by Todd Gordon
IMPERIALISM WITHOUT COLONIES
Our fundamental analytical and empirical concern in this book is the role assumed by the Canadian state within the worldwide system of capitalist imperialism in relation to Latin America. It makes sense, then, to be clear conceptually from the outset about the relationship between capitalism and imperialism. A key feature of capitalism is its self-expansionary character, its compulsion to envelop the world. “The need of a constantly expanding market for its product,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote long ago in The Communist Manifesto, “chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.”5
“From its beginnings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” notes political economist David McNally, “capitalism has sought to profit from the exploitation of the peoples and natural resources around the globe.” The international dimensions of the history of capitalist development in Europe involved massive “world movements of cotton, sugar, tobacco—and, most unconscionably, of enslaved Africans,” all of which “fuelled the accumulation of capitalist wealth.” According to McNally, “the colonization of huge areas of the globe—Ireland, India, the aboriginal lands of North and South America, China, much of Africa—were all central aspects of capitalist development…capitalism has always been global in orientation.”6 “Mature capitalism,” political theorist Colin Mooers argues, “is inevitably imperialist; the outward push of capital, its search for new geographical sources of accumulation, is an inbuilt feature of the system.”7
However, when we look around the world today we do not see the same proliferation of prolonged territorial conquests and rule by colonizers over the colonized as in centuries past. Colonialism, understood strictly as the “political control of peoples and territories by foreign states, whether accompanied by significant permanent settlement (‘settler colonies’) or not” is a marginal feature of contemporary world politics.8 Has speaking of imperialism in the twenty-first century therefore lost much of its meaning? Or did imperialism become, in the wake of World War II and the decolonization of former European empires, imperialism without colonies?
Following the political theorist Ellen Meiksins Wood, we want to suggest that we live in a world in which imperialist domination no longer relies on permanent colonies. According to the dynamics of the world system today, “capitalist imperialism has become almost entirely a matter of economic domination, in which market imperatives, manipulated by the dominant capitalist powers, are made to do the work no longer done by imperial states or colonial settlers.”9 In Empire of Capital, Wood takes us on a whirlwind tour, beginning with the rhythms of the Roman Empire and ending with driving dynamics—capitalist competition, accumulation, and increasing labour productivity—at the heart of the contemporary leadership of the United States over the global economy and the hierarchically ordered world system of states. Hashing out the distinctive characteristics of a particularly capitalist imperialism is the consistent focus of Wood’s text, which moves her to juxtapose our current epoch with empires past. Wood’s aim is to unmask and underline “what drives [capitalist imperialism] and has distinguished it from other imperial forms since its inception.”10
There is one facet of Wood’s contribution that deserves special attention. She points to the analogous relationship between specific forms of domestic social relations and specific forms of imperial rule, between the operation and expansion of the domestic social relations of capitalism particularly, and the externalization of capital through capitalist imperialism. The historical record shows that there has been a tight historical association between both non-capitalist and capitalist societies, on the one hand, and their imperialisms, on the other. Non-capitalist colonial empires of the past—such as the feudal Portuguese and Spanish Empires in Latin America between the late fifteenth and early nineteenth centuries—like feudal lords in their relations with peasants, dominated territory and subjects through military conquest, often direct political rule, and therefore extensive extra-economic coercion; in contrast, capitalist imperialism “can exercise its rule by economic means, by manipulating the forces of the market, including the weapon of debt.”11 It does not follow that capitalist imperialism dispenses with the need for coercive force, as any casual perusal of the daily newspapers in the twenty-first century will attest. Indeed, as Colin Mooers suggests, “force remains indispensable both to the achievement of market ‘openness’ where it does not yet exist and to securing ongoing compliance with the rights of capital.”12 For Wood, a world defined by the near-universalization of capitalism is a relatively recent historical development and thus requires a new theory of imperialism, one that is “designed for a world in which all international relations are internal to capitalism and governed by capitalist imperatives.”13
Therefore, colonialism, understood as direct political control of peoples and territories by foreign states, whether or not through permanent settlement strategies, is best understood as merely one of the forms that imperialism has assumed historically. As Bernstein points out:
Whereas colonialism means direct rule of a people by a foreign state, imperialism refers to a general system of domination by a state (or states) of other states, regions or the whole world. Thus political subjugation through colonialism is only one form this domination might take; imperialism also encompasses different kinds of indirect control.14
In a complimentary refinement of this definition, which focuses our attention on North-South relations specifically, and which allows us to see how forms of capitalist imperialism may change over different historical periods in the rise and consolidation of capitalism as a world system while retaining some of their basic presuppositions, David McNally suggests: “imperialism is a system of global inequalities and domination—embodied in regimes of property, military power and global institutions—through which wealth is drained from the labour and resources of people in the Global South to the systematic advantage of capital in the North.”15
In sum, capitalist imperialism is characterized by deep structural inequalities between regions and countries of the world. These inequalities are exacerbated by the uneven development of global capitalist relations, and are reproduced through the active policies adopted by imperialist states and powerful international financial institutions (IFIs), such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Capitalist imperialism involves the draining of the wealth and resources of poorer countries to the benefit of capital of the Global North, at the cost of the majority of the peoples of the Global South. The majority of inhabitants of imperialized countries experience imperialism through the blunt end of economic, political, ideological, and military bludgeons. “Underdevelopment” or “dependency” in the Global South is not a necessary structural corollary of growth and development in the imperialist core—as per classical dependency theory.16 Rather, it is a product of the uneven way in which capitalist growth takes shape, itself a product of the logic internal to capitalism at the national, regional, and global levels that leads the most productive capital to concentrate in already wealthy regions and spread slowly, haltingly, and often under fairly specific conditions (for instance, to access raw materials, or in response to economic crisis at home) to other parts of the globe. What concerns us here, however, is not simply a question of uneven development, or simply market forces internal to capitalist accumulation. We are interested in the manners in which uneven development is amplified and reproduced through the actions of capitalist states of the Global North in order to create and recreate conditions to the benefit of Northern capital. In some cases, these actions benefit all capital, but because of uneven development the patterns of contemporary capitalist imperialism tend to concentrate benefits in the hands of capital from the Global North. State managers of core imperialist countries introduce policies such as structural adjustment, free trade, market liberalization, and political interference of various kinds in o
rder to structure the domestic political economies of weaker nations to the benefit of imperialist capital.
Dependency of peripheral countries on the core, therefore, is not a necessary product of capitalist accumulation, but rather the frequent outcome of the combination of uneven development and conscious actions taken by imperialist states. This is not to say imperialist states are attempting consciously to reproduce the impoverishment of dependent countries necessarily (though it may be the case in some instances), as much as they are trying to shape the political and economic dynamics of dependent states such that they remain politically subordinate to the interests of capital from the core. Patterns of dependency are, therefore, a combination of intended political action and unintended by-products of capitalist accumulation. Political economist Andrew Higginbottom points out that one can find contemporary iterations of modernization theory in the outlook of many core imperialist states, as well as in the regular publications of the World Bank and the IMF.17 Such articulations of modernization theory today argue that Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) ipso facto represents a necessary source for Third World development and improvement in the standard of living of the peoples of the Third World. And, indeed, the position is reiterated, albeit in a different register, in some Marxist theories of imperialism. 18
Ray Kiely, for example, deploys a framework of uneven development that offers important insights into the persistent political and economic asymmetries between the Global North and Global South. However, he also suggests that a principal problem facing the Global South is the lack of inflowing FDI from richer nations. The continuing concentration of FDI within and between the countries of the Global North is a central problem for Kiely.19 This overstates the concentration of FDI in the North, which is real, but in the case of Canada, for instance, there is also clear growth over the last twenty-five years in the proportion of its outward flowing FDI that targets countries of the South.20 But it also fails to problematize an economic process that is clearly not, in and of itself, beneficial to populations of the South. An increase in FDI flows does not by definition equal progress. To cite but one important example, a recent report of the Economic Commission for Latin American and the Caribbean argues:
Profits made by transnational companies operating in Latin America and the Caribbean have increased by a factor of 5.5 in nine years [up to 2011].…This surge in profits…tends to cancel out the positive impact of FDI inflows on the balance of payments. The evidence for Latin America and the Caribbean shows, in fact, that in the past few years outflows registered as FDI income were almost as high (92%) as inflows in the Caribbean.21
The same study indicates that the rate of outflow per dollar of profit earned—that is, repatriated to the home country of the multinational corporation (MNC)—is highest in the natural resources sector with over 50 percent of FDI profit in mining-centric countries being repatriated, for example. At the same time, average returns on FDI accruing to MNCs in the natural resources sector has been considerably higher than in other sectors over the last two decades, and more than double that of the second highest sector for the largest five hundred companies investing in the region.22 Due to the intersection of the liberalized natural resource regimes found throughout much of the Americas and high global commodity prices, “extremely high returns [were] obtained by corporations in the extractive industries.”23 From 2001 to 2011, FDI flows increased by a factor of approximately 2.7, or less than the increase in profits.24 The fact that liberalized tax regimes in countries of the Global South are accompanied by corporate strategies to transfer profits to jurisdictions with more permissive tax environments if necessary, means that natural resource sector growth is not typically a reliable strategy for improving economic wellbeing of people in these countries. Adding to this problem, as the ECLAC report makes clear, despite Canadian government justifications to the contrary, the natural resources sector is a poor employment generator. Mining and oil investment, for example, is the lowest job creator out of twelve major industries featured in the ECLAC report, with only 0.5 jobs created per US$1 million invested.25
This is especially important because the strategic orientation of imperialist powers such as the U.S. and Canada vis-à-vis Latin America over the last fifteen years has been driven principally by an effort to assert control over access to the region’s immense natural resource wealth. The importance of this dynamic has intensified as opportunities for accumulation have been opened up in the context of the neoliberal privatization of natural resources, and, until recently, increasing prices of basic commodities on the international market.26 At the same time, in geopolitical terms, both the U.S. and Canada have been interested in containing through persuasion, and/or eliminating through coercion, the rising tide of popular social movements and left-leaning governments in the region, an important part of whose mandates has been precisely to reclaim popular sovereign control over natural resources and reassert political and economic autonomy in the region vis-à-vis dominant external powers.27
It is worth remembering here that Latin America and the Caribbean contain 25 percent of the world’s forests and 40 percent of its biodiversity. The region contains 85 percent of all known reserves of lithium, and a third of copper, bauxite, and silver. Latin America and the Caribbean are similarly rich in coal, oil, gas, and uranium, with 27, 25, 8, and 5 percent respectively of all discovered deposits in the world currently being exploited. New underwater oil reserves, meanwhile, are regularly being discovered along the region’s vast coast lines. Finally, the region contains 35 percent of the globe’s potential hydroelectricity and the biggest reserves of fresh water under its soil.28
ECOLOGY AND RACISM
Access to the South’s natural resources, and the often disastrous ecological impact of the rapid development of economic sectors like mining, oil and gas development, and dam building, are therefore key to the dynamics of imperialism. Imperialism is an ecological phenomenon: it is shaped by ecological regimes, such as the ways in which certain natural resources have become central to capitalist accumulation and the geographical location of these natural resources, while it in turn transforms (usually destructively) local and regional ecologies in pursuit of profit, such as by blowing off the side of and clear-cutting a mountain in order to build an open-pit mine, the toxic waste from which leeches into the surrounding water system poisoning everything in the area. This connection remains undeveloped in much of the literature on imperialism, especially in accounts that stress a lack of FDI as a central issue facing poor countries without seriously considering the ecological factors motivating and resulting from the expansion of capital from the Global North into the South. Canadian FDI, as we discuss, is inserted into the wider system of global capitalism, which is based on an insatiable thirst for non-renewable resources, increasingly found in the Third World. Inevitably running alongside Canadian efforts to expand FDI is a series of initiatives that aim to weaken already poor environmental regulations.29
Predictably, imperialist powers downplay the environmentally and socially destructive nature of capitalist expansion and their aggressive free market policies. In so doing, their defense of market liberalization and FDI mobilizes, explicitly or implicitly, racist tropes about the backward peoples of the Third World, mired in poverty and debt and unable to help themselves. This is a recurring theme throughout our book. Imperialism and racism, as noted earlier, have been intimately connected through the history of capitalism, rooted as it is, in part, on colonialism. As is the case of ongoing capitalist expansion within Canadian borders, much of the land Canadian resource companies are pursuing in Latin America is inhabited by indigenous peoples. Canadian natural resource companies often ignore indigenous claims to the land, and act as if these territories were terra nullius: empty and going to waste. It is up to MNCs to transform that land into a source of commerce and profit, and any indigenous communities that challenge the authority of investors—that are not grateful for the help foreign invest
ors are bestowing upon them—are seen as obstacles to progress—that is, they are to be removed, by force if necessary. The mere fact that they do not demonstrate reverence to the interests behind capitalist development, and see the land as more than a means for capitalist exploitation, is cause for them to be dismissed as backward and naïve. This worldview also regularly provides justification for the repression of indigenous communities in resource-rich areas by legal and illegal security forces. Given the history of capitalism within Canadian borders, Canadian business and political leaders are well practiced in these dynamics.
Ecological destruction of indigenous or poor peasant communities in the South transforms those communities in profound ways. Dislocated from the land and its resources, indigenous patterns of social reproduction are undercut, putting new pressures on women in particular who are often the primary caregivers for the young. The ability to sustain themselves on the land is threatened, and greater integration into market relations is encouraged by the IFIs and national aid programs, including Canada’s. But the sheer scale of displacement from the land over the last two decades has meant that market relations in poorer countries are not a realistic option for survival for most people. The natural resources sector, as we have noted, has very low employment levels as a ratio of investment. The growth of low-wage manufacturing zones in the Third World has drawn millions of dispossessed peasants, primarily women, in search of work, despite extremely poor working conditions. The new proletarians are desperate to eke out an existence on the rough margins of global capitalism. For many others, the only option for survival is migration to the Global North, leaving family behind in a desperate search for work at what is, inevitably, the very bottom end of the labour markets in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. In the Global North, racist exploitation of migrant labour is cloaked in the language of citizenship to exclude these foreign-born workers from the basic rights won by workers born in places such as Canada and the U.S. In the neoliberal age of global mass migration—the scale of which is unparalleled in history—the social reproduction of increasing numbers of poor people of colour is an international process.30