Neocolonialism
Today’s economic policies were shaped by the antiquated world view of the colonial explorers and early mercantilists of the enlightenment era. Now, industrialism is displacing workers and disrupting ecological equilibrium on a vast level. The globalization of neoliberal capitalism has been an overwhelming failure for the world, evidenced by the fact that 20% of the world’s population consumes up to 80% of the world’s resources produced from the labor of those who earn less than $1 per day.
The majority of essential raw materials that help produce the goods that consumers of the developed world take for granted, (for example minerals like copper, iron, and aluminum and precious metals, to crops, coffee, sugar, cotton etc.) are largely provided by developing countries in of the South. Sadly, workers in developing countries go uncompensated for their labor due to repressive political regimes backed by the developed world through foreign aid programs and other measures.
John Perkins, former international economic consultant, and author of Confessions of an Economic Hit-man argues in that the conditions of poverty in the developing world are sustained because capitalism itself is justified by the profit margin which has its conceptual origins in the colonial era worldview.
During the late 15th centuries through the 18th centuries European explorers predominantly Spanish, Portuguese, and the Dutch plundered the South and Central American continent for its abundance of precious metals, and other commodities like coffee, cotton, and spices. The British and French were similarly involved in the colonization and settlement over Africa and Asia and later the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Inhabitants of colonized areas were treated as property that the colonizers could lay claim to in the name of their feudal overlords, (kings and queens) as such was the prevailing political understanding of the late medieval era.
The Enlightenment movement of the late 18th century which quickly transitioned into the era of technological modernism was largely characterized by the rejection of religious superstitions in favor of a society informed by the scientific method. As a consequence, monarchical rulers were either forced to concede to a parliamentary system or be violently deposed. The citizen became sovereign, empowering mercantilists to accumulate new wealth and establish empires based on commercial trade and industrial manufacturing. This meant little in the way of change for indigenous inhabitants of colonized nations; however, although the rhetoric over equality rights for all men became a contentious debate among critics and idealists, the modern European world had become dependent upon the import of raw materials from the South to sustain its urban development and military imperialism.
Modernism came as a result of revolutions in technology, the steam powered engine, electronic computing machines, aeronautics, and long distance communication systems such as the telegraph. With it brought a heavily increased demand on more resources, primarily coal, oil, and minerals. Modernism reached its point of collapse in the European developed world at around the turn of the 20th century when warring hegemonic states (i.e. England, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, and the United States) cultivated their resources and technology for the development of weapons of mass destruction, hence the tragedy of the First and Second World Wars. Following the Bretton Woods conferences that presided over the post-war economic reconstruction, the Third World colonies possessed by the European countries were granted “independence,” although they had no realistic means to sustain sovereignty due to their pre-existing impoverished and illiterate population base.
Under neoliberalism countries are expected to follow the rules of “trade liberalization” in order to properly participate in the global market economy. These rules are commonly characterized by the pursuit of economic-efficiency for business through the externalization of cost (i.e. the diminishment of labor and environmental costs). Therefore public assets are to be privatized, (i.e. communications, transportation, education, health-care and public utilities such as water and energy). Under the conditions of structural readjustment programs set by lenders, local economies are to be opened up through free trade agreements, meaning that there should be no financial restrictions on imported goods, even at the expense of putting local producers out of business.
Therefore, the stage would be set once again for the re-conquest of the Third World under “neo-colonialism,” whereby newly established financial schemes concocted out of the Bretton Woods institutions, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, (based out of Washington DC) would assist Third World countries attempt the initiation of their own modernization. By the same token, political economic power would be transferred from centralized state managed economic institutions over to newly emerging transnational corporations, heralding the arrival of the globalized neoliberal economic paradigm that dominated the latter half of the 20th century.
Joseph Stieglitz former head of the World Bank, has commented that the neoliberal system is by economic evaluation, a dysfunctional system informed by the conservative bias’ of a certain era rather than by traditional economic principles or scientific empiricism. At this late stage however, the likelihood that a workable compromise in the interests of a sustainable future can be reached, again due to the vastly disproportionate political economic power differentials between the 1 percent who own as much as 40 percent of the world’s total wealth in real assets. This is because capitalism as a theory is predicated on the exploitation of advantages where they can be gained and it is a theory derived from people and institutions that hold a vested interest in maintaining a status-quo that provides them with a life of luxury and abundance.
References
Cobb, C. (Producer), & Diaz, P., (Director). (2009). The End of Poverty [Motion picture]. United States: Cinema Libre Studio.
(c) 2013
