The structures of the neocolonial world-system
The structures of the neocolonial world-system
Understanding racism in global and historical (colonial) context
The most serious limitation of the woke ideology is that it does not escape the pervasive ethnocentrism of present-day U.S. thought, such that its critique of racism understates the global and historical context that has shaped racism in the nation. As a result of this limitation, the woke erroneously emphasizes the alleged racism of historic figures and contemporary individuals; it fails to call the peoples of the United States to participation in the present global movement by peoples of color to attain fundamental changes with respect to unjust global neocolonial structures.
Modern racism emerged in the context of the Western European conquest of the world from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, which was a modern and more technologically advanced expression of the historical human tendency toward conquest of neighboring nations and peoples in the formation of empires and civilization. The modern conquest, consistent with historical tendencies, was driven by the quest of nations as well as corporations and individuals for wealth and power.
Modern racism was created as a justification of the world conquest, utilizing the biologically unimportant but readily visible fact that the conquering peoples had lighter skin color, a consequence of the fact that their ancient ancestors had migrated to colder climates, and their biological evolution favored lighter skin, for its greater capacity to absorb the rays of the sun in conditions of more limited exposure to sunlight, due to the covering necessary in colder climates. Modern science joined the cause of justification, legitimating racial differentiation by imposing racial categories on an empirical reality characterized by gradations in skin coloring, in accordance with ancient migratory trends in and across various geographical regions.
During the great expansion of the world-system from 1750 to 1914, the use of religion to impose restrictions and obligations on the conquered fell out of favor, due to its decline among the colonizers themselves, and due to its capacity to be remedied with conversion. Racism was more effective, classifying persons into categories that rendered them genetically inferior as a permanent condition.
By historical standards of conquest, the Western European conquest of the world from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries was oriented to the long term. It effectively created relatively permanent local and global structures that ensured the continuous access of the conquering nations to the cheap labor and natural resources of the conquered peoples. In addition, destroying or disrupting the traditional manufacturing capacities of the conquered, the colonial powers had access to markets beyond their borders for the manufactured goods that were beyond the capacities of their own economies to consume. Moreover, the colonial process created an educated elite that would rule the masses in the name of the colonizers.
As is a normal human tendency, the conquered peoples resisted the conquest by taking up arms, except in conditions that its fruitlessness was evident, laying down arms only when options were limited. But as the colonial edifice was constructed through the passing of years and generations, the colonized began to struggle in and through the institutions and structures of the colonial process itself. They sought to take political control of the structures established by colonial domination, becoming independent nations with full and equal rights in the modern community of nation-states. The process played out differently in Latin America as against Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean, but during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the colonized peoples were able to attain political independence.
But it was not true independence or genuine sovereignty. What emerged was a neocolonial world-system, characterized by formal political independence for the neocolonized in the context of control of the world-economy by the ex-colonial powers.
Imperialism emerged as the policy of the ex-colonial powers, a policy of interference in the affairs of the supposedly independent nations of the world. Imperialist policies support accommodationist political movements in the neocolonies, and they provide aid to governments that are able to repress and contain nationalist popular movements that seek a more autonomous road. When recalcitrant governments emerge in the neocolonies, imperialist governments impose economic sanctions, support coups d’état, and/or carry out military interventions.
By the post-World War II era, the United States had emerged to become the dominant imperialist power. The USA was an exceptional case on several counts. The European conquest of the indigenous nations of North America was tied to the formation of a large-scale white settler society, economically and socially divided between an economy of small independent farmers and merchants in the North and Midwest, and a plantation economy of African slaves in the South. Unlike the European colonial powers, the spectacular economic ascent of the United States was not based directly on colonial domination but on several key factors: a lucrative trading relation with the slaveholders of the Caribbean; the lucrative triangular trade within the United States among emerging northeastern industry, midwestern farmers, and the slave South; territorial expansion through the conquest of the West and indigenous nations; the concentration of industry and banking via the amoral practices of the Robber Barons; imperialist policies, involving continuous interference in the affairs of Latin American and the Caribbean nations, seeking to protect U.S. economic interests; and profits from the two world wars of the twentieth century, culminating in the development of a military-industrial complex. Never a colonial power, the USA became a major imperialist power in the neocolonial era by strategically inserting itself into the world-economy that had been forged by the European colonial powers. By the end of the Second World War, the United Sates had risen to become the hegemonic core power, which is to say, the most economically, financially, and militarily dominant nation among those global powers that were at the center of the world-economy, which were economically benefitting from the exploitation of the nations and peoples of the world. In world-systems terminology, the United States had emerged to become the hegemonic core power of the capitalist world-economy and the neocolonial world-system.
The neocolonial world-system pretends that an international system of equal and sovereign states has been established. But it is a great deception, in that the former colonial powers indirectly control supposedly sovereign states in order to maintain the exploitative economic structures established during the colonial era. Thus, the past survives in the present in an indirect and less manifest form.
However, the transition to neocolonialism means that colonialism and racism in their traditional forms have been eliminated by the world-system. Certain democratic principles had to be conceded to the Third World movements of national liberation, and their practical implementation is necessary for the legitimacy of the neocolonial world order. Accordingly, in the second half of the twentieth century, the European colonial empires disintegrated; white settler societies in Africa were dismantled; and the United States brought to an end its system of Jim Crow segregation, changes that were supported by corresponding transformations in ideologies, laws, and customs.
Accordingly, racism continues to exist, but it is not systemic. The system is opposed to racism and has been for half a century, as it must be, for the sake of its own legitimacy. These fundamental dynamics are not negated by residual survivals and pockets of resistance to the new norms of racial democracy, which the system itself opposes.
Therefore, the neocolonial era is post-racist. Once the neocolonial world-system reached maturity, justifications of imperialist policies were no longer based on the race and supposed racial inferiority of the peoples of the neocolonies. Today, interventions are justified on the basis of alleged violations of the rules of the international order, backed by ideological manipulations and misinformation, taking advantage of the ethnocentric ignorance of the people about the world.
But the neocolonial world order is not sustainable in the long run, for two reasons. First, colonialism expanded by conquering new lands and peoples, and the world-system reached the geographical limits of the earth during the twentieth century. Thus, the fundamental engine driving the economic growth of the system has been taken away. Secondly, the colonized peoples were not satisfied with the transition to neocolonialism. They have settled for nothing less than true sovereignty, with control over their natural resources and the capacity to develop political-economic systems in accordance with their own principles, concepts, and traditions. Therefore, the world-system simultaneously confronted a fixed geographical constraint on its capacity to expand and a sustained and determined resistance from the neocolonized peoples.
In the face of this situation, reason would suggest a changing of priorities and goals by the power elite. But it demonstrated its incapacity for such a shift. Instead, it sought to reinforce control, through aggressive economic policies and through military aggression. It turned in the 1980s to the global imposition of neoliberal policies on the nations of the world, with the pretext that the reduction of state regulation of economies was necessary to improve the productivity of national economies. Following 9/11, it turned to wars of aggression, with the pretext of waging a “war against terrorism.” Thus, the United States has launched endless wars and has imposed economic sanctions on a variety of nations that defy U.S. rules and seek an autonomous road. With the passage of time, the military attacks and the economic sanctions are increasingly lacking in credibility, provoking a great fall of prestige in the hegemonic nation that, despite its imperialist project, was greatly admired in the world.
The economic sanctions and the endless wars have led to a further deterioration of the U.S. economy, because they involve excessive state expenditures, underinvestment in the national economy, and a loss of opportunities for mutually beneficial trade with other nations. Seeking to preserve its hegemony in a superficial form, U.S. policies have undermined the great economic advantage that the U.S. held over other core powers at the end of World War II, while China and other emerging powers also have closed the gap. But the USA remains the world’s strongest military power, so it increasingly uses military force and the threat of force to attain its imperialist objectives, constituting by far the greatest threat to world peace.
The colonized have been speaking in resistance to colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism. My narrative formulated above on the colonial foundations of today’s European-centered neocolonial world-system is a narrative that I have learned from the colonized, formulated by the principal leaders and intellectuals of the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean since the 1950s, which also attained expression in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a dimension of the black power movement and black nationalist thought; Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were among its contributors.
The classic period of the Third World project was from 1955, when the leaders of newly independent states met in Bandung, Indonesia; to 1983, which was the last year of Cuba’s first presidency of the Non-Aligned Movement. Its greatest achievements during the classic period were the forming of the Non-Aligned Movement, an organization of governments, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1961; and the passage by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1974 of its proposal for a New International Economic Order, which declared, among other things, the right of nations to sovereign control of their natural resources and to non-interference in their affairs.
The Third World critique of the modern world-system continues to be expressed today by leaders in vanguard socialist and progressive nations in the Third World. From the period 1983 to 2000, the Non-Aligned Movement had been hijacked by accommodationists to Western interests, led by representatives of the “Asian Tigers.” But the classic Third World agenda was retaken by the Movement beginning in 2000, culminating in the second Cuban presidency from 2006 to 2009, which was followed by the presidencies of Iran (2013-2016) and Venezuela (2016-2019). The renewal of the Third World project was led by Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, which declared “Socialism for the Twenty-First Century,” and which were accompanied by Cuba, persistent in its socialism. In the renewed manifestation of the Third World project, Third World nations have advanced much further in the implementation of the concept of South-South cooperation in practice.
Today, the Non-Aligned Movement has 120 member states representing three-quarters of humanity, and it has the ideological and economic cooperation of China. The Movement today reconfirms the commitment of the neocolonized to the rights of nations to true sovereignty and to control of their natural resources; and it continues to uphold the principal of mutually beneficial trade among nations as the necessary road to global economic prosperity and world peace. Many Third World leaders today speak out against the most recent policies and maneuvers of the neocolonial powers: neoliberalism, aggressive militaristic imperialism, the unilateral imposition of economic sanctions, soft imperialism under the pretext of democracy, and the global war against terrorism. Third World nations are seeking to construct, bit by bit, in theory and practice, an alternative, more just, democratic, and sustainable world-system.
The Nineteenth Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was held in Kampala, Uganda on January 19-20, 2024; with the slogan “Deepening cooperation for shared global affluence.” The Uganda Chairmanship of 2024 to 2027 has put forth the Ten Bandung Principles that have guided the work of the Movement, including: respect for fundamental human rights, and for the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations; respect for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all nations; recognition of the equality of all races and of the equality of all nations, large and small; abstention from intervention or interference into the internal affairs of another country; refraining from acts or threats of aggression or the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any country; settlement of all international disputes by peaceful means, such as negotiation, conciliation, arbitration, or judicial settlement; and promotion of mutual interests and cooperation.
I prefer the term “Third World” over “global South,” because the former term was meant to convey a movement with goals that were different from those of the West or the socialist bloc headed by the Soviet Union. The Third World movement was profoundly influenced by key concepts from, on the one hand, Western bourgeois republicanism and Marxism; and on the other hand, Marxism-Leninism and Soviet-led socialism. But it formulated a third option, based on a synthesis of the Western ideas and Eastern European socialism with traditional concepts in its own diverse nations and regions, on a foundation of analysis of its neocolonial situation. Although the Third World vision fell into confusion during the last two decades of the twentieth century, it remained alive in the hopes of the neocolonized peoples. It experienced renewal during the twenty-first century, with the young Venezuelan military officer Hugo Chávez and an elderly Fidel Castro playing a leading role in stimulating the renewal. In its second stage, the Third World project continues and reaffirms the principles and concepts of its classic period. The Third World project is alive, more vibrant and expansive than before. It has demonstrated its capacity to assimilate all reasonable claims with respect to gender, ecology, indigenous rights, and sexuality. It is an unfinished project that represents the unfulfilled hopes of the colonized peoples of the world, the fulfillment of which is necessary for the future of humanity.
The Third World critique of the neocolonial world-system is overlooked by public discourse of the United States, including the woke ideology. It is a major oversight, leading to a misreading of the human situation today, debilitating the capacity of U.S. intellectuals and leaders to discern the source of social problems and to see the path to their resolution; and obscuring the process through which we arrive to understand.
Links to previous commentaries on the origin, development, and current structures and contradictions of the world-system can be found in the Thematic Index. Click on “Explore Previous Posts,” and scroll down to the third category, “The capitalist world-economy and the modern world-system.”
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