The Latin American revolutionary/reform movements of today are developing, in both theory and practice, an alternative world-system.  They have taken the lead in the transformation of the world undertaken by the colonized and neocolonized peoples of the Third World, a process of global transformation that has been unfolding for 200 years, seeking to transform the basic structures of colonialism and neocolonialism.

      The Third World revolution expresses not merely what appears to be true and right from a Third World point of view.  It expresses the most advanced human understanding of the true and the right in the present stage of human social and cultural development.  We who pertain to the North develop our understanding in the limited context of horizons that emerge in positions of privilege that have been established by structures of colonial and neocolonial domination.  But the Third World movements look at the world-system from the vantage point of the colonized and the exploited,  a vantage point that makes possible insights into global structures of domination that are not possible from the vantage point of privilege.  The Third World movements are pushing human understanding of societies to a more advanced stage.  We in the North can learn this advanced understanding, if we engage in sustained encounter with the Third World movements, and if we permit the desire to understand to take priority over other desires.

     The Third World national liberation movements have been anti-imperialist but not anti-Western.  As they sought to formulate understandings that would be integral to their liberation, they appropriated insights from the West, adapting them to the colonial situation.  Thus they took seriously the values of the American and French Revolutions and the insights emerging from the European proletarian movements from 1830s to 1920s, formulated by Marx and Lenin. 

       Therefore, as we seek to understand the Third World Revolution, we must develop an understanding of its perspective on the Western revolutions.  We must ask the question: What were the most important insights of the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Western European workers’ movement, and the Russian Revolution from the vantage point of the movements of the Third World? 

     Reflections on the insights that emerge from these revolutions and movements will be the subject of future posts.  We begin in the next post with the American Revolution.

     At a later point in time, during the last decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, the Third World movements also would appropriate and adapt the womanist and ecological ideas that were gaining force in the West.  These issues too will be discussed in relation to the current deep structural crisis of the world-system, which provides the social and political context in which the Third World movements today are developing.

Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective

      Let us take stock of where we are. Drawing upon the Catholic philosopher Bernard Lonergan, I have tried to show that we can arrive at an objective and social scientific understanding of the modern world-system through personal encounter with the social movements formed by the peoples of the Third World (see “Personal Encounter” 7/25/2013 and “Cross-horizon encounter” 7/26/2013).  And in a number of posts on the development of the world-system, I have tried to formulate the key insights that emerge through such encounter, insights that enable us to understand that the European conquest and peripheralization of vast regions of the world from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries established the foundation for the present neocolonial world-system.  We who pertain to the peoples of the North, even though we materially benefit from global neocolonial structures, can arrive at this objective understanding, if we have the discipline to engage in sustained encounter, and if we are committed to understanding and not to the defense of particular interests.

      Conquest is not new in human history.  When humans developed food production in seven different regions of the world from 10,000 to 5,000 years ago, the foundation was established for economic and cultural development through the conquest of neighboring lands and peoples. 

     Food production had definite advantages over foraging.  By increasing both the quantity and the reliability of the food supply, it made possible the emergence of social classes not directly involved in food production and able to devote themselves to a wide variety of occupations.  Humans began to live in vibrant cities with markets, streets, temples, and palaces.  They developed crafts such as spinning, weaving, brick making, and metallurgy.  They invented new technologies.  They expanded trade and commerce.  They created sculpture, mural art, writing systems, weights, measures, mathematics, and new forms of political and social organization.

     But there also were clear disadvantages to food production.  It led to social inequality and to systems of social stratification that constructed ideological legitimations of inequality.  Generally those at the bottom were incorporated into the system through conquest.  The conquered peoples formed a lower class of forced laborers that originated from different cultures, ethnic groups, and/or nations.  In this way, class inequality and ethnic/national/“racial” domination have been intertwined throughout the history of domination in human societies.   Meanwhile, alongside class/ethnic domination, gender domination emerged as an important social phenomenon in the system of social stratification, and patriarchal ideologies justifying the exclusion and devaluation of women came into being.  And food production has environmental consequences.  It kills the diverse species of trees and plants of the natural environment, and renders the environment unlivable for a wide variety of animal species. 

     And so for 10,000 years our species has developed with an intertwined duality: on the one hand, great achievements in production, science, technology, literature, art, and music; and on the other hand, structures of domination that devalue the majority of people and that degrade the environment.  But the achievements could not have been attained without the domination, because domination established the material conditions necessary for the development of human resources.  Thus we see that domination and development are dialectically related: domination makes possible development, which in turn makes possible further domination.  Let us give name to this central human tendency since the agricultural revolution:  the dialectic of domination and development. 

     In the modern era, the dialectic of domination and development would reach an advanced expression.  Beginning with the sixteenth century Spanish conquest of America, the tendency for more powerful human groups to dominate other human populations became global.  By the beginning of the twentieth century, European nations had conquered nearly all of the American continents as well as most of Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.  Global structures of domination emerged, far surpassing in scope and depth the structures of domination of the earlier empires.  Vast regions of the world became obligated to provide cheap raw materials to feed the consuming and manufacturing center of the world-economy.  With their traditional manufacturing destroyed, the conquered regions were compelled to purchase the goods of the manufacturing center.  Unprecedented levels of human inequality emerged.  The new international elite became far more wealthy and powerful than the elites of the earlier empires that were based on merely regional domination and a primarily agricultural economy.  Meanwhile, the masses of the vast peripheral regions, whose ancestors had formed in many cases great civilizations, were reduced to forced and cheap laborers amidst social conditions of underdevelopment and widespread poverty.

     These modern global structures of domination have become institutionalized in a modern world-economy characterized by a geographical division of labor between core and periphery.  The periphery assumes the economic function of exporting raw materials, on a base of forced and cheap labor, to the core.  The core functions as the manufacturing center, on a base of relatively high wages.  This function has enabled the core to become consuming societies with advanced forms of manufacturing, technology, and science.  There has emerged an unequal exchange between the high priced manufactured goods of the core and cheap raw materials of the periphery, an unequal exchange that is central to the exploitative core-peripheral relation.  

     At the same time, the modern global structures of domination have established the conditions that make possible their negation, in that modern social conditions have provided fertile ground for social movements that envision human liberation from structures of domination. 

     Thus far, we have sought to understand the historic development of modern structures of colonial domination that established the foundation for the present neocolonial world-system.  In subsequent posts, we will seek to understand the historic development of movements that seek human liberation, movements that make evident the essential dignity of our species.

 

References

Diamond, Jared.  1999.  Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.  New York: W.W. Norton.

Kottak, Conrad Phillip.  2011.  Anthropology:  The Exploration of Human Diversity, Fourteenth Edition.  Boston:  McGraw-Hill.

Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, food production, agricultural revolution, Jared Diamond

Posted August 16, 2013

So wrote Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano in 1970, giving classic expression to an image that portrays the relation between Latin America and the centers of global power.  For Galeano, it was a question of the relation between the development of some nations and the underdevelopment of others:

     The exploitation of the natural resources of Latin America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was principally an exploitation of gold and silver, which was found in great quantities in the Mexican plateau and in high plateaus of the Andes, and in lesser quantities in the riverbeds of the Caribbean.  The Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires and the Caribbean peoples established access to the minerals.  

     The gold and silver made possible the economic development of Europe.  “The metals robbed from the new colonial dominions stimulated European economic development, and it even can be said that they made it possible” (Galeano 2004:40-41; 1997:23).  But the gold and silver stimulated the development of northwestern Europe, not the development of Spain, because the Spanish purchased manufactured goods from northwestern Europe.  As Galeano expresses it, “The Spanish had the cow, but it was others who drank the milk” (2004:41; 1997:23).  “Neither Spain nor Portugal received the benefits of the sweeping advance of capitalist mercantilism, although their colonies were those that, in substantial measure, supplied the gold and silver that fueled this expansion” (Galeano 2004:47; 1997:29).

     Gold also was discovered by the Portuguese in its colony of Brazil, and they developed gold mines first in Minas Gerais and later and more extensively in Ouro Preto. During the course of the eighteenth century, the Portuguese colony exported more gold than the Spanish colonies had exported during the previous two centuries.  This was accomplished through imposition of a harsh system of slavery on indigenous and imported African populations.  As had occurred with the Spanish, this process promoted the development of British manufacturing rather than that of Portugal, as the silver was used by the Portuguese to purchase manufactured goods from the English, and in addition, the colony of Brazil was opened to British manufacturing (Galeano 2004:73-81; 1997:51-58).

     The Open Veins of Latin America is a classic work that formulates the role of conquest and colonialism in promoting the development of the West and the underdevelopment of the Third World, as understood from the Third World perspective.  In 2008, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave a copy of the book to newly inaugurated US president Barack Obama.  It was a significant gesture by Chávez, offered at a time in which some had hope that Obama would take US policy in a new direction.  The gesture was an indication of the importance that Latin American revolutionary leaders give to intellectual work in general, and this book in particular, and it also symbolized the enduring hope in Latin America for a future time of cooperation between North and South.

     Eduardo Galeano was a young man when he wrote The Open Veins of Latin America.  His recent articles can be found at Cubadebate:  http://www.cubadebate.cu/categoria/autores/eduardo-galeano/


References

Galeano, Eduardo.  1997.  The Open Veins of Latin America: Five centuries of the pillage of a continent, 25th Anniversary Edition.  Translated by Cedric Belfrage.  Forward by Isabel Allende.  New York: Monthly Review Press.

__________.  2004.  Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina, tercera edición, revisada.  México: Siglo XXI Editores.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, state, gold, silver, Galeano

Posted August 22, 2013

      The expansion of the world-economy after 1750 led to prosperity for the Latin American agricultural and cattle sectors that were tied to the mining industry, giving the Spanish colonies the capacity to export other raw materials in addition to minerals.  Conceding to demands from these sectors, the Spanish government announced reforms in 1778 and 1782 that legalized exports to Spanish markets of sugar, tobacco, cocoa, and leather.  But Spain was lagging behind Northwestern Europe in manufacturing capacity, levels of capital, and standard of living, and it therefore was increasingly unable to adequately supply manufactured goods and investment capital to Latin America and to provide sufficient markets for Latin American raw materials exports.  So the Latin American agricultural and cattle sectors had interest in direct commercial relations with other core nations.  Spain was obstructing the development of such commerce, and it was imposing burdensome taxes in order to sustain the colonial empire (Regalado 2007:104-6; Weaver 1994; Frank 1979:164-71).

     So there emerged conflicts of interest at the end of the eighteenth century, as has been explained by the Cuban scholar Roberto Regalado.  On the one hand, there was an emerging conflict between the Latin American elite and Spain.  The Latin American elite had an interest in free trade with European and American markets, whereas Spain (and Spaniards in America) had an interest in maintaining the monopoly of the Spanish crown over trade with the Spanish colonies.  At the same time, there was emerging another conflict of interest between the Latin American elite and the popular sectors.  The former had an interest in maintaining its economic and social control of the colony, whereas the latter had an interest in fundamental changes in the colonial system of class and ethnic stratification (Regalado 2007:106-7)

     By the early nineteenth century, these conflicts of interest gave rise to independence movements in Latin America.  The movements were formed by planters, farmers, small and medium-sized producers, merchants, intellectuals, and artisans; and they were influenced by the Enlightenment, American (U.S.) Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Haitian Revolution.  As a result of the two simultaneous conflicts of interest, there were in the Latin American independence movement two ideological tendencies that Regalado has called oligarchic and progressive.  The oligarchic orientation sought to attain independence while maintaining the socioeconomic status quo, and this approach was favored by the elite participants in the independence movement.  On the other hand, the popular sectors had a progressive orientation, envisioning independence from Spain as establishing the possibility for fundamental socioeconomic change, including the abolition of slavery as well as other measures in defense of the poor (2007:107-8). 

     The independence movements resulted in the establishment of independent Latin American republics, but the new republics were not truly independent, as we will discuss in the next post.

References

Frank, Andre Gunder.  1979.  Dependent Accumulation and Underdevelopment.  New York:  Monthly Review Press.

Regalado, Roberto.  2007.  Latin America at the Crossroads: Domination, Crisis, Popular Movements, and Political Alternatives.  New York: Ocean Press.

Weaver, Frederick Stirton.  1994.  Inside the Volcano:  The History and Political Economy of Central America.  Boulder:  Westview Press.

Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, capitalism, peripheralization

Posted August 23, 2013

     To be genuinely independent, the new American republics of the early nineteenth century would have had to follow an autonomous road to economic and social development, one that was not shaped by the interests of the core powers.  This would have required that the Latin American republics unify politically and integrate economically, in order that they would have the political and the economic capacity to resist the efforts at penetration by the world´s most advanced economies.  Such unity and integration was advocated by Simón Bolívar, the leading figure of the progressive tendency in the South American independence struggle.  However, it was not possible to accomplish the union and integration envisioned by Bolívar, because, as Cuban scholar Roberto Regalado has observed, “the Americas lacked a level of capitalist economic development and social structure that could serve as a basis for their integration” (Regalado 2007:108), that is, they lacked sufficient manufacturing capacity and capital as well as finance structures and a transportation infrastructure oriented toward regional integration.

      The global powers of the era did not immediately penetrate Latin America, due to limitations in the availability of capital, so the new republics enjoyed a brief period of true independence from 1825 to 1850.  British economic penetration began after 1850 and grew considerably after 1880.  British domination of Latin American economies continued until the Great Depression of the 1930s, when British capital was displaced by that of the United States.  U.S. economic penetration of Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and South America emerged as a policy goal after 1850, and it was effectively accomplished by the 1930s (Regalado 2007:111-18).

     The Latin American republics of the nineteenth century were in some respects neocolonies of Great Britain.  However, the Cuban scholar Jesus Arboleya considers them to have been semi-colonies rather than neocolonies, because not all of the characteristics of neocolonial domination were present.  The capitalist world-economy had not yet arrived to the stage of finance capital, and thus British penetration was commercial rather than financial, involving an exchange of manufactured goods for raw materials without control of banking and financial institutions.  In addition, competition from the United States, also seeking economic penetration of Latin America, prevented Great Britain from establishing full economic control (Arboleya 2008:8-9, 42).   In the twentieth century, the United States would establish neocolonial domination in all of its aspects with respect to Latin America, forging an exemplary neocolonial system, a theme that we will explore in future posts.

     The emergence of the Latin American republics as semi-colonies during the nineteenth century was a consequence of political action taken by key actors that had an interest in the preservation of the core-peripheral relation: the Latin American estate bourgeoisie, whose raw materials products were sent to the core; Latin American merchants tied to the core-peripheral trade; and the industrialized and industrializing nations of the core that utilized peripheral raw materials, especially Britain and the United States.  The embryonic Latin American urban industrial bourgeoisie, which had an interest in an autonomous development that would strengthen the domestic market, lost out (Regalado 1997:109-10).

     Among the losers also were the popular classes and sectors.  The core-peripheral relation depended on low prices for Latin American exports based on low-waged labor.  A social and economic transformation that would benefit the popular classes could not occur without a rupture with the peripheral role, consciousness of which would general anti-neocolonial popular struggles during the twentieth century.

     The Latin American semi-colonial republics of the nineteenth century came to be characterized by military dictatorships or authoritarian civilian governments, supported directly or indirectly by the Latin American estate bourgeoisie.  The military provided to some extent an escape valve, in that it was a mechanism for upward mobility for the impoverished rural masses.  But the mechanisms of force used by the military were instrumental in maintaining control over the popular sectors, whose basic rights and needs were denied (Regalado 2007:109-10). 


References

Arboleya, Jesús.  2008.  La Revolución del Otro Mundo: Un análisis histórico de la Revolución Cubana.  La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.

Regalado, Roberto.  2007.  Latin America at the Crossroads: Domination, Crisis, Popular Movements, and Political Alternatives.  New York: Ocean Press.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, capitalism, peripheralization, estate bourgeoisie, military dictatorship

Posted August 26, 2013

     The penetration of foreign capital in Latin America during the semi-colonial republics of the nineteenth century destroyed what had been, prior to independence, an emerging industrial development, which had been developing in spite of the limitations imposed by Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule.  At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a significant textile manufacturing industry had developed in Mexico, Peru, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, and Argentina.  But it was newer than British textile manufacturing, and its transportation infrastructure was not sufficiently developed.  It therefore could not compete with British manufacturing. Under the control of the landlords and the merchants, the newly independent Latin American republics adopted a policy of free trade, rather than protecting infant Latin American industry through tariffs and other mechanisms (Galeano 1997:173-81).

      Thus the economic relation that emerged between Britain and the Latin American republics in the nineteenth century was a core-peripheral relation.  Britain exported textiles and other manufactured goods to Latin America and imported cattle products from Argentina, guano and nitrates from Peru, copper from Chile, sugar from Cuba, and coffee from Brazil (Galeano 1997:174, 177).  This core-peripheral relation benefitted the Latin American estate bourgeoisie, because it provided markets for the Latin American raw materials, and because it was an arrangement that provided for the landlords cheaper manufactured goods than would be possible under protected national industry.  And it expanded business for merchants connected to the core-peripheral trade.

       But the core-peripheral relation undermined Latin American industry, and it thus weakened the emerging urban industrial bourgeoisie, which was in an embryo stage of development and did not have sufficient influence over political structures to defend its interests. Ultimately, for a project of industrialization to be successful, the domestic market would have to be expanded, and this would require raising the standard of living of the superexploited rural masses, which formed the majority of the population.  However, such an improvement in the standard of living of the rural peasantry and the working class would undermine the position of the Latin American estate bourgeoisie, whose exportation of raw materials was based on an international standard of superexploited low wage labor.  The Latin American estate bourgeoisie therefore always has been opposed to the development of a “genuine national capitalism” (Galeano 1997:185).

       The core-peripheral relation and free trade policies were integrally connected.  Free trade rejects tariff protection of national industry.  The defenders of free trade claim to be promoting a free market, but they ignore a fundamental fact: the prevailing social and economic conditions of underdevelopment and mass poverty were not established by a free market, but by brute force, in the form of conquest and forced labor.  In the context of these social and economic conditions, a newly independent government that seeks true independence would have to act decisively in the economy, seeking to promote autonomous industrial development and an improvement in the standard of living of the masses.  The protection of infant national industry would simply be one measure in a comprehensive plan for autonomous national development.  But free trade negates this possibility, and it promoted the deepening of the core-peripheral relation during the semi-colonial republics of the nineteenth century

       The free trade policies of the nineteenth century did not emerge from a political vacuum.  They were promoted by particular social classes, namely, the landed estate bourgeoisie and successful merchants of the periphery, which acted in alliance with the core.  These classes defended their particular interests at the expense of the well-being of the nation as a whole in the long term.  They disseminated ideologies that confused and divided the people.  It could be said of them that their conduct was self-interested and unpatriotic.  Indeed, such would be said of them and their contemporary kindred spirits by the popular anti-neocolonial movements that emerged during the twentieth century and that continue today.


References

Galeano, Eduardo.  1997.  The Open Veins of Latin America: Five centuries of the pillage of a continent, 25th Anniversary Edition.  Translated by Cedric Belfrage.  Forward by Isabel Allende.  New York: Monthly Review Press.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, capitalism, peripheralization, estate bourgeoisie, free trade

     Interrelated with control of the production and commercialization of petroleum by the Venezuelan state (see “Petroleum and Venezuela” 10/21/2013), there is the issue of Venezuelan participation in OPEC. Venezuela (along with Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and Kuwait) had been one of the five founding members of OPEC in 1960.  At that time, government income from oil production in the oil producing countries represented no more than 6 or 7% of the final price for a barrel of oil. OPEC was formed with the intention of establishing a just price for the producing countries petroleum and facilitating their economic independence.  During the 1960s, OPEC was able to become stronger by incorporating new members.  Using a strategy of controlling production in order to protect prices and conserve petroleum reserves, OPEC declared higher prices in 1973, generating the first oil price shock, as oil prices nearly quadrupled during 1973 and 1974 (Pichs 2006:152-54).

      However, the OPEC strategy did not break the neocolonial relation. The transnational petroleum companies, which control the refining and commercialization of the final product, passed the higher prices to the consumers.  And the governments of OPEC deposited the new funds in the banks of the North.  As we will explore in future posts, this generated a surplus of capital in the banks of the North, becoming a source of an expansion of Third World debt, which also would become, through the payment of interest, a mechanism for the flow of capital from the impoverished nations of the Third World to the wealthy nations of the North (Pichs 2006:154-55).

      At the same time, the nations of the North were able to rapidly adjust to the higher petroleum prices by adopting energy conservation programs and searching for alternative sources of energy.  The underdeveloped nations of the Third World, by virtue of their limited resources, were less in a position to make these kinds of adjustments. As a result, the higher oil prices had a negative impact on the non-oil producing and exporting nations of the Third World (Pichs 2006:154-55).  
 
     The Venezuelan government of Hugo Chávez developed new policies in relation to OPEC.  During the 1970s, although Venezuela had played a central role in the development of OPEC, PDVSA was functioning as a state within a state (see “Petroleum and Venezuela” 10/21/2013), and it tried to avoid OPEC quotas by investing in production outside of Venezuela.  During the neoliberal era, the government of Venezuela had been cooperating with the Washington policy of breaking OPEC by flooding the oil market.  Meanwhile, succumbing to the pressure of the Washington consensus toward the “free market,” OPEC had abandoned control of production and prices in 1985, leading to a period of low oil prices from 1986 through 1998.  In response to this situation, the Chávez government cut back on production, and Chávez visited OPEC leaders, informing them that Venezuela would respect OPEC quotas and asking them to also reduce production.  This produced results, and by the end of 1999, there began a period of higher prices for petroleum (Pichs 2006:157-58, 162; Guevara 2005:24, 36).

      But unlike OPEC nations in the 1970s, the Chávez government invested the petroleum income in the development of Venezuela.  Other nations of OPEC also are beginning to take steps in this direction, in part as a consequence of the impact of the Islamic Revolution. Moreover, the Chávez government sought to develop mutually beneficial social and economic accords with the nations of the South in accordance with the concept of South-South cooperation.  Venezuela sells oil to nations of Latin America and the Caribbean with terms more favorable than those of the international market: ninety-day credit for a payment of 75% of the international market value, with the remaining 25% financed over fifteen years at a fixed rate of 2% annual interest, with payments to begin after two years and with the option of making payments in goods or services, such as rice, corn or maize.  And Venezuela has formed Petrocaribe, dedicated to addressing the energy needs of the nations of the Caribbean (Chavez 2006: 149-51).  
 
       The story of petroleum in Venezuela and the efforts of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela to control the petroleum industry and to resurrect OPEC illustrate an important dimension of today’s Third World revolutions: they seek to control the natural resources of the nation with the goal of promoting the economic and cultural development of the nation and with the intention of cooperating with other Third World nations in mutually beneficial exchanges.   We will be exploring this Third World effort to break the neocolonial relation in future posts.


References

Chávez Frías, Hugo. 2006. La Unidad Latinoamericana. Melbourne: OceanSur.

Guevara, Aleida. 2005. Chávez, Venezuela, and the New Latin America. Melbourne: Ocean Press.

Pichs Madruga, Ramón.  2006. “Petróleo, Energía, and Economía Mundial, 1964-2004” in Libre Comercio y subdesarrollo.  La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, petroleum, oil, Venezuela, OPEC


 

Posted August 27, 2013

    Paraguay was an exception to the nineteenth century Latin American norm of the retardation of national industry by the Latin American estate bourgeoisie and merchants in alliance with the global powers.  In Paraguay, the government of Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia (1814-1840) appropriated rural land, thus taking power away from the estate bourgeoisie and the merchants.  The government of Francia and two successive governments successfully pursued a policy of independent economic development, investing economic surplus from agricultural production in the development of industry.  By 1865, “Paraguay had telegraphs, a railroad, and numerous factories manufacturing construction materials, textiles, linens, ponchos, paper and ink, crockery, and gunpowder….  From 1850 on, the Ibycui foundry made guns, mortars, and ammunition of all calibers; the arsenal in Asunción produced bronze cannon, howitzers, and ammunition.  The steel industry, like all other essential economic activities, belonged to the state.  The country had a merchant fleet, and the Asunción shipyard turned out many of the ships flying the Paraguayan flag….  The state virtually monopolized foreign trade….  The trade balance produced a big surplus.  With a strong and stable currency, Paraguay was wealthy enough to carry out great public works without recourse to foreign capital.  It did not owe one penny abroad, yet was able to maintain the best army in South America” (Galeano 1997:189-90).

     But from the point of view of British commerce, the only truly independent nation in Latin America in the nineteenth century was a “dangerous example” (Galeano 1997:191) that could demonstrate to its Latin American neighbors an alternative road.  Paraguay was destroyed in a genocidal war of 1865 to 1870 conducted by a Triple Alliance consisting of Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina and financed by British bankers.  By 1870, the population of Paraguay was one-sixth what it had been in 1865 and significant parts of its territory were ceded to the members of the Triple Alliance. 

     The country was subsequently turned into a typical example of foreign domination and free trade.  “In defeated Paraguay it was not only the population and great chunks of territory that disappeared, but customs tariffs, foundries, rivers closed to free trade, and economic independence.  Within its shrunken frontiers, the conquerors implanted free trade and the lafifundio.  Everything was looted and everything was sold: land and forests, mines, yerba maté farms, school buildings.  Successive puppet governments were installed in Asunción by the occupation forces….  National industry never came back to life” (Galeano 1997:194). 

      But nineteenth century independent Paraguay has come back to life in spirit, symbolized by the new efforts at Latin American autonomy being forged today by Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, with the support and participation of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Nicaragua.  Similar to the mobilized effort to destroy independent Paraguay in the nineteenth century, today the neocolonial power seeks to destroy the new manifestations of Latin American autonomy.  But nowadays, the world-system is suffering from a profound systemic global crisis, the neocolonial power is no longer the dominant power that it once was, and the anti-neocolonial movements are more advanced; the destruction of the independence projects forged by the peoples of the world is more difficult.

 
References

Galeano, Eduardo.  1997.  The Open Veins of Latin America: Five centuries of the pillage of a continent, 25th Anniversary Edition.  Translated by Cedric Belfrage.  Forward by Isabel Allende.  New York: Monthly Review Press.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, independence, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, capitalism, peripheralization, Paraguay

Posted August 28, 2013

     During the stages of the origin and development and consolidation of the world-economy (1492-1815), sugar was developed as an important raw material for export.  “The search for gold and silver was, without doubt, the central motor of the conquest.  But on his second voyage, Christopher Columbus brought the first roots of sugar cane from the Canary Islands, and he planted them in lands that today are located in the Dominican Republic. . . .  In a little less than three centuries after the discovery of America, there was for European commerce no agricultural product more important than the sugar cultivated in these lands"  (Galeano 2004:83; 1997:59).

     The Portuguese colony of Brazil was the first to develop sugar production on a large scale, developing it on the coastal northeastern region of the colony.  By the middle of the seventeenth century, Brazil was the principal producer of sugar in the world, and it was the largest market for African slaves.  The financing of sugar production in Brazil was undertaken by Dutch capital, and Dutch companies owned the sugar mills and managed the importation of African slaves (Galeano 2004:85-88).

      The production of sugar in the Caribbean islands became so extensive that they came to be known as the “Sugar Islands.” Barbados was the first Caribbean island to establish sugar plantations on a large scale, and the Dutch were the first to develop them on the small British colony.  The sugar plantations on the island displaced the production of a variety of agricultural and animal products by small-scale producers; and it devastated the dense forests and exhausted the soil.  Sugar production also was developed on the Caribbean islands of the Leeward Islands, Trinidad-Tobago, Guadalupe, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Santo Domingo, Cuba, and Jamaica as well as Guyana on the South American coast  (Galeano 2004:90-91).

     By the second half of the eighteenth century, one of the leading producers of sugar was the French colony of Haiti.  In 1791, a slave revolution erupted.  The insurrectionist slaves pushed the French army to the sea and burned the sugar plantations, leaving sugar production paralyzed.  The newly independent nation, under the leadership of insurrectionist General Toussaint-Louverture, immediately suffered a blockade imposed by an international coalition of global powers, facilitating the end of the revolutionary process launched by the slaves, although the nation remained formally independent (Galeano 2004:91-92).

     The destruction of sugar production in Haiti led to the rapid expansion of sugar production in Cuba, which became the world´s leading sugar producer.  The expansion of sugar production in Cuba led to an expansion in the importation of slaves and the displacement of other land use patterns, including production by small farmers of tobacco and vegetable products.  The extensive sugar plantations reduced the forests and the fertility of the soil (Galeano 2004:92-95).

      Sugar production promoted development of the nations of the core, where it was marketed and consumed, and underdevelopment for Brazil and the Caribbean, where it was cultivated.  Galeano writes:  “Sugar not only produced dwarfs.  It also produced giants, or at least, it contributed intensely to the development of giants.  The sugar of the Latin American tropics gave great impulse to the accumulation of capital for the industrial development of England, France, Holland, and also the United States, at the same time that it mutilated the economies of northeastern Brazil and the Caribbean islands and sealed the ruin of the history of Africa” (2004:106).

     As Augusto Cochin has written, “The history of a grain of sugar is above all a lesson in political economy, politics, and morality” (quoted in Galeano 2004:106).


References

Galeano, Eduardo.  1997.  The Open Veins of Latin America: Five centuries of the pillage of a continent, 25th Anniversary Edition. Translated by Cedric Belfrage.  Forward by Isabel Allende.  New York: Monthly Review Press.

__________.  2004.  Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina, tercera edición, revisada.  México: Siglo XXI Editores.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, independence, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, capitalism, peripheralization, open veins of Latin America, Galeano, sugar

Posted September 2, 2013

     Prior to 1850, indigo was used for the production of blue dye for textile manufacturing.  Indigo haciendas were developed in Central America during the second stage (1640-1815) of the world-economy.  The haciendas were characterized by mixed economic activities, including small parcels of land for subsistence production for indigenous and ladino families.  In some cases, labor on the haciendas was "voluntary," as families looked for some measure of protection in the aftermath of the sixteenth century conquest.  In other cases, the labor was coerced, utilizing strategies such as labor tributes imposed on indigenous villages and debt peonage.  The indigo haciendas were developed throughout Central America, but they were particularly concentrated in El Salvador.  

     Not all of the land of Central America was devoted to indigo production.  A good proportion of the land in Central America continued to be under the ownership of indigenous villages during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  In the indigenous systems, the land was communally owned by the village as a whole.  The land was distributed to families, to use but not to own, on the basis of need.  In addition to indigo haciendas and indigenous villages, other land use patterns existed.  In some areas of Central America, cattle ranching for the export of hides and leather emerged.  Also, silver mines were developed in the mountains of Western Honduras, using a combination of voluntary labor, indigenous forced labor, and African slaves.

     By 1850, the German chemical industry developed synthetic means for producing dyes that were less expensive, thus causing the total collapse of the market for indigo.  The Central American elite advocated utilizing strong state action to modernize the Central American economy, so that it could more effectively participate in the peripheral function of the expanding global economy.  Their philosophy, which came to be known as liberalism, became the dominant political philosophy in nineteenth century Central America.  Liberals modernized the economy by taking land away from the Church and the indigenous villages, both of which had used land to produce a variety of products consumed locally rather than to develop a raw materials production economy oriented to markets in the core of the world-economy.  Liberals developed ideas such as the secularization of society, the separation of church and state, and general notions of progress to justify these actions against the Church and the indigenous villages.  Liberals were particularly effective in implementing their policies beginning in the 1870s.  There emerged coffee plantations under Central American ownership and banana plantations and silver mines under U.S. ownership, so that by 1913, coffee comprised 63% of Central American exports; bananas, 18%; and metals, 10%.  Thirteen products were exported from Central America in 1913, and all were raw materials destined to the core. 

     The conversion of the land from indigo haciendas to coffee plantations deepened and expanded the peripheralization of Central America.  Multi-purpose haciendas were converted into single-product plantations, and land previously functioning beyond the structures of the world-economy was transformed to the peripheral role.

     Thus the collapse of the indigo market provoked a liberal reform that increased underdevelopment and poverty in Central America by consolidating its peripheral role, a process facilitated by the decisive action of the Central American elite, which protected its particular interests, sacrificing the economic and social development of Central America in the long run.  The Central American elite formulated and disseminated ideological distortions which confused and divided the people, and which functioned to hide the true nature of its conduct.


References

Booth, John A. and Thomas W. Walker.  1993.  Understanding Central America, Second Edition.  Boulder:  Westview Press.

Galeano, Eduardo.  1997.  The Open Veins of Latin America: Five centuries of the pillage of a continent, 25th Anniversary Edition.  Translated by Cedric Belfrage.  Forward by Isabel Allende.  New York: Monthly Review Press.

__________.  2004.  Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina, tercera edición, revisada.  México: Siglo XXI Editores.

Weaver, Frederick Stirton.  1994.  Inside the Volcano:  The History and Political Economy of Central America.  Boulder:  Westview Press.


Key words: Third World, revolution, colonialism, neocolonialism, imperialism, democracy, national liberation, sovereignty, self-determination, socialism, Marxism, Leninism, Cuba, Latin America, world-system, world-economy, development, underdevelopment, state, indigo, coffee, silver, cattle, open veins of Latin America, Galeano