{"id":1176421,"date":"2023-08-11T05:16:16","date_gmt":"2023-08-11T05:16:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dissidentvoice.org\/?p=143008"},"modified":"2023-08-11T05:16:16","modified_gmt":"2023-08-11T05:16:16","slug":"can-poorer-nations-break-the-cycle-of-dependency-that-has-inflicted-grief-for-a-hundred-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2023\/08\/11\/can-poorer-nations-break-the-cycle-of-dependency-that-has-inflicted-grief-for-a-hundred-years\/","title":{"rendered":"Can Poorer Nations Break the Cycle of Dependency That Has Inflicted Grief for a Hundred Years?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In late July, I visited two settlements of the Landless Rural Workers (MST) on the outskirts of S\u00e3o Paulo (Brazil). Both settlements are named for brave women, the Brazilian lawmaker Marielle Franco \u2013 who was assassinated in 2018 \u2013 and Irm\u00e3 Alberta \u2013 an Italian Catholic nun who died in 2018. The lands where the MST has built the Marielle Vive camp and the Irm\u00e3 Alberta Land Commune were slated for a gated community with a golf course, and a garbage dump, respectively. Based on the social obligations for land use in the Brazilian Constitution of 1988<\/a>, the MST mobilised landless workers to occupy these areas, build their own homes, schoolhouses and community kitchens, and grow organic food.<\/p>\n

Each of these MST encampments are beacons of hope for ordinary people who are otherwise taught to feel redundant within the neo-colonial structures of contemporary capitalism. The MST has been under concerted attack<\/a> in Brazil\u2019s legislature, driven by the agenda of agro-business elites who want to prevent 500,000 families from building a tangible alternative for the working class and the peasantry. \u2018When the elite see the land, they see money\u2019, Wilson Lopes of the MST told me at Marielle Vive. \u2018When we see the land,\u2019 he said, \u2018we see the people\u2019s future\u2019.<\/p>\n

It is often impossible for people in large parts of the planet to imagine the future. Hunger rates rise, and those who can access food are often only able to eat unhealthily; family farmers, such as those at the MST settlements, provide<\/a> over a third of the world\u2019s food (more than 80% <\/a>in value terms) and yet, they find it nearly impossible to access agricultural inputs, mostly water, and reasonable credit. The MST is the largest<\/a> producer of organic rice in Latin America. Pressure from Bretton Woods institutions (the IMF and the World Bank) as well as from commercial banks and development agencies force countries to embrace \u2018modernisation policies\u2019 that are contrary to the facts. These \u2018modernisation policies\u2019, as we showed in dossier no. 66<\/a>, were designed in the 1950s without an accurate assessment of global neo-colonial structures: they assumed that if countries borrowed money, strengthened their export sector for commodities, and imported finished goods from the West, then they would be able to \u2018modernise\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As we walked around the MST settlement, residents Cintia Zaparoli, Dieny Silva, and Raimunda de Jesus Santos told us about how the community struggled to access electricity and water, social goods which are not easily produced without large-scale interventions. For context, two billion people around the world have no easy access to safe drinking water. None of these social goods can be conjured out of thin air; they require complex institutions, and in our modern world, the most important of these institutions is the state. But most states are constrained from acting on their citizenry\u2019s behalf due to external pressures that thwart economic policies which would benefit society over private capital and wealthy bondholders<\/a>, who stand first in line to extract the immense social wealth produced in poorer nations.<\/p>\n

None of these problems are new. For Latin America, the contemporary suffocation of state projects that aim to elevate people\u2019s social conditions can be dated back to the Chapultepec Conference of 1945 held in Mexico City. Mexico\u2019s Foreign Minister Ezequiel Padilla told<\/a> the conference that it was \u2018vital for the Americans to do more than produce raw materials and live in a state of semi-colonialism\u2019. The view was that those living in the hemisphere must be allowed to use all tools necessary \u2013 including tariffs and subsidies \u2013 to build industries in the region. US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, was horrified by this attitude, telling the Venezuelan delegation that it had been \u2018short-sighted \u2026 increasing tariffs and restricting trade by import and other controls after the first World War and in the early thirties\u2019. The US put forward a resolution to get all Latin American states \u2018to work for the elimination of economic nationalism in all its forms\u2019, including the exercise of economic sovereignty against the advantages secured by multinational corporations. This agenda asserted that the first beneficiaries of a country\u2019s resources should be US investors.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

An important line of thinking, now known as \u2018dependency theory\u2019, developed in the aftermath of the Chapultepec Conference. It describes a neo-colonial setting where capitalist development in \u2018periphery\u2019 countries cannot take place since their economic output is structured to benefit \u2018core\u2019 countries, creating a situation that Andre Gunder Frank called<\/a> \u2018the development of underdevelopment\u2019. Our dossier no. 67<\/a> \u2013 Dependency and Super-Exploitation: The Relationship Between Foreign Capital and Social Struggles in Latin America<\/i> (August 2023) \u2013 uses the centenary of one of Brazil\u2019s most important Marxist intellectuals, Ruy Mauro Marini (1932\u20131997), to outline a proper Marxist view from the Third World of this \u2018dependency theory\u2019 tradition for our current times. The text was developed by the Brazil office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, in collaboration with Professor Renata Couto Moreira<\/a> from the Research Group on Marxist Studies of Dependency Theory in Latin America \u2013 Anata\u0301lia de Melo Collective of the Federal University of Espi\u0301rito Santo (UFES).<\/p>\n

Our key assessment is to be found in these sentences:<\/p>\n

The root of underdevelopment was not to be found in the industrial backwardness of each economy, but rather in the historical process and in the way that the countries of Latin America had been incorporated into the world market through colonisation by Europe, and then by the international relations to which those countries were subjected, which were perpetuated after their political independence by means of economic dependence on the dictates of the division of labour in global capitalism.<\/p>\n

Countries in Latin America, but also in Africa and Asia, emerged in the post-World War II era as appendages of a world system that they were not able to define or control. As in the era of high colonialism, unprocessed raw materials were exported from these countries to earn valuable foreign exchange that was used to buy expensive finished products and energy. The uneven exchange that took place allowed for the almost permanent deterioration of the \u2018terms of trade\u2019, as Ra\u00fal Prebisch and Hans Singer had shown<\/a> in the 1940s and that has been reaffirmed<\/a> in the 2000s. The structure of unevenness was premised not only on the terms of trade, as Prebisch and the more liberal scholars of dependency understood it, but importantly, in the global social relations of production.<\/p>\n

In the zones of the South, wages are held down through a wide variety of mechanisms, as shown by an International Labour Organisation report<\/a> from 2012. Reasons given for unequal wages across international borders are often racist, the argument being made that a worker in India, for example, does not have the same expectations of life as a worker in Germany. If workers in the South are paid less, this does not mean that they do not work hard (even if their productivity rates are lower due to less mechanisation and less scientific management of the workplace). The Marxist theory of dependency focused<\/a> on this \u2018super-exploitation\u2019, pointing to the sub-contracted mechanisms of labour discipline that allow richer countries to maintain high moral standards while they rely on brutal work conditions that render social relations toxic in poorer nations. Our observation in the dossier is clear:<\/p>\n

The super-exploitation of labour refers to the intensified exploitation of the workforce, resulting in an extraction of surplus value that exceeds the limits historically established in core countries. This becomes a fundamental feature of the capitalist system in underdeveloped economies, since foreign capital and local ruling classes benefit from workers\u2019 low wages and precarious working conditions as well as the absence of labour rights, thus maximising their profits and capital accumulation. This contributes to the reproduction of these countries\u2019 dependence and subordination as part of the international order.<\/p>\n

The cycle of dependency, we argue, has to be broken by two simultaneous and necessary operations: the building of an industrial sector through active state intervention, and the building of strong working-class movements to challenge the social relations of production that rely upon the super-exploitation of labour in poorer regions.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1965, the year after the US-backed coup in Brazil and during the US-initiated coup in Indonesia, Ghana\u2019s president Kwame Nkrumah (1909\u20131972) published his monumental book, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism<\/i>. In this book, Nkrumah argued that the new nations that had come out of colonialism remained trapped in the neo-colonial structure of the world economy. Governments in places like Ghana that had been impoverished by colonialism had to beg their former colonizers and \u2018a consortium of financial interests\u2019 for credit to conduct the basic functions of government, let alone to advance the social needs of their population. The lenders, he argued, \u2018have a habit of forcing would-be borrowers to submit to various offensive conditions, such as supplying information about their economies, submitting their policy and plans to review by the World Bank, and accepting agency supervision of their loans\u2019. This intervention, deepened by the IMF\u2019s Structural Adjustment Programme, simply did not allow room for manoeuvre.<\/p>\n

Neocolonialism<\/i> was widely reviewed, including in a secret memorandum<\/a> of 8 November 1965 by Richard Helms, Deputy Director of the US\u2019 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Helms took offence at the direct assault on imperialism in the book. In February 1966, Nkrumah was removed from office by a coup d\u2019\u00e9tat<\/em> encouraged<\/a> by the US. That is the price to be paid for revealing the neo-colonial structure of the world and fighting for structural transformation. It is a price that the West wants to inflict on the people of Niger, who have decided<\/a> that it is no longer beneficial to allow their wealth to be leeched away by the French, and for the US to have a major military footprint<\/a> in their country. Can the people of Niger and the Sahel, in general, break the cycle of dependency that has created grief for over a hundred years?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In late July, I visited two settlements of the Landless Rural Workers (MST) on the outskirts of S\u00e3o Paulo (Brazil). Both settlements are named for brave women, the Brazilian lawmaker Marielle Franco \u2013 who was assassinated in 2018 \u2013 and Irm\u00e3 Alberta \u2013 an Italian Catholic nun who died in 2018. The lands where the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":152,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[708,2242,1006,730,67131,742],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1176421"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/152"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1176421"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1176421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1177791,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1176421\/revisions\/1177791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1176421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1176421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1176421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}