This is Richard Wolff responding to another Ask Prof Wolff question from our Patreon community.
And this one comes from David Melendez who asks, does the United States still
operate with colonies around the world? And if so, is Puerto Rico one of them
and are there movements such as in Puerto Rico to make it (and perhaps other colonies)
states here in the United States—perhaps something that might advantage
the Democratic Party which would hope thereby to gain senators etc. for its political objectives?
I want to respond to this question mostly about the first part of it—about colonialism and the
role of the United States in it. The leading colonialist powers in modern history were places
like Russia, Germany, France, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal. These were European societies / European
nations who used mostly their naval power, their shipping, and their military to invade,
destroy (in many cases), dominate militarily, and convert other parts of the world into subordinate
units called colonies. Sometimes they took other names but the relationship was the same.
Local government [and] local social institutions were either destroyed or subordinated in these
places to the power of the European economy that took them over. The most successful of these
was the United Kingdom, Britain, which boasted in the 18th and 19th century that
“they had so many colonies around the world that the sun never set on the British empire.”
No matter whether it was dark or light, somewhere the sun was shining
on a piece of property, land, and people that Britain owned, controlled, and dominated.
Why did these countries go out there? Overwhelmingly for economic reasons they
wanted to control those countries to get gold and silver, in some cases, that could be mined
there often forcing local people in those colonies to do the work of bringing the gold
and silver up so it could be sent back home to London or Paris or Berlin or Moscow or wherever.
Sometimes it wasn't for gold and silver but it was for markets—a place where the products of the
dominating European country could be sold and other countries' products would be excluded.
I remember research I did on East Africa that the people in East Africa had to buy British goods if
they lived in a British colony because competing goods were kept out; and that very situation led
other European countries quickly to carve out whatever was left of the world in Asia, Africa,
and Latin America if only not to be excluded by someone else setting up a colony there.
And then there was the interest in raw materials—particularly
the product of land, mines, and mills. Again utilizing my own research in East Africa,
I learned that the country we now call Kenya was once a British colony;
and that the British introduced there something that would make money for British businesses,
namely, coffee. And so Kenya to this day produces coffee—stuck still in the coffee
business even though that was implanted there by their colonial masters a century or more ago.
All right, so what about the United States? The United States, especially in the Monroe Doctrine
back in 1830, established its own colonial regime. It basically said in 1830 that ‘Latin America was
ours [and] that the Europeans better not mess around in Latin America or there might be war.’
We didn't set up colonies. In most cases there were a few—Puerto
Rico one of them—but we let the countries be independent technically/formally
but not really. Just as the Europeans had done, the United States maneuvered these countries
into an economic dependence on the United States serving the U.S. economy.
One of the best examples: Cuba, a very fertile island that was converted into producing sugar
and a few other items for export to the United States. Which is why when the United States
had a problem with Cuba going independent of its subordinate position (an independence begun by the
revolution of Fidel Castro), the United States reacted by denying access to the U.S. economy
hoping thereby to cripple the Cuban economy because it depended on the United States,
and the only thing that allowed Cuba to survive the embargo that has basically existed ever since
was finding other countries (at first Russia, now the whole world) to sell to at least to get
by. But it's very hostile (the United States) to every effort to become independent. And you can
see it in Puerto Rico; You can see it in Haiti; You can see it in the Dominican Republic; And you
can see it everywhere else in Latin America even as the United States replaced the formal empires
that were revolted against after World War II—ending them for Britain, and France,
and Belgium, and so on. The United States replaced formal colonies with
informal colonies. It maneuvered Africa, Asia, and Latin America the way it had once only done
to Latin America—making these countries depend on capital investment from the United States,
selling their products to the United States, allowing the American military to set up bases,
and becoming subordinate. Always there have been movements for independence and often
they have achieved some success. You see that now particularly in Latin America, Cuba, Venezuela,
to an extent Mexico, to an extent now Chile, and so on. But it is an ongoing struggle in those
parts of the world who look upon the United States as a colonialist power even though we never set up
formal colonialism. But informal colonialism, as these places have learned, can be as
impoverishing as formal colonialism ever was. Thank you for your attention. Thank you Patreon
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