No Third World country can or will develop today into an economically advanced industrial power with the class structure of the United States, Canada, the countries of Western Europe, Japan, Australia or New Zealand. No new centers of world finance capital are going to emerge. That has been settled by history. It is one of the great lessons of the last century. It has nothing to do with the policies—“neoliberal” or “progressive”—of any capitalist government, even those “independent of imperialism.” This hasn’t changed since Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin summed up this scientific conclusion of the communist workers movement some 85 years ago. The imperialist world, Lenin said, has been “divided into a large number of oppressed nations and an insignificant number of oppressor nations, the latter possessing colossal wealth and powerful armed forces.”

As Lenin further explained in his pamphlet Imperialism, written in 1916, at that stage of development of world capitalism, “The income of the bondholders is five times greater than the income obtained from the foreign trade of the greatest ‘trading’ country in the world [Britain].

“This,” Lenin said, “is the essence of imperialism and imperialist parasitism.”

For that reason, Lenin added, Marxists should not object to those at the time who had begun referring to the major capitalist industrial powers of the day as “rentier states” or “usurer states.” The rival imperialist powers remain industrial giants and fight over markets for their exports, Lenin said. But at the same time, “The world has become divided into a handful of usurer states on the one side, and a vast majority of debtor states on the other.”

Since the consolidation of imperialism at the opening of the 20th century, every action by finance capital in relation to the colonial and semicolonial countries ends up further warping their economies. That is the effect of every bank loan to their ruling classes; every investment in landed, industrial, and commercial capital; every purchase of bonds issued by a semicolonial administration; every trade pact—the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) or any other such treaty; every scheme to peg the value of weaker currencies to stronger ones, or get rid of local currencies altogether and “dollarize” the economy. Every one of these moves makes the oppressed nations of Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean more, not less, dependent on capital, technology, and imports from the imperialist nations. Their currencies are ever more reliant on, and vulnerable to, the U.S. dollar, the British pound, the “Franco-German” euro, or the Japanese yen.

Capitalist classes in the semicolonial countries do arise and do come into conflict with the imperialist overlords over division of the surplus value produced by the peasants and workers. The recent conflicts between Washington, on the one hand, and Buenos Aires and Brasilia, on the other, shown at the Monterrey summit are one such indication. But the national bourgeoisies in these semicolonial countries are ultimately too weak to come out on top in these conflicts, without the kind of working-class and peasant mobilizations that would threaten the privileged classes’ own wealth and power in the process. (The dynamic of the class struggle in Venezuela is developing in such a direction, much more so than any other capitalist country on the continent, which is why Washington is doing its utmost to topple the nationalist government of Hugo Chávez.) As long as the bourgeoisie remains in power in a semicolonial country, national sovereignty cannot be achieved.

This is actually one of the graphic lessons of the two-day general strike in the Dominican Republic. Working people there and throughout the Americas must increasingly aim their fire at the domestic capitalist class and the profit system in its entirety—not just international finance capital and the policies of the Mejía government or other bourgeois regimes in office or those to come. The only road to liberation from imperialist oppression and exploitation is that charted by the Bolsheviks and the Cuban communists: that of socialist revolution.
 
 
Related articles:
Two-day strike shuts down Dominican Republic
Unionists demand jobs, moratorium on foreign debt payments
Government deploys army, police; troops kill seven people
Havana conference opposes FTAA pact  
 
 
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