U.S. taxes on profits made in other countries until these profits are repatriated to the USA – if even they are. Taxes paid to a host country are treated as tax credits rather than mere deductions here at home. In other words, $1 million paid to a foreign country in taxes or even oil royalties is not treated as a deduction of taxable income by the IRS (which might save the company $100,000 or so in stateside taxes), but is written off from the final taxes the company has to pay, saving it an entire $1 million in payments.
In addition, multinationals can juggle the books between their various foreign subsidiaries, showing low profits in a high-tax country and high profits in a low-tax country, thereby avoiding at least $20 billion a year in U.S. taxes.
These billions that corporations escape paying because of their overseas shelters must be made up by the rest of us. Additional billions of our tax dollars go into aid programmes to governments that maintain the cheap labour markets that lure away American jobs. U.S. foreign aid seldom trickles down to the poor people of the recipient countries. In fact, much of it is military aid that is likely to be used to suppress dissent among the poor. Our tax money also is used to finance the construction of roads, office complexes, plants, and ports needed to support extractive industries in the Third World.
Nor do the benefits of this empire trickle down to the American consumer in any appreciable way. Generally the goods made abroad by superexploited labour are sold at as high a price as possible on U.S. markets. Corporations move to Asia and Africa not to produce lower-priced goods that will save money for U.S. consumers but to maximise their profits. They pay as little as possible in wages abroad but still charge as much as possible when they sell the goods at home. Shoes that cost Nike $7 to make in Indonesia – where the company or its subcontractors pay women workers about 18 cents an hour – are then sold in this country for $130 or more. Baseballs produced in Haiti at a labour cost of two cents a ball are sold in the USA for $10 and up. The General Electric household appliances made by young women in South Korea, who work for bare subsistence wages, and the Admiral International colour television sets assembled by low-paid workers in Taiwan, do not cost us any less than when they were made in North America. As the president of Admiral noted, the shift to Taiwan "won't affect pricing stateside but it should improve the company's profit structure, otherwise we wouldn't be making the move."
Nor do these overseas investments bring any great benefits to the peoples of the Third World. Foreign investment created the "Brazil Miracle," a dramatic growth in that country's gross national product in the 1960s. At the same time it created a food shortage and increased poverty, as Brazil's land and labour were used increasingly for production of cash export crops, and less for the needs of the Brazilian people. In Central America, land that once yielded corn and beans to feed the people has been converted to cattle ranches that raise the beef consumed in North America and Europe.
We have heard much about the "refugees from communism"; we might think a moment about the refugees from capitalism. Driven off their lands, large numbers of impoverished Latinos and other Third Worlders have been compelled to flee into economic exile, coming to the United States, many of them illegally, to compete with U.S. workers for entry-level jobs. Because of their illegal status and vulnerability to deportation, undocumented workers are least likely to unionise and least able to fight for improvements in work conditions.
Empire Against Environment
For years the herbicides, pesticides, and hazardous pharmaceuticals that were banned in this country have been sold by their producers to Third World nations where regulations are weaker or nonexistent. (In 1981, President Reagan repealed an executive order signed by President Carter that would have forced exporters of such products to notify the recipient nation that the commodity was banned in the USA.) With an assured export market, these poisons continue to cripple workers in the American chemical plants where they are made, and then reappear on our dinner tables in the fruit, vegetables, meat, and coffee we import. Such products also have been poisoning people in Third World countries, creating a legacy of sickness and death.
With the passage of GATT, it will be easier than ever to bypass consumer and environmental protections. The chemical toxins and other industrial effusions poured into the world's groundwater, oceans, and atmosphere by fast-profit, unrestricted multinational corporations operating in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and the devastation of Third World lands by mining and timber companies and agribusiness are seriously affecting the quality of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat. Ecology knows no national boundaries.
The search for cheap farmland to raise cattle induces companies to cut down rain forests throughout Central America, South America, and Southeast Asia. This depletion of the global ecological base is a threat to all the earth's inhabitants. The tropical rain forests in Central America and the larger ones in the Amazon basin may be totally obliterated within the next two decades. Over 25 percent of our prescription drugs are derived from rain forest plants. Rain forests are the winter home for millions of migratory North American songbirds – of which declining numbers are returning from Central America. Many of these birds are essential to pest and rodent control.
Over half the world's forests are gone compared to earlier centuries. The forests are nature's main means of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Today, the carbon dioxide buildup is transforming the chemical composition of the earth's atmosphere, accelerating the "greenhouse effect," melting the earth's polar ice caps, and causing a variety of other climatic destabilisations.
The dumping of industrial effusions and radioactive wastes also may be killing our oceans. If the oceans die, so do we, since they produce most of the earth's oxygen. While the imperialists are free to roam the world and defile it at will, we are left to suffer the potentially irreversible consequences. Additional damage to the environment is inflicted by the U.S. Armed Forces, which use millions of acres of land at home and abroad in bombing runs and manoeuvres. For decades, over one hundred nuclear weapons plants have been pouring radioactive waste into the air, soil, groundwater, and rivers. The military is the single biggest consumer of fuel in this country and the greatest polluter, contaminating the environment with hundreds of thousands of tons of heavy metals, solvents, lubricants, PCBs, plutonium, trinium, fuel runoffs, and other toxic wastes.
The military creates over 90 percent of our radioactive waste and stockpiles thousands of tons of lethal biochemical agents. There are some 21,000 contaminated sites on military bases and at nuclear weapons plants. Each year, the military utilises millions of tons of ozone-depleting chemicals.
In sum, one of the greatest dangers to the security and well-being of the American public and to the planet itself is the U.S. military.
American Casualties
The military is also a danger to its own ranks. enlisted personnel are regularly killed in vehicular accidents, firing exercises, flight crashes, ship fires, and parachute jumps – resulting in 20,269 non-combat deaths from 1979 to 1988, or an average of 2,027 a year. In addition are the several hundred suicides that occur yearly in the armed services.
Thousands of Army veterans exposed to nuclear tests after World War II have suffered premature deaths from cancer. Vietnam veterans who came back contaminated by the tons of herbicides sprayed on Indochina are facing terminal ailments, while their children have suffered an abnormally high rate of birth defects (in common with the children in Vietnam, though the latter have endured a much higher rate of abnormalities). Similarly, tens of thousands of veterans from the Gulf War of 1991 have succumbed to a variety of illnesses due to exposure to a range of war-related, lethal substances. And for many years, workers in nuclear plants and "downwinders" in Utah who were afflicted with radiation poisoning from the Nevada atomic tests have died prematurely. Many have given birth to genetically-deficient children.
The U.S. Military has performed chemical and bacteriological experiments on Americans. The Navy sprayed bacteria in San Francisco in 1950, an escapade that has since been implicated in the serious illness of several residents and the death of at least one person. In 1955, the CIA conducted a biological warfare test in the Tampa Bay area, soon after which twelve people died in a whooping cough epidemic. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, there were purposeful releases of radiation from the nuclear weapons manufacturing facility at Hanford, Washington, with subsequent secret medical monitoring of the local downwind population.
In 1994 it was revealed that in the late-1940s, government scientists injected perhaps hundreds of Americans with plutonium without their knowledge and for the next twenty years sprayed infectious bacilli and chemical particles in about 270 populated locations, including St. Louis, New York, and Minneapolis.
The empire strikes back home with the narcotics that are shipped into the USA through secret international cartels linked to the CIA. Large-scale drug trafficking has been associated with CIA-supported covert wars in Southeast Asia and Central America. As of 1988, evidence was mounting linking the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contras to a network of narcotics smuggling that stretched from cocaine plantations in Colombia to airships in Costa Rica, to dummy business firms in Miami – and inevitably to the drug-ridden streets of our society. As the Kerry Senate subcommittee documented, the drug epidemic of the 1980s was a direct result of this CIA-supported traffic.
The empire has a great many overhead costs, especially military ones, that must be picked up by our people. The Vietnam War's total expenditures (including veterans' benefits and hospitals, interest on teh national debt, and the like) comes to well over $518 billion, as estimated by economist Victor Perlo. He pointed out that by the war's end inflation had escalated from about 1 percent a year to 10 percent; the national debt had doubled over the 1964 level; the federal budget showed record deficits; unemployment had doubled; real wages had started on their longest decline in modern U.S. history; interest rates rose to 10 percent and higher; the U.S. export surplus gave way to an import surplus; and U.S. gold and monetary reserves were drained.
There were serious human costs as well. Some 2.5 million Americans had their lives interrupted to serve in Indochina. Of these, 58,156 were killed and 303,616 wounded (13,167 with 100 percent disability). More than 70,000 have died since returning home because of suicides, murders, addictions, and alcoholism. Tens of thousands more have attempted suicide. Ethnic minorities paid a disproportionate price. While composing about 12 percent of our population, African Americans accounted for 22 percent of all combat deaths in Vietnam. The New Mexico state legislature noted that Mexican Americans constituted only 29 percent of that state's population but 69 percent of the state's inductees and 43 percent of its Vietnam casualties in the early years of the war.
Impoverishing the Republic
The empire increasingly impoverishes the republic. Operational costs of global militarism may become so onerous as to undermine the society that sustains them, such as has been the case with empires in the past. Americans pay dearly for "our" global military apparatus. The spending binge that the Pentagon has been on for decades, especially the last fourteen years or so, has created record deficits and a runaway national debt, making the United States the largest debtor nation in the world. The government is required to borrow more and more to pay the growing interest on a debt that is owed to rich creditors at home and abroad.
Between 1948 and 1994, the federal government spent almost $11 trillion on its military – more than the cumulative monetary value of all human-made wealth in the United States. The current Pentagon budget plus the military projects of the Energy Department and NASA, foreign military aid, veterans' benefits, and interest paid on past military debt comes to almost $500 billion a year. The annual Pentagon budget is more than the gross national product of almost every country in the world. Over the last decade, the average contribution per family to military spending was $35,000.
U.S. Military spending is of a magnitude unmatched by any other power. In 1993, according to the Center for Defense Information, the United States spent $291 billion on the Military, while second-place Japan spent $40 billion, followed by France's $36 billion, the United Kingdom's $35 billion, Germany's $31 billion, Russia's $29 billion, and China's $22 billion. In any one year, the United States spends more on the military than the next fifteen nations combined.
Most of our domestic financial woes can be ascribed to military spending. The enormous scale of that spending is something hard to grasp. The cost of building one aircraft carrier could feed several million of the poorest, hungriest children in America for ten years. Greater sums have been budgeted for the development of the Navy's submarine rescue vehicle than for occupational safety, public libraries, and daycare centres combined. The cost of military aircraft components and ammunition kept in storage by the Pentagon is greater than the combined federal spending on pollution control, conservation, community development, housing, occupational safety, and mass transportation. The total expenses of the legislative and judicial branches and all the regulatory commissions combined constitute less than 1 percent of the Pentagon's yearly budget.
Then there is the distortion of U.S. science and technology, as 70 percent of federal research and development (R&D) funds goes to the Military. Contrary to Pentagon claims, what the military produces in R&D has little spin-off for the civilian market. About one-third of all American scientists and engineers are involved in military projects, creating a serious brain drain for the civilian sector. The United States is losing out to foreign competitors in precisely those industries with a high military rather than civilian investment. For instance, the U.S. machine tool industry, which once dominated the world market, has seen a sixfold increase in foreign imports. The same pattern has been evident in the aerospace and electronics industries, and other areas of concentrated military investment.
Because of the disproportionate amount spent on the Military, Americans must endure the neglect of environmental needs, the financial insolvency and decay of our cities, the deterioration of our transportation, education, and healthcare systems, and the devastating effects of underemployment upon millions of households and hundreds of communities. In addition, there are the frightful social and psychological costs, the discouragement and decline of public morale, the anger and suffering of the poor and the not-so-poor, the militarisation and violence of popular culture, and the application of increasingly authoritarian solutions to our social ills.
Poverty can be found in the rich industrial nations as well as in the Third World. In the richest of them all, the United States, the number of people below the poverty level grew in the last dozen years from twenty-four million to almost thirty-five million, according to the government's own figures, which many consider to be underestimations, thus making the poor the fastest growing social group in the USA, rivalled only by the dramatic growth of millionaires and billionaires.
In recent years, tuberculosis – a disease of poverty – has made a big comeback. The House Select Committee on Hunger found that kwashiorkor and marasmus diseases, caused by severe protein and calorie deficiencies and usually seen only in Third World countries, could now be found in the United States, along with a rise in infant mortality in poor areas.
Those regions within the United States that serve as surplus labour reserves or "internal colonies," such as Appalachia, poor Latino and African American communities, Inuit Alaska, and Native-American Indian communities, manifest the symptoms of Third World colonisation, including chronic underemployment, hunger, inadequate income, low levels of education, inferior or nonexistent human services, absentee ownership, and extraction of profits from the indigenous community. In addition, the loss of skilled, good-paying manufacturing jobs, traditionally held by white males, has taken a toll of working-class white communities as well.
So when we talk of "rich nations" and "poor nations" we must not forget that there are millions of poor in the rich nations and thousands of rich in the poor ones. As goes the verse by Bertolt Brecht:
"There were conquerors and conquered.
Among the conquered the common people starved.
Among the conquerors the common people starved too."
As in Rome of old and in every empire since, the centre is bled in order to fortify the periphery. The lives and treasure of the people are squandered so that patricians might pursue their far-off plunder.
The Few Against the Many
The empire concentrates power in the hands of a few and robs the populace of effective self-rule. As James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson in 1798: "Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad."
One might respond that we should not worry too much about this, for public policy is not formulated by the people, those masses beloved and idealised by people on the Left. Average people have a low level of information by any objective measure. They seldom know what is really going on. Government policy, both domestic and foreign, almost always has its origin in the highest circles of government and within bodies such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and other public and private elite groups populated by top policy specialists, bankers, CEOs, investors, leading publicists, and a sprinkling of academic researchers. They are the people who inhabit the upper circles of power, who become the Secretaries of State, Defense, Treasury, Commerce, and the heads of the CIA and the National Security Council. They create and monopolise policy. The most we can expect from the public, the argument continues, is that at election time it gives its stamp of approval to one or another elite coterie of policymakers.
In response, I would agree that elites try their best to monopolise policy and mislead the public, and too often they are successful. Yet it should be pointed out that almost all policy that is worthwhile, life-affirming, and democratic in its substantive output, has come from the people. Consider the struggle for women's rights extending over the last one hundred years. What presidents, cabinet members, or high-powered policy specialists led the way in that battle? At best, some leaders belatedly took up the causes of female suffrage, affirmative action, and legal abortion only after women long agitated for such rights. So with the struggle for civil rights. Political elites reluctantly came out for a Fair Employment Practice Commission in the late-1940s, the abolition of Jim Crow in the South, a Civil Rights Voting Act in the 1960s, and other such moves only after decades of struggle by ordinary people, most of them African Americans.
It would also be hard to name the political leaders and captains of industry who fought for and not against the ten-hour day or, later on, the eight-hour day. And which of them were moving lights in the struggles for collective bargaining, public education, community health standards, and the abolition of child labour? To be sure, there were individuals from privileged backgrounds who advocated these things – but usually as individuals, not as representatives of any corporate interest or elite policy group. If these were things that the rich and the powerful had wanted, it would not have been necessary to wage such prolonged struggles to attain them.
One would be hard pressed to name the major political leaders who originated the environmental movement. Only in response to public pressures did our political leaders establish an Environmental Protection Agency, which to this day needs to be pressured by private citizens to do the things it should be doing anyway. Corporate leaders still treat environmental laws as unnecessary bureaucratic intrusions upon their pursuit of profit. Vice President Al Gore wrote an environmentalist book about the fate of the planet before taking office, then fought for NAFTA and GATT, measures designed to cripple the ability of governments to maintain environmental protections.
The consumer protection movement was started by consumers and independent investigators like Ralph Nader. Getting unsafe products off the market is not something a capitalist government is to get as a matter of course. Quite the contrary, the natural function of a capitalist government is to get things onto the market (including lethal tobacco products), using subsidies, export supports, grants-in-kind, tax breaks, free research and development, and various other forms of corporate welfarism.
So with the antinuclear movement. Far from protecting us from the dangers of fallout and radioactive wastes, the government has been busy all these years covering up and denying the unsafe features of atomic tests that led to the deaths of hundreds of U.S. soldiers and civilians.
Every day government releases a flood of publications, press releases, and deliberate leaks designed to get us to view the world the way policymakers want us to. The Pentagon has a massive propaganda machine churning out self-serving disinformation, mostly fed through the corporate-owned mainstream media. But regarding things that government does not want us to know, secrecy is the rule. What political leader originated the idea of a Freedom of Information Act? Such legislation was enacted only after much organised effort by nongovernmental critics.
Government classifies millions of documents each year, often for fifty years or more, inking out large portions of them, shredding many others and thereby distorting history, keeping critical independent researchers from the entire story. One has the distinct impression that the job of policy officials is to undermine the Freedom of Information Act, while the public's job is to fight for information, something that would not be necessary if politico-economic elites had nothing to hide and were really interested in serving the public interest.
This is not to say that no policies originate with the power-wielders. They originated the Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb. They developed the nuclear industry, then handed it over to private business at a fraction of its original cost, subsidised yearly with vast sums from the public treasury. They created the FBI, the CIA, the entire national security state apparatus, and the U.S. global military network. They gave us McCarthyism, political witch hunts, loyalty and security programmes to purch dissenters from government, the secret surveillance of our personal lives, and the push for ideological orthodoxy.
There are other elite policy creations: the foreign aid programmes to military dictators and the setting up of security forces, death squads, and torturers, with all the necessary funding and technology. Nor should we forget the bombers and missiles, and the costly interventions in scores of countries. Generally speaking, policy elites serve the needs of state domination and manipulation, and are resistant to the life-affirming policies for which we have to struggle so long and hard.
A Moral Self-Interest
If we are to mobilise resistance to the empire, we must appeal not only to people's moral values but to their self-interest (and I do not mean their selfishness). People may rally around the banners of empire when convinced that their security and survival are at stake. They will not choose morality if they think it brings endangerment to them and their loved ones. Nor will they choose disarmament and peaceful conversions if they think it will show weakness and invite aggression against themselves.
So they must be shown that the republic is being bled for the empire's profits, not for their well-being, that real national security means secure jobs, safe homes, and a clean environment. They must be informed that this empire, which is paid for by their blood, sweat, and taxes, has little to do with protecting them or people abroad and everything to do with victimising them in order to feed the power and profits of the few. The global military apparatus they grudgingly support at such immense costs does not serve their interests. To cut it drastically will not leave us prey to some foreign adversaries. On the contrary, to lay down the sword and use our labour and national treasure for the peaceful reconstruction so desperately needed at home and abroad is not to become a weak nation but a truly great one.
Mainstream pundits and propagandists label our desire to move away from corporate militarism and imperial domination as weakness, folly, isolationism, or self-defeating pacifism. But there is another name for the course of action that aims to wrest the wealth and power out of the hands of the military-industrial complex and the multinational investor class and give it back to the people so that they become the agents of their own lives and social conditions: it is called democracy, the victory of the republic over the empire.
These same propagandists dismiss criticisms of U.S. imperialism as manifestations of a "Hate America" or "Blame America" syndrome. But when we voice our disapproval of militarism, violent interventions, and other particular policies, we are not attacking our nation and its people; rather we are maintaining that we deserve something better than the policies that currently violate the interests of people at home and abroad. To expose the abuses of class power is not to denigrate the nation that is a victim of such abuses.
With more justification, we might conclude that it is the conservatives who lack patriotism when they denounce spending on human services, environmental protections, and more equitable taxes. The charge of anti-Americanism is selectively and self-servingly applied, against those on the Left who struggle for the interests of the many, rather than against those on the Right who serve the interests of the few. Those who oppose empire are thought to be against the republic, when actually they are its last best hope.