Colonialism and Dependence Essay -- essays research papers

Colonialism and DependenceIn "Imperialism, the Highest State of Capitalism", Lenin warned, inrefuting Kautsky, that the domination of finance capital not onlydoes not lessen the inequalities and contradictions pose in theworld economy, but on the contrary ac centuates them.Time has passed and proven him right. The inequalities work becomesharper. Historical research has shown that the distance that separatedthe standard of subsisting in the wealthy countries from that of the poorcountries toward the middle of the nineteenth century was much smallerthan the distance that separates them today.The gap has widened. In 1850 the per capita income in the industrializedcountries was 50 per cent higher than in the underdeveloped countries.To have an idea of the march on that has been achieved in theDEVELOPMENT OF INEQUALITY, we have only to listen to President RichardNixon"...and I think around what this hemisphere, the new world, will be likeat the end of this century. And I consider that if the present growthrates of the United States and the rest of the hemisphere have notchanged, at the end of this century the per capita income in the UnitedStates will be 15 times higher than the income per person of ourfriends, our neighbors, the members of our family in the rest of theHemisphere."(1)The laden nations will have to grow much more rapidly just toMAINTAIN their relative backwardness. Their present low rates ofdevelopment feed the kinetic of inequality the oppressor nations atomic number 18becoming increasingly rich in absolute terms, but they are richer stillin relative terms.The overall strength of the imperialist establishment rests on the necessaryinequality of its component parts, and that inequality is achieving evergreater proportions.Capitalism is still capitalism, and unequal development and widespreadpoverty are still its visible fruits."Centralized" capitalism can afford the luxury of creating and believingits own myths of op ulence, but myths cannot be eaten, and the poornations that constitute the vast capitalist "periphery" are well awareof this fact. Imperialism has "modernized" itself in its methods andcharacteristics, but it has not magically turned into a universalphilanthropic organisation. The systems greed grows with the systemitself.Nowadays imperialism does not req... ... the consumer market, which is increasingly attracted byU.S. advertising, to channel national savings and the sparing surplusproduced by our countries, to use advertising and the various other ship canalof creating public opinion, and, also, to exert that political pressurerequired by imperialisms digestive needs.The new type of imperialism does not make its colonies more prosperous,even though it enriches its "enclaves" it does not alleviate socialtensions, but on the contrary sharpens them it extends poverty andconcentrates wealth it takes over the internal market and the key partsof the productiv e apparatus it appropriates progress for itself,determines its direction, and fixes its limits it absorbs credit anddirects foreign trade as it pleases it does not provide capital fordevelopment, but instead removes it it encourages waste by sending thegreatest part of the economic surplus abroad it denationalizes ourindustry and also the profits that our industry produces. Today in LatinAmerica the system has our veins as open as it did in those distanttimes when our blood first served the needs of primary accumulation forEuropean capitalist development.