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Emiliano López is an economist and Assistant Professor at the University of La Plata. He is a researcher at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONI CET) and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, Buenos Aires Office.

For Issue #23 of The Internationalist López draws from his book The Veins of the South Are Still Open (Leftword Books, 2020) to argue that the practice of imperialism remains the key prism through which to understand global inequality today — from the appropriation of common goods by Northern powers to the brutality of poor working conditions and control of Southern production processes by Northern corporations.

The concept of imperialism has a bad reputation. Without any doubt, within the intellectual and hegemonic academic world, it is treated as a démodé term, mainly ideologic and with low explanatory capacity for our current reality. But in this ‘Era of Globalization’, we do not need to re-edit categories from other historical moments that would lead us to repeat old formulae to improve the life of our people. We need to know the time we are living in and give priority to realism. Even though it may be motivated by noble intentions, this vision paralyses us at the same time as it convinces us about the fact that an unequal world can just be transformed in its molecular dimension. However, it is part of the triumph of the Western and capitalist civilizing model after the fall of the Berlin Wall that a good part of critical thinking has abandoned certain categories in pursuit of explanations which are more friendly to the academic and political establishment of our time. Whichever way we look at it, in the Global South, we find situations that require global explanations.

The appropriation of common goods in Africa and Latin America; the expansion of textile workshops in inhuman working conditions in Asia; the control of production of the countries from Southern Europe and Northern Africa by companies based in Germany and France; the domination of the State of Israel over Palestine; the imposition of private property over communal spaces, transforming them into spaces for capital accumulation; the countless military interventions in the Middle East; the imposition of the ‘American way of life’ through the American cultural industry—all these are just some of the expressions of the fact that global capitalism is, as Samir Amin put it, an ‘unequal system between countries and regions’. Inequality is not an abstraction or a mere theoretical speculation; it makes itself tangible in the bodies of the oppressed from the South.

This is why we consider that imperialism is the most appropriate category to understand this global inequality. We think it is urgent to give substance, according to our current times and struggles, to a powerful concept in explicative and historical terms associated with the struggles of peoples for their liberation. Imperialism is both a concept and a native category of our emancipation projects from the South. The history of this theoretical and political concept is widely spread.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Great Britain met its strongest capitalist expansionary period. After suffering a heavy economic crisis, a new impulse of its own capitalism implied a new wave of global expansion of the Western capitalist civilization. Here, the most significant novelty in relation to the previous colonial practices was that the expansion in response, mainly, to the needs of capital accumulation in the industrial centres of Europe. As it has been noted by J.A. Hobson, a liberal critic of the imposition of English government on the rest of the world,

‘It is admitted by all business men that the growth of the powers of production in their countries exceeds the growth in consumption, that more goods can be produced than can be sold at a profit, and that more capital exists than can find remunerative investment. . . . It is this economic condition of affairs that forms the taproot of Imperialism.’

This interpretation motivated Marxist thinkers as Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and Kautsky to look at this new stage that would open in the world. Lenin’s work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism marked a before and an after in the debate about imperialism. This concept not only explained the concentration of power and the incomes of the Northern countries, but it was also a mechanism for capital concentration and monopolization, based in the exportation of capital from the imperialist countries towards the world’s peripheries and favoured by the development of financial capital and the simultaneous appropriation of the resources that came from the South to guarantee Northern productive conditions.

To a large extent, we can see these years of global expansion of Northern capital, the English one in particular, as a jumble of capitalism and colonialism. In fact, much of the operation of this apparently civilizing process of the North was based in the economic liberalization and political dependency of a quarter of the world. Asia, Africa and the Middle East were divided as property of different imperialist countries of Europe. Hence, a quarter of the world was distributed into colonies which imposed with bloodshed and fire the new ‘ought to be’ of transnational corporations.

In the case of Latin America, imperialism adopted the shape of economic dependency in a frame of presumed national policy independence. As presented by Manuel Scorza in his magnificent and heartbreaking story, foreign capital got installed in our lands, appropriating water, hills and life itself. Apart from this expansion, global capital entered a new and terrible phase of crisis. A war without precedent until now, which destroyed the centres of classic imperialism, was the most dehumanizing expression of this new phase of development of the unequal world order. It is in this context that a new global hegemony emerged which was consolidated after the Second World War: United States. Far from trying to fan the conflict between powers, the United States became the best representative of American capital and global capital for, at least, fifty years. It encouraged the reconstruction of Europe to obtain profitable markets for its domestic industrial expansion, it made negotiations possible to promote flows of productive investments in Southern countries, it exported its cultural consumption patterns around the world, it openly participated in the military operations against the left projects of several countries and imposed military regimes in a variety of Southern countries.

As the historian Perry Anderson has correctly said, the United States based its new imperial logic in a combination of the productive strength of its economy, its capacity for military domination and its hegemonic capacity through the legitimacy of its democracy and cultural model. It is, to a great extent, ‘an iron fist inside a velvet glove’. Beyond the triumph of the American imperialism, the popular resistances in the Global South during the ’60s, the Cuban Revolution, and the defeat of the empire in Vietnam marked a new political crisis in this unequal order while it developed a new global economic crisis—maybe the most significant one—to explain the world we are living in today. The crisis in the ’70s found, again, its way out in reloaded imperialism. Neoliberalism and imperialism twinned to give place to a new cycle of financial, productive and military impositions from the North to the South. The new global (dis)order that was born during the capitalist crisis in the ’70s multiplied the previous inequalities and generated a tendency towards financialization and an unprecedented plundering. After declaring the ‘death of ideology’ and the ‘end of history’ in favour of a new, free, democratic and capitalist global world, the potential new American century is, again, in an undeniable crisis.

But this crisis does not have any conditions of more dignity for the people of the South. On the contrary, the American imperialist crisis highlights barbarism: direct military intervention in the Middle East, multiplication of its financial impositions, absorption of the world’s capital masses turning them into financial capital, development of new formats of hybrid wars against countries that do not want to give up sovereignty, from Syria to Venezuela. This book tries to build a new interpretation of imperialism in our time from a conversational and collective debate. It is a toolbox to understand our time and renew our commitment against any form of oppression.

Understanding how imperialism acts today, through which mechanism it acts, defining the depth of its crisis and the possibilities of alternative hegemonies allow us to re-edit our commitment to the liberation of our people in the Global South. It helps us realize that, to the greatest extent possible, we should close the wound that implies the spoliation of our bodies, our culture, our common goods and our jobs. It allows us to reconstruct a historical base on which we can stand, what Che Guevara synthesized, in that beyond the tactical disagreements, ‘as for the great strategic objective—the total destruction of imperialism by means of struggle—on that we must be intransigent’.

This excerpt has been taken from The Veins of the South Are Still Open, published by Leftword Books, 2020. 

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