Anniversary Essay: The Changing Faces of Imperialism
Dore, Liz & Weeks, John
Imperialism," as defined by the analytical Marxist and "Iradical tradition, is the process and consequences of the rivalry among capitalist states.' Competition to dominate markets,...
...This strategy was also applied in Argentina and Chile, though it was not pursued consistently, or for very long, in either...
...This relative decline of U.S...
...223-27...
...The era of the patron, the gamonal, and the hacendado is over, and the term "landed oligarchy" is no longer appropriate to describe Latin America's ruling classes...
...In 1950, 65% of Latin America's population resided in the countryside, a crude indicator of the degree to which capitalist development was still incomplete...
...9. UN Commission on Trade and Development, Yearbook of Trade and Development (Geneva: UNCTAD, 1995...
...political domination of Latin America...
...capital gave class politics in this period its anti-imperialist character...
...Progressives working on behalf of social change in Latin America ponder the future with a sense of pessimism, which deepened after the electoral defeat of the Workers' Party in Brazil in 1994...
...Such a reduction of the term "imperialism" is ahistorical, however, since larger countries have dominated smaller ones throughout recorded history...
...5. "Tenth annual ranking of individual and family fortunes," Forbes Magazine, June, 1996, as cited in "The World's Billionaires," The Guardian, July 2, 1996, p. 3. 6. Victor Bulmer-Thomas, Life After Debt The New Trajectory in Latin America (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1992), and The Economic History of Latin America since Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995...
...government was a principal player-directly or indirectly-in orchestrating the defeats of each of these revolutionary and reformist movements (with the exceptions of Bolivia and Peru in 1994...
...Importsubstitution" is thus an ideological term that serves well the neoliberal re-writing of Latin American economic history by interpreting it as a period of "inward-looking" development...
...9 The Brady Plan, for example, famous for restructuring Latin America's debt, was largely financed by the Japanese...
...7 The United States still dominates capital investment in Latin America...
...But the past triumphs of a progressive option-the Cuban revolution, the election of Allende-were isolated moments...
...Even when successful, all revolutionary or reformist programs were rolled back-with the important exception of Cuba-often to a position more reactionary than before...
...ECLAC structuralg ism-and its first cousin, dependency theory-was, purng portedly, endorsed across the political spectrum: from the left (Argentina's Per6n, Chile's Allende, Peru's Velasco) through the center (the PRI in Mexico, Frei Senior in Chile), to the right (Brazil after 1964, the reactionary states of Central America...
...economic and political domination...
...30, Part 1 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), p. 140...
...For many on the left, the term was less important as an analytical concept than as a political slogan to rally against the United States...
...Great Britain was the dominant imperialist power in postcolonial Latin America until the second half of the nineteenth century, when it began to lose ground irretrievably to the United States...
...Just as British radicals at the end of the nineteenth century treated their country's imperial role as the defining and perhaps eternal characteristic of imperialism, U.S...
...corporations-Anaconda, Kennecott, ITT, Cerro de Pasco, Standard Oil, W.R...
...4 Market-based social relations now dominate the landscape: most Latin Americans are landless and dependent on wage labor, which many supplement through work in the informal sector...
...As in Brazil, the fortunes of workers' parties will ebb and flow, but they are nevertheless an essential part of the current...
...According to this "regional consensus" view, Prebisch's theory was widely applied throughout the region...
...troops on repeated occasions: Guatemala (1954), Cuba (1961), Dominican Republic (1965), El Salvador (1980s), Nicaragua (1980s) and Grenada (1983...
...The present, rather than a contrast with the past, is actually an extension of Latin America's history of conservative rule...
...domination, it may actually symbolize the long-term decline of U.S...
...2 Only 11ANNIVERSARY ESSAY/ IMPERIALISM thirty years ago, most Latin Americans were tied to the land, and social relations of patronage were common...
...in order to develop, underdeveloped countries must therefore shift from primaryproduct exports to manufactures via an interventionist state policy of industrial growth...
...Nothing symbolizes this more dramatically than the closing of Fort David, a U.S...
...The reality is far more complex...
...John Weeks teaches development studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London...
...economic power and increased competition among capitalist powers in Latin America...
...A brief review of the successes and failures of revolutionary and NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 10ANNIVERSARY ESSAY/ IMPERIALISM The left has used "imperialism" and "U.S...
...3. William C. Thiesenhusen, ed., Searching for Land Reform in Latin America (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989...
...The argument that a consensual strategy for national development existed in the postwar period has been widely accepted partly because ISI was pursued longest and with greatest consistency in Latin America's two largest countries-Mexico and Brazil...
...Liz Dore teaches Latin American history at the University of Portsmouth in England and is a member of NACLA's editorial board...
...domination...
...To the degree that some Latin American governments flirted with interventionist industrial policy at all, such interventionism was the general orthodoxy of the postwar period both in developed and underdeveloped countries...
...In varying degrees, the bourgeoisie throughout Latin America supposedly pursued projects of ly national development based on so-called ISI that were sup1. ported by broad-based alliances, including the lower aS classes...
...troops, never occurred, however, south of the Panama Canal...
...L atin America has changed dramatically over the past thirty years...
...government, systematically thwarted the will of the lower classes and the movements they spawned...
...Progressive politics today tend to focus The on women's and indigenous Latii issues...
...Most observers expected that Washington's unchallenged political hegemony would translate into an expansion of U.S...
...In the 1990s, this proportion has fallen to about one-fourth...
...Underpinning these national-development strategies was a cross-class or intra-bourgeois consensus about Latin America's need to contain U.S...
...In identity politics of this kind, patterns of capital investment and geopolitics seem to be less central than they were to the class-based struggles of a few decades ago...
...N 1. See Tom Kemp, Theories of Imperialism (London: Dobson Press, 1967), and Tom Bottomore, ed., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (London: Blackwells, 1983), pp...
...The superficial explanation for this geographical limit to U.S...
...Latin America today is not in a progressive phase...
...Today, Asian firms are increasingly prominent in manufacturing, timber and fisheries...
...In the postwar period, intercapitalist rivalry played a minor role in the hemisphere...
...On this basis, new and strong progressive movements may well be built in the future...
...Gunboat diplomacy," or direct intervention by U.S...
...economic and political interests...
...Only in Cuba did a revolutionary insurrection result in more than a temporary set-back for the bourgeoisie...
...Two types of progressive movements emerged to challenge capitalist penetration and authoritarian rule in the region...
...Progressive reforms in Ar6valo and Arbenz's Guatemala (1944-1954), Allende's Chile (1970-1973) and Velasco's Peru (19681975) were largely undone by subsequent regimes-in Guatemala and Chile, through a brutal reign of terror...
...economic and political leadership in the capitalist world...
...23, July 20, 1996, p. 7. 11.Capitalism can develop during periods of crisis as well as periods of growth...
...This interpretation fits well with the argument that the region passed through a progressive, anti-imperialist era that has come to an end...
...In Argentina, ISI was partially abandoned after the fall of Juan Per6n in 1954, then further undermined by his successors...
...6 National, inwardfocused development was not the general tendency in postwar Latin America...
...Economic strategies pursued by governments of the region, such as tariffs, protectionism and exchange rate controls, were part of mainstream Keynesian policies pursued by governments worldwide from 1945 to 1975...
...economic and political influence...
...3 As a result, the peasantry has virtually disappeared...
...In general, class politics plays a less important role in contemporary Latin America than was the case thirty years ago, partly because trade unions have been seriously weakened by neoliberal policies...
...The idea that ISI dominated Chile's development strategy in the 1950s and 1960s is in great part a NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 12ANNIVERSARY ESSAY/ IMPERIALISM creation of the neoliberals-a crude attempt to glorify the supposedly bold economic "reforms" of the murderous Pinochet regime...
...AntiAmericanism was central to progressive politics in the region...
...2. J. Wilkie et al., Statistical Abstract of Latin America, Vol...
...economic power...
...Investors from Western Europe, Asia, and other Latin American countries have bought recently privatized industries, such as telecommunications and utilities...
...military intervention is that Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean constituted the United States' "backyard...
...At the same time, workers and students throughout Latin America became active in populist and anti-bourgeois movements whose politics were dominated by anti-imperialism-to be more precise, anti-Americanism...
...Consequently, anti-imperialist politics focused almost exclusively on U.S...
...652-58...
...A's Latin The U.S...
...In South America, cohesive ruling classes adequately protected both rule by the local bourgeoisie and U.S...
...Yet, while revolutions in Bolivia and Nicaragua brought about fundamental changes in political power and ownership, their revolutionary impact-in terms of destroying the power of the propertied classes-proved transitory...
...Given this paucity of progressive alternatives, many leftists in both the United States and Latin America look back on the postwar period as one of powerful anti-imperialist struggles, and lament a bygone golden age of mass activism...
...This strategy, known as "import-substitution industrialization" (ISI), was based on the work of Rail Pr6bisch, head of the United Nations' Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC...
...By the early 1990s, Japan had displaced the United States as the largest donor to the World Bank and the Vol XXX, No 2 SEPT/OCT 1996 International Monetary Fund (IMF...
...10.Central America Report, Vol...
...Although Washington has not intervened militarily in the region in the 1990s, except in Haiti, it has retained its role as the dominant external political power...
...While this reflects the unequal distribution of wealth that plagues the region, it is also an indicator of the degree of capitalist expansion in Latin America.5 A prominant interpretation of this period holds that after the Second World War, Latin American governments across the political spectrum broadly agreed to pursue a national, inward-looking economic strategy based on a strong, interventionist state...
...economic power declines and capital from Western Europe and East Asia grows in importance in Latin America, the nature of imperialism is likely to change significantly-with wide-ranging repercussions for progressive politics...
...economic control over the hemisphere...
...8 Ulmaz Akyuz, "New Trends in Japanese Trade and Foreign Direct Investment, Post-Industrial Transformation and Policy Challenges," East Asian Development: Lesson for a New Global Environment (Geneva: UN Conference on Trade and Development, 1996...
...economic power may seem paradoxical, given that the break-up of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War seemed to herald the unprecedented hegemony of the United States worldwide...
...This may explain in part why anti-Americanism features less prominently in student and trade-union struggles than it did a generation ago...
...Postwar Latin America can be characterized as a period of rule by reactionary, authoritarian bourgeois governments that were obeisant to the United States...
...In this sense, the reactionary 1990s fit comfortably into the conservative postwar history of Latin America...
...Waxing nostalgic for Latin America's purportedly radical past glosses over the basic continuities from that era to the present...
...Of the long list of other Latin American guerrilla movements that failed to wrest state power, only the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador and Peru's Shining Path ever posed a serious threat to the ruling classes in their respective countries...
...radicals in the second half of the twentieth century have equated imperialism with U.S...
...cover of the April 1972 issue of NACLA's n America and Empire Report...
...Capitalist development in Latin America has not improved the living conditions of the vast majority of the continent's population...
...Today, 76% of the region's people live in cities...
...intervention...
...Few are the countries with the prospect of a center-left, progressive-reformist government in the foreseeable future...
...domination" almost interchangeably...
...While many see NAFTA as the ultimate expression of U.S...
...Conflating "imperialism" and U.S...
...In only three cases-Bolivia in 1952, Cuba in 1959 and Nicaragua in 1979--did insurgent movements successfully challenge authoritarian rule and imperialist domination...
...4. Projected figure for 1995, UN Development Program and World Resources, World Resources (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 287...
...It was also the largest bilateral foreign-aid donor...
...Chile-reviled by neoliberals as the country most afflicted by ISIimplemented the policy inconsistently until the mid-1950s, then abandoned it with a vengeance in 1973...
...Whether the present low ebb of mass movements should be interpreted as a fundamental change in postwar Latin America is, however, an important analytical question for the left to ponder...
...intervention The U.S...
...government just routinely obliged, funding mercenary armies or sendii in U.S...
...No period exists in Latin American history in which the progressive movement was so strong that its achievements dominated an era which it could call its own...
...The expansion of capitalist agriculture-aided in part by land reform, even when the intended outcome was otherwise-prompted a massive rural exodus...
...political and economic hegemony in Latin America was virtually complete...
...Governments and capitalists in Western Europe, Canada and East Asia have, without exception, expressed their outrage at this flagrant attempt by the United States to assert its control over Cuba-perhaps the most intense display of intercapitalist rivalry in Latin America since before the Second World War...
...troops...
...domination is also analytically problematic, since it fails to identify U.S...
...Velasco's reformist military regime (19681975) followed the ISI strategy, but it was dropped with his ouster and revived only briefly under Alan Garcia's government a decade later...
...7. Based on World Bank figures cited in the Financial Times (U.K...
...Not even the region's reformist experiments managed to bring about long-term social change...
...ince the turn of the century, U.S...
...The neoliberal right also advocates the argument that the postwar period was one during which a broad, cross-class coalition supported so-called ISI...
...Nor was ISI a Latin American version of economic nationalism...
...Perhaps the most significant change has been the rapid expansion of capitalism and capitalist social relations throughout the region...
...1 2 The development of capitalism-and the contradictions that it engenders-lay the basis for reform through the rise of the working class as an economic force...
...23, No...
...This pessimism is misplaced...
...Imperialism," as defined by the analytical Marxist and "Iradical tradition, is the process and consequences of the rivalry among capitalist states.' Competition to dominate markets, protect investments, and secure geopolitical position drives capitalist states to divide the rest of the world into spheres of influence...
...reformist efforts of the time will make the point...
...I (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970), pp...
...government just as routinely obliged, funding mercenary armies or sending in U.S...
...Yet Western European and East Asian-especially Japanese-capital is increasingly important, marking what promises to be an increase in intercapitalist rivalry in Latin America into the next century...
...Yet as U.S...
...In order to quell lower-cla mobilization, the ruling classes in Central Americi and the Caribbean routine solicited U.S...
...Today, we are on the cusp of a significant historical change, with broad implications for progressive politics in Latin America: the relative decline of U.S...
...According to Pr6bish's theory, the international terms of trade tend in the long run to move against primary products...
...Today, wage labor is more important economically in Latin America than ever before...
...In fact, it could be argued that the vast majority of Latin American countries were less protectionist and less interventionist in economic matters than the Christian-Democratic and Social-Democratic governments of Western Europe...
...The approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) seemed to indicate that this was indeed the case...
...Governments implemented a deliberate, interventionist industrial policy only intermittently, and often in the face of opposition from segments of the bourgeoisie...
...military base in Panama, and its conversion into an industrial park developed with Taiwanese capital.10 The historical parallel to these changes may very well be the shift after the First World War from British to U.S...
...Grace, United Fruit, Coca-Cola-dominated much of Latin America's economy...
...Other East Asian countries have also emerged as important players in Latin America...
...See Karl Marx, Capital, Vol...
...The ruling classes of Argentina (1954), Brazil (1964) and Chile (1973)while certainly encouraged by Washington-were quite capable on their own of crushing progressive forces clamoring for social reform...
...With the possible exception of Venezuela, ISI was not implemented consistently and seriously in any other Latin American country...
...Peru, another severe sinner in neoliberal eyes, was in the ISI camp for an even shorter period...
...The ruling classes of Central America and the Caribbean, by contrast, were often deeply divided, and lacked the power to subdue insurgent groups without Vol XXX, No 2 SEPT/OCT 1996 outside help...
...During the period of ideological and geopolitical rivalry between the two superpowers, the Soviet Union acted as a partial constraint on U.S...
...By the end of the Second World War, U.S...
...Another recent example of growing conflict among capitalist powers in Latin America is the HelmsBurton Act, which seeks to prevent foreign investment, mainly Canadian and Western European, in Cuba...
...In order to quell lower-class mobilization-and to buttress their position vis-A-vis rival elite factions-one sector of the ruling class routinely sought out U.S...
...The case of Great Britain again offers a historical precedent...
...On the contrary, only select groups have prospered, while nearly half live in poverty...
...The Zapatistas, who have explicitly stated that their movement does not seek to challenge state power, confirm this conclusion...
...June 25, 1996, p. 16...
...Yet NAFTA can be interpreted as an attempt by the United States to arrest growing East Asian and Western European influence over markets and financial investments in Latin America by constructing a regional trading bloc over which it exercises complete domination...
...The U.S...
...Local ruling classes, in league with the U.S...
...The proponents of neoliberalism blame Latin American governments' alleged inward orientation for all conceivable economic maladies, including inequality...
...This preponderance of U.S...
...According to this perspective, the rise of neoliberalism, the dismantling of so-called ISI, and the rolling back of the state's putative role in promoting economic and social welfare in the 1980s represented a dramatic shift in Latin America's political history...
...hegemony in Latin America as a general relationship within capitalism...
...8 At the same time, the influence of the United States in the international financial community has shifted notably...
...12.Victor Bulmer-Thomas, ed., The New Economic Model in Latin America and Income Distribution (London: Macmillan Press, 1996...
...In fact, the goal of "import-substitution industrialization" was not to replace foreign imports-which would have done little to change Latin America's dependency on primary-product exports-but to use the domestic market as a springboard to generate manufactured exports...
...The clearest example is the Soviet backing of the Cuban revolution, which prevented the United States from imposing a military "solution" to Cuba's assertion of independence...
...In Forbes' ranking of countries by the number of billionaires, Mexico and Brazil figure among the top ten--on par with France, Switzerland and Malaysia...
...Reality is considerably different, as inspection of the historical record shows...
...lizations against land expropriation-essentially an effort to resist proletarianization...
...At the founding of NACLA in 1966, the United States accounted for one-third of worldwide GDP...
...Peasants in places like Peru, Chile and Colombia engaged in vast mobiThe cover of the January/February 1978 issue of NACLA's Report on the Americas...
...In 1996--thirty years after the founding of NACLA-no armed insurgency seriously threatens the ruling classes in any Latin American country...
...The cover of the May/June 1973 issue of NACL America and Empire Report...
...After the Second World War, the government of Great Britain attempted to bind its colonies and former colonies closer through the creation of the "Commonwealth" in order to stave off its decline as a "Great Power...
...The relative decline in importance of the United States as an economic power in the postwar period will have significant effects on Latin America, particularly for progressive politics...
Vol. 30 • September 1996 • No. 2
