The Problem of Imperialism
Pachter, Henry
The Question Asked: Clearly, a superpower that maintains bases and troops on foreign soil, wages war in faraway countries, provides others with arms worth $3 billion a year, and influences...
...HENRY PACHTER The question is: whose interests does this effort serve...
...The foreign companies, especially those in the oil and mining businesses, make enormous profits...
...Strangely, the same argument has also been used in reverse: apologists of imperialism claimed Lebensraum for their respective fatherland and proposed to make it self-sufficient (autarchic) in case of war...
...76-77...
...when we have a cold, they get pneumonia...
...It never was equally chummy with European dictators...
...There is no doubt that her concern with the Caribbean area, her solicitude for the safety of the Panama Canal, her fear of foreign intervention on this continent generated naval and financial imperialism...
...It also prefers democratic governments that guarantee the free exchange of goods and ideas...
...20 20 Quoted by George Kateb in Commentary, January 1970...
...None of which is surprising...
...one deplores that, whatever we do, we come out on top...
...It is remarkable that the great historian manages to tell his story without mentioning weapons technology or arms manufacturers—and defense budgets only when they become objects of rivalry...
...He also concurs with the anthropological view that "The destructive instinct strives for the annihilation of the individual's life...
...This capitalism has become destructive and is digging its own grave...
...Yet the U.S...
...U.S...
...After all, Soviet imperialism has yoked to its wagon ten formerly independent nations without any prompting by such money interests...
...The U.S...
...Often the profits have to be reinvested locally, so the companies are Arab in the Middle East, Pan-European in the countries of the Common Market...
...Before going into details, however, I shall propose a preliminary definition: Imperialism is a complex of political, diplomatic, military, financial, and economic strategies to secure the hegemony of one nation over others...
...See also John H. Adler, ed., Capital Movements and Economic Development (New York: Macmillan, 1967...
...his economic theory was so logical and coherent that no attempt to verify it could have made it more convincing...
...44 Mr...
...Often the three will appear in intimate symbiosis...
...Some proceed to expropriate U.S...
...It is here that we seek to apply the remedy...
...And again: "The malady of revolution and financial collapse is most acute precisely in the region where it is most dangerous to us...
...militarism and chauvinism he saw as means to maintain the hierarchical structure of society...
...HENRY PACHTER The United States government has provided a precious precedent in its draft proposal for the control of atomic energy through a worldwide agency (the so-called Baruch Plan, actually the work of Acheson, Lilienthal, and Oppenheimer...
...the wish to substitute dollars for bullets ended in more bullets...
...The dollar was the means rather than the motive or the purpose of policy...
...When that happens, when the means of security acquire a life of their own and become goals, we have imperialism: the desire to expand for the sake of expansion, the desire to have the strongest military forces, the strongest alliance, the greatest influence on other governments, the greatest economic penetration of other countries, and also an ideology claiming universal validity...
...7 Karl Kautsky, "Aeltere and neuere Kolonialpolitik," in Die Neue Zeit, 1898, pp...
...Provided you pay a fair price, the colonies will be only too glad to sell...
...But Harriman and Morgan found the proposition unprofitable and asked for a government guarantee...
...27 Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, Le Defi Amerfcain (Paris: Denoel, 1967...
...The key reform of the international economy must be a higher price of labor in the underdeveloped countries and a subsequent increase in the price level of their products...
...policies as determined basically by the structure of its economy...
...3 The latter view is held by the followers of Senators McCarthy and Fulbright, by the large majority of those engaged in the Moratorium movement, by the democratic Left and all those whom Lenin contemptuously called "petty-bourgeois pacifists...
...16 Rudolf Hilferding, Das Finanzkapital (first edition: Berlin, 1910) and N. Lenin, Imperialism...
...Medieval Venice was built on even less land...
...assets...
...had little to sell to the Latin republics and no capital to invest...
...13 Nor were our two great rivals in 13 American Historical Review, February 1968, pp...
...hence they seek new investment opportunities abroad...
...when U.S...
...As the U.S...
...The structure of the situation may be gathered from the following table citing U.S...
...Is it not a fact that England offered the German Kaiser advantageous arrangements in the Near East and Africa if only he would renounce the naval race...
...scandal-mongering and moral indignation do not overthrow the capitalist system...
...was talking to her neighbors as Athens had talked to Melos...
...I have called this tactic the "Pseudo-colonialist bogeyman...
...would be no less vigorous...
...One should speak of imperialism when a relationship is primarily of a political and military nature...
...The problem plagues democracies whenever they engage in world politics: at some point their ideology will find itself at odds with policy...
...But to name these, to denounce and to fight their influence, is not tantamount to the proposition that "American capitalism"—an abstraction— brings forth another abstraction, imperialism...
...Various power apparatuses— military, political, cultural, economic —are allowed to spread into all directions, to subdue the remnants of older social structures, preach a new gospel, and to profess new ideas that justify its conquest as morally and historically right...
...15 Imperialism, pp...
...the liquid assets of foreigners in the United States, however, constitute a danger to the stability of the dollar...
...Also Kolko (see Note 6...
...These companies produce a commodity that cannot be consumed in the underdeveloped country...
...5 Looking at this same argument from a slightly different angle, Professor Gabriel Kolko emphasizes the poverty of the United States in industrial raw materials and especially in such defense-related ores as uranium, copper, and zinc...
...A world development tax of 1 percent on national income could serve as the basic fund on which expansion of the world economy could be built with Keynesian techniques...
...See R. Avakov and G. Mirsky, "Class Structure in Underdeveloped Countries," in The Third World in Soviet Perspective, T. P. Thornton, ed...
...I find it difficult to call this American counterintervention "imperialist" or "colonialist...
...and again: "The Leader who has behind him a life-time of devoted patriotism, constitutes a screen between the people and the rapacicus bourgeoisie...
...Indeed, all these maritime republics share one remarkable characteristic: they fight ideological wars—against dictatorships, against the barbarians, against the infidels...
...More than half of England's investments were in the United States...
...it could not save U Nu in Burma...
...therefore the economy of the metropolitan states becomes more vulnerable to depressions...
...Goethe wrote that "the Trinity of trade, war, and piracy cannot be split...
...in backward countries, farmers respond to price falls not by cutting production but by increasing it, thus making the problem worse...
...And Russia's imperialism was built on borrowed money...
...Even genuine aid, however, has come under attack...
...They produce an excess of certain HENRY PACHTER goods which they must exchange in order to satisfy their other needs, especially if they wish to industrialize...
...It is interesting to note that some of these ventures are not profitable, but must be pursued, nevertheless, because businesses are in a growth competition and must be "present" just as the U.S...
...Should these marks be repatriated suddenly, there will bea run on the dollar...
...Up to the early 1930s the State Department had supported the oil companies in their dealings with the Mexican government...
...The U.S...
...17 I shall address myself to this theory later on...
...government is protecting any investments in Vietnam, but suggests that the ruling classes need this war to maintain their domination...
...The gap between developed and developing nations will remain wide for at least one generation, and their relations will still be governed by the Gulliver complex...
...policy to encourage private investment abroad...
...in Costa Rica we have supported Figueres, in Venezuela the liberal President Betancourt and his successor Leone...
...This kind of economic determinism is, I believe, no longer tenable...
...30 "Open Door" has meant that a new imperialism tried to pry open some doors that older imperialisms held closed...
...their privileged position in the hierarchical structure of European society was under attack.24 Their pernicious alliance with big industry in the conservative parties made World War I inevitable...
...Their "confident access to raw materials" is assured by that archcapitalistic device—buying them...
...It was Jefferson— hardly a representative of finance— who talked of annexing Cuba...
...Colonialist practices often have started this process, but now can only obstruct the path toward further progress and self-determination...
...They may establish themselves for production purposes in one country, for tax purposes in another...
...In the period before World War I this must still be called hemisphere imperialism...
...Nor was this new in the 20th century...
...Imperialism without Empire THE U.S...
...In the case of Greece, for instance, it is well-known that the CIA supported the king rather than the generals...
...has given $7 billion to Nehru despite his preference for socialism and his pronounced anti-Americanism...
...Contrary to the charge that it always uses dictators, it often collaborates with democratic forces and institutions if they are available...
...cotton exporters felt threatened by the Special Treaty Rights obtained by England, Russia, Japan, and Germany in China...
...HENRY PACHTER world trade...
...In many cases the two will go together...
...the misfits the adventurers, the freebooters—an Evelyn Cromer, a Cecil Rhodes, a Carl Peters—go abroad, found empires, and fire the imagination of other rootless people...
...We must distinguish between two very different cases...
...The roots of empire lie deeper than trade...
...capitalists control over foreign business...
...The great struggle between the Powers was for supremacy in Europe—a supremacy that certainly included economic power but must be seen in the context of domination, hegemony, exercise of power, rivalry, and security...
...The interest and aim of American policy in nesses have in influencing public opinion and government policies...
...Specific class and professional interests and certain industries or corporations do stand to profit from imperialistic policies and armament...
...Nor is there an "intermediate position" or third choice: we shall have to decide whether American capitalism is inevitably, inextricably, and fatally bound up with imperialism, or whether the two evils can and must be dealt with in separate, different ways...
...Establishment of interna50 See two works by Gunnar Myrdal: An International Economy (Harper Torch paperback) and Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions (Mystic, Conn.: Verry, 1957) . HENRY PACHTER tional authorities for the world's fuel economy and for strategic materials...
...even grants have been criticized because they are in fact subsidies not for the needy but for our own industries...
...See similar arguments in Raymond Aron, The Century of Total War (Garden City: Doubleday, 1954...
...Magdoff would add those $40 billion to the volume of U.S...
...Pointing to the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Romans, he denied that empirebuilding has any specific connection with capitalism, which is by nature rational...
...Sir Thomas More complained that "everywhere do I perceive a certain conspiracy of rich men seeking their advantage under the name and pretext of the Commonwealth...
...Are these democracies imperialist because they are commercial...
...But they have failed to show— if that was their intention—that capital interests guided U.S...
...as capitalism engulfs all underdeveloped countries and plants become more sophisticated, the struggle for markets grows fiercer...
...An international corporation knows no exports or imports...
...policies bear a greater threat to Peruvian sovereignty...
...Since no breakdown by countries is provided, the reader remains unaware that the bulk HENRY PACHTER fore World War I; Karl Kautsky, one-time grand oracle of Marxism, defined imperialism as the policy of an advanced power to secure sources of raw materials, and he observed that the U.S...
...Ernest Mandel, Traite d'P-conomie Marxiste (Paris: Julliard, 1962...
...Inevitably, we established five protectorates—states that remained nominally independent but were governed by U.S...
...The air of corruption that Hobson smelled in imperialism had been there a long time—even in antiquity, when as virtuous a senator as Marcus Junius Brutus used the army to collect a debt from a Greek city...
...In another variation of this context: if the Arabs should raise the price of their oil, it would pay to develop our wells in Alaska...
...they can mold their ideology to fit their policies...
...2 Ronald Segal, The Race War (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966...
...whether its policies are good or bad, progressive or reactionary, coinciding or colliding with any government interest, they cannot be identical with "American imperialism...
...We buy less bauxite, magnesia, and chromium, as in many utensils metal is being replaced by plastic materials...
...These workers are not, as Lenin charged, sharing the profits of colonialism...
...In the recent discussion on Biafra, New Left writers have charged that American and British imperialists supported Lagos because they would not buy oil from Colonel Ojukwu...
...HENRY PACHTER spend $30 billion a year to protect a piddling few millions of trade and investments in Southeast Asia—never mind anti-Communism and big-power aspirations...
...6 Gabriel Kolko, The Roots of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp...
...Moreover, were raw material prices to rise, it would become profitable for U.S...
...as long as they feel dependent on the decision of their overweening neighbor, they will experience his decisions as encroachments on their sovereignty...
...Mutual funds overseas also sell shares in U.S...
...Even Hobson saw that the imperialist interests "appeal to the lust of domination surviving in a nation from early centuries of animal struggle for existence...
...and their notorious inefficiency is supposed to keep them beholden 35 It is ironical that the French Communists then declared they "had not joined the government to liquidate the French empire...
...In 1968 we exported $23 billion worth of goods to industrial countries and imported $24 billion worth from them...
...The United States actually can do little to alleviate the plight of the underdeveloped countries or to overcome their resent THE PROBLEM OF IMPERIALISM ment...
...For, unfortunately, the problem of economic dependence which plagues the underdeveloped areas is not directly connected with the problem of political hegemony which plagues the United States...
...I am aware that some American liberals will disagree with this statement...
...To balance our advantage we should, in Gunnar Myrdal's words, "discriminate against ourselves," 50 and agree to the following measures: (1) Common Market arrangements in Latin America and Africa, permitting these continents to protect their industries a-building while not excluding them from our markets...
...It overawed those who might have doubted the wisdom of the upper classes, and forced all to find their places on the ladder of domination...
...No doubt, those who upheld these interests were glad when 2,500 American Marines joined the expeditionary corps to subdue the Boxer Rebellion in 1900...
...The foreigner often is the agent of that change,45 the visible target for the hate of the old ruling classes, and for the anxieties of the unsettled proletarians...
...imperialism contrasts with Hobson's well-balanced, circumspect analysis of the multiple sources of imperialism in countries he knows first-hand...
...Incidentally, the cartoonists have not failed to note the sexual symbolism in the arms race, and if we have to have a "system," the psychoanalytical or the anthropological models are just as good as the economic model...
...It tried to defend democracy in Argentina against the dictator—without success, but not for want of trying...
...property...
...a similar amount in all of Asia and Africa...
...Only recently did the Latin Americans move the Nixon administration to renounce the scandalous "additionality clause" (forcing them to buy more of the goods they had first received as grants) and to give them a wider choice of suppliers for goods bought with aid money...
...The main effort must come from the underdeveloped countries themselves, as it did in the older industrial countries...
...Ambassador supported the Accion Popular, with President Belaunde, and even Haya de la Torre, the venerable leader of the APRA (American Popular Revolution Alliance...
...The point is that the interests of the U.S., as a latecomer to the power game, happened to coincide with the interests of China, its victim...
...it demands, and gets, government guarantees...
...But in neither case does the relationship, of itself, necessarily imply an intention to exploit or subdue...
...policies coincides with this premonopolistic period...
...See also Hobson, Modern Capitalism (first edition: London, 1906...
...But our question is not one of economic analysis but one of the weight export-oriented busi THE PROBLEM OF IMPERIALISM Rosa Luxemburg missed an important point, both in theory and empirically: when the geographical frontier was reached and closed in 1898, new industrial frontiers were opened in depth...
...Socrates could afford to loaf in the marketplace because his wife managed a lucrative export business...
...Monthly Review Press, 1968...
...in South Vietnam, two factions of the CIA seem to have been pulling in different directions, and Mr...
...for he was the victim of the market mechanism...
...The problems of the underdeveloped countries are serious...
...gives foreign aid in order to aid American business...
...In particular, it may be useful to distinguish the "youthful," dynamic style of an expansionism based on the exuberance of new social forces from the "late" imperialism described by Spengler or witnessed in the unsuccessful disengagement maneuverings of empires in liquidation...
...But in 1938 President Cardenas expropriated U.S...
...It may be necessary to invent a special term for this relationship—pseudocolonialism...
...but eventually they had to recognize that in order to sell you have to buy...
...The U.S...
...In Europe the U.S...
...the rich are always in a better bargaining position than the poor...
...government should never have relaxed, and it should have insisted on another "string": no aid to governments that buy heavy arms in the world market...
...The question is not for a theologian alone...
...8 Then they excluded others and also prevented the Indians from founding native industries...
...Corruption, however, is not an explanation but an effect...
...Quoted by Le Monde, May 30, 1969...
...42 ff...
...Rosa Luxemburg has shown that the motor of capitalist accumulation itself creates the need for expansion into noncapitalist areas...
...What motives or instigations are backing it...
...but if we count all assets, including stocks and bonds, the relationship is more balanced: Americans have invested $93 billion abroad, and the U.S...
...Lenin may have known these figures, but he did not cite them...
...For both Junkers and gentry, protectionism and imperialism were vital in their fight to stay in power...
...Then our political outlook would have to be gloomy...
...But where are these profits realized...
...it] approximated apathy...
...any attempts to reform the monster then are futile, naive delusions...
...But in bargaining about such (literally...
...We would not suffer if Africa were to disappear...
...Incidentally, the largest bank in Peru is Italian, the biggest cotton textile plant Japanese, the railways are British...
...The reverse is true: the financial troubles of the Caribbean republics were exploited to ascertain the political ascendency of the United States...
...Imperialism is a deliberate, well-profiled policy, executed with powerful means and accompanied by an ideology that justifies the striving for empire and domination...
...See Albert 0. Hirschmann, How to Divest in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969...
...51 The American taxpayers had to pick up part of the bill, and in future settlements the U.S Treasury might indemnify the companies totally and present the plants to the nations as a gift...
...a country whose consumption of raw materials amounts to more than half of total exports from a number of other countries, and whose exports of manufactured articles and cultural goods determine and revolutionize the style of life in the rest of the world...
...In opposing imperialism abroad the United States had to develop the weapons imperialists used: a two-ocean navy, a military establishment, the draft, a propaganda agency...
...And, incidentally, the alleged burden of political strings sits lightly on those who have repudiated all debts of such nature, as India has done often enough with impunity...
...its main producer, South Africa, has much in common with black Africa...
...Actually, American bankers complained that they did not have enough dollars to do the job the President asked them to do...
...The Open Door policy required meddling in the affairs of China...
...corn THE PROBLEM OF IMPERIALISM panies operate abroad than foreign companies do here...
...Contrary to the Lenin-Hobson theory, capital is not under pressure to find investment opportunities...
...By skillful manipulation of their quotations they have conveyed the impression that Knox and Taft were contemplating something more sinister than their own use of the term "dollar diplomacy" implied...
...Rosa Luxemburg is part of a long line of nonclassical economists, beginning with Malthus, Sismondi, and Rodbertus, and including Hobson (see below) who denied that capitalism can expand its scope, as it must, unless it finds resources outside its circuit of exchanges...
...But the means of competition— whether economic or political or military— may render themselves autonomous and create antagonisms which in turn degenerate into confrontations...
...Magdoff has pointed out that in certain industries, such as rubber, chemicals, and transportation equipment, the foreign plants export more than the mother company...
...You need a globe, and there is no land connection between the various parts of the empire...
...Obviously, the people have not read Lenin but know where power lies...
...Today much aid is given not for purposes of development but for pork-barrel projects...
...I see no reason why they should not, or why a revolutionary government should be defined as one that sells to and buys from Pompidou...
...Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), p. 278...
...I am not implying that America's intervention in China was motivated by philanthropic reasons...
...Our aim is precisely to determine the relationship of these two terms in the conduct of U.S...
...Any structure as big as the United States, the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China or, for that matter, as big as the Lever Brothers Concern, the United Fruit Corporation, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the Ford Foundation, or the Catholic Church is bound to engage others of its kind in a power struggle that affects the interests, and often the fate, of the bystanders...
...Here is how they lectured the unhappy citizens of Melos: Of the Gods we believe and of men we know that by a necessary law of nature they rule wherever they can...
...HENRY PACHTER those financial interests which Hobson and Lenin denounced as the roots of imperialism...
...5) Transfer of industrial properties in underdeveloped countries from foreign companies to state agencies or to international development boards...
...The opportunities are offered and the U.S...
...Magdoff and Baran have offered American versions of Lenin's view...
...In New Left lore, oil and Zionism usually appear as twin evils, though actually oil has always been hostile to the Jewish state...
...we offered to support Castro's farm reform...
...The directors of big business care little what dividends are paid to the stockholders...
...He characterized imperialism as an atavism, "a remnant of the roving instinct...
...consuls in China constantly complained about the "apathy of business," and exports to China totaled $16 million in 1910...
...It happened to be mistaken...
...54 Juan Bosch, Pentagonism—A Substitute for Imperialism (New York: Grove Press, 1969...
...But that would be misleading, for the labor and materials were bought in the countries of origin, and the product is their export, often our import...
...he considered the conquest of Africa by England and France "a fearful reaction [to Bismarck's successes], an ardent desire to recover national prestige...
...not a dollar was invested in Manchuria...
...18 Needless to say, the "social Darwinists" tried to turn all these characteristics into assets, making imperialism praiseworthy...
...Is guilt revealed by association...
...For the original conception see Willard Straight, The Politics of Chinese Finance (Published Address, May 2, 1913, East Asia Society, Boston), and Croly's biography of Straight, who was consul general in Mukden and later J. P. Morgan's agent...
...And Velasquez, the Peruvian darling of the New Left, now advertises for American capital...
...Hobson, Schumpeter, and Arendt, starting from assumptions widely apart from each other, agree on this one point: that imperialist policies are parasitical, often atavistic outgrowths of particular forces which have superimposed themselves upon the body politic and exploit it rather than serve it...
...But it has been accused of "financial" or "neo-colonial THE PROBLEM OF IMPERIALISM ism," and the loudest outcry against American domination does not come from underdeveloped countries whose raw materials we buy but from the most highly industrialized nations, which have themselves practiced imperialism and colonialism in the recent past: from France and Japan...
...government has claims to $23 billion...
...oil properties valued then at a quarter of a billion dollars...
...business, frequent misunderstandings often prevented agreement on what the national interest was...
...then we decided to give the abrazo to any leader who actually was in possession of a country.S8 'a As a principle of international law and as amaxim of diplomacy, one should recognize allgovernments—Right or Left—exercising sovereignty in a given territory...
...52I would give less weight to ideology and the defense of capitalism, for as early as 1916 Woodrow Wilson began to worry that a world war might result in Europe's subjugation by the Czar...
...It is true that the big Cerro de Pasco mines and the International Petroleum Company are American...
...If the U.S...
...but at the time of its conception American capitalists would not bet their own money on European recovery...
...The latest example of this view is a book that has earned the prize of "Best Political Book of 1968" in Paris and has been translated into many languages...
...imperialism, the self-justifying Will to Power, remains as the enemy of progress, justice, and peace...
...A Theory and a Strategy THE SURGERY I HAVE PROPOSED may however reveal two ugly pieces of naked truth: • The rivalry between big powers and their ideological antagonism will not disappear and the so-called cold war will go on in new forms...
...Of Germany's overseas investment-25 billion marks in 1914-3 percent was invested in all of Africa and Asia, and a small part of that 3 percent in her own colonies...
...no longer protects the passengers of its airliners from kidnapping...
...21 Is it not a fact that the great Ententes of 1902 and 1907 settled the colonial rivalries between France and England in Africa, between Japan, England and Russia in the Far East, between England and Russia in the Near East and Central Asia...
...Confident access to industrial materials is a precondition for expansion into new fields of industrial technology...
...in Foreign Countries": ". . . should any nation, contrary to our wishes, . . . continue its system of prohibitions, duties and regulations, it behooves us to protect our citizens, their commerce and navigation by counter-protection...
...It was Messrs...
...part of their product is re-exported to the U.S., another part elsewhere...
...The reason is twofold: it is indeed difficult to find the common root of the many phenomena which can be described as imperialist, and Lenin has misled an entire generation of anti-imperialists by insisting that the root was always economic...
...It would apply particularly to establishments that have caused resentment and whose economics are not well understood by the public...
...These "strings" the U.S...
...buys their raw materials, it depletes their resources...
...But the same view is held also by neo-isolationist writers who are not necessarily committed to social reform, such as Professors Morgenthau and Kennan, and even by many people whom we must count among the Right: followers of the old isolationist school, the Republican opponents of American intervention in the two world wars and in the Korean war, the late Senators Taft and Langer...
...Ancient Athens certainly was an imperial power, although she 26 Also from Canada and from some Latin-American countries which have reached a certain stageof industrialization and now feel that they could do better under national management...
...These pragmatic policies have paid dividends that could hardly have been expected by the policy-makers...
...Such big-power supremacy is resented, even if exercised without malice and intent—as Gulliver found out in Lilliput...
...problems of pseudocolonialism may be difficult to solve but they are a headache for the statesmen rather than a cause of real antagonism...
...Aid Imperialism SPECIAL ARRANGEMENTS must be designed to internationalize the supply of capital...
...every system of society is maintained and grows under the protection of a power apparatus that is essential to its survival...
...Now, unfortunately, our economy is so big that the 3 percent of GNP constituting our imports for other countries constitute almost half of the world trade...
...investments in Asia and Africa was $200 million, in South America $400 million—nothing to compare with the $7 billion investment of foreigners in the United States...
...They account for a certain percentage of 41 All figures quoted here are from The Statistical Abstract of the United States...
...government has been blamed for helping the U.N...
...the safeguarding of trade interests is not the same thing as imperialism...
...But if we disregard oil and mining—where location is the decisive factor—American investments in the Third World are neither as substantial nor as profitable as those in the highly industrialized countries...
...21 A. J. P. Taylor, The Struggle for the Mastery of Europe (London: Oxford University Press, 1954...
...they were imperialistic but by the U.N.'s definition not colonialist— although those countries are clearly exploited and subjugated...
...They all think it bad business to 43 This is one of those arguments you cannot win...
...No doubt it was in the interest of both the American and the European democracies to keep the Soviet armies at bay and to avert the danger of a Communist take-over...
...11 In contrast to the theories relating imperialism to big business, William A. Williams argues in The Roots of the Modern American Empire (NewYork: Random House, 1969) that the American farmer in the 19th century was desperate to find outlets for his surplus and therefore tried to extend his market philosophy to other nations...
...See also Frantz Fanon, "To the national bourgeoisie, nationalization only means the transfer into its hands of the unfair advantages which are the legacy of colonialism...
...neither with Tibet and Sinkiang nor with the blacks in the Sudan or the Berbers in Morocco...
...4) Superimperialism: domination or hegemony of a superpower over developed economies and independent countries which themselves may exploit other countries, thus forming a pyramid of primary and secondary dependencies...
...Not that the hunt for gold and diamonds ever stopped, but the method to get them now had to be capitalist...
...policies seem to favor Israel, it is said that the oil companies want to use it as a spur in the flank of their Arab retainers...
...In contrast to Julien, Servan-Schreiber is neither shrill nor anti-American...
...now available as a separate Harcourt, Brace & World paperback...
...36 we caused the downfall of Trujillo and Batista by withdrawing support from them...
...Thus, while the record is by no means edifying, we might conclude this section with these observations: U.S...
...Presidents, therefore, have used the most bizarre arguments to prove that foreign aid is good for American business...
...HENRY PACHTER An obvious objection to this view is the question: why, then, did the middle class so avidly follow the imperialist ideals...
...mining operations also should be controlled by agencies modeled after the European Coal and Steel Community or Euratom...
...Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969...
...They may be owned by nationals of one country and managed by nationals of another...
...from this Lenin concluded that capitalism itself had become parasitical...
...It is obvious that a government that can afford the luxury of arms does not need grants...
...advisers...
...In the first case, imperialism is the manifestation of a rotten system that will produce My Lais over and over again...
...THE PROBLEM OF IMPERIALISM Americans out only to call in the French, and Western firms can do business with dictators of the Left as well as of the Right...
...Other historians saw imperialism before the world wars as the struggle for "mastery in Europe...
...but why should this empty boast be the motto of an admiring essay in a semiliterary New York review...
...their solution to a number of insoluble problems is a nationalization which is often costly...
...The interests of all parties also demanded a restoration of democracy in those countries of Europe that had lost it...
...On the other hand, we might start with the more benevolent assumption that blunders have been committed by individuals who were perhaps ignorant or had miscalculated the effects of their decisions...
...Whenever they have demands, they must feel righteous...
...In India, for instance, the British first reaped enormous extra-profits which they used partly to build up their own industries...
...World War I broke tions which are not one-dimensional at all...
...For similar reasons of selfinterest we have "supported" Tito, Nasser, Sukarno, and other heroes of the Left...
...Proposals for Acfion THE PLIGHT OF the underdeveloped nations does not stem from "imperialism" but from the coincidence of a health revolution (population explosion) with the pains of modernization...
...firms also own $10 billion worth of investments in Latin America, and $7 billion in Africa, Asia, and the Near East...
...Foreign Policy (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1955) p. 293...
...policy veers away from Israel, the oil companies are said to fear for their property in Arab lands...
...assistance to aidreceiving countries in such a way as will encourage the development of the private sectors of their economies...
...Where U.S...
...Hobson remarked that in jingo politics the sportsloving upper crust is joined by the sensationhungry mob...
...31 But the ideology on which the doctrine was based certainly expressed both America's interests and her "way of life" (see the concluding section) . 29 The principle of the Open Door was first enunciated by Jefferson in a memorandum of December 16, 1793, "On the Privileges and Restrictions of the Commerce of the U.S...
...At international conferences like UNCTAD, we hear charges that the rich get richer and the poor, poorer...
...But what is actually a social question is made to appear as a racial or national question...
...At present, the United Nations is discussing a similar proposal to assure the resources of the seabed to all nations...
...The CIA even supported Ho Chi Minh, 35 and worked against Diem...
...More often now they merely seem to transfer business, plant, and work force from a hightax, high-wage country to one that offers low wages and taxes...
...Carlton Hayes, authority on 19thcentury history, doubted that "the flag has to follow trade or investments...
...exports, and what is pompously called "aid" is often export financing, a legitimate but certainly not philanthropic business...
...chicken-feed, the U.S...
...Investments abroad: YEARLY INCREASE INVEST- OF INVESTMENTS INCOME MENTS 1965 1965 1966/67 (millions of dollars) IN LATIN AMERICA Oil and Mining 4,148 653 500 Other 5,223 236 776 IN AFRICA Oil and Mining 1,381 288 125 Other 523 43 63 IN ASIA Oil and Mining 2,421 923 195 Other 1,190 110 225 IN CANADA Oil and Mining 5,075 232 540 Other 10,097 460 916 IN EUROPE Oil and Mining 3,484 25 490 Other 10,411 735 1,500 Despite the higher profit rates in the underdeveloped countries, capital went to Europe and Canada...
...INTERNATIONAL CORPORATIONS may contribute to the development of some countries...
...We did not invent this law, we are only following it...
...The benefits have been distributed very unevenly...
...but if we were to disappear—to whom would Africans sell their coconuts, aluminum, coffee, etc...
...He also threatens 45 Only during World War II, when the Allies paid any price and were unable to export any of their goods, did some industries establish themselves in Latin America...
...When U.S...
...It is well-known that Batista's officers deserted him when Eisenhower stopped supplying him with arms...
...It absorbed those who did not fit into the establishment and diverted those who might have attacked it...
...but the Spanish king and nobles wanted dominium, rule over others, power...
...But fear is also the agent that invites power to assert itself...
...Fiat, Mannesmann, and Ford extend credit lines to the "reds" and calmly listen to the speeches which condemn them as colonialists and imperialists...
...But it is erroneous to think that only the latter is "imperialist...
...At the time Lenin wrote, France had put 2 billion francs into her colonies, but 35 billion into independent countries...
...18 And numerous are the literary documents exposing this instinct to rule over the nether breeds...
...the use of political and economic advantages to exploit a country commercially by selling dearly and buying cheaply in its market...
...imperialism...
...capital prefers areas that already have developed markets...
...The U.S...
...The THE PROBLEM OF IMPERIALISM Marxists Rudolf Hilferding and V. I. Lenin used Hobson's theory by turning it rightside up: 16 imperialism is not the bastard child of capitalism but its legitimate scion, "the last stage of capitalism"—"last" in three senses: the latest, the most highly developed, and the terminal stage...
...By default, its decisions usually favor the special interests...
...in Bolivia we supported Paz Estenssoro...
...bled into quagmires from which we did not know how to extricate ourselves, had gotten involved without knowing how, etc...
...but more often they are dis tinct and different...
...Professor Fritz Fischer has shown the intertwining of business and state interests in the Kaiser's "world political" saber rattling.25 His research brings out two things: the middle class could hope to gain prestige only by throwing itself into the role of the military caste...
...The importance of international corporations in world trade is staggering...
...it fits America quite poorly because, except in wartime, our foreign trade has never exceeded 5 percent of GNP...
...Also, with political pressure U.S...
...A better source is William L. Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1960...
...Is it not a fact that German diplomacy used its business interests in the Maghreb and in Anatolia merely as small change on the bargaining counter of "high policy," where the stakes were not profits but superiority, power...
...tribution of incomes, tougher antitrust laws, and vigorous trade-union action could eliminate the calamity of surplus capital in the hands of Morgan...
...imperialist policies are nothing but exaggerated, perverted, unleashed functions of the legitimate security interests of national states...
...private income from investments abroad is about $7 billion, whereas foreigners draw about $4 billion from dividends and interest in this country...
...But when you speak of the British and Dutch empires, a map is not sufficient...
...At the Inter-American meeting in Caracas, the Latins desired "more action under the Alliance for Progress . . . [but] there was no talk of the social reforms that were its basic principles...
...This is most evident in countries where the conduct of foreign policy is dominated by a military elite which considers the rest of the country merely as strategic resources...
...they even manage to "explain" how a Hitler, a Stalin, a Nasser, a Genghis Khan may be driven "ultimately" by hope of economic gain...
...he is describing a way of life—that of the master race, the warrior caste...
...But without monopoly powers in the consuming centers, the world market sets limits to the return on other commodities, as coffee and cocoa producers found out...
...have criticized the way in which this was done...
...Drawing on the experience of his native Austria, Schumpeter saw monopoly and imperialism as creatures of the feudal state...
...In England, Austria, and Germany the big estates also were the cradle of the caste that provided the empires with army officers and governors...
...Most countries are more import-dependent than the U.S...
...MANY OF THE COMPLAINTS underdeveloped nations have voiced against U.S...
...It is necessary and possible, however, to separate the purely economic aspects of this relationship from the psychological and political irritations...
...But as we have seen, U.S...
...It seems to me that empires can settle their differences as long as their leaders are aware of the overall interests which each must serve in his policies...
...We often speak to recipient countries like a banker, telling them what is good for them...
...In the framework of a capitalist society all ideologies must serve the profit motive...
...democracy of necessity became the watchword of the Western coalition...
...HENRY PACHTER hind the Marshall Plan and the containment policy of the late forties—the twin weapons of the so-called Cold War...
...press release, ICA, September 11, 1957, quoted by Kolko (see Note 6), p. 78...
...For a critical review of this conception, see Michael Harrington, Toward a Democratic Left (New York: Macmillan, 1968), and John Strachey (see Note 8...
...and unless a revolution comes to rescue us, we can only watch and wait for humanity to be blown to pieces...
...Non recognition is very popular as a form of public pouting...
...In many cases it is the structure of the market that leads to grievances against the big, wealthy customers: the terms of trade favor the industrial nations and discriminate against developing countries...
...But the Chinese government could use these tokens of American interest to maintain its independence until World War I. It is all too clear that U.S...
...while financial control may remain in New York, the thinking of the corporation assumes a "colonial" coloration, and something similar to the the managerial revolution might be in the making, eroding the prerogatives of ownership and substituting functional criteria for all other motives...
...There was an enlightened self-interest be macy...
...Among the dictators we have supported we must distinguish between those —like the Brazilian and Guatemalan—for which U.S...
...Imperialism and Colonialism IT IS EASY TO CITE outrageous feats of financial piracy or enormous profits made by some freebooters and imperial freeloaders...
...they want the money 49 It is well-known how reluctant Congress is to vote grants to nonvoters...
...Tribes and nations are held together by certain mechanisms of group relationship...
...has no colonies to speak of...
...As Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto: "The need for a constantly expanding market chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe...
...The "long arm of Zionism" was unveiled by L'Opinion de Rabat (Istiqlal) when it wrote that the Paris student riots of May 1968 had been instigated by the CIA in complicity with the Zionists to punish de Gaulle for his pro-Arab, anti-American stand the year before...
...36 See Morris West, The Ambassador (New York: Morrow, 1965) a novelistic account based on information...
...it loyally supported the socialist Adoula in the Congo against Tshombe, an avowed puppet of the Societe Generale...
...At Caracas they requested freer access to U.S...
...The famous chapter on "the economic taproot of imperialism" is one of 14 chapters dealing with the sociology and psychology of the parasitic classes...
...Bigness itself provides opportunities and engenders a dynamism of its own, expansion feeding upon further expansion...
...corporations can "use our own money to dominate our industries...
...3) "Neo-colonialism": domination of newly independent countries by investors or traders, usually without political rule...
...We do not "support" Franco, but he is extorting an exorbitant price for a piece of real estate the Navy thinks it needs...
...While the government was internationalist, business remained isolationist...
...Then new elites, new classes come to the fore, armed with new techniques and uninhibited by the old codes of values or cultural traditions...
...papers to assert that in Peru the press is free and foreign capital safe...
...diplomacy...
...34 ea Loc...
...Such runaway businesses re-export into the U.S...
...29 Woodrow Wilson fought for collective security...
...Helms is known to have been at odds with military intelligence for years...
...corporations...
...but it also served the interest of other American nations...
...Nor does Kolko account for the fact that countries without empire, such as Germany, Sweden, etc., can prosper...
...while presidents seek to make the country defense-conscious, the Stock Exchange has consistently given defense industries a lower rating than other firms and in recent years has responded to peace rumors with bullish, to war with bearish behavior...
...Dilemmas of Power Politics THIS LEADS To a second observation about means, ends, and intentions...
...it expects the government to organize and finance preliminary surveys and research...
...citizens draw income from overseas sources than vice-versa...
...Pseudo-colonialism has another dimension which, though not economic and demonstrable, is nevertheless real...
...On the other hand, they think it good business to help build "socialism" in the U.S.S.R...
...But, after all, the money to facilitate them was collected in the U.S., the needy received the goods (minus what their officials stole), and the beneficiary government usually was allowed to convert the counterpart funds into capital for development work...
...McKinley clearly tried to save China's integrity from Russian, German, English, and Japanese threats and to protect normal trade relations that were endangered by the Special Treaty Rights...
...these na THE PROBLEM OF IMPERIALISM tions would be better off if such companies were nationalized and profits were retained and used for development...
...But if neither trade nor finance drove the U.S...
...and vice-versa, the United States had invested more capital in Canada than had the mother country...
...51 and 55...
...12 But President McKinley made it clear that the Marines would be withdrawn—and they were—as soon as other nations withdrew their forces...
...They even plan across national frontiers...
...s This view was very popular be 5 Ibid., concluding statement...
...it may shame the U.S...
...Especially this last measure should help to overcome the image of neo-colonialism...
...Received wisdom has it the other way around: that diplomacy had to follow the initiative of the dollar...
...Bilateral aid is often made conditional upon certain political services or on economic concessions that convert the aid into a fetter...
...Brazil, Ghana, Columbia, and a few other countries have an agreement on coffee, but wholesale prices follow a declining trend...
...As a branch of industry it is invaluable...
...The brilliance of Lenin's work resides entirely in this Hegelian approach: imperialism is systemic, inevitable, and fatal...
...Incidentally, this also happened to the price of gold...
...corporations in Mexico quasi-extraterritorial...
...they are concentrated in a few industries and a limited number of large Corporations...
...46 Instead, demagogic leaders of the underdeveloped nations brandish the banner of "nationalism" and "anticolonialism...
...I am aware that I have taken up more space saying what imperialism is not than saying what it is...
...could allow tourists to bring wood carvings home from Haiti, or bird-lovers to buy seed in Ecuador...
...He charges that "the American consumer society is plundering the natural resources of the world...
...The Athenians were democratic at home...
...48 Or "aid" serves as small change on the counter of political bargains, to buy votes at the U.N., to support allied governments, etc...
...A corporation may be an octopus, but without a navy it cannot be "imperialist...
...If we are to follow Ronald Segal, whose book has been widely acclaimed in Europe,2 we will see imperialism largely as a matter of white domination over colored races which, again, puts us at a loss to explain the U.S...
...On the whole, this is a good arrangement which also has been adopted by other countries...
...The Kaiser's ideologists saw the German Young Siegfried, pure and innocent in spirit, of chivalrous bearing and noble race, forever fighting the dragon of Mammon...
...the old caste rule, staunchest obstacle to the most urgent and necessary reforms...
...government, a predilection for military dictators...
...These principles obviously are complementary, and their realization is not utopian...
...Similar observations are true of D. H. Lawrence...
...It is clear from the behavior of the two "powers," as they are rightly called, that their game is one-upmanship, power lusting after power, with the agent becoming the master...
...Loans have been tied to the purchase of certain goods, or guarantees that were demanded have bordered on receivership...
...On the contrary, to maintain its well-being, the U.S...
...But his hyperbole might come true now in half of the world at least, with interlocking directorates extending into many countries...
...they tend to feel humiliated by the mere hint that they may be petitioners or dependents...
...40 In all countries entering the industrial age, labor is being exploited, by native even more cruelly than by foreign capitalists...
...In its deterministic radicalism Lenin's theory is unsurpassed and still attractive to modern Marxists who feel that a revolutionary theory must give a comprehensive picture of a system of evil riding to its inevitable doom...
...The choice of means is hardly a dilemma for dictatorships...
...The first is the case of utilities, railways, and most of the manufacturing industries: their profits are made off the natives and—unless reinvested as is often required by law—are taken out of the country...
...In fact, this compatriot of Freud called imperialism a disease, the madness of a ruling class going to seed, a sure sign of decadence, the fulfillment of a death instinct...
...For their part, the corporations often act in flagrant 42 A German Jewish industrialist, author of technocratic books, and 1922 Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic...
...Overlapping with but distinct from imperialism, the term "colonial 4 Claude Julien, L'Empire Americain (Paris: Grasset, 1968...
...now Ann Arbor paperpack...
...Paul Baran and Herbert Marcuse therefore have characterized the pseudoprogressive, national-revolutionary governments as "the last and most dangerous disguise of business rule" over underdeveloped nations...
...The Wall Street Journal is as critical of the Vietnam war as it was of Korea...
...At least 80 percent of 39 necessary commodities, 50-79 percent of 15 commodities, 10-49 percent of 23, with a total import value of $6.6 billion," are being imported from abroad...
...We may add a third conclusion, to be drawn from the literature of imperialism: the empire was a safeguard of the domestic class structure...
...To do that, the European economies had to be rebuilt and the reconstruction site had to be shielded...
...In spite of his honest conduct and sincere declaration the Leader is objectively the fierce defender of the interests...
...That conclusion is forced upon us by statistics: It is not true that the surplus capital went to the colonies...
...interests have led U.S...
...social forces within a country submit themselves to such pernicious leadership...
...they require fundamental restructuring of their domestic and foreign exchanges...
...The bland assertiveness in these two lonely references to U.S...
...The compulsion to expand was not economic but strategic...
...What American business was doing in China and elsewhere reminds us of Karl Marx's paean to the revolutionary force of capitalism which "has dislodged old wants . . . creates new wants instead of those satisfied locally . . . draws even the most barbarian nations into civilization and batters down every Chinese Wall...
...capitalists prefer to invest in highly developed countries...
...Five billion dollars are invested in mining, $24 billion in manufacturing, $13 billion in construction, finance, commerce, shipping, utilities, etc...
...who cares today about the independence of the Circassians or of Texas...
...In most countries this effort will not come forth without fundamental changes in their social structure and without the psychological and political shock of a reformation or revolution...
...The U.S...
...When we sneeze they get a cold...
...capital found outlets for expansion at home and became protectionist...
...Yet the have-nots must ask for even more loans and complain that not enough funds come their way...
...and as we have seen, her imperialism was not motivated by primary financial interests...
...This was true even more of the peasants, though their interests were even less identical with those of imperialism...
...owned no territory beyond the barren rocks of Attica...
...Professor Williams shows that populists, agrarians, free-silverities, and other farm spokesmen tried to impose a "market mentality" on other nations...
...This is the tragedy of all politics, the tragedy of power: it becomes absolute, independent of its purposes...
...they may write new laws or make new contracts...
...I fear the Greeks, especially when they carry gifts," said Virgil, and many recipients of American aid have become critical of its results...
...It occurs when one national state encroaches on the power of other nation-states...
...found congenial forces —democratic and capitalistic—to work with...
...The local powers in South America or Arabia may raise wage rates, ground rent, or royalty...
...But this answer underestimates the radicalism of Schumpeter's attack on the only imperialism he knew: in its servility the bourgeoisie had adopted the values of its feudal rulers, had not outgrown its political diapers even while it had to supply the "sinews of war...
...Also, possession of the island "would fill up the measure of our well-being," quoted by J. W. Pratt, History of U.S...
...but the means then take over and tend to determine the ends...
...By contrast, Soviet economists distinguish between big bad imperialist capitalists and nice national bourgeoisie "which are opposed to the [American] interests...
...The more se;doisly mustwe take his charge...
...See A. P. Thornton, Doctrines of Imperialism (New York: Wiley, 1965...
...Much of the international aid program is actually seed money —developing areas that may provide a hospitable environment for private capital...
...The French even accused the CIA of aiding the Algerian rebels...
...but next-door in Bolivia, the mines are owned by the Argentinian Senores Aramayo, Patino, and Hochschild—and the U.S...
...Democracy, freedom, humanism are ideas that claim universality, precisely because they are not nationalistic...
...The stakes are vast...
...If you are well advised, you will not think it dishonorable to submit to the greatest city in Hellas when it makes you the modest offer to become its ally without ceasing to enjoy the country that belongs to you 2 8 In Thucydides, this speech is only a few pages away from that other Athenian oration, the first and proudest manifesto of democracy— Pericles' famous celebration of the virtues of Athens and of its idea of government...
...Nevertheless, it remains U.S...
...Free commerce and navigation are not to be given in exchange for restrictions and vexations...
...To escape the thralldom of exploitation and competition, the raw-material-producing countries should accept international planning on a scale much greater than we have known hitherto...
...by the same token, a small concession on our part might mean significant help for them...
...their war was the defense of "Geist" against the mercantile (Kramer) mentality of the British "traders" who greedily grabbed all the world markets for themselves...
...THE PROBLEM OF IMPERIALISM Black Liberation movement, by the orthodox Marxist-Leninists who reject America as the country of trust capitalism...
...It must settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere...
...But business was hostile to both the Spanish war and the Boxer expedition...
...Smaller Western nations and their friends in the U.S...
...A word about the economics of these operations...
...What matters here is not where the profit goes but where the power resides...
...In China likewise, the "Open Door" policy was to stop the Russo-Japanese partition of Manchuria...
...19 Speaking from the no-nonsense viewpoint of the enlightened capitalist, he held that war is bad business and empires cost too much...
...Pseudo-Colonialism—Whaf's in a Name...
...in England and Germany we still see the ruins of Hadrian's Wall, which once enclosed the Roman Empire...
...Hobson was still more outspoken in Modern Capitalism, p. 262...
...When we created a safety zone in this hemisphere, we provided for American capital precisely those opportunities that then, in turn, had to be protected by the Marines...
...As I make my final revisions, Henry Ford has to call off a profitable deal with the Soviet government...
...Roosevelt, much more concerned about the international situation than about corporate rights, forced the oil companies to settle for $40 million—one-sixth of the asking price...
...Obviously, the real situation is more complex and the arguments are confused: radicals denounce individual culprits while moderates in Congress also attack institutions...
...No matter what big powers do or leave undone, the Third World will be wronged in one way or another, and this is the definition of neo-colonialism as a state of affairs...
...2) Naval colonialism: exploitation of less developed nations by settlers or managers, usually with political rule...
...A U.N...
...Using the latest figures, we are dealing here with comparatively small sums: $4 billion in mining, smeltering, and petroleum in Latin America...
...Professor Prebisch recommends, in addition, the creation of a "residual lender capable of providing capital without regard to returns...
...For, of course, all these big naval powers—Athens, Venice, the U.S., Genoa, and we even might add the Phoenicians— were commercial republics, and they were ruled by the rich...
...but they do provoke responses which they see as "imperialist...
...government vainly implores U.S...
...As a liberal, Hobson placed the emphasis on the parasitic character of imperialism...
...On balance, of course, more U.S...
...Today American direct investments in Europe amount to $18 billion, in Canada and Australia to $21 billion—together four times as much as all our investments in all countries abroad 20 years ago...
...but the Third World projects its own predicament into a pattern which the naked eye—or hate-tinted glasses—can hardly distinguish from colonial dependence...
...Such a proposal can no longer be considered revolutionary...
...is still considered the imperialist...
...In addition to paying these prices, the advanced countries could help by abandoning rights acquired through unequal treaties with corrupt governments...
...he was pursuing power politics, and the other presidents after him who coveted the Isthmus of Panama or moved to build a canal and deployed the Marines to protect it, also were thinking in terms of strategy...
...However, the amounts involved may be too small and, even combined with realistic estimates of available aids and loans, will not be suf ficient to provide the desirable amount of seed money...
...exclaimed one farm editor...
...Do not their agents abroad work hand-in-glove with the U.S...
...In underdeveloped countries the Leader stands for moral power, but in his shelter the thin and poverty-stricken bourgeoisie of a young nation intends to get rich...
...Franklin D. Roosevelt first quarantined the dictators and then fought for the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter...
...14 "The adventurous enthusiasm of President Theodore Roosevelt must not deceive us," Hobson wrote...
...What comes as a shock is that a large non-Marxist segment of public opinion in the Western countries and in the underdeveloped world also views U.S...
...by H. Norden, in a Meridian paperback...
...If a government does not like such "strings," which might embarrass its ruling classes, it is always free to refuse the "Greek gift...
...26 JeanJacques Servan-Schreiber, the editor of L'Express and now leader of France's traditional middle-class party, the Radicals, has charged that through superior techniques of management U.S...
...study has shown that any serious effort at big-power disarmament would hurt most severely the exports of the underdeveloped countries...
...but it has not stopped revolutionizing the world...
...Imperialism here is seen as the alliance of capital with the mob...
...The disease itself is a constitutive element of our international system, which is a system of states...
...For a while we would not recognize any Latin-American dictator...
...International Cooperation Administration declared, The U.S...
...As a result we have the phenomenon of the "scissors," i.e., industrial goods fetch ever-rising prices, while farm products and other goods underdeveloped countries must export are constantly depressed...
...is convinced that private ownership and operation of industrial and extractive enterprises contribute more effectively than public ownership and operation to the general improvement of the economy of a country...
...Both works are exciting examples of Marxism's ability to present a coherent picture of all observable phenomena...
...China clearly was to safeguard the political, financial, and commercial independence of the old Middle Kingdom...
...the few it has retained serve strategic purposes...
...It cannot deal with Biafra, Kashmir, the Kurds, or with the Baltic and Caucasian nations in the Soviet Union...
...He errs...
...He further says that "contrary to Senator Fulbright's assertion, the U.S...
...the design to stave off foreign intervention called for intervention...
...On the contrary, the presidents were defending ordinary business interests...
...Yet most governments do not like aid programs designed and earmarked for specific purposes...
...One compares "their" lot and "ours...
...policies...
...Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon have recognized the right of any country to nationalize corporations in its territory...
...Agriculture—the one industry that in most European countries is least capable of survival and decidedly underdeveloped— also is the most protectionist and jingoist...
...Now I submit that these new corporations constitute a phenomenon that is the opposite of imperialism...
...This game has been called "balance of power" or "deterrence," and it is obvious that the instruments of security which are useful in this game— military, political, and economic ones— should become values per se in the eyes of the players...
...The pessimistic view is held by the New Left, by the more militant leaders of the 3 For argument's sake, I exaggerate the difference between the two types...
...In Berlin a wall was erected under our very eyes...
...2) Conclusion of international raw material and foodstuff agreements to stabilize prices and to allot production and import quotas (as in the case of sugar...
...condemn these practices, it is hypocritical to include the amounts in the statistics of "foreign aid...
...into making concessions, but it also creates a mood of recrimination that converts business negotiations into a contest between "haves" and "have-nots...
...Citizens of an underdeveloped country are hypersensitive to the slightest lack of respect...
...markets and capital, renegotiation of licenses granted under duress, better terms of trade...
...Recognition meansneither moral approval nor attestation of legitiOften American interests pulled in different directions, with the CIA, the army, the ambassador, business interests, and the State Department backing different contenders...
...into harness on a limited number of policy issues...
...12 William A. Williams, The Tragedy of American Foreign Policy, (Cleveland: World, 1959...
...But above all, the markets of the developed nations are not sufficiently open to late-coming competitors and the highly industrialized countries are trading more with each other than with the underdeveloped world...
...it followed hard on the wars that created Germany and Italy, that brought Russia within sight of Constantinople...
...The answer is pregnant with political consequences...
...What conscienceridden Americans may do in one sphere hardly affects the other sphere, and therefore I must give an ambiguous answer to my opening question: Imperialist policies are not a necessary consequence of economic pressures, but they may have their own inevitable logic...
...It is not necessary, though it is possible, to confuse the negotiable issues of economic policy with the power issues of world politics...
...The "big China market" was, according to Paul A. Varg, "a myth...
...134 if: "in the developed countries the bourgeois dictatorship results from the power of the bourgeoisie...
...In Russia, the heyday of imperialist expansion coincided with heavy borrowing...
...This brings me to a further distinction...
...and therefore Professor Williams has called our "Open Door" policy the fountainhead of imperialism...
...If we were to follow Lenin, defining imperialism as "the last stage of capitalism," 1 we would have answered the question...
...To withold it makes sense only if one ex pects an early overthrow of the government...
...consistently achieves export surpluses in trading with underdeveloped countries...
...This also applies to the Cold War...
...The attempt to stay out of the power game leads straight into it...
...Ceylon and Indonesia were allowed to expropriate oil firms because, unlike Cuba, they did not simultaneously fall into the Russian or Chinese orbit...
...relations with the Third World...
...The single motor of imperialism is Marx's "law of the diminishing rate of profits": as capital finds no more profitable employment in high-wage areas, it is driven into a mad scramble for overseas investment...
...but first I wish to complete my survey with a brief glance at the noneconomic theories...
...It has given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country...
...a country, moreover, whose currency serves as monetary reserve for half of the world's currencies, whose capital export and foreign trade are the main sources of new investment in underdeveloped areas, and whose corporations influence economic policies even on the most advanced continent...
...so-called neocolonialism is capable of being converted into measures to aid the development of backward countries...
...But if words have any meaning, imperialism implies an uneven relationship...
...Quite different is the second case which concerns the extractive industries—mines, oil, bananas, and timber...
...but what we are containing here are the symptoms, not the disease...
...At the Conference of Vina del Mar (Chile) in May 1969, and again at Caracas in February 1970, Latin Americans complained that the inflow of capital had dwindled to a trickle and now amounted to less than they were paying back in interest and dividend...
...The Wretched of the Earth, p. 124...
...10 It may well be that statistically 5 percent constitutes the margin between depression and prosperity...
...Obviously, fixed investments give U.S...
...Rockefeller, Pierpont Morgan and their associates who needed imperialism because they desired to use the public resources of their country to find profitable employment for their capital which otherwise would be superfluous...
...Its root is not corruption, but corruption is the inevitable consequence of monopoly capitalism as it has developed in this century, with its intertwining of finance and manufacturing capital, its cartels and trusts, its fierce struggle for hegemony in the world...
...but she ruled the waves and financed the Crusades—which always ended up in places where the Venetians needed trading posts...
...Yet, to say this is not to say much...
...These policies not only helped to restore a capitalist world market...
...similar schemes to milk the nation instead of serving it...
...When the State Department tried to mediate a quarrel between Chile and Peru over the TacnaArica territory, an arms manufacturer complained that it was "interfering perniciously with legitimate business...
...By contrast, if the American farmer wished to retain his liberal orientation, he had to support a foreign policy that was anti-imperialist in ideology—though in practice that does not mean anti-interventionist...
...or, as in the case of recent investments in Europe, they wish to get in under a customs wire...
...American firms were prepared to work for Castro until he forced a showdown, and only after he had opted for the Russian orbit did Eisenhower break with him...
...Only 30 miles of railway were built —not in Manchuria but far to the south in Fukien...
...But in 1902 J. A. Hobson offered a theory that has remained most influential because it links big business, and in particular monopoly, with both imperialism and colonialism: monopoly prevents a fair distribution of purchasing power...
...The first are accessible to THE PROBLEM OF IMPERIALISM reasoning...
...subsidies...
...empirically, it fits early capitalism better than the most highly developed countries which are each other's best customers...
...for, obviously, when Japan first took Korea and Formosa she was not capitalistic, and when she attacked the United States she was not in the last stage...
...At other stages the instruments of power may be liberated from supervision, initiate their own dynamism, accelerate evolution, or revolutionize the system...
...Secretary of State Laird vetoed it for strategic reasons—as though to prove this point...
...Economic Interpretations MR...
...Hence, like Athens, America fights an ideological war...
...German firms build chemical plants in South Carolina and electric power plants in South America with World Bank financing...
...It occupied bases abroad and tried to influence, nay to dominate other governments...
...THE PROBLEM OF IMPERIALISM out, not because the Powers could not agree on the distribution of the colonies—they had agreed but because none could back down in a game of chicken without losing its standing in the concert of Europe...
...militarism, colonialism, and imperialism are summoned to forestall the crisis...
...Indivisible freedom cannot tolerate areas of servitude...
...Even if I were to grant that, I would still argue that in the real world, the "ultimate" never appears and "power" may well have become autonomous (or in Marxian language: verselbstandigt) . The profundity that the profit motive explains all is utterly shallow and flies in the face of all the evidence we have about the motives of policy-makers...
...31 "If the promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine was an act of imperialism," asks William Langer, "where was the export of capital which ought to have been its conditions...
...Some of the dictators find it profitable to cast themselves in an anti-imperialist role—even while soliciting American investments...
...41 The Divorce of the State from Business IN RECENT YEARS something new has been added to the economic structure of the West: the international corporation...
...Lord Palmerston still could call upon the might of the Britsh Empire on behalf of a Maltese Jew who happened to be its citizen...
...policies in the Near East.43 Incidentally, even at a time when the U.S...
...34 1a their classic study of Dollar Diplomacy (first Alas, we all know what Taft's lofty resolutions later came to: outright intervention by Marines in Nicaragua, Honduras, Mexico, Santo Domingo—and this under Woodrow Wilson, of all presidents, who had begun his adminsitration by repudiating dollar diplomacy in China...
...Bigness with a direction, expansion with deliberate intent, display of power, the wielding of influence abroad— these are the characteristics of imperialism...
...The poetry of the imperialistic age and the colonial novels confirm this insight...
...We must not beg the question by including these driving forces in our definition...
...THE PROBLEM OF IMPERIALISM to U.S...
...Nixon avoided invoking the Hickenlooper Amendment against Peru because he hopes that Velasquez will continue to do business with the U.S...
...they discover expansionist goals of their own which enhance their popularity...
...The American empire expresses its presence and exercises its influence through the capitalist mode of operation for which it keeps as much of the world "open" as possible...
...they would have preferred a multicentrist to a polarized structure of international relations...
...must secure for itself access to the great resources of the entire world of which it consumes the largest part...
...Naive or demagogic muckrakers always howl when they hear the word profit...
...He promised to "remove countries in this hemisphere from the jeopardy involved by heavy foreign debt and from the danger of internal complications due to disorder at home...
...809 ff...
...finally, a country that defines its own foreign policy in terms of a historic world struggle with one or two other expansionist powers and on whose ambitions smaller countries rely for their own protection—clearly, such a power must be called imperialist by any definition of that term...
...17 Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capitalism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966...
...but this tool was soon to dominate the scene...
...in translation, The American Challenge (New York: Athenum, 1969...
...The three optical deceptions of pseudocolonialism, "psycho-imperialism," and neocolonialism prevent the people of underdeveloped countries from seeing their true plight: they need to modernize their economy, and that often means considerable disruption of the time-honored web of social and cultural relations, of cherished customs and traditions...
...now, transl...
...foreign affairs...
...This is usually called colonialism, a term based on "the seawater fallacy": If you conquer a neighboring country by the sword, riding on horses, or rolling in tanks— that may be imperialism but is forgiven sooner or later...
...9 Rosa Luxemburg drew attention to contradictions in classical and Marxian economics, and to real conflicts in capitalist development...
...14 J. A. Hobson, Imperialism (first edition: London, 1902...
...Political and Psychological Theories PIZARRO MAY HAVE LOOKED for gold...
...The World Bank complained in its report for 1962 that aid often was given for no economic reasons, or even against economic reason...
...in Latin America they enjoy solidarity with the Hochschilds, the Patinos, and the Aramayos...
...53 But the new means of destruction are not the only and not even the major reason why imperialist confrontations have become so much more dangerous in recent times...
...corporations to produce them here or to develop substitutes...
...wage war in the Congo and for refusing to wage war in Biafra, Rhodesia, and Palestine...
...Williams's argument about the Open Door fails to prove either imperialism or colonialism...
...It was natural for Athens to fight for the freedom of cities in Asia, for Venice to fight against the closed society of the Moslem Turks...
...foreigners own $70 billion of U.S...
...For all these reasons, U.S...
...He defined "the purpose of the present administration": "to encourage the use of American capital in the development of China by the promotion of essential reforms...
...it did so enthusiastically, no matter how much its material interests were hurt, precisely because those atavistic notions were stronger than economic rationality...
...Presidents have indeed performed small and large services for their corporate campaign contributors...
...ambassadors have naively assumed that what is good for American corporations is good not only for America but for the natives, too...
...Brazil now has a law making it obligatory that at least 50 percent of every company be owned by Brazilian nationals—though to profit from American know-how they may have a management contract with an American firm...
...It has even been said that the Monroe Doctrine was proclaimed to fence South America in as a preserved hunting ground for U.S...
...vice-versa, no country has the right to reserve its natural resources for its own exclusive use...
...The Aluminum Corporation of America generates two-thirds of its total income in its foreign subsidiaries, ColgatePalmolive three-quarters...
...Most seriously: when President Kennedy told the Latins: no reforms—no money, they sabotaged the Alianza para el Progreso...
...Yet the imperialist phase of U.S...
...policy-makers to support regimes of various descriptions, republican and dictatorial, progressive and reactionary...
...48 These criticisms should not be interpreted, however, to deny the usefulness of development aid...
...49 This is certainly true of food shipments...
...Is it not reasonable to assume that the bourgeoisie was using the feudalist fantasies, the Holy Grail, the Quest for Glory, the Superman and National Honor, merely as a screen for its very material interests...
...Dollars were mobilized to serve diplomatic ends...
...Tribes, nations, races, states establish themselves as entities which define their identity in contrast or conflict with others...
...An absolute loss...
...Economic nationalism cannot solve problems any better in the 20th than it did in the 19th century...
...We may speak of a suicidal tendency on a truly large social scale...
...Though he denounced the "economic taproot of imperialism," he thought the interests that were riding the nationalist bandwagon were illegitimate...
...The U.S...
...See also Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), pp...
...Allegedly, business interests had encouraged the annexation of the Philippines as a stepping stone to the "great China market...
...Despite Khrushchev's doctrine of coexistence, most Communists abroad also hold to Lenin's vision that imperialism is the apogee of capitalism and its apocalypse...
...37 There may . be, in certain circles within and outside the U.S...
...Far from serving any American interest in Peru, the American owners of the Cerro mines plead the Peruvian government's case in this country...
...James Mill called imperialism "a vast system of outdoor relief for the upper classes...
...interventions in the Caribbean area, or the Soviet invasions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia...
...39 In this matter, the American government agrees with Stalin, who said: whoever conquers a territory introduces his own economic system into it...
...now a Beacon paperback...
...above all, being poor in capital she had no need to export it...
...treasures, and the primitive methods of enriching one country at the expense of another, which certainly had played a great role in the beginnings of capitalism, lost much of their significance—proportionally —as the forces of capitalism grew...
...Even if we grant that all this was not done from imperialistic motives, the means certainly were imperialistic, and the old motto of all absolute pacifists was proven once again in resisting evil one ends by doing evil: in fighting the totalitarians, the United States came to imitate some of their methods...
...It is generally agreed that the present development aid mechanisms are unsatisfactory...
...capitalism at the point of its supreme organization but already toppling over into ruin and waiting to be replaced by socialism...
...30 "Our navigation involves still higher consideration...
...imperialism then could not be financial: The total of U.S...
...Conor Cruise O'Brien has written that if America were to sink into the ocean tomorrow, Africa would not know it...
...their protest is in the Populist tradition of Bryan and La Follette...
...64 Such a view, however, leaves one important question unanswered: why would sound 53 See Raymond Aron, "The Leninist Myth of Imperialism," in A Century of Total War...
...The Marshall Plan was supposed to stop the Russians in Europe...
...Such pseudorevolutionary leaders were analyzed 120 years ago by Karl Marx: his pamphlet on Louis Napoleon has not been improved upon, nor has the original model...
...I believe that we shall never understand imperialism fully until we know more about the importance of power in society...
...Most of these requests, however are no different than those discussed in trade negotiations between any two nations and do not imply an imperialist or colonialist relationship...
...Kolko and Magdoff, in turn, have not failed to exhibit these quotations as so many proofs that the U.S...
...Even Magdoff (see Note 17) admits that without U.S...
...Colonialism as Lenin knew it was mostly liquidated after World War II...
...and India holds sovereignty over the Nagas...
...Lord Keynes, a disciple of Hobson, found a way out of the dilemma...
...the seeds he had planted sprouted like dragons' teeth...
...Indeed, Libya throws the 40 Velasquez bought full-page ads in several U.S...
...Trade in the great international commodities must be brought under the control of international boards...
...but that did not mean financial exploitation...
...4) Renegotiation of all mining and prospecting rights and royalties, with special regard to each nation's sovereignty over its natural resources...
...44 I must warn against a common fallacy...
...THE PROBLEM OF IMPERIALISM free of conditions and strings, and here I beg to disagree: The purpose and use of international aid should be under rigorous control...
...At the time of the SpanishAmerican war, even when Theodore Roosevelt intervened in the Caribbean republics, the United States was still a debtor nation, importing capital...
...23 One can verify this in Thomas Mann's World War I book, Betrachtungen Eines Unpolitischen (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1918)—"Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man"—which merely reflects the ravings of famous German professors...
...ambassadors...
...exports...
...The Decolonization Committee of the United Nations cannot by its Charter debate "contiguous territories...
...But it may be advisable to include public utilities such as gas, electricity, telephone, and public transportation, which in most of Europe were nationalized long ago...
...It would be better to speak of colonialism only if the relationship is exploitative, if it benefits one side more than the other in terms of money...
...Vice-versa, foreigners own $10 billion worth of plants in this country...
...in fact, they may complain—as do our Latin neighbors today—that the metropolis does not buy enough from them...
...Colonel Ojukwu, an illiterate in economics, might be forgiven for saying that Biafra would "sell in the world market with absolute equality" and thereby bring colonialism down...
...Their poverty cannot be their fault...
...32 But as the 32 "We must have the Floridas and Cuba," quoted by T. Bailey, in A Diplomatic History of the American People (New York: Appleton, 1969), p. 195...
...The Chinese emperor even built a wall...
...The United States fought for Freedom of the Seas and proclaimed the principle of the Open Door against those imperial powers that conceived of their empires as fenced-in 2 8 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, Chapter I. HENRY PACHTER territories...
...The record is not consistent and clear at all, but it shows a frequent wavering between extremes...
...When Kipling speaks of the white man's burden, he certainly does not mean profit...
...Her trade with the Latin-American countries was minimal, her investment there negligible...
...They are considered reliable as anti-Communists...
...It is understandable that the martyred Dominicans should single out the Pentagon as the main enemy of small nations in this hemisphere...
...While Marcuse often displays a crude, almost superstitious belief in "capitalism's" ability to make consumers desire what it wants to sell, in this and other passages his subtler sensibility suggests that ideologies cannot be made to order but must be based on psychological disposiLeaving psychology aside, most historians define imperialism simply in terms of power...
...The pioneering precedent was set by Franklin D. Roosevelt, more than 30 years ago...
...See DISSENT, July–August 1970...
...government is not always of one mind...
...Unfortunately, there are not many of them, especially in the Third World—and some whom we mistook for democrats, like Diem, disappointed us...
...Nevertheless, the international solidarity of capital seems to be guaranteed institutionally much more firmly than in any previous decade: the new arrangements to protect currencies from speculators, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, international cartels and trade agreements constitute an international directorate of banking, industry, and commerce...
...Low-interest loans must be provided for long-term projects...
...Interventions IT IS OFTEN SAID that we support dictators because they protect American business...
...When Woodrow Wilson came to power, he refused to endorse the scheme...
...is in very distinguished company...
...EMPIRE CANNOT BE FOUND on any map or globe, yet it is worldwide...
...When we established ourselves as tutors and guardians of the smaller American republics, we established exactly the kind of preserved hunting ground we pretended we had to deny the Russians and Japanese in Manchuria...
...The Latin-American desk at the State Department, the New York Times, and influential New York bankers had openly supported the insurgents in 1958...
...the "opening" of a country, pulling its economy out of the precapitalist into the capitalist orbit...
...contradiction to national policy or even become spokesmen for the country in which they operate...
...To be rescued by Big Brother may seem almost as painful as to be swallowed by the Big Bad Bully...
...Even though no United Fruit Corporation stands between them and the American consumer, their national and international cartels were unable to stabilize prices...
...In another context A. A. Berle has compared the new corporations to nations...
...Most other advanced countries depend for 80 and more percent of their industrial output on exports.—A detailed criticism of Luxemburg's theory is in Paul Sweezy, Theory of Capitalist Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942...
...Should we conclude that America is inherently racist, colonialist, and expansionist, that our interventions in Cuba, Santo Domingo, and Vietnam were prompted by corporate influences in the White House, that the wars this country has fought were the inevitable consequences of our not-sofree enterprise system...
...52 It would be foolish to deny that money interests ride this engine—but, even without money interests, America's drive for hegemony in the Western world or its struggle with the U.S.S.R...
...The $17 billion invested in the oil industry produce the highest profits...
...All underdeveloped countries lose in these exchanges...
...His Secretary of State, Philander Knox, sounds almost modern when he says that he "could imagine no better use for American dollars than to replace insecurity by stability in neighboring states...
...He also was anticapitalist...
...They will just raise prices and the American consumer will pay...
...President Taft wanted to replace the big stick with subtler means...
...He rejects the notion that the U.S...
...America's ability to procure such materials...
...She played no role in the rivalries that led to the catastrophe of 1914...
...Industrial countries limit their production when prices fall...
...As we go to press, a review article by Robert Heilbroner draws my attention to Seymour Melman's new book, Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War (New York: McGrawHill...
...The farmer, almost everywhere, was chauvinistic...
...prodding Pakistan could not have improved its productive capacity...
...WHOSE INTERESTS WERE SERVED by these contests of prestige, which ultimately precipitated Europe into two world wars...
...On this foundation Joseph Schumpeter built his denunciation of imperialism as an atavistic hangover from the feudal order and from barbarian conditions...
...The precedent for Franklin D. Roosevelt's good-neighbor policy had been set by Woodrow Wilson, who stubbornly stood by Mexico's President Carranza in his fight against the Standard Oil Company...
...cannot abandon its empire and use its enormous resources to give the world a shining example of the good life...
...In the distorted view of demagogic dictators, class war is being deflected into "war of national liberation...
...It asserted the United States' hegemony in this hemisphere...
...Truman had to clothe his power conflict with Stalin into the ideological drapes of anti-Communism, free enterprise and collective security...
...American oil companies, which once thought they had the sheiks in their pockets, now plead with President Nixon to change America's Near East policy in favor of the Arabs—fortunately in vain, but that will not change the New Left prejudice that oil determines U.S...
...Only petroleum and ores, of necessity, have to be produced at the location where nature put them...
...They have been trained to believe that power is always derived from economic interests or directed toward economic goals...
...The planning of such firms is now global, with loyalties determined by the political situation on each of the continents...
...The Russian invasions of Hungary and of Czechoslovakia also concerned "contiguous territories...
...What is gravy for us is their living...
...government considered itself the errandboy of U.S...
...It is therefore a basic policy of the ICA [International Cooperation Administration] to employ U.S...
...agents bear direct responsibility, and those—like the Greek or Argentinian— with whom fate has forced the U.S...
...Still, we are not likely to be satisfied with a definition explaining imperialism as a mere byproduct of bigness...
...At the time of this writing, Nixon cannot stop inflation because German marks are fleeing from Willy Brandt's government...
...Moderating forces within and without may domesticate these drives, and if we are lucky the rivalry may be contained within certain channels...
...It is frightening to think how much de-escalating and disarmament would be necessary to lower the tension even to the level that pre HENRY PACHTER ceded the world wars, let alone the wars of the 19th century...
...into expansion, what did...
...firms than among their compatriots, and it would be much lower if we were to disappear...
...it must be the consequence of discrimination and unlawful exploitation...
...The Rationale of U.S...
...the State Department asked the ill-famed railroad tycoon Edward Harriman—grandfather of the present champion of liberal imperialism—to save Manchuria by investing a few million dollars there...
...The only way for new countries to increase their oil income would be to acquire refineries and tankers...
...but the conjunction "because" is erroneous...
...Financial imperialism, the socalled dollar diplomacy, was a tool, one of the means available to an over-all policy...
...They must sell it, and they can sell it only to industrialized countries, above all to the United States...
...if it does not buy, it acts selfishly, perhaps in the interest of its oil companies...
...but they spoke harshly to their allies, and they dealt brutally with defectors...
...s 1 Taft and Knox called the technique they were using "dollar diplomacy"—meaning the deliberate, purposeful exploitation of commercial and financial interests in order to bind other countries to the United States, to further strategic projects, to counteract designs of other powers...
...for governmental and international development aid cannot provide an adequate substitute for the formation of new capital in the underdeveloped countries themselves...
...But we exported $11 billion worth to underdeveloped countries and imported from them only $9 billion worth of goods...
...When State Department officials are confronted with Latin-American demands for lower tariffs, they actually may be dealing with front men for international corporations...
...imperialism is nationalism writ large, and it cannot disappear unless the national state itself withers away...
...Nor was it always the dollar that called in the big stick...
...ism" shall mean for the length of this paper the subjection of one nation by another for purposes of economic exploitation...
...the latter, unfortunately, are charged with emotions and made manageable only through fear...
...Worse: motives and ends initially seem to permit a wide choice of means—some of them even, in the beginning and in the intention, quite humane...
...in due course, no doubt, someone would sell them this equipment—at a price...
...that we had stum 1 N. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Communism (first, Russian, edition: Zurich, 1917...
...In trying to develop techniques of humane, peaceful intervention, Knox created precisely edition: 1925, now a Monthly Review Press paperback), Scott Nearing and Joseph Freeman have shown how capital used the opportunities offered by U.S...
...Some of these operators may have had an illegiti 24 Max Weber has shown that the desperate attempt to preserve the Prussian estates made it impossible for East Germany to become the industrial center whose emergence might have changed the course of history for all of Eastern Europe, 25 Fritz Fischer, Grijf nach der Weitmacht (Dus seldorf: Droste, 1961...
...The Wall Street Journal and the right wing of the Republican party were isolationist and anti-interventionist through two world wars, the Korean war, and even in Vietnam...
...but neither the United Fruit Corporation nor ESSO will suffer...
...as a resource of defense, essential...
...These nations must telescope the three industrial revolutions through which the West has passed into the lifetime of one generation...
...Hannah Arendt has shown how the dregs of all classes—lumpen proletariat, lumpen bourgeoisie, lumpen aristocrats, and lumpen intellectuals—find expression of their resentments in racism and imperialism22 Healthy, progressive capitalists create fields for innovation at home...
...we must stay with our definitions, and we shall see later on that these definitions have social-political meaning...
...Even where the Westerner tries to be helpful, he seems to impose his ways, to tell others what's good for them, to threaten ancient cultures with extinction...
...if imperialism is but a policy one can adopt or reject, perhaps a series of blunders and at worst the willful extravaganza of idealistic dreamers or the brutal pursuit of special interests by the military, certain corporations, or demagogues who thrive on chauvinism— then wise reforms or political action can curb such arrogance of power, and the outlook will be more optimistic...
...40 New York Times, February 9, 1970...
...All their frustrations, therefore, are blamed on Big Brother, and their demands are presented as liberation from an oppressive "System...
...As Canada's Prime Minister Trudeau said: it is uncomfortable to lie down with an elephant, be the beast ever so friendly...
...that the debtors feed the creditors...
...39 U.S...
...They think that directors of, say, United Fruit or Grace Line or ESSO routinely inform the State Department or the President about American interests in each particular country...
...The national interest is not to protect individual American firms but to preserve a system of business, which the American public identifies with its way of life and which the American government considers the alternative to the rival system of Communism...
...From the same Jefferson memorandum, quoted in R. J. Bartlett, The Record of American Diplomacy (New York: Knopf, 1960), p. 77...
...business to help industrialize countries suffering from underdevelopment...
...aid has been denounced as a subtle form of "colonialism...
...interests in China...
...It was a cancer, a parasitical, retrogressive, stultifying force, a bastard child of capitalism that honest business could and had to repudiate...
...I gather that Melman's view is similar to the one presented here: that the power drive, in this case of the military establishment, has precedence before the calculus of profitability...
...The trouble with this theory is that in 1823 the U.S...
...America was not yet a world power...
...It is nationalism writ large when it enters world politics...
...Colonialist methods may not constitute the behavior pattern of U.S...
...the supply of industrial goods is easier to monopolize than farm products...
...Dollar Diplomacy THE MONROE DOCTRINE was political and self-serving...
...The world market is a game in which the raw-materials producers cannot win...
...Business Comes In CLEARLY, AMERICAN AND OTHER BUSINESS INTERESTS find a more favorable climate under republican governments than under such populist-nationalist generals as Peron, Ovanda, Velasquez, or Nasser...
...THE PROBLEM OF IMPERIALISM Louisiana Purchase showed, Jefferson had a strong sense of geopolitical realities...
...government must show a "presence" abroad—wherever a rival has established affiliates...
...has emerged from the two world wars as the only power capable of containing the Russian advance...
...Thus we have the following types of domination: (1) Territorial imperialism: oldfashioned - rule over conquered nations...
...All documents of the time show that the Doctrine was a diplomatic move, designed to assert the independence of U.S...
...The U.S...
...In Latin America, U.S...
...15 But Hobson felt that a more equal dis is a measure of how seriously Washington took the...
...Developing countries with one-crop economies suffer from the vicissitudes of a world market they cannot control...
...Some do protect American business interests...
...but the U.S...
...JULIEN'S INDICTMENT is neither new nor convincing...
...more U.S...
...But even though profit may be high, capital no longer takes risks...
...In Peru the U.S...
...their insatiable appetite for hardware is considered a guarantee of their continued dependence on U.S...
...It is not surprising to find their jingoism in frequent alliance with anticapitalist, pseudosocialist, anti-Semitic ideas...
...3) Conversion of military budgets into development funds at least to the extent that cancelled defense orders mean a loss of export for Third World countries...
...Make the Chinese eat American food...
...if it demands reforms, it is meddling in the affairs of other countries...
...At certain, rare stages of societal development such a special apparatus can be dispensed with and replaced or supplanted by ritual and routine, usually at the price of further development...
...When our imports decline by an ever so small percentage point, their exports decline catastrophically...
...47 But when we compare these desiderata with the reality of "development aid," the contrast could not be greater...
...The Question Asked: Clearly, a superpower that maintains bases and troops on foreign soil, wages war in faraway countries, provides others with arms worth $3 billion a year, and influences their foreign as well as domestic policies...
...their unhealthy influence could be defeated...
...or to other countries, and the AFL—CIO has charged, not without reason, that they are taking thousands of jobs from American workers, especially from minority people and hardcore poverty areas...
...10 9 Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (first edition: Berlin, 1913...
...Cash surpluses should be used to subsidize diversified farming...
...Pratt...
...They are not likely ever again to enjoy a similarly sheltered situation...
...In the manufacturing industries, many firms may not lend themselves to nationalization, nor have they aroused resentment...
...HENRY PACHTER mate, surreptitious influence in some policymakers' backrooms...
...37 See Theodore Draper, Castro's Revolution (New York: Praeger, 1962...
...in Chile we rooted for Frei...
...nor is the cold-war tension explained by the development of two worldwide empires whose interests clash at the fringes...
...investment becomes risky and the trust magnates find more money on their hands than they can employ profitably...
...Nor is aid through international agencies always better than bilateral aid, and it certainly is not cheaper...
...has found it expedient, for example, to do business with dictators who are repugnant to our sensibilities—Trujillo, Batista, Somoza, Chiang Kaishek, Diem, Franco...
...In brief, an empire seems to be a well-defined area, a territory dominated by one power...
...firms employ 1,230,000 people, and nine out of ten in managerial positions are hired locally...
...See the section entitled "Political and Psychological Theories," p. 467) Big Business Imperialism ATTEMPTS TO REDUCE IMPERIALISM either to the desire for imports or the need for markets in general have been unsuccessful...
...The limited concerns of small nations are distorted when they are projected on the screen of world politics, which is of much more vital interest to the larger nation...
...It is only here, in our country, that the profit can be realized...
...Since much of the uneasiness in the Third World stems from the lopsidedness of our bilateral relations, we ought to handicap ourselves in negotiating with its representatives...
...Many Americans share a vulgarized version of this view...
...Hegemony makes enemies...
...Books are already being written about these new corporations, which know no frontiers and no nationality...
...We buy Volkswagen cars and Sony radios, but pay low prices for our coffee...
...it confronts the honest politician every time he must make a decision that may hurt someone...
...While it is unrealistic to 47 Paul Prebisch, the Argentine economist and chairman of UNCTAD, is the leader of the Third World claimants at international economic powwows...
...What is announced as "aid" often is a promotion gimmick for U.S...
...by contrast, he emphasized the irrational nature of imperialism, its restless, mindless drive for more and more expansion, its hunger for power after power without any reasonable objective or definable limit...
...On a world scale, the Nassers and Giaps share at this moment the responsibility for the escalation of tension, and the Soviet general staff has more influence on foreign policy than is good for the world's peace...
...But one cannot conclude that they are poor because "we" are rich, or that they are poor because they are exploited by us...
...There is a limit to robbing a country of its of strategic goods comes from such countries as Canada, Russia, Australia, England, and Chile, which are economically independent...
...The term makes no sense if one cannot point to a government that supports the imperialist or economic interests...
...He quotes statistics showing that the U.S., with only 6 percent of the world's population, is buying 30 percent of the world's output of bauxite, 40 percent of the produced nickel, 36 percent of the chromium, etc., and generally consumes 30 percent of the world's raw materials...
...This substitution of resentment for analysis we shall call "psycho-imperialism...
...supports the governments of underdeveloped countries unconditionally, it helps to perpetuate an unjust system...
...If government support of consular service HENRY PACHTER the China tangle, Russia and Japan, "capitalist" powers...
...They know no government and no homeland but are international freebooters, following their interests to any place that may suit them...
...Still others—like Duvalier, Thieu, Papadopoulos —become so embarrassing that at least part of the U.S...
...It has often been remarked that in the Cold War, as in earlier contests of alliances, each side interpreted the defensive moves of the other as aggressive and therefore increased its own defense preparations, which in turn escalated the other's fear...
...If, on the other hand, you have to board a ship and cross salt water to conquer a foreign tribe, that is "Colonialism," very reprehensible and never forgotten or forgiven...
...diplomacy...
...When, 60 years ago, Walther Rathenau wrote that the world was "ruled by 200 people who know each other," 42 communicate with each other, and understand one another, he may have thought of Greek ship owners, Armenian cannon kings, LatinAmerican copper barons, Dutch oil men, Jewish bankers who acquired British knighthood, and also American heiresses who guilded rusty escutcheons...
...moreover, they are far more dependent on exports and imports than we are...
...Since the developing countries are debtors, they should export more than they import...
...the current foreign aid appropriations for only a few years...
...But this proves the opposite of Lenin's thesis, for the colonialists were not typical capitalists...
...usually is in the stronger position, and its partners make up for their weakness by raising the hue and cry of "colonialism...
...To such ideologies Sir Charles Dilke and other British opponents of imperialism replied that you don't have to own a country to buy from it...
...This is as true of bananas as it is of oil...
...Recently, however, we have found rats in this brew: some dictators don't stay bought, but find the Russians just as eager to provide them with hardware or even more amenable than the U.S...
...While the international corporations have lost their identification with the country of their origin, nations in turn do not identify their interests any longer wtih those of the corporations...
...Finally, the national revolutionaries of the Third World may be mistaken in identifying their enemy as "neo-colonialism...
...They are powerblind...
...establishment would rather get rid of them...
...needed no overseas colonies, for it treated its South as a colony...
...They identify (or confuse) the presence of American corporations abroad with American prestige and influence...
...Following this Wagnerian mythology, the Nazis conjured up the foggy ideologies of "blood and soil" and exalted the rebellion of primeval tribal instincts against the rationalist spirit of Western plutocracy...
...Curiously enough, Herbert Marcuse, though a Marxist, supports these sociopsychological views...
...Hence, for him imperialism was not inevitable...
...President Harding still considered U.S...
...The only correct way to approach the question is by first isolating the phenomena of imperalism and colonialism and then to ask whether they are perhaps connected and how they are related to the social structure of the country afflicted by these practices...
...The gross value of goods produced by U.S.-owned firms or affiliates abroad alone is $40 billion a year—twice our export of manufactured goods, and the equivalent of total consumer expenditure in a good-sized country like Italy...
...Some say that such alliances disclose the true reactionary nature of U.S...
...Denial of this demand would not prove "imperialism," nor would its granting remove the plagues of overpopulation and underdevelopment...
...Imperialism" is definitely and unmistakably tied to the policies of one country or government...
...19 Joseph Schumpeter, Imperialism and Social Class (first edition: Tubingen, 1919...
...In this tableau the U.S...
...Normally, we can point out an empire on the map—the Egyptian, the Roman, the Inca empire, all had boundaries...
...Also objectionable is the inclusion of loans that are purely commercial arrangements...
...commissars—and interests of a commercial and financial nature were grafted upon this empire...
...their appetite transgresses the boundaries we deem safe—and the Russians provide them with ideologies and propaganda techniques...
...But we also would have to find another word for the policies of Japan in 1894, in 1905, in 1931, and in 1941...
...capital...
...big business is in a power game just like states...
...Here we distinguish three different processes: the conquest of a colony in order to fence it off for plunder...
...Its author, Claude Julien, chief of foreign reporting of the highly-respected Paris daily Le Monde,4 charges that American imperialism is mostly guided by economic interests and that these interests make imperialism inevitable...
...that the producers of raw materials enrich the makers of machinery...
...If, however, imperialism is not institutional or "systemic," not inherent in the structure of American politics and business...
...8 John Strachey, The End of Empire (New York: Random House, 1959...
...Today the Soviet Union is in a similar position: as a latecomer, she often can coordinate her interests with those of underling countries...
...the U.S...
...The bulk of overseas investments went to other advanced countries: not to underdeveloped areas but to Europe, to the United States, and to the white Dominions...
...is one of the keystones of its power...
...Their estates could not compete with American farmers...
...If the U.S...
...and, unfortunately for our friends in Manila, Dupont is producing fibers that replace sisal...
...The whole bill would be equivalent to 51 Robert Engler, The Politics of Oil (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961...
...Neo-Colonialism IF BUSINESS is no longer patriotic it may still display a "colonialist" stance vis -a-vis the underdeveloped countries...
...But the American presence is resented because U.S...
...corporations have infiltrated the allied economies and exploit them in subtle, and often not so subtle ways.27 A "superimperialism" is said to overarch the old colonial and neocolonial countries...
...We may call Jefferson an imperialist in the older sense, but not in Lenin's...
...But modern economists have not sustained her theory...
...Or, perhaps, what may appear to the donor as a reasonable guarantee for the grant's purpose is experienced by the recipient as an instrument of control or domination...
...the national and international play with total destruction may well have found a firm basis in the instinctual structure of individuals...
...trade practices are justified...
...Today we cannot be so sure, and it is perhaps better to describe different types of imperialism...
...Do not their Iobbies dominate a Congress that is as uninformed as its voters...
...Though he admitted that "once flag-raising became common and competitive, economic considerations undoubtedly spurred [the Powers] to greater efforts," he held that "basically the new imperialism was a nationalistic phenomenon...
...Nehru refused to be bothered by the invasion of Hungary because that was not colonialism...
...Does this sound suspicious...
...We have found that intentions don't really count...
...But the case of Cuba has shown how difficult it is to diversify and to find alternative markets...
...that is a different story...
...People get used to seeing a larger area on the map colored yellow or blue and forget that there lives a subjugated nation...
...and in prewar imperialism the retrogressive, parasitical interests were far more prominent than the modernizing interests...
...Colonialist powers have earned extra profits from the services they have rendered and, for the sake of principle, should agree to pay restitution...
...23 Likewise, the shaky businesses are the ones that lobby for protective tariffs, empire preference, and 22 Hannah Arendt, Imperialism (originally Chapter II in Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt, Brace, 1951...
...Their wage level was low before "we" came in...
...Nearly half of the hundred biggest corporations in the United States depend for a sizable part of their dividends on foreign sources...
...it is much higher among employees of U.S...
...This is the third and final mode of expansion: the transformation of precapitalist, self-sufficient producers into capitalist suppliers and customers of the market...
...No private company has the right to exploit the natural resources of any country for its own benefit or for the benefit of a foreign country...
Vol. 17 • September 1970 • No. 5
