Neocolonialism and the New Imperialism
The persistent quest of the neocolonized peoples for true sovereignty
In my last commentary, I discussed the emergence of socialism with anti-colonial characteristics forged in practice from the colonial situation in Korea, Vietnam, and China, led by exceptional leaders (Kim Il-Sung, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong) who adapted the teachings of Marx and Lenin to the conditions of their particular nations. See “The conquered peoples seek a more just world: The emergence of socialism in the world of the colonized,” April 18, 2023.
The emergence of socialism with anti-colonial characteristics was itself part of a larger anti-colonial people’s revolution in Asia and Africa that was initiated in 1919 and came to culmination in the period 1946 to 1963. Exceptional leaders emerged, such as Sukarno in Indonesia, Nehru in India, Nasser in Egypt, Nkrumah in Ghana, and Nyerere in Tanzania. The emergence of the colonized as political actors on the world scene compelled the European colonial powers to concede political independence, giving the appearance of a new era of sovereign equality among nations.
However, the appearance of a new era was a deceptive façade. The colonial powers maneuvered to ensure that the essential colonial economic structures would be preserved and maintained; so that the newly independent nations would continue to export raw materials on a base of cheap labor and to import manufactured goods, in accordance with the geographical division of labor between core and periphery in the capitalist world-economy. The deception was exposed to the world in 1966 by Kwame Nkrumah in Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism,1 which describes the “economic stranglehold” in which the former colonial powers had the newly independent nations.
Decades later, the Cuban scholar and diplomat Jesús Arboleya described the key characteristics of neocolonialism. It involves a figurehead bourgeoisie in the neo-colony that is subordinate to transnational corporations and their interests, as well as financial institutions in the neo-colony that are subordinate to transnational banks and international financial agencies. Neocolonialism involves control of the political process in the neo-colony by a political class that is subordinate to the figurehead bourgeoisie and its interests, thereby ensuring the protection of the interests of the core nations and the transnational corporations based in the core nations. Moreover, neocolonialism maintains social control in the neo-colony through, first, the armed forces of the supposedly independence state, which are trained and supplied by the core power; and secondly, ideological penetration of the neo-colony and the dissemination of ideas that justify and legitimate the existing political-economic system.2
The worldwide transition to a new form of colonialism compelled the colonial powers to adopt a new form of imperialism. It was no longer of question of organizing armies to seize control of territories for incorporation in colonial empires. It was now a question of policies that were designed to forge a neocolonial political-economic-cultural situation in the once-colonized regions, so that supposedly independent nations would implement economic policies that promoted the interests of the core nations.
The spectacular ascent of the USA and its implicit neocolonial characteristics
In 1945, the United States emerged from the Second World War as the hegemonic power of the world-system, far stronger than any other nation in commerce, industrial production, international finance, prestige, and influence. In addition, the USA was in a strong position to adjust to a world-system with neocolonial characteristics, inasmuch as its own spectacular ascent in the world-system was not based primarily on conquest of vast territories but on advantageous insertion into structures previously established by European conquest and colonial domination of vast territories throughout the world.
It had been so from the beginning of the English settlement of North America. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, farmers and merchants in the New England and mid-Atlantic colonies had a lucrative trading relation with slaveholders in the Caribbean islands, who had developed plantations utilizing African slave labor to produce sugar for export to Western Europe. The North American farmers and merchants were selling food and animal products to the Caribbean landholders, enabling the North Americans to accumulate capital and expand their commerce and industry. Therefore, the major commercial centers of the New England and mid-Atlantic colonies were benefitting from advantageous insertion into the slave political-economic system in the European colonies in the Caribbean, even though slave ownership in their own region was limited and was marginal to their own economies.
During the period 1800 to 1860, there was a tremendous expansion in the USA of slavery for the production of cotton for export. This expansion, however, was confined to the South. With differing political-economic systems, the North and the South during the period were evolving into de facto separate nations. The commercial centers of the North were developing significant economic relations with the expanding slave South, structurally similar to their relations with the slave Caribbean, and in accordance with the prevailing core-peripheral relation in the capitalist world-economy. The industrial and commercial expansion of the American Republic until 1860 was based in the North, which was driving the ascent of the nation on the basis of lucrative trade relations with slave regions in the Caribbean and the U.S. South, with a very limited amount of slavery in its own geographic area.
After 1865, the American Republic undertook the conquest of the horse nomadic tribes of the Great Plains, seeing the land as the foundation for further settlement of the English and other European peoples and the commercial expansion of the nation on the basis of an agricultural economy with small independent producers. In addition, the commercial advantages of ports on both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans were recognized. The conquest of the West was attained by 1890, through the genocidal extermination and forced relocation of the conquered peoples, confining them to reservations of limited territorial extension.3
During the expansion to the West, the nation experienced the concentration of industry and banking, rendering outdated Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a nation of small agricultural producers. The process of concentration was stimulated by the “Robber Barons”, whose unfair and illegal economic practices were described by Matthew Josephson in 1934 in The Robber Barons, The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901.4
The control of petroleum, steel, and other industries by a few “Trusts” and the control of banking by Big Banks undermined the possibilities for small producers and local banks, and they also had the consequence of leaving the captains of industry in control of the U.S. government and the educational institutions and the press of the nation as well as the Church. However, the concentration of capital had the positive consequence, viewed from the perspective of human need, of increasing the productive capacity of the economy.
In the context of the political economy of “monopoly capitalism,” the concentration of capital had the unintended consequence of overproduction, that is, the production of goods in excess of the capacity of the national market to buy. The captains of industry became aware of the problem of overproduction during the Great Depression of 1892-1893. Therefore, masters of their destiny that they were, they put forth a new expansionist foreign policy that would seek new markets outside the United States for U.S. manufacturing and agricultural products. They called their proposed policy “imperialism,” and specific imperialist policy proposals found their way into the Republican Party platform of 1896.
The first practical implementation of the new imperialist foreign policy was the U.S. intervention in Cuba in 1898, and imperialism became a staple of U.S. foreign policy from that time until the 1970s, when it fell into decadence and acquired different characteristics. During the stage of imperialist vitality, there were U.S. economic, political, and/or military interventions in a number of Latin American and Caribbean countries, including Cuba, Colombia, Panama, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, Mexico, Guatemala, Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Chile, some more than once. The purpose of these interventions was to ensure economic policies supportive of U.S. economic interests. No colonial governors were appointed; the polices were carried by the governments themselves, in accordance with U.S. interests. See “The robber barons and monopoly capitalism: The origins of US imperialism in Latin America,” June 25, 2021.
The collapse of the European colonial empires in the period 1946 to 1963 established new possibilities for the United States to become an imperialist power beyond its own region. With the strongest economy in the world by far, and enjoying enormous worldwide prestige, the USA began its project of global hegemony with political intelligence, establishing the United Nations as an institution that could lend legitimacy to U.S. interests.
When the new imperialism and neocolonialism were in their heyday, from 1945 to 1965, imperialism was practiced in a form that provided political and economic space to the subordinate national bourgeoisie in the neo-colony, so that it would have a certain degree of latitude of action. This gave the subordinate figurehead bourgeoisie greater stimulus for participating in the maintenance of the neocolonial world, rather than striving for a more autonomous form of national production; and it provided the figurehead bourgeoisie with a greater capacity for maintaining social order in the neo-colony.
In the heyday of neocolonialism, the neocolonial powers would use direct military force only as a last resort, because the direct use of military force can expose the neocolonial deception of pretended democracy and false sovereignty. In general, social control was to be maintained by the government of the neo-colony.
As the U.S. global neocolonial project unfolded, it became increasingly evident that the American political establishment had entered its project of global hegemony without a scientific understanding of the structures of the world-economy. It therefore developed unintelligent internal policies, spending enormous human and financial resources in military expenditures and military presence everywhere, without a corresponding investment in continued growth in economic productivity, which is the necessary economic base for military expenditures. U.S. imperialism would thus fall into decadence, as has become increasingly evident during the last forty-five years, which I will address in subsequent commentaries.
The Cuban Revolution: Sustained resistance to the new imperialism
The supposedly independent Republic of Cuba was initiated on May 20, 1902, with the inauguration of an accommodationist pro-USA president. The new government’s economic policies intensified the US-Cuba core-peripheral relation, which had begun during the last two decades of Spanish colonial rule. By 1920, U.S. companies directly controlled 54% of Cuban sugar production, and U.S. ownership attained 80% of sugar exportation companies and mining industries. By the end of the 1930s, sugar comprised four-fifths of Cuban exports, and Cuban trade with the USA comprised three-fourths of Cuban foreign commerce. Distinct from other Latin American countries of the 1930s, Cuba had no defined policy of import-substitution and the development of national industry. The Cuban scholar Federico Chang notes that the Cuban oligarchy delivered without reserve the Cuban internal market to U.S. vendors, demonstrating its “complete subordination to the United States” and its “most abject servility.”5
From the early 1920s to the 1950s, people’s movements integrating all sectors of the people were a persistent dimension of Cuban reality, creating a situation of permanent political conflict. The Revolution of 1930, led by the first Cuban Communist Party (which had been founded in 1925) and the National Worker Confederation of Cuba (a nationwide confederation of agricultural and industrial workers), forced the resignation in 1933 of President Gerardo Machado, a would-be-reformer turned dictator. In the chaos that ensued, the U.S. ambassador maneuvered to ensure the passing of power to Fulgencio Batista, a former Army sergeant who had participated in the Sergeant’s Revolt of September 4, 1933. The maneuverings of the ambassador constituted the third U.S. intervention in Cuban internal affairs since 1898.
From 1934 to 1937, Batista initiated reforms that were designed to ensure control of the institutions of the society by the armed forces, and the Batista dictatorship had certain characteristics that are generally associated with the fascism of that era. However, in December 1937, Batista took a progressive turn, influenced by the USA, which was turning to a global anti-fascist front in support of democracy in response to the rise of fascism in Europe.
On November 15, 1939, elections were held for delegates to a Constitutional Assembly, in which eleven political parties nominated candidates. The Constitution of 1940 was advanced for its time, recognizing the full equality of all, regardless of race, color, sex, class, or similar social condition. It recognized the rights of workers with respect to employment and working hours. It recognized the principle of state intervention in the economy; and it declared natural resources to be state property. It prohibited large-scale landholdings. However, the impressive document was a dead letter, ignored by subsequent governments.
In the period 1940 to 1952, elections were held, giving the neocolonial republic the appearance of democracy. But in 1944 and 1948, there emerged a phenomenon of candidates promising reform, but once elected, they did not deliver on their promises and delivered instead increasingly high levels of corruption, including warm relations with the Italian-American mafia. In 1952, when the elections appeared to be heading to the victory of an alternative political party with committed intentions to deliver on its promises, the former dictator Batista reappeared. The March 10 coup d’état put Batista in power again; he dissolved the Congress and cancelled the presidential elections.
Fidel Castro Ruz became the maximum leader of the Cuban Revolution when he led an attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba on July 26, 1953. The assault had the intention of obtaining arms for the launching of a guerrilla war from the nearby mountains. Although it failed, the attack galvanized and awakened the people.
Fidel’s revolutionary consciousness was formed in the context of the Cuban neocolonial situation. He conceived of the revolution as in essence an anti-neocolonial revolution that sought to attain and protect the true sovereignty of the nation. A student of Cuban history and the writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, Fidel’s thinking was a synthesis of the revolutionary nationalism of José Martí and Marxism-Leninism. He was an advocate and defender of what we today might call socialism with Cuban characteristics.
In his 1953 manifesto issued following the failed Moncada assault, subsequently known as “History Will Absolve Me,” Fidel called not the workers but the people to the retaking of an unfinished revolution that had been initiated in 1868 with the declaration of a war for independence and for the abolition of slavery. Fidel declared that this single revolution, which had expressed itself in various ways during the twentieth century, was now entering a new stage of war. He called the people to the taking of political power from the hands of a corrupt political class that served the interests of the great landholders, the large companies, and the owners of rental housing and the utilities companies. He called the people to a revolution that sought to place political power in the hands of a revolutionary government that would adopt measures in accordance with the interests of the people and the needs of peasants, workers, and professionals. He proposed measures with respect to concrete problems that he described in vivid terminology: pervasive unemployment in all economic sectors; wretched rural housing conditions; unsupportable urban housing rents; high electricity rates; limited electricity in the countryside; woefully inadequate nutrition, health care, and education in the countryside; low levels of land ownership among peasants; and widespread largescale landholdings.
Without using the term “neocolonialism,” Fidel described the neocolonial structures that are the source of the impoverishment of the Cuban people: an economy dedicated to the exportation of raw materials, with the best agricultural land in foreign hands. Fidel proposed a revolutionary program of industrialization, agrarian reform in the countryside, the conversion of urban families into the owners of their houses or apartments, the elimination of large-scale landholdings, and a comprehensive reform of education.
The Moncada Program, as it came to be called, was implemented by the Cuban Revolutionary Government from 1959 to 1961, decisively and definitively striking at the heart of the neocolonial relation with the United States. The Agrarian Reform Law of May 17, 1959, expropriated large sugar and rice plantations and cattle estates, whether owned by Cubans or foreigners, distributing the land to individual peasant proprietors, peasant cooperatives, and state farms, with compensatory bonds offered to former owners. In 1960, the Cuban Revolutionary Government nationalized U.S. properties, defining the terms of compensation through a thirty-year fund that would be fed by the Cuban-USA sugar trade. The U.S. government, however, rejected this offer of mutually beneficial cooperation, opting instead for a program of regime change. As all the world knows, this stalemate remains outstanding.
Understanding that the political process in the neocolonial republic had been controlled by a foreign government and foreign capitalists, who exercised political power through a subordinate figurehead bourgeoisie and political class, the Cuban Revolution sought to establish alternatives to representative democracy and its farcical normalization of political lackeys. In the 1960s, the revolution developed a process, led by the revolutionary leadership, of mass assemblies and mass organizations. In the 1970s, the alternative process of direct people’s democracy was institutionalized through the establishment of people’s assemblies of people’s power, integrated with mass organizations of workers (including professionals), agriculturalists, women, students, and neighborhoods, guided by the moral authority of a vanguard political party. (I have written of the Cuban political process in previous commentaries; see, for example, “Cuba wins the 2023 elections: The socialist nation continues to attain legitimacy for its sovereign road,” March 28, 2023).
The persistent and surprising achievements of the Cuban Revolution with respect to health, education, science, sport, culture, political stability, and international leadership have been built on this foundation of people’s democracy and people’s power.
The Non-Aligned Movement proposes a New International Economic Order
In the global transition from colonialism to neocolonialism in the period 1946-1963, the great majority of the newly independent countries did not have the necessary conditions to establish a version of people’s democracy and sovereign control of their economies and natural resources, as was accomplished by revolutionary Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s. The great majority of countries were not able to put their dreams into practice, unable to overcome the legacy of underdevelopment and poverty, the economic structures of the world-economy, and the constant maneuverings of the former colonial powers. However, the exceptional anti-colonial leaders of the era were able to create an organization of lasting and continuing significance for the struggle for a more just world order.
The Non-Aligned Movement was established by twenty-one newly independent nations of Asia and Africa plus Yugoslavia and Cuba in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1961. Yugoslav President Josip Tito as well as Nasser, Nehru, Sukarno, and Nkrumah were present. The Founding Summit called for the democratization of the United Nations, and it called upon the four nuclear powers (USA, Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France) to eliminate their nuclear arsenals. Moreover, it declared support for the armed struggles of national liberation movements in Algeria and the Portuguese colonies in Africa.
The Non-Aligned Movement was the organized expression of the “Bandung spirit,” which was stimulated by a 1955 meeting in Bandung, Indonesia, convoked by Sukarno and attended by representatives of twenty-nine newly independent Asian and African nations, including Nehru and Nasser. Zhou En-lai of China was among the participants. The Bandung conference declared the importance of Third World unity in opposition to European colonialism and Western imperialism. It advocated economic cooperation as the base of international relations. Envisioning the end of the assigned peripheral role of their economies as exporters of raw materials and importers of manufactured goods, the Bandung conference called for the diversification of their national economies and the development of their national industries. It supported the regulation of international capital flows, and it advocated international control of arms, the reduction of military forces, and the prohibition of nuclear arms. It denounced cultural imperialism and the suppression of national cultures.
In 1973, the Non-Aligned Movement declared, at its third Summit in Algiers, that the international order continues to promote the underdevelopment of Third World nations. The Summit supported the creation of public cartels to transfer power to raw materials exporters; it called for a linking of the prices of raw materials exports to the prices of imported manufactured goods; and it affirmed the principle of the sovereignty of nations over their natural resources, including their right to nationalize property within their territories. The Summit endorsed a document on the New International Economic Order, which had been in preparation by Third World governments for a decade.
In 1974, the UN General Assembly adopted the document on a New International Economic Order, which had been prepared by the Non-Aligned Movement and was supported by the G-77 and the socialist nations. The document affirmed the principle of the sovereignty of nations over their natural resources. It advocated: the creation of raw materials producers’ associations to give raw materials exporting states control over prices; a new international monetary policy that did not punish weaker states; increased industrialization of the Third World; the transfer of technology from the advanced industrial nations to the Third World; regulation and control of the activities of transnational corporations; the promotion of cooperation among the nations of the Third World; and aid for Third World development.
In 1979, at the Sixth Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Havana, ninety-three countries of the Third World reaffirmed their commitment to national sovereignty, economic integrity, cultural diversity, and nuclear disarmament. They declared: “The Chiefs of State and Government reaffirm their deep conviction that a lasting solution to the problems of countries in development can be attained only by means of a constant and fundamental restructuring of international economic relations through the establishment of a New International Economic Order.”
Cuba, representing the Non-Aligned Movement as its President from 1979 to 1982, called upon the United Nations to respond to the desperate economic and social situation of the Third World. It proposed: an additional flow of resources to the Third World through donations and long-term low-interest credit; an end to unequal terms of trade; the ceasing of irrational arms spending, directing funds to finance development; a transformation of the international monetary system; and the cancellation of the debts of less developed countries in a disadvantageous situation.
In the early 1980s, the Non-Aligned Movement was hijacked by representatives of the Asian tigers. However, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Non-Aligned Movement would recover the revolutionary projection of its classic period, in the context of the increasingly evident decadence of the neocolonial world-system and the new imperialism, a recovery that was evident in the 2006 Summit in Havana. I will be addressing these issues in my next commentaries.
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Kwame Nkrumah, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International Publishers, 1966).
Jesús Arboleya, La Revolución del Otro Mundo: Un análisis histórico de la Revolución Cubana (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2008).
The conquest of the Native American horse nomadic societies of the Great Plains is well described in Paul K. Davis, Ed. Encyclopedia of Invasions and Conquests, 4th edition (Millerton, NY: Grey House Publishing, 2023).
Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2011). Matthew Josephson was a U.S. journalist who contributed regularly to The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The Nation. The Robber Barons was originally published in 1934 by Harcourt, Brace, and Company.
Federico Chang Pon, “Reajustes para la estabilización del sistema neocolonial” in Instituto de Historia de Cuba, La neocolonia (La Habana: Editora Política, 1998).