In the first days following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro envisioned the economic and scientific development of the nation through the incorporation of the Cuban bourgeoisie in a national project of autonomous development, liberated from the neocolonial economic relation with the United States.  Inasmuch as the bourgeoisie had been forged in the context of the neocolonial Republic of 1902 to 1959, its adaptation to the new revolutionary reality of the nation would have required it to transform itself, bringing to an end its function as a figurehead bourgeoisie, dependent on and directed by U.S. economic and political interests.  In accordance with this vision, Fidel called the national bourgeoisie to patriotic participation in the revolutionary project, and he took decisive steps to include the national bourgeoisie in the revolutionary government and the revolutionary process.  See my article in Counterpunch, “The Cuban Revolution and the National Bourgeoisie.”
 
 
      The adaptation of the national bourgeoisie to the revolutionary reality of the nation was not likely to occur, given various economic, political, and ideological obstacles.  But there was wisdom in Fidel’s approach.  No one could know with certainty beforehand what the comportment of the national bourgeoisie would be.  The historic moment was dynamic, driven by the unprecedented force and overwhelming popular appeal of the Revolution.  Fidel waited for the revolutionary process itself to teach the revolutionary leaders and the revolutionary people what the comportment of the national bourgeoisie would be. 
 
      Beginning in July 1960, Fidel began to teach the people that the revolutionary process was demonstrating that the interests of the national bourgeoisie and foreign capital were one and the same in the revolutionary moment, as they had been in the neocolonial situation.  Therefore, although the Revolution would prefer that the big industrialists continue to own and manage their companies in accordance with the revolutionary reconstruction of the economy, the industrialists in reality were working against the revolution by sabotaging production, abandoning management of their companies, and participating in illegal and violent counterrevolutionary activities.  The comportment of the national bourgeoisie made necessary the nationalization of Cuban companies in industry, commerce, and banking.  The first nationalizations of Cuban companies occurred on October 13-14, 1960, with the hope that no more nationalizations would be necessary.  But with the national bourgeoisie continuing to abandon the country and expanding their participation in illegal counterrevolutionary activities, subsequent nationalizations occurred through July 1962, in effect liquidating the national bourgeoisie as a class.  (See “Cuban property ‘confiscations,’ 1959-1962” 07/11/2019 in the category Cuban History; see also my article in Counterpunch, “The Cuban Revolution and the National Bourgeoisie”).
 
      Observing that the Cuban Revolution, through the Agrarian Reform Law of 1959 and the nationalization of U.S. properties of 1960, had struck at the center of U.S. neocolonial interests in Cuba, the national bourgeoisie during the period 1959 to 1962 increasingly placed its hopes in the interests of the USA to bring the Revolution to an end.  Unable to transform itself from a figurehead bourgeoisie to an autonomous national bourgeoisie allied with a popular revolutionary project, the national bourgeoisie abandoned the nation and worked in cooperation with U.S. interests to bring about regime change in Cuba.  However, the revolution’s overwhelming popular appeal within Cuba made its reversal politically impossible.  Having misread the political situation and having left the country at the decisive historic moment, the Cuban national bourgeoisie subsequently had no option but to adapt to a permanent self-imposed exile in the USA.
       
     The Cuban émigré community that took shape in Miami during the period 1959 to 1962 was constituted almost entirely by the national bourgeoisie and the most privileged members of Cuban society, including many professionals and technicians.  The first counterrevolutionary organizations operating from Miami were formed in 1960, and they were composed of members of the national bourgeoisie, persons affiliated with the Batista regime, representatives of the traditional political parties, and Catholics influenced by the anti-Communist ideology.  There thus emerged a political and social integration of the different economic and social sectors that had an economic or political interest in the overthrow of the Cuban Revolution.
 
    In 1962, a special unit of the CIA created approximately 55 legitimate companies in Florida that supported covert counterrevolutionary activities in Cuba.  In 1962 and 1963, the U.S. government no longer directly supported internal clandestine groups in Cuba, which had been nearly totally dismantled by Cuban civilian-military security.  Rather, the U.S. strategy was to use the Cuban émigré community as the base of the Cuban counterrevolution.  During the period, the CIA directly and indirectly financed and supplied counterrevolutionary groups in Miami that were engaging in counterrevolutionary activities in Cuba, including sabotage of the Cuban energy, transportation, and production infrastructure.  Such injection of resources by the CIA was the base for the economic development of the Cuban-American community in Miami and the re-composition of the Cuban figurehead bourgeoisie and other privileged sectors into a Cuban-American bourgeoisie. 
 
     The evident failure of the counterrevolution to bring down the Cuban government led the United States to decrease its support for the Cuban counterrevolution.  In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson ordered the suspension of operations of sabotage against Cuba.  In the 1970s, with the deterioration of the prestige and influence of the counterrevolutionary groups based in Miami, U.S. government support of counterrevolutionary activity declined significantly, and the number of counterrevolutionary groups decreased.  From 1973 to 1975, President Richard Nixon softened policy toward Cuba, seeking global détente with the Communist world, although the normalization of relations was blocked by the USA, supposedly over objections to Cuban support of Angola and for the independence of Puerto Rico. 
 
      Nevertheless, the Cuban-American organizations of the Left of the 1970s did not have sufficient cohesion or capacity to reframe U.S. policy to Cuba on a foundation of alternative premises, nor did it have the necessary resources to influence U.S. policy.  The counterrevolutionary rhetoric remained the official line of U.S. policy and of the sectors that controlled the political life of the Cuban-American community. 
 
      The conservative restauration of 1980 in the USA revitalized the fortunes of the Cuban counterrevolution based in Miami.  The emergence of the Right in the United States was due to various factors.  The student anti-war and black power movements, while correctly pointing to the colonialist and imperialist foundation of the nation’s ascent, adopted tactics that alienated a majority of the people.  The emergence of the movements of national and social liberation in the Third World, symbolized by the black power movement in the USA and the triumph of anti-imperialist revolutions in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Iran, generated popular insecurities by casting doubt on the capacity of the U.S. government to maintain control of the neocolonial world order.  Popular apprehensions were further fed by the sustained economic problems of inflation and recession.  The Left in the United States lacked the maturity to explain the causes of these developments to the people, and to reformulate the American narrative on a foundation of historical and scientific knowledge and universal human values.  In contrast, the Right was able to revitalize the American narrative, but with a discourse that omitted significant historical facts.
 
     The “New Right” reformulation, later known as neo-conservativism, was new in the sense that it rejected the focus on small-scale capitalism as well as the international isolationism of the conservativism of the past; rather, it accepted the logic of monopoly capitalism that had emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and it envisioned the reestablishment of the supreme power of the United States that had existed in the post-World War II era.  At the same time, it promoted values that had reigned in an earlier era, advocating a restoration of religious values and the family.  It extolled individual liberty, rejecting the growing size of the governmental bureaucracy.  It promoted “the law of supply and demand,” attacking the state for hindering production by intervening in the economy for what it considered dubious social ends.  It rejected the initial proposals then emerging for the protection of the environment. 
 
     With respect to Latin America, the New Right called for the re-imposition of U.S. power and interests over the region.  It rejected the efforts of the Carter administration to improve relations with Cuba, and it called for support of the Cuban counterrevolution.  Cuba was presented as a vassal of the Soviet Union, as an organizer of subversion in Latin America and the Caribbean, and as a violator of human rights. 
 
     The ideology of the New Right coincided with the Cuban-American counterrevolution’s rejection of the strongly interventionist role of the Cuban Revolutionary Government in the economy, and it coincided as well with counterrevolution’s religion-based anti-communism.  Once in power, the New Right adopted a policy of using the Cuban-American community to disseminate an essentially false portrayal of Cuba that was distorted by the particular interests of the Cuban-American bourgeoisie.  At the same time, the Cuban-American bourgeoisie, owners of businesses that provided goods and services to the Cuban émigré community, were useful to the neoconservatives of the national power structure, because of its capacity to mobilize necessary resources for political ends in an area of concentrated population in a key Electoral College state. 
 
     Accordingly, the counterrevolutionary function of the Cuban immigration was revitalized, and the Cuban-American Right was incorporated into the neoconservative movement, catapulting it into a position of national influence.  Integrated into the U.S. structures of power, the Cuban-American national bourgeoisie has been able to influence U.S. policy toward Cuba, shaping it in accordance with its particular interests and its presuppositions, setting aside analysis on a basis of U.S. interests as a whole, thus legitimating a policy of maximum hostility toward Cuba.  This political revitalization was the culmination of the re-composition of the Cuban national bourgeoisie as a Cuban-American bourgeoisie in the United States.
 
     The Cuban-American National Foundation has played a key role in this process of connecting the Cuban-American counterrevolutionary bourgeoisie to the neoconservatives of the national political power structure.  In the early 1980s, some 100 Cuban-American business persons were integrated into the Foundation, many of whom had been tied to the Cuban national bourgeoisie and were active participants in the counterrevolutionary organizations, including many with ties to the CIA.  The Foundation has made financial contributions to the political campaigns of U.S. congresspersons and senators, and it has been able to influence donations to campaigns by individuals associated with the activities of the Foundation.  The local means of communication submit to its pressure, either through common interest or fear.  In fact, Americas Watch has singled out the Foundation for its participation in the intimidation of dissident political voices in the Cuban-American community in Miami, and for its repeated verbal assaults against newspapers, radio stations, and individuals.  In addition to its repressive methods, a decisive factor in the success of the Foundation as the undisputed source of legitimation of U.S. policy with respect to Cuba has been the absence of a true opposition to the suppositions of U.S. policy toward Cuba.
 
     Although the Cuban-American counterrevolution, based in Miami, has been successful in attaining influence in Washington, it has scant influence in Cuba, where it completely discredited itself in the early 1960s by virtue by its blatant subservience to a foreign imperial power.  The Cuban counterrevolution seeks a return to representative democracy, a political system much more subjectable to elite manipulation than are structures of popular democracy; and a return to rule by the market, curtailing the authority of the state to control and regulate the economy.  Such proposals represent the interests of the U.S. power elite and the Cuban-American bourgeoisie.  In Cuba, however, such a program lacks a domestic class base; it represents the specific interests of no particular sector of Cuban society, as a result of the massive emigration of the national bourgeoisie in the early 1960s.  At the same time, the Cuban Revolution has been able to develop viable alternatives to these proposals.  Following the departure of the bourgeoisie from national life, the Revolution attained the integration of the remaining social classes, including a professional class formed by the remnant that remained in Cuba in the early 1960s and the considerable number of professionals that have been educated and formed by the Revolution itself.  Such is the political reality within Cuba, a situation that could be called a revolutionary reality.
 
     The Helms-Burton Law of 1996 permits civil demands in U.S. courts by proprietors who were not U.S. citizens at the time of the expropriation, such as Cuban big industrialists whose property was nationalized and who emigrated to the USA and subsequently became U.S. citizens.  This unusual and questionable feature of the Law reflects the influence of the Cuban-American bourgeoisie on the U.S. government.  In contrast, reflecting the Cuban political reality, the National Assembly of Popular Power emitted from 1996 to 1999 a number of laws that constitute a Cuban legal counteroffensive to the Helms-Burton Law.  Law No. 80 of 1996, Reaffirmation of the Dignity and the Sovereignty of Cuba, declares the Helms-Burton Law illicit, and it considers null any demand based on it.  In addition, the Law reaffirms the disposition of the Cuban government to negotiate with the U.S. government compensation for proprietors who were U.S. citizens at the time of the nationalization, apparently not recognizing the U.S. government as a legitimate representative of the interests of the Cuban national bourgeoisie reconstituted as a Cuban-American bourgeoisie. 
 
      A 1999 Cuban law declares the economic, commercial, and financial blockade imposed by the USA against Cuba since 1962 to constitute the crime of genocide, as defined by the 1948 UN Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.  The Law also declares as criminal any support of or collaboration with the blockade, the Helms-Burton Law, and the economic war against Cuba, within the national territory or from outside Cuba, including the territory of the United States.  Therefore, any negotiation of compensation for expropriated properties with the Cuban-American bourgeoisie is complicated by the criminal conduct of some of its most prominent members, with respect to association with the Batista regime, illegal counterrevolutionary activities in 1959 and 1960, and support for the criminal genocidal blockade in recent years.
 
     For decades, Cubans whose property was confiscated and their descendants have disseminated a discourse that conveniently ignores their own activities and that exploits the limited understanding of the people of the United States, portraying a “communist tyranny” that has little to do with Cuban reality.  The people of the United States ought to have sufficient political maturity to recognize the discourse of the Cuban-American bourgeoisie as a distortion of reality in pursuit of particular interests.
 
       The Trump administration’s move toward the implementation of Title III is consistent with its policy toward Latin America as a whole.  It seeks to reestablish U.S. neocolonial domination, which has lost terrain to the popular revolutions of the last two decades.  The USA, however, has experienced relative decline, and it no longer has the economic capacity nor the necessary prestige to reestablish the relatively stable political domination and economic penetration that it possessed in the 1950s.   Inasmuch as it is politically incapable of accepting and adjusting to its decline, the United States is likely to continue to use its hegemonic military power and its remaining economic capacity to unleash great damage on Latin America and the world.  The Left in the United States, however, should make a comprehensive, scientifically informed, and principled analysis of this situation, proposing an alternative direction for the nation.

Source
 
Arboleya, Jesús.  1997.  La Contrarrevolución Cubana.  La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.

​      In my last post, I reviewed a Counterpunch article by Roger Harris, in which we are reminded of the progressive political, economic, and social gains of the Sandinista Revolution as well as its international anti-imperialist projection (see “The Sandinistas: Remembering the basics” 8/16/2018 in the category Nicaragua).
 
      The Harris article also makes observations with respect to “dissident Sandinistas,” which have implications for our understanding of current imperialist strategies.  He writes that, following the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in the 1990, some Sandinistas split and formed the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS for its initials in Spanish).  He maintains, “When the MRS left the Sandinista party, they took with them almost all those who were better educated, came from more privileged backgrounds, and who spoke English.”  They are not, he argues, a progressive alternative.  “They are now comfortably ensconced in US-funded NGOs, regularly making junkets to Washington to pay homage to the likes of Representative Iliana Ros-Lehtinen and Senator Marco Rubio to lobby in favor of the NICA Act.”  In addition, they have little popular support in Nicaragua, having attained only 2% of the vote in national elections. 
 
     Harris believes that the ties of the MRS to activists in the United States may explain the fact that “some North American left intellectuals are preoccupied with Nicaragua’s shortcomings while not clearly recognizing that it is being attacked by a domestic rightwing in league with the US government.”
 
      I have observed a similar phenomenon with respect to Cuba and China.  Dissident English-speaking intellectuals, with supposedly leftist credentials, criticize the socialist projects in their nations, in a form consistent with ethnocentric assumptions in the USA (including the Left).  These “leftists” have relations with intellectuals and think tanks of the English-speaking world.  They play an important role in disseminating misinformation in the societies of the North, in spite of their very limited influence in their own nations.  With respect to Latin America, this phenomenon is part of a larger imperialist strategy: wage economic war (sanctions, hording of goods), finance local gang violence, and distort the international debate through the major news media.  The goal is to facilitate regime change in nations that stand against the neocolonial and neoliberal world order.  Such nations are not only seeking to protect their sovereignty, but also seeking to participate in the construction of an alternative, more just world order. 
 
     All of this has been observed by Cuban journalists and academics with respect to Latin America.  They see it as a new form of imperialism, made necessary by the fact that the old forms of imperialism have become discredited.
 
       I talked recently (in English) with a young Cuban, supposedly leftist intellectual, who uses the phrase, “social movements within the Revolution.”  The concept has a dignified history in Cuba.  In the early 1960s, Fidel called upon women to forge a “revolution within the revolution.”  And environmental issues can be seen in this way, in that in the 1970s and 1980s, some academics and leaders were calling for greater direction of resources toward environmental problems, and they achieved a breakthrough during the “Special Period” of the 1990s, because ecological forms of production and transportation could also be more economical.  To a certain extent, the current gay rights movement in Cuba could be seen in this way, although, if popular debates on the proposal for a new Cuban Constitution are any indication, a proposal that would provide the constitutional foundation for the legalization of gay marriage seems to be generating significant popular opposition.
 
      However, my “leftist intellectual” comrade, even though he seeks to place himself in this noble tradition of social movements within the Revolution, does not seem to me to belong to it.  Rather, he appears to be indulging in a disinformation campaign against the Cuban Revolution, exploiting the ignorance of Cuba in the US Left.  For example, he insisted that the Cuban Constitution of 1976 established the Cuban Communist Party as the highest legal/constitutional authority in the nation, which he found undemocratic and unacceptable.  This claim concerning the authority of the Party was based on Article Five, which defines the Cuban Communist Party as the vanguard of the nation and as the highest directing force of the society and the state.  But the claim ignores a whole bunch of other articles of the Constitution that give specific authority to the National Assembly (elected directly and indirectly by the people), including the authority to elect the executive branch and to enact laws.  The Cuban Constitution sanctions a structure in which the Party leads, teaches, and exhorts; and the delegates of the people decide and govern.  This is very difficult for people in the United States to understand, because in the USA, assumptions have been shaped in an entirely different social and political context, in which the political and ideological necessity of a vanguard party is not imagined.  It seems to me that the young Cuban “dissident,” probably driven by egoism and immaturity, takes advantage of this political/cultural obstacle to understanding, in order to present himself as an important intellectual critic of the Revolution.  With the consequence that, to the extent that he gains influence, confusion in the North is deepened.
 
     The conversation with him prompted me to write a blog post, “The Party and the Parliament in Cuba,” posted on June 19, 2018, in the category Cuba Today.
 
      With respect to Cuba, the issues that seem to germinate in the “critical” US Left are authoritarianism, human rights, income inequality, racial discrimination, and gay rights.  This focus distracts from the central point: Cuba, China, and Vietnam are developing alternative political-economic systems, in which the states play a major role as formulator, regulator, and principle actor in the economy, with space for various forms of property in the economic plan; and in which structures of popular democracy, distinct from representative democracy, have been developed and are continually developing.  These nations are developing in practice an alternative to the prevailing structures and norms of the political economy of the modern world-system.  Moreover, they have registered important economic and social gains, they are politically stable, and they enjoy popular legitimacy.  Meanwhile, other nations (Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and the Ecuador of Correa) have moved in a similar direction, albeit principally with structures of representative democracy, rather than popular democracy.  The socialist and somewhat socialist nations have been joined by progressive governments (the Argentina of the Kirchners and the Brazil of Lula and Wilma) in an effort to transform global neocolonial structures, replacing imperialist interventionism with mutually beneficial relations.  The Left in the North sees these global dynamics only partially and superficially, and therefore it is incapable of grasping their significance with respect to the political projects that they ought to be proposing in their own nations. 
 
      One of the reasons for the Left’s blinders is its tendency to distrust authority in any form, even the charismatic authority of exceptional leaders who are lifted up by popular movements, and the bureaucratic authority of states in which such popular movements have taken power.  It tends to be cynical toward popular movement leaders after they come to state power.  The tendency may be rooted in a subjectivity in which a person enjoys casting himself or herself as always the rebel.  Or it can be based in the demonstrably false intellectual assumption that power always corrupts.  Whatever its source, the distrust of authority in any form makes the U.S. Left vulnerable to the new imperialist strategy of partnering with “leftist” intellectuals in the dissemination of the supposedly authoritarian and/or corrupt characteristics of socialist and progressive governments.
 
     The tonic for the infirmity of distrust for authority in any form is personal encounter with the movements of the neocolonized of the world.  If a person from the North desires to understand; if she or he places that desire above other desires, including those pertaining to successful careers; if she or he, in accordance with this desire, seeks personal encounter with the movements of the Third World; if she or he takes seriously the words of the other and permits her or his understanding to be challenged at its roots; she or he may well find that the peoples in movement of the Third World believe that significant leaders and movements have taken and are taking important steps in construction of a more just, sustainable, and democratic world.  This belief is itself a dimension of a world-view defined by faith in the future of humanity and by belief in the duty of all to participate actively, with courage and with sacrifice, in the building of a better world.  By and large, the Left in the North has not encountered the Third World in movement, and this is the epistemological foundation of its limited capacity to understand.

​August 30, 2018
 
     In my last post, (“The new imperialist strategy” 8/20/2018, found in the category US Imperialism or the category Critique of the Left), I discussed the new imperialist strategy of cultivating relations with supposedly leftist intellectuals in nations with socialist and progressive governments, in order to disseminate false claims that these governments are authoritarian and/or corrupt.  The strategy has been effective in generating confusion among U.S. intellectuals and activists of the Left, taking advantage of the inherent tendency of the U.S. Left to distrust authority in any form.  And taking advantage of the Left’s limited consciousness of the international projection of China, Russia, and the socialist and progressive governments of the Third World, which envisions the construction of an alternative, more just and sustainable world-system, transforming neocolonial structures of domination that are integral to the capitalist world-economy. 
 
     My comments referred specifically to the cases of Nicaragua, Cuba, and China, and they were based, in addition to my own experiences, on a perceptive article by Roger Harris in Counterpunch, “Chomsky on Regime Change in Nicaragua.”
    
      With respect to my August 20 post on “The new imperialist strategy,” Harris has written to me as follows:

    So Harris and I are on the same road of discovering a tendency in the U.S. Left to be quick to accept the claims of “dissidents,” thus falling into the trap set for us by imperialism and its allies.  In my view, in order to prevent being victims of this trap, we need to begin with the premise that we of the U.S. Left have much to learn from socialist and progressive movements that have taken political power, for they have accomplished far more in their nations than we have in our nation. Furthermore, we have to recognize that we have a limited understanding, given the political and social context in which we live, of the alternative project that they are building; so we need to be oriented to doing a lot of listening, including their explanations of why they are doing this rather than that.  And we need to be wary, because the “dissidents” are looking for us, for we are integral to their plan.  In contrast, the revolutionaries, defending the majority, are busy building; they are happy to speak to us, because they are internationalists, but we have to get their attention.  We need to be spending a lot of time listening to those that are active forging the socialist and progressive projects in various Latin American nations, in order to deepen our understanding of socialist and progressive thought and action.  It would also empower us to understand in context any critical commentaries made within those nations by intellectuals who present themselves as leftists.

​     Harris also writes, 

​     Yes, it is a question of anarchistic and libertarian tendencies, with a social base in the middle class.  However, the middle class gives rise to a variety of ideological tendencies.  In the colonies and neocolonies of the world, the middle class has been the social base of accommodation to imperialist interests; but on the other hand, most of the great revolutionaries have been from the middle class.  In our country [the United States], the middle class is the social base not only of ultra-leftism, but also of liberal reformism, consumerist escapism, and the current incipient neofascism.  For the middle class in the core region of the world economy, it is a question of how each of us born into this relatively privileged position responds to the situation of relative privilege.  Do we ignore it?  Do we seek to defend it aggressively?  Do we support reforms, but not to the extent that it causes inconvenience?  Do we find satisfaction in a posture that presents us as critical thinkers or radicals, blaming our political ineffectiveness on the ignorance of others?  Do we dedicate ourselves to the quest for the true and the right, seeking to overcome the limitations on understanding that our social position imposes?  It is a personal decision. 
 
      I believe that it is possible for middle class intellectuals in the United States, if we have commitment and discipline, to learn the true and the right.  And possibly, if we learn well, we could have influence on our nation, explaining fundamental global, historical, and political realities to our people.  We could make clear the global structural sources of the relative privilege of our nation’s middle class, and we can demonstrate the incompatibility of those structures with the values that we proclaim.  And we could convincingly demonstrate the unsustainability of a world-system shaped by each nation pursuing its interests and each corporation pursing its profits, without regard for the consequences for the nation and the world.  Our people are increasingly becoming middle class, albeit a middle class with social insecurity and personal anxiety.  I believe that if we were to explain well the dynamics of our situation, the consensual majority would opt for social justice, for themselves and for all.
 
     I also recommend to the reader another article by Harris, “A Specter of Peace Is Haunting Nicaragua.”  The article criticizes opposition to Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, the leader of the Sandinista Revolution since it first took power in 1979.  It specifically criticizes commentaries by The Nation and by academic Latin Americanist William I. Robinson.  Among other issues discussed, Robinson maintains that many on the Left support Ortega because they see him on the good side in an “infantile Manichean view,” which sees a binary world of good or evil.  Against Robinson, Harris maintains that we confront in practice a choice between two morally different projects.
 
      I am in agreement with Harris.  We intellectuals and academics are able to imagine other possibilities, in accordance with various ideas that we have, and impress each other with our virtuosity.  But in political practice, we have a choice between, on the one side, the neoliberalism, incipient neofascism, and aggressive wars of the declining hegemonic power; and on the other side, an effort by the neocolonized peoples of the earth to construct, in theory and in practice, an alternative world-system, more just and sustainable.  In the real world, we have a choice between two very different possibilities, in which the global powers systematically attack those leaders, governments, and movements that are seeking to forge an alternative road for humanity.  In this situation, we have the duty to take sides; we have the responsibility to understand, appreciate, and defend that alternative more just and sustainable possibility for humanity that is emerging from below.  As Fidel said in 1960, when a revolution is under attack, revolutionaries must close ranks.

      As the world prepares to observe the historic visit of President Barack Obama to Cuba, we ought to have a clear understanding that the changes that the Obama administration proposes are changes in strategies, and they in no sense reflect a departure from US imperialist objectives with respect to Cuba and Latin America.  The Obama administration is trapped in an imperialist web from which it cannot escape.

      The impulse of the great American republic of the north toward domination was evident from its beginnings, expressed in: its economic development on the basis of a lucrative trade relation with the slave plantations of the Caribbean during the seventh and eighteenth centuries; its development of a system of slavery in the US South, and the development of its industry in the North on a foundation of commerce with the slave South; and its expansionism, through which it forcibly took lands from indigenous nations and from Mexico, establishing a nation that extended from coast to coast.  On the other hand, during its first century as a republic, a democratic impulse existed alongside its disposition to domination, as was expressed by the continual expansion of political and civil liberties to white men of the laboring classes, and by its abolition of slavery.  In 1876, the possibility still existed that the United States could fulfill the promise of democracy that it had proclaimed at its birth.  It was not too late for a US government with a democratic political will to compensate the indigenous nations and the freed slaves, and to proceed on a more democratic road.  Although the territory of the nation had been acquired through force and the economic development of its principle industry was tied to slavery, much of the economy and commerce of the nation remained in the hands of small scale industrial and agricultural producers that were not directly tied to superexploitation of labor in other lands.

      But during the last decades of the nineteenth century, the economic development of the nation took a leap toward concentrated capital and banking, the leaders of which, the “robber barons,” emerged to control the important opinion shapers in the country, including the press, the universities and the churches.  During the 1890s, concerned with the fact that the productive capacity of the nation exceeded its domestic market, the elite began to forge a policy of imperialism, characterized by interventions in other lands in order to secure markets.  President William McKinley was the first to implement the policy with military intervention in Cuba, and President Theodore Roosevelt developed imperialism as a systemic policy at the beginning of the twentieth century.  Imperialism has been the continuous policy of US presidents ever since, regardless of political party or ideological orientation, and maintained in spite of significant national and international developments.

       The move to imperialism at the beginning of the twentieth century was a decisive turn, for it meant that the development of the economy of the United States would be tied to the superexploitation of vast regions, first in Latin America, and later in Africa and Asia.  At the same time, a profound ideological change occurred, as the American promise of democracy was converted into the American dream of upward mobility.  The nation was on the road to the creation of a consumer society, constructed on a material foundation of the superexploitation of the peoples of other lands.  From that time forward, it would be difficult to depart from an imperialist road, because this would require a change in the structural foundation of the national economy, and it would imply a new direction in the evolving American way of life.

     However, the American imperialist and consumerist road was not ecologically and politically sustainable in the long term.  The earth has finite limits, placing ecological constraints on human productive capacities; and the peoples of the world would not in the long run accept the conditions of poverty and underdevelopment imposed by global structures of superexploitation.  Sensing this, Franklin Delano Roosevelt envisioned a democratic reform of the world-system following the Second World War.  In the Atlantic Charter, he expressed a dream that every person in the world would be freed from want.  In other contexts, he spoke in favor of ending the colonial empires; and he voiced his intention to provide financial aid to the newly independent nations, so that greater global equality among nations and persons would emerge.  

     We cannot be sure if Roosevelt understood the implications of such a vision.  It would have required a transformation of global structures of superexploitation, and thus a restructuring of the US economy, including the development of new patterns of investment in ecologically sustainable production oriented toward providing for human needs.  As such, it would have involved a reversal of a half-century of imperialism in support of consumerism.  But it would have been possible, given the advanced industry, science and technology that the United States had developed.  Such a democratic turn would have involved a kind of global Keynesianism, implemented by an enlightened US elite, aware that an anti-imperialist democratic global project would be necessary for the sustainability of the world-system in the long run.

      We cannot know if Roosevelt would have been committed to such a global democratic transformation, if he had lived.  Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy with respect to Latin America was imperialist, and we therefore have reason for skepticism.  On the other hand, World War II created a different international situation, in that the United States emerged from the war with the economic and political power to implement a global democratic vision.  

     Nor can we know if Roosevelt’s third term vice-president, Henry Wallace, a man with progressive vision, would have guided the nation toward global leadership in the development of a democratic world-system, if he had succeeded Roosevelt.  Wallace was dumped by the Democratic Party bosses at the convention in 1944 and replaced with Harry Truman.

     We do know that Truman surrounded himself with advisers who had none of the vision of Roosevelt and Wallace.  And we know that the United States, instead of reconverting its war economy to a peace-time economy, turned to a permanent war economy, creating what retiring President Dwight Eisenhower would later call the military-industrial complex.

      The turn of the nation to a permanent war economy, justified with the Cold War ideology, further set the nation on the imperialist road.  For it would mean that the United States would be most inclined toward military aid and to military intervention in neocolonies with anti-imperialist popular movements that were threatening the established order.  And it would mean that the United States would be less and less capable of leading the world in a peaceful and democratic turn, in that it would be less capable of developing sustainable forms of production that would respond to the human needs of the world. Increasingly dependent on military intervention in order to protect its economic interests, the United States would be increasingly unable to lead the world in a different direction.  

     Barack Obama inherited this legacy of 125 years of imperialism and seventy years of a permanent war economy.  He arrived to the presidency as a result of campaign contributions from the elite, and not on a foundation of a popular anti-imperialist movement.  So there was never a basis for thinking that he was prepared to make changes in US foreign policy beyond adjustments in imperialist policies.  As the foreign policy of the Obama administration took form, Cuban and Latin American analysists continually have stressed that Obama’s policies are characterized by continuity with his predecessors, rather than change.  They have noted, for example, continued US military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq; regime change in Libya; supported for terrorist opposition groups in Syria; efforts to destabilize socialist governments in Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador; and increasing military expenditures and military presence in the world.  

     The Obama administration has had some tendency to express support for more intelligent forms of imperialism, characterized by support of internal opposition groups and use of the mass media, combined with destabilizing economic strategies, while formally pretending to respect the sovereignty of the nation.  The intelligent use of imperialist strategies has been the approach with respect to Leftist governments in Latin America, and it has been more effective than cruder strategies, such as an embargo.  This shift to intelligent imperialism is what Obama now intends with respect to Cuba, eliminating the embargo, which has been universally condemned by the nations of the world, and thus is damaging to US imperialist intentions.

      One hundred twenty-five years of US imperialism have put the North American republic on a course of opposition to the legitimate aspirations of the peoples of the Third World, who for nearly a century have formed anti-imperialist popular movements in search of true independence and sovereignty.  Attempts have been made to justify antagonistic policies toward the Third World with distorting ideologies: the Cold War, the war on terrorism, and human rights.  We the people of the United States must see through these ideological distortions and develop an alternative political party with an anti-imperialist platform that seeks to lead the nation in a foreign policy of cooperation with the nations and peoples of the world, as the only path to the development of a world-system that is just, democratic and sustainable.

       In September and October 2013, I published eighteen blog posts on US imperialism in Latin America.  The posts tried to show that US policy from McKinley to Obama has been characterized by imperialism.  Shifts in emphasis have occurred within the context of a fundamental imperialist intention.  The posts are the following:
 “Lenin on Imperialism” 9/10/2013; 
“The origin of US imperialist policies” 9/18/2013; 
“US Imperialism, 1903-1932” 9/19/2013; 
“Imperialism and the FDR New Deal” 9/20/2013; 
“Post-war militarization of economy & society” 9/23/2013; 
“The Cold War and Imperialism” 9/24/2013; 
“Kennedy and the Third World” 9/25/2013; 
“The Alliance for Progress” 9/26/2013; 
“US Imperialism in Latin America, 1963-76” 9/27/2013; 
“Imperialism falters in Vietnam” 9/30/2013; 
“Jimmy Carter” 10/1/2013; 
“Pan-Americanism and OAS” 10/2/2013; 
“The national turn to the Right” 10/3/2013; 
“Reaganism” 10/4/2013; 
“Imperialism as neoliberalism” 10/7/2013; 
“The “neocons” take control” 10/8/2013; 
“Obama: More continuity than change” 10/9/2013; and
“Imperialism as basic to foreign policy” 10/10/2013. 

A subsequent post on “The imperialist discourse of Obama” was published on April 22, 2015.  

To find the posts, in the category US imperialism, scroll down.

      The development of US imperialist policies was integrally tied to the development by the United States of neocolonialism in Cuba and Latin America, and to the US rise to hegemony in the neocolonial world-system.  US imperialism has involved the use of a variety of strategies to guarantee cheap labor, raw materials and markets in nations that are formally independent.  It was born in a neocolonial context, and it has not been characterized by the seizing of political control through military aggression, as occurred with European colonialism.  In the neocolonial world-system, even when military intervention is used and imperialist wars are launched, the occupied nation is presented as independent.  Neocolonial domination is primarily through ownership by corporations of the neocolonial power and by the figurehead bourgeoisie of the neocolony of the economic, financial and mass media institutions of the neocolony.  The use of military force is secondary, and when it occurs, it is carried out by the apparently independent government of the neocolony, which receives military aid from the neocolonial power.  In the heyday of neocolonialism, direct US military intervention only occurred in situations in which the neocolonial system broke.

      Inasmuch as the United States has experienced a relative economic decline, and inasmuch as fascism is characterized by the attainment of economic objectives by military means, the increasing use by the United States of aggressive wars in promotion of economic interests can be interpreted as a turn toward global fascism.  It may be that the United States is taking steps that could lead to the abandonment of the imperialist neocolonial world-system constructed during the twentieth century in favor of a global military dictatorship and a world-empire directed by a United States government controlled by transnational corporations. 

     See seven posts on neocolonialism, posted in September 2013 and in 2014.

Posted September 10, 2013

     In 1917, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism by Vladimir I. Lenin was published.  It became a classic work, influencing labor and anti-colonial movements and intellectuals connected to them during the course of the twentieth century.  The book by the leader of the Russian Revolution described important new dynamics in the development of capitalism.  

Concentration and monopolization.   By the beginning of the twentieth century, the old form of capitalism had given way to a new form of capitalism.  The old capitalism was characterized by free competition among a variety of enterprises of various sizes.  The new capitalism is characterized by the concentration of industry and the tendency toward the formation of monopolies in the form of combines, cartels, syndicates, etc. (Lenin 1996:11-23).  “This transformation of competition into monopoly is one of the most important – if not the most important – phenomena of modern capitalist economy” (Lenin 1996:12).
     
      The concentration of banking also occurs. The big banks provide credit for industrial production.  Close ties are established between the big banks and the biggest industrial and commercial enterprises.  This is the stage of “finance capital” (Lenin 1996:27-59).

The export of capital.  During the stage of finance and monopoly capitalism, capitalists find that the most profitable investment is not in the domestic economy, but in “backward countries,” where the prices of land and wages are low, raw materials are cheap, and profits are high (Lenin 1996:62).  So there emerges the exportation of capital, in which big banks and big industry invest surplus capital in profitable enterprises in the peripheral and semi-peripheral regions.  “Under the old capitalism, when free competition prevailed, the export of goods was the most typical feature.  Under modern capitalism, when monopolies prevail, the export of capital has become the typical feature” (Lenin 1996:61).

     In the “backward countries,” the capitalist investor or creditor receives advantages of a commercial-political nature, including stipulations that the borrower use the loan to purchase manufactured goods from the country of the creditor.  Thus the export of capital becomes a means for the export of manufactured goods to the countries and colonies of the periphery and semi-periphery (Lenin 1996:64-65).

The division of the world market among capitalist combines.  In the stage of monopoly capitalism, the major combines and cartels arrive at agreements which divide among themselves the world market.  For example, General Electric Company (USA) and General Electric Company (Germany) agreed that the former would have the markets of the United  States and Canada and the latter would have the markets of Europe.  Similar agreements are found in the oil, shipping, railroad, and steel industries (Lenin 1996:67-75).

The division of the world among the great powers.  In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the occupation and division of the earth by the European colonial powers was completed (Lenin 1996:77-82). Colonial possession gives monopolist combines control over the raw materials of the colonial territories (Lenin 1996:83-85).  The division of the world into colonizer and colonized is an important feature of capitalism in its finance and monopoly stage (Lenin 1996:86).  
 
     Lenin’s penetrating analysis of the imperialist stage of capitalist development enables us to understand that at the dawn of the twentieth century there had emerged a new form of capitalism, characterized by the concentration of industry and banking, in which large corporations and banks would become increasingly transnational, and they would have access to raw materials and influence over the political processes of the nations of the peripheral and semi-peripheral regions.  The transnational corporations would become in the twentieth century an important mechanism of core domination.  They would have such force that they would make direct political control unnecessary. Thus, they would render outdated the formal structures of colonial domination, and they would make possible a new form of domination, apparently but not actually consistent with democratic values, which came to be known as neocolonialism.  


References

Lenin, V.I.  1996. Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Introduction by Norman Lewis and James Malone.  Chicago:  Pluto 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

Posted September 18, 2013

     With the concentration of industry and the emergence of a few large companies that controlled the market in several key industries (see "Lenin on Imperialism” 9/10/2103), productive capacity in the United States reached a level that overextended the capacity of its domestic market to consume products.  This could give rise to a surplus of goods and a fall of prices.  Periodic crises of overproduction had been a pattern of capitalism, but the problem was deepened by the arrival of the system to large-scale and concentrated production.  Therefore, in order to maintain or increase level of profits, US companies would have to find new markets for their products beyond the frontiers of the United States.  
 
      In the 1890s, there was consciousness of the need for new markets among US producers, as a result of the economic crisis of 1892-93, which was widely interpreted as having been caused by overproduction.  This situation gave rise to the formulation of a new expansionist foreign policy by the US government.  The new foreign policy was called “imperialism” by its promoters.  The basic goal was to find new markets outside the United States for US manufactured and agricultural products.  Strategies for the attainment of this goal were proposed by the platform of the Republican Party in 1896.  They included: the expansion of the army and the establishment of military bases abroad; control of Hawaii and the purchase of the Danish Virgin Islands; support of Cubans in their war of liberation from Spanish colonial rule; and the construction of a canal across Nicaragua to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.  Control of the Caribbean and the Far East were considered central, and thus the Philippines, Hawaii, and Cuba were viewed as having high strategic value as locations for US military bases.  The election of William McKinley in 1896 was a political victory for the promoters of the new imperialist policy (Arboleya 2008:35-37).

      The first practical implementation of the new expansionist policy was US intervention in Cuba in 1898, launching what US historians have called the Spanish-American War, Cubans call the Cuban-Hispanic-American War, and Lenin considered the first imperialist war.  The war resulted in Spain ceding to the United States the Caribbean islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico and the Pacific Islands of the Philippines and Guam (Arboleya 2008:37, 40).

      With the acquisition of these territories, the United States was becoming a colonial power like those of Western Europe.  However, in justifying the expansionist policy to the people of the United  States, the government obscured its colonial character and sought to present the policy as fulfilling a civilizing mission, consistent with the values of democracy, liberty and justice.  The discourse of the political elite was effective in convincing the people that the expansionist policies were defending freedom and were the fulfillment of a “new manifest destiny,” in contrast to the decadent European empires (Arboleya 2008:41-42).


Bibliography

 Arboleya, Jesús. 2008.  La Revolución del Otro Mundo.  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

Posted September 19, 2013

     The development of US imperialist policy took a significant step forward during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09). Although the United  States had intervened in Cuba in 1898 in response to the challenge to its interests posed by the Cuban revolutionary war of independence, non-intervention continued to be the norm that guided US foreign policy.  But “Rooseveltbroke with this tradition and promoted interventionism without reserve”(Arboleya 2008:73).  As the Cuban scholar Roberto Regalado has written:  “During Roosevelt’s term in office, Washington sponsored the forcible secession of Panama (1903), enabling it to refuse to recognize the Columbian Congress’s rejection of the proposal to construct the Panama Canal; intervened militarily in the Dominican Republic (1904), which led to control over that country’s customs policy (1905-12); occupied Cuba for the second time (1906-09); sent in the marines in order to obtain political dividends in the wars that broke out between Guatemala and El Salvador (1906) and between Honduras and Nicaragua (1907); and applied interventionist policies that led to the resignation of President Santos Zelaya in Nicaragua (1909)"  (Regalado 2007:116-17).

     The imperialist policies of Theodore Roosevelt continued under his successor, William Howard Taft (1909-13).  Taft adopted different rhetoric, replacing Roosevelt’s “big stick” with “dollar diplomacy,” thus promoting a policy of facilitating US economic and financial  penetration through the buying of politicians in the neocolony (Arboleya 2008:74-75).  But the military interventions and aggressive policy continued, with military interventions in Honduras and Nicaragua and threats designed to hinder the Mexican Revolution (Regalado 2007:117).

     The foreign policy of Woodrow Wilson “was equally expansionist in relation to the Caribbean and Central America, and he developed a policy as interventionist as his predecessors” (Arboleya 2008:82). Although he was critical of “dollar diplomacy” due to its ethical implications, he expressed a similar view when he affirmed that dollars “ought to be reserved for the ministers of the state, even if the sovereignty of the reluctant nation is mistreated in the process” (quoted in Arboleya 2008:82).  In addition, military interventions continued, consistent with the policies of Roosevelt and Taft.  Between 1913 and 1921, under the pretext of “promoting democracy” and “stopping German intervention,” the US government interfered in Mexican international affairs, occupied Haiti (1915-34) and the Dominican Republic (1916-24), intervened in Panama (1918), and supported coups d’état and dictatorships  in Central and South America (Regalado 2007:117).

     Wilson, however, developed a more advanced ideological formulation of imperialism.  Roosevelt and Taft had proclaimed imperialist policies to be consistent with the values of democracy and freedom, but in the implementation of the policy, the emphasis was on the application of military force (the “big stick”) and economic pressure (“dollar diplomacy”).  But Wilson sought to establish a new international order on a foundation of US political values, thus facilitating greater global acceptance of US intervention and economic penetration and reducing the need for the application of force and pressure.  As Arboleya has written, Wilson believed that US national interests would be served best by “the establishment of an international order that would universalize North American political values.  A mixture of divine mission, democratic crusade, and expansionist will constituted the ingredients of this international project, which in reality was no more than a modernized version of ‘manifest destiny’” (2008:82).

     However, national and international conditions had not yet arrived at a point that would enable the implementation of the Wilsonian vision. Following World War I, Wilson encountered opposition from Britain and France, who objected to those components of Wilson’s policy that would involve a reduction of their spheres of influence. The United States was not yet able to impose international rules of conduct on the nations of Western Europe.  At the same time, Wilson’s goals for the post-war era also encountered opposition in the United States.  US capitalism and political culture had not yet developed sufficiently, and important sectors of the capitalist class were not convinced that the “new world order” proposed by Wilson would provide sufficient guarantees for the protection of their capital.  The US government therefore did not enter the League of Nations that had been promoted by Wilson (Arboleya 2008:82-86).

     The presidential administrations of Warren Harding (1921-23), Calvin Coolidge (1923-29), and Herbert Hoover (1929-33) continued US imperialist policies toward Latin America, supporting military dictatorships in order to constrain popular struggles in opposition to the neocolonial system, and initiating new interventions in Panama, Honduras, and Nicaragua  (Regalado 2007:118).

     We are beginning to see a phenomenon that is emphasized in the Third World perspective: the continuity of US foreign policy during the twentieth century, regardless of shifts in rhetoric or changes in political party, as an interventionist imperialist policy, in violation of the internationally accepted principle of the sovereignty of all nations.


References

Arboleya, Jesús.  2008.  La Revolución del Otro Mundo.  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, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson

Posted September 20, 2013

     As early as 1919, the British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) had argued for strong state intervention in the economy.  In the aftermath of the stock market crash of 1929, Keynes argued that the principal cause of the crisis was a collapse in investment, and that state spending would give a boost to the economy and to employment.  Higher wages and full employment are desirable, he argued, because they increase consumption and thus strengthen the market.  National economic policy should be orientated above all toward attaining full employment and distributing income equitably throughout the society (Toussaint 1999:179-80).

     Assuming the presidency at the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-45) turned to Keynes’ prescriptions of strong state intervention to raise wages, reduce unemployment, and promote more equitable distribution of income (Toussaint 1999:171-72, 180).  This represented a significant change in the domestic policy of the United States.  US historian Howard Zinn (2005:392-96 & 401-3) has interpreted New Deal policies as state action to protect to some degree the social and economic rights of the people, with the principal intention of promoting political stability.  In a similar vein, Arboleya writes that “the goal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was to save capitalism, but he had the vision and the sensibility to understand that this would lie in feeding the hungry, creating sources of work, and freeing the people from the misery in which they found themselves” (Arboleya 2008:104). “Roosevelt had the merit of understanding that the stability of the North American system was unsustainable under the presence of the inequalities and tensions resulting from the desperation of millions of persons.  He thus decided . . . to not leave them at the mercy of the market, which represented a significant change in North American political life” (Arboleya 2008:103).

      During Roosevelt’s administration, domestic political factors worked against the continuation of the military interventions in Latin America that had been central to U.S. policy since 1903 (see “US Imperialism 1903-32” 9/18/2013).  Keynesian economic policies made necessary a more humanistic discourse, placing ideological constraints on the capacity of the government to act aggressively in other lands.  Moreover, there had emerged a renewal of isolationist tendencies and a rejection of armed interventions, expressed in new laws on neutrality that limited the possible participation of the United States in future armed conflicts; armed interventions in Latin America came to be viewed as unconstitutional.  At the same time, there had emerged in Latin America during the 1920s an anti-imperialist popular movement, which had been able to develop popular nationalist consciousness in opposition to US interventions, requiring even elite sectors in alliance with the United States to adopt a nationalist rhetoric.  Such opposition to interventionism both nationally and internationally required the United States to adopt a non-interventionist foreign policy (Arboleya 2008:104).

      So the United States turned to a “Good Neighbor” policy of non-intervention, seeking to pursue its imperialist goals through means other than direct military intervention.  The strategy was to strengthen the military in the Latin American nation, in order that it could play a more active role in maintaining social control.  In some cases, this involved supporting military dictatorships that had been established through previous interventions during the period 1898-1926.  In others cases, it involved establishing military dictatorships through diplomatic maneuvering and economic pressure.  In still other cases, the system worked with constitutional and even progressive governments in power.  
 
      In addition, it was necessary to give more economic space to the figurehead bourgeoisie, so that this class would have a stronger commitment to the neocolonial system and a greater capacity to participate in the maintenance of social control (see “Neocolonialism in Cuba and Latin America” 9/12/2013).  
 
      These new policies represented the pursuit of an imperialist agenda through alternative means, and as such they signified a more advanced and sophisticated form of neocolonialism, under which US corporations continued to  control the labor, raw materials, the financial and productive structures, and the markets of the neocolony.  The Good Neighbor policy of the New Deal does not represent the abandonment of imperialist goals, but the adaptation of imperialist policies to new economic, ideological, and political conditions (Arboleya 2008:105-7; Regalado 2007:118).

     From the Third World perspective, even the most progressive US administration was imperialist.  It did not engage in direct military intervention, but it intervened indirectly in pursuit of its imperialist goals.


References

Arboleya, Jesús.  2008.  La Revolución del Otro Mundo.  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.

Toussaint, Eric. 1999.  Your Money or Your Life:  The Tyranny of Global Finance.  Sterling, VA: Pluto Press.

Zinn, Howard. 2005.  A People’s History of the United States: 1492 – Present.  New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Harper Perennial Modern
Classics.


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, New Deal, FDR, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Keynes, Keynesianism

Posted September 23, 2013

      As World War II came to a close, Franklin Roosevelt had conceived of a post-war “new order” in which the United States would have hegemony, but in which there would be a balance of power and cooperation among the great powers, a vision that later was represented in the structures of the United Nations.  He saw the new world order as a neocolonial system, and he therefore advocated the dismantling of the colonial empires of the European powers.  He believed that political and social stability in the world was a fundamental prerequisite for the growth of U.S.commerce.  He believed in the persuasive power of capitalism, and he therefore viewed the Soviet Union as a market to be conquered, and he expressed opposition to the permanent stationing of US troops in Europe (Arboleya 2008:113, 135).

     But Roosevelt died before the war ended, and the implementation his vision was complicated by: the ruin of Europe; the high levels of unemployment and difficulties in the reinsertion of soldiers in the post-war economy; and the characteristics of the war industries, including their integral role in the US economy at the end of the war (Arboleya 2008:132).  
 
      Thus there emerged an alternative idea that proposed the expansion of the war industry rather than its reconversion.  “Winston Churchill was the first to speak of a world divided by an Iron Curtain, but the concepts that served the theoretical base of the Cold War were proposed by George Frost Kennan, a lower rank US diplomat stationed in Moscow, who developed the thesis that lasting peace with the Soviets was impossible, for which reason it was indispensable to strengthen US military power in order that it would serve as the ‘counterweight to expansionist tendencies,’ whose cultural origins go back to the Russian Empires" (Arboleya 2008:133).

      In reality, rather than expansionist, Soviet foreign policy sought to construct a cordon of security around its territory and to peacefully co-exist with the capitalist powers, a policy that created tensions in Soviet relations with the anti-colonial and anti-neocolonial revolutions in the Third World during the period 1945 to 1989.  However, the extraordinary success of the Kennan thesis, in spite of its mischaracterization of Soviet foreign policy, can be explained by the fact that it served the interests of the arms industries and functioned to justify and legitimate an arms race (Arboleya 2008:133-34). 
 
      Thus militarism came to dominate the US political system.  “In a kind of militarist application of Keynesian theory, defense expenses replaced public spending as the principal driving force of the economy and the scientific development of the country” (Arboleya 2008:133).  Arms production became integral to the economy.  “Arms capital merged with other branches of the economy and served the expansion of the large conglomerates and transnational companies of the country.  Such was the warning of President Eisenhower, that a military-industrial complex had been consolidated” (Arboleya 2008:134).

      In a similar vein, U.S. sociologist C. Wright Mills published in 1956 a classic work maintaining that there had developed in the United States a “power elite” composed of the top two or three executives of the largest 100 corporations, the highest fifty members of the executive branch of the federal government, and the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Most of the members of the power elite were born into the upper class, although one-third of its members were recruited from the upper middle class through a process of selection that included socialization into its values.  The power elite made the decisions of great consequence for the nation, and members of Congress as well as educational and religious leaders and the mass media had to adjust to the direction established by the elite.  It was, for Mills, an economic, military, and political elite (Mills 1956).

      The militarism of US society shaped the cultural and ideological formation of the people.  “Militarism required US policy to be based on the fabrication of a climate of fear and insecurity, because this was required for the arms market. Communism was presented as a phantasmagoric force that intended the domination of the world”  (Arboleya 2008:134). 
 
      Anti-communism was an enormously powerful ideological tool, enabling the United States to present a distorted image of Third World anti-colonial and anti-neocolonial movements as manifestations of the spreading menace of communism, thus justifying imperialist interventions throughout the world.  Interventions in defense of neocolonial  interests were presented as the defense of democracy, and this Orwellian inversion was widely accepted by the people.


References

Arboleya, Jesús.  2008.  La Revolución del Otro Mundo.  La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales.

Mills, C. Wright.  1956.  The Power Elite.  New York: Oxford University 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, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, Cold War, militarization, FDR, Franklin D. Roosevelt, power elite, C. Wright Mills

Posted September 24, 2013

      Franklin Roosevelt’s vision of a neocolonial world system with US hegemony and cooperation among the global powers, including the Soviet Union, was cast aside by the ideological construction of the Cold War, which defined communism as evil and expansionist, requiring the defense of democracy through a permanent military preparedness. 

     A liberal-conservative consensus emerged.  There was wide agreement on the militarist application of Keynesian economic principles, facilitating the growth of the economy and the capacity for military intervention anywhere in the world.  “Conservatives as well as liberals ended up supporting this approach, which reduced the differences between the two to the dimension and the quality of the intervention of the state in the economy, with neither side rejecting its
tax collector-investor function in the production of arms” (Arboleya 2008:133).  And there was consensus based on Cold War ideological premises.  “In foreign policy, the distance between liberals and conservatives was reduced to the point of converting Roosevelt into the last traditional liberal that occupied the White House.  As liberalism moved toward militant anti-communism in the context of the Cold War, liberalism ceased to be an alternative ideological current for foreign policy, expressed on the basis of a different political agenda.  Militarism united both currents, and although differences persisted between conservatives and liberals in regard to the procedures to be utilized, nearly no one questioned the strategic importance of US expansionism. Isolationism became obsolete during the Second World War.  The United States no longer was separated from the rest of the world by the ocean or by anything.  Like the dollar, its soldiers appeared everywhere" (Arboleya 2008:138).   
 
     Utilizing the Cold War ideological construction, US presidents Harry Truman (1945-53) and Dwight Eisenhower (1953-1960) provided economic and military support to Latin American governments that utilized repressive tactics against communist and socialist parties as well as progressive organizations.  Eisenhower’s “Good Partner” policy included CIA support for a counterrevolutionary force in Guatemala in 1954 in opposition to the government of Jacobo Árbenz, a democratically elected president who had nationalized some of the properties of the United Fruit Co.  “In addition to the overthrow of Árbenz and his replacement with the Carlos Castillo Armas dictatorship (1954-57), the Good Partner policy also stimulated the fall of the governments of Getúlio Vargas in Brazil (1954); Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina (1955); and Federico Chaves in Paraguay, which led to Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship (1956-89).  At the same time, Eisenhower’s policies contributed to undermining the thrust of the Bolivian revolution in the governments of Victor Paz Estenssoro (1952-56) and Hernán Siles Zuazo (1956-60).  Jean-Claude Duvalier’s dictatorship in Haiti also arose in this period” (Regalado 2007:122).

     The Cold War was the ideological pillar of imperialism, facilitating US economic and financial penetration of Latin America and the Third World and ensuring the consolidation of the United States as the hegemonic power of the neocolonial world-system.

       Thus, we see that immediately following the Second World War, pushed by the economic interests of arms industries, political leaders created a Cold War ideology that provided justification for a permanent war economy.  But the Cold War ideology distorted history in fundamental ways: the Soviet Union was not a threat, and it was less evil than portrayed; the nations of the Third World were not turning to communism, but were seeking independence from colonialism and neocolonialism; and the nation itself was less democratic than it pretended.   The Cold War ideological distortions became widely accepted beliefs not because they were true or right, but because they served powerful particular interests.  

     The ideological distortions of the Cold War would be exposed in the 1960s by the African-American movement and the student anti-war movement, bringing to an end the post-war consensus.  We will be discussing these movements and their anti-imperialism in future posts.


 References

Arboleya, Jesús.  2008.  La Revolución del Otro Mundo.  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, colonial, neocolonial, blog Third World perspective, Cold War, militarization, Eisenhower, Truman