Latin America, Birthplace of the Modern World
Slavery and Liberty in the cradle of capitalism
Where was capitalism born?
One fact shapes all serious discussion on world security, world development, world civilization and world government: Latin America was the birthplace of capitalism. By this same token it was the birthplace of the world struggle for liberation. In this sense, whatever importance we may wish to attribute to the civilizations of antiquity, the world we all live in started here.
The historically, geographically and economically correct description of this region is ‘Latin America and the Caribbean’. ‘Latin America’ is an abbreviation. There is a parallel problem in the North of the Americas. Whatever goes on in Donald Trump’s head, the name started when Amerigo Vespucci mapped the Atlantic coast of the Southern continent. I will speak of the whole continent as ‘The Americas’ and use ‘America’ to describe the USA.
The region itself, and indeed the Americas as a whole, are a product of conquest. The conquistadores either wiped out or enslaved entire populations, imposed their language and religion on those who remained, and replaced their civilizations with colonial polities devoted to exporting, through ruthless exploitation, the raw materials that fuelled the industrial revolution. Where the indigenous peoples had either been slaughtered or so exhausted that it could no longer meet the needs of their rapacious masters, slaves were imported from Africa to made up the difference.
This article was commissioned by the Center for Studies and Exchange on China, Latin America and the Caribbean of CLACSO (Latin American Council of Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities) ), the Academy of Marxism of CASS (China), and Transform! Europe, for a collective book entitled China’s Four Global Initiatives. It will be published in Spanish and Chinese. With the kind permission of the publishers, here I present my English-language contribution, with small amendments. No copyright permission is provided or implied.
This was not a ‘regional’ phenomenon, confined to the Hispanic territories; it launched a world-wide process embracing every nation in the world. It began with the super-exploitation of the silver mines of Cuzco, which by the late sixteenth century had become the fourth largest city in Christendom, and in which an estimated nine million labourers were worked to death. American Silver and Gold financed the rise of European capital, starting in the Netherlands before moving first to Britain, then to France, then Germany before transforming the economies of Western Europe and the Anglophone American North.
The rise to dominance of the United States was powered by the super-exploitation of this labour force. It reached its most extreme form in the Antebellum South, where the slave workforce rose by 1860 to 3.9 million. It was almost exclusively devoted to producing cotton, the key raw material of the industrial revolution. By this time US output of cotton had risen from 720,000 to 5,000,000 bales, supplying 70% of the world’s cotton and 60% of all US exports. By this time also, the cotton industry employed 450,000 workers in the UK; in other words, slave labour formed 80% or more of the total workforce of the world cotton industry.
Paradoxically as a result of the Civil War and the liberation of the slaves, the North then rose to parity, and eventually overtook, its European rivals by creating an industrial machine to provision them through two fratricidal World Wars. Meantime the methods first tested in Latin America were adopted by all the major powers to create the Victorian colonial system, giving rise to the present division of the world between the Global South or ‘world majority’ countries and the global North or ‘Columbian’ Nations, as I call them, of Europe, the USA, Japan and the settler colonies, whose prolonged and internally-produced decline has provoked the present turbulent phase of world politics.
Marx explained this, though many Western Marxists have yet to grasp it:
Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.
Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North America off the map of the world, and you will have anarchy – the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.
Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed among the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World.
(Poverty of Philosophy Chapter 2 Fourth Observation)
This astute observation of 1847 somewhat dulls uninformed claims that Marx offers no account of imperialism. Actually, the problem is that Western liberal thinking, of which too much Western Marxism is but a sub-category, fails to grasp the historical connection between colonialism and modern imperialism. Engels’ footnote to the 1885 edition of this famous work of Marx fills the gap:
This was perfectly correct for the year 1847. At that time the world trade of the United States was limited mainly to import of immigrants and industrial products, and export of cotton and tobacco, i.e., of the products of southern slave labour. The Northern States produced mainly corn and meat for the slave states. It was only when the North produced corn and meat for export and also became an industrial country, and when the American cotton monopoly had to face powerful competition, in India, Egypt, Brazil, etc., that the abolition of slavery became possible. And even then this led to the ruin of the South, which did not succeed in replacing the open Negro slavery by the disguised slavery of Indian and Chinese coolies. [Note by Engels to the 1885 German edition]
Political Liberation, Economic Enslavement
Precisely because Latin America was the birthplace of colonialism it became the crucible of resistance.
The very names of its heroes are synonyms in the world battle for freedom.
Europe likes to think that it led the world fight for freedom. Actually, the modern battle for freedom started with the struggle against Europe. Latin America’s freedom fight was not an afterthought of capitalism but arose simultaneously with it, indeed before many of the bourgeois revolutions of Europe itself. Tupac Amaru led the Inca rebellion against the Conquistadores of 1570. His direct descendant, also named Tupac Amaru, beside his wife and co-commander Micaela Bastidas, mobilized a rebellion of over 40,000 Indigenous and mestizo people that swept across Peru and Bolivia in 1780. Toussaint l’Ouverture led the world’s first successful slave revolt in Haiti in 1804. Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla who initiated the 1810 struggle for Mexican independence. Simon Bolivar, celebrated as ‘Liberador’ throughout the continent, defeated the Spanish Crown and in 1820 established Gran Colombia—spanning modern Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Panama—and followed his election as its president with stunning military victories culminating in the decisive battle of Ayacucho in 1824, led by his closest general Antonio José de Sucre, which permanently broke Spanish colonial power in South America a scant forty years after the French revolution.
Other leaders too numerous to mention have been joined over the centuries by such household names as Emiliano Zapata, César Sandino, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. Indeed Latin America holds the honour of producing generations of freedom fighters more famous than any of the despots they fought against.
Which comes first: freedom or prosperity?
This leads us to the question at the centre of the present condition of the peoples of Latin America: what is the relation between political independence and economic sovereignty, or in the terminology of China’s global initiatives, between security and development? In its most poignant form, this can be posed as follows: how, given such inspiring and successful struggles for political freedom, what forces inflicted the widespread poverty and economic dependency that reigns throughout the region? How did its nations lose, economically, the freedoms that their leaders so valiantly defended politically?
The reason is aptly summarised in the lament of the 19th Century Mexican president Porfirio Dios: ‘Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States’. Out of the turbulent years of the 19th Century, there grew the paradox which Kwame Nkrumah named ‘neocolonialism’: the economic subjugation of the politically liberated. Though this term was coined in 1963, the phenomenon had already been invented seventy years earlier—by the United States of America. Its mechanisms have been accurately described by many writers, including those of Latin American origin or inspiration such as Prebisch and Singer who first drew attention to it, and was successively amplified and built on by theorists of unequal exchange such Arghiri Emanuel and Samir Amin, and by Dependency School writers such as Andre Gunder Frank and in Latin America Ruy Mauro Marini, Theotonio dos Santos, Augustin Cueva and the controversial Brazilian President Henrique Cardoso.
It is well-described by the term ‘dependency’, in which nominally independent nations are either compelled politically or driven by their economic circumstances to subordinate their economies to the profit-driven requirements of the Columbian nations. It occurs when two countries (or blocs, or regions) of differing labour productivity enter into trade relations with each other, typically when the higher-productivity country specialises in ‘knowledge-intensive’, high-tech products. The lower-productivity country (the dependent country) is then driven to specialise in the products of cheap labour. In the early colonial days these were typically mineral or agricultural products, though nowadays it extends to manufactures at the low end of the value chain such as garments, electronic components (the basis of Mexico’s ‘maquiladora’ industries) or even vehicle components, which, being labour intensive, can be created more cheaply with the cheap labour of the South.
The high-productivity country or bloc benefits from these cheap imports, allowing it to specialise in so-called ‘high-end’ products in which they can preserve a monopoly by the specialist skills of their workforce, elaborate mechanisms of protection, or their control of large resources to invest in Research and Development which keeps them ahead of the game.
In these circumstances, the labour of the dominant country exchanges, even at ‘fair’ market prices, against a much larger quantity of the labour of the dependent country. The ratio is very large; we can estimate it by comparing the GDP per capita of the two countries, which is an approximation for the labour that creates their products. It can be seen in the above chart that by 1989 when neoliberal policies peaked, the labour of one worker in the global North exchanged against that of 14 from Latin America and the Caribbean.
Things have got ‘slightly better’ since then and the chart provides what looks like an improving trend. Yet the simple ratio between what US capitalists can get for the work of their labourers, and what even Latin American capitalists can get, is no better than it was in the time of Theodore Roosevelt. Dismally also the ‘improvement’ is not the result of any bettering of the conditions of Latin America, but the long, autonomously-generated, decline of the USA.
According to neoclassical trade theory, this gap should not exist at all. It should have closed long ago as a consequence of the operation of the world market. In fact, the opposite has occurred. Inequality rose sharply during the neoliberal years and reduced most during the ‘protectionist’ sixties and seventies, when Latin American countries, informed by the dependency analysis, introduced measures such as import substitution, capital controls, and development-oriented state investment.
This highlights two key points: first, because of unequal exchange, dependency—and with it, inequality and poverty—gets worse when the world market is unregulated and the nations of the global South are compelled to ‘open their markets; it is relieved when these nations protect their economic sovereignty by protecting their own industries, managing trade, and controlling capital flows. To put it another way, ‘divergence’ is self-reenforcing. As a consequence, it does not need to be imposed by colonial occupation. Instead, the dominant countries use political force and economic corruption to maintain pliant governments in power in the rest of the world. When this doesn’t work, military action and regime-change coups are their immediate recourse. This is indeed the principal cause of the belligerence which the Columbian nations show towards China.
Monroe and his corollaries
The second ‘leg’ on which neocolonialism rests is, hence, the persistent and regular use of force to impose governments that cave in to dependent economic relations. This, too, was pioneered in the Americas—in the North, not the South. It emerged in the USA, above all under the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt which lasted from 1901 to 1912.
Marx, in a celebrated passage on the ‘Rosy Dawn’ of capitalism in Capital Volume I, expressed very clearly the umbilical relation between colonialism and capitalism, and the critical function of force in cementing it:
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre. It begins with the revolt of the Netherlands from Spain, assumes giant dimensions in England’s Anti-Jacobin War, and is still going on in the opium wars against China, &c.
The different momenta of primitive accumulation distribute themselves now, more or less in chronological order, particularly over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force, e.g., the colonial system. But, they all employ the power of the State … Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power.
Roosevelt was the primary architect of the use of neocolonial force, setting in place a pattern that has prevailed to this day. He put paid to the Anti-imperialist League, formed by Mark Twain in 1898 to oppose the annexation of the Philippines. His presidency saw the annexation of Puerto Rico, the occupation of Cuba, the construction of the Panama Canal, the so-called ‘Banana Wars’ and a vast expansion of the US Army and Navy including the creation of the US Marine Corps and the military doctrine enshrined in their ‘manual of small wars’.
The next twenty years saw interventions into Cuba, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. The USA acted in single-minded support of US growers and importers such as the United Fruit Company with the single objective of converting these fertile lands into plantation economies.
The excuse was the ‘Roosevelt Corollary’, a key to modern US doctrine. The original Monroe doctrine only specified that the USA would intervene in Latin America in the event that a European Power did so. This ceased being a practical risk in 1867 with the dismal collapse of France’s brief invasion of Mexico. The Roosevelt Corollary however specified that the United States should intervene in the finances of ‘unstable countries’ in order to forestall European intervention. This converted the Monroe Doctrine from opposition to European meddling into the imposition of US control. It was not a redux of Palmerston’s Victorian gunboat diplomacy; it was a new form of warfare. It arrogated, to the USA, the right to decide who would govern its neighbours.
Regional Security, the precondition for Economic Sovereignty
What is to be done?
What conclusions can be drawn from this brief history? I suggest it can be expressed in two fundamental principles, which the other countries of the world should assist the Americas to achieve in whatever manner is freely determined by the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean. The first such principle is that of regional security: the lands of Latin America and the Caribbean face the very real and immediate shared threat of military invasion and attack by their Northern neighbour. They have a shared past; they deserve a shared future, and to achieve this they must be able to act as one. The principle of ‘a threat to one is a threat to all’ has to prevail if they are to succeed, as is tragically demonstrated by the run-up to the illegal invasion of Venezuela; had Brazil, for example, clearly indicated that it would not tolerate a hostile naval presence in the hemisphere, instead of vetoing Venezuela’s admission to the BRICS, a different result could have been achieved.
The second such principle is collective regional development; in this respect, the farsighted vision of Hugo Chavez’s ALBA proposal greatly exceeds the fragile and vulnerable mechanisms provided by Mercosur and its related institutions. A concerted drive to increase connectivity, focussed not just on transport but on energy, communications and knowledge, cries out for the political will to see it through.
This brings me to the relation between development and security. These are always in a general sense indivisible, in that development is the greatest guarantee of security as the example of China shows; however, in the particular, neocolonial case of Latin America and the Caribbean, it is the absence of security that constitutes the greatest obstacle to development—as the example of Venezuela illustrates.
Development is not a threat
One final point has to be made: is the development of Latin America a threat to the USA? This view clearly informs the rhetoric and belligerence of its current president, but it should be noted that more or less all US presidents have worked within the framework that casts its Southern neighbours as a menace. In the course of history, its motivation however evolved. Born of a drive to escape the stifling grasp of the dynastic aristocratic regimes that ruled Europe in the eighteenth Century, the US drive for independence was at one time, just like that of its Southern neighbours, synonymous for radicals such as Paine and Lafayette, with the struggle for liberation from dictatorial rule. There were, at that time, ample grounds to treat the liberation struggle of the North and the South as expressing some kind of common interest.
This however evaporated as the USA began adopting the very practices for which it condemned the Europeans. From the earliest days it set itself the task of not merely ridding the Americas of European influence but taking over from the Europeans. In a series of conquests and agreements it took over the entire Northern continent down to the Rio Grande in the South and the 49th parallel in the North. At the same time it waged what amounts to a genocidal war against its own indigenous people, whilst its Confederate South gave birth to a slaveocracy every whit as tyrannical as the worst Europe had to offer, Things might have stopped there, but they didn’t: having helped expel the Spaniards from Cuba and the Phillippines, a historical tragedy ensued when the USA, despite the readiness and willingness of the indigenous resistance to govern these countries autonomously, decided to stay.
From that time on the Monroe doctrine, originally formulated as an anti-colonial doctrine to keep out predatory Europeans, and which hence at least in theory could have favoured liberation struggles, mutated into a colonial doctrine designed to convert the former European possessions into an exclusive monopoly of the USA. The urge not merely to intervene in the affairs of Latin America but to remove any government there that is perceived as a ‘threat to American interests’ has since expressed itself in countless military adventures, in dictatorships and massacres consciously backed and resourced by the USA, and in the profoundly unequal—and therefore ultimately unstable—relation between North and South which holds today.
At the heart of this historical tragedy lies a profound economic fallacy; that the rise of any nation in which US monopolists have a stake is a threat to the well-being of the ordinary people of the USA. This is not so, and elementary economics tells us so: were Mexico or Brazil to attain, for example, the productive capacity of China, the result would be an immense cheapening of the goods that US workers consume, resulting in a formidable rise in living standards. It is for this precise reason that a politically independent and economically sovereign Latin America and the Caribbean, free from military adventurism and coercive sanctions, is in the shared interests of all the peoples of the Americas.
References
Freeman, A. (2024). ‘The Geopolitical Economy of International Inequality’, Development and Change, Vol. 55, Issue 1, pp 3-37