Neocolonialism Quotes

“What I see is the millions of people, of whom I am just one, made orphans: no motherland, no fatherland, no gods, no mounds of earth for holy ground, no excess of love which might lead to the things that an excess of love sometimes brings, and worst and most painful of all, no tongue. (For isn't it odd that the only language I have in which to speak of this crime is the language of the criminal who committed the crime? And what can that really mean? For the language of the criminal can contain only the goodness of the criminal's deed. The language of the criminal can explain and express the deed only from the criminal's point of view. It cannot contain the horror of the deed, the injustice of the deed, the agony, the humiliation inflicted one me.”
― Jamaica Kincaid

“When they challenge the innocent morality of the rights regime, anthropologists join a number of political and legal theorists who have asked whether humanitarianism is the new face of colonialism. Some have pointed out the paradoxes of rights-based arguments: that they allow people to make claims, but lock them into fixed identities defined by their injuries rather than freeing them from these identities into a world of equals; or they absolve the perpetrators of past violence by making them the defenders of rights.”
― Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

“The greatest barrier to the emergence and spread of these movements is not the overwhelming power of capital. It is the conviction, held by millions of people, that change is impossible. The moment we let go of our collective belief in the inevitability of the current system is the moment we start to build a new one.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“If capitalism is not defined by the presence or absence of markets, but by the domination of society by capital, then socialism is not defined by the presence or absence of planning, but by the democratization of society. Rather than a system of top-down control, true democratic socialism would be a project of collective liberation, which would allow workers to take control over production and citizens to take control over government.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“The danger to world peace springs not from the action of those who seek to end neo-colonialism but from the inaction of those who allow it to continue. To argue that a third world war is not inevitable is one thing, to suppose that it can be avoided by shutting our eyes to the development of a situation likely to produce it is quite another matter.”
― Kwame Nkrumah, Neo Colonialism the Last Stage of Imperi

“We usually think of empires as violent undertakings. As Frantz Fanon observed in the 1960s, the process of conquering and governing a colony is, by definition, violent. But in the context of global capitalism, empire has a more expansive meaning. Capitalist empires are not simply the states capable of winning the most wars; they are the command centers of the capitalist world system. Their corporations are the largest and most powerful multinationals, extracting profits from all corners of the globe and sucking them back to the imperial core. Their financial institutions are some of the most important nodes in the networks of global finance. The priorities of their governments are forcefully communicated to -and sometimes enforced upon- less powerful states.

In fact, at the global level it is much easier to see the equivalence between economic and political power than it is domestically. The power of US businesses abroad is maintained through an international order that prioritizes the interests of US capital, promulgated by the US government and its allies. The power of US finance rests on the central role played by the dollar as the global reserve currency, which is it self a function of American military, political, and economic might. American military power, meanwhile, stems from and helps to reinforce the power of a web of military contractors, weapons manufacturers, and research hubs that provide the expertise and equipment needed to maintain its supremacy. In certain parts of the world, as in Iraq after its invasion, the US government has rules through private corporations like Halliburton.

Empire is, then, about more than formal colonization -it refers to all the processes through which the world's most powerful capitalist institutions plan who gets what at the level of the world economy. Throughout history, this imperial power has often been exercised through horrendous acts of violence that have warped the development of entire societies for decades. But today, it is often exerted in far more covert ways, such as through the secretive system of international courts or international financial institutions imposing rigid conditions on countries trying to access emergency lending.”
― Grace Blakeley

“The strategies used in Indonesia were replicated in socialist states all over the world, with the active or passive support of the United States. From Brazil to Chile, anti-communists began talking openly about their own 'Jakarta plans.' Bevins is clear about what this meant: 'the state-organized extermination of civilians who opposed the construction of capitalist authoritarian regimes loyal to the United States.' The next testing ground for the Jakarta Method would be Latin America, where hundreds of thousands of people would be killed or 'disappeared' in the name of anti-communism over the subsequent decades.

At home, the US government justified these actions -where they were revealed to the public- by claiming that it was acting to protect 'freedom' by ridding the world of the communist threat. The actions taken to promote this 'freedom' often involved literally exterminating communists and socialists who dared resist the power of the world's foremost empire. One historian found that the number of victims of US-backed violence in Latin America 'vastly exceeded' the number of people killed in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc over the same period.

Why did the world's foremost imperial power find it necessary to unleash such extreme violence on some of the poorest people on the planet? To protect the structure of the capitalist world system. had states in the Global South been allowed to band together, resist the power of the rich world, and forge their own development paths, these countries would have been far harder to exploit. The rich world needed the poor countries to remain scattered and underdeveloped global capitalism could not function were they to unite.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“The neoliberals have always portrayed their proposals as attempts to embed freedom and liberal democracy. And yet, when people have not chosen the right outcome, neoliberal policies have been forced upon them anyways. The divide between authoritarian statist societies and democratic market ones, which was emphasized by thinkers like Hayek, turns out not to be much of a divide at all. Whether by frustrating democracy, or by supporting authoritarianism, capital tends to find a way to bend the state - and the market- to its will.

In fact, all over the world, neoliberal thinkers have supported authoritarian regimes in the name of 'freedom”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“Whether through the secretive system of international courts, international institutions that exploit crises to force neoliberal policies on poor states, or a financial system designed to discipline disobedient governments into submission, the international rules-based system restricts and undermines development. This is not a problem for the businesses that profit from the exploitation of poor countries and their people. In fact, were it not for these inequalities between the rich and the poor worlds, global capitalism could not exist.

Empire is, in this sense, about more than formal colonization -it refers to all the ways in which the world's most powerful countries and the international institutions they dominate plan economic activity at the level of the global economy. The international financial system was constructed and designed quite self-consciously by neoliberals who, while claiming to abhor planning of any kind, were quite happy to support planning that protected the interests of capitalists in the rich world.

But maybe the neoliberals were not being completely cynical when they claimed to champion the ideals of freedom and democracy. Maybe they just thought these things should only even be available to people like them.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“The Lucas Plan was an extraordinarily ambitious document that challenged the foundations of capitalism. In place of an institution designed to generate profits via the domination of labor by capital, the workers at Lucas Aerospace had developed an entirely new model for the firm -one based on the democratic production of socially useful commodities. It was almost as if the workers had never needed managing at all, as though they were creative architects rather than obedient bees.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“Where the workers behind the Lucas Plan had laid the foundations for the development of an economy that respected the dignity, creativity, and autonomy of workers, Thatcher used her control over the state to ruthlessly reassert the power of capital over labor. Cloaking her project in the language of freedom and autonomy, she crushed one of the most innovative and ingenious examples of democratic production on the world had ever seen. The success of the neoliberal movement ensured that 'individualized consumerism rather than collective services and a democratized state and economy became the main legacy of working-class struggles during the twentieth century.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“We have continued to frame our politics in such a self-defeating terms simply because these are the only ones that make sense to us. Capitalism, according to common understanding, means free markets, and socialism means state central planning. If you want more socialism, you have to add more state, and if you want more capitalism, you need to extend markets. Yet the defining feature of capitalism is not the presence or absence of 'free markets', any more than the defining feature of socialism is the centralized planning of the economy. Markets existed long before the emergence of capitalism, and state planning existed long before the emergence of socialism.

Aside from the fact that it's wrong and it doesn't work, there's an even more fundamental reason to avoid pitching leftist politics as one of the state versus market: it's disempowering. There is a big difference between approaching people with an offer of protection and approaching them with an offer of empowerment. The former encourages people to alienate their sense of political agency to a group of unaccountable representatives and bureaucrats who, at best, pay attention to their needs only once every four years. When these electoral promises are broken, people fall into despair and disillusionment, often giving up on politics altogether because 'politicians are all the same.'

But when we frame our political project in terms of collective empowerment, we show that politics can't be reduced to elections -it's something we all do every day. Organizing with your colleagues to demand higher wages is politics, protesting climate breakdown in politics, even fighting alongside your neighbors to keep your local library open is politics. Socialism should not be based on asking people to trust politicians -it should be based on asking people to trust each other.

The significance of the Lucas Plan is that it showed in very concrete terms exactly how people could work together to build a better world. People do not need to surrender their power to state institutions that can control and protect them. Nor do they need to surrender control to a market that is dominated by the powerful. Instead, we can work together to create the kind of world we want to live in. In place of domination, we can build society based on cocreation. In this chapter, we'll look at then real-world examples of attempts to do just this.

Such a perspective might sound naive to those who are convinced that humans are naturally competitive beasts who need to be tamed by authoritarian social institutions. Liberal philosophy stretching all the way back to Hobbes has been grounded on the premise that without an all-powerful sovereign to control their competitive instincts, people would tear each other apart. There's just one problem with this argument: it's demonstrably untrue.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“And indeed, much of the evidence presented in this book so far would appear to confirm this. From the Boeing executives who built faulty planes, to the Goldman Sachs analysts who lied to their clients before being bailed out by the taxpayer, the capitalist class seems to provide the best evidence that society is made up of innately selfish individuals whose cooperative impulses extend, at best, to their immediate family and friends.

But this view is highly one-sided. As we will see in this chapter, people are capable of amazing feats of ingenuity, compassion, and cooperation -even in a social order as brutal and competitive as our own. Capitalism, of course, rewards the opposite behavior: ruthlessness, competitiveness, and self-interest. No wonder these are the behaviors we see most prominently on display at the top of our society.

And those at the top are precisely those who benefit from the belief that everyone is just like them. You don't have to look particularly hard to find the view of humanity as inherently selfish repeated by those in positions of authority. The managers at Lucas Aerospace certainly shared this view. And it is no coincidence that Golding was a schoolmaster -he was probably quite used to being disobeyed by his students, and likely saw this as an indication of man's inherent selfishness.

But disobedience to authority is not an indication of selfishness; it's an assertion of an individual's autonomy. In fact, the willingness to disobey is precisely what separates genuinely civilized societies from barbarous ones. One only has to listen to the testimony at the Nuremberg trials to see what can happen when people unquestionably obey their superiors.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“But wherever there is power, there is resistance. People always find ways to resist attempts to control their behavior and exercise their autonomy. Time and time again throughout history, people have demonstrated their extraordinary capacities to cooperate in pursuit of a higher purpose. And it is through these examples of resistance and solidarity that we can find the springs of a new world order emerging.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“The work of a revolutionary is more like that of a gardener than a builder. The new world will not be brought about overnight - its seeds have to be planted, nurtured, and protected.

As we have seen, there already exist plenty of spaces in which people are working to build alternatives to the current system - despite resistance from those who benefit from the status quo. Even though both failed, the Lucas Plan and Project Cybersyn were two of the most ambitious examples of such work. Both took place during a period when it had begun to seem as though capitalist social relations might not last forever - when working people began to realize that the only thing standing between them and self-governance, between them and real freedom, was capital itself.

It is up to us to continue the legacy of those projects, to peer through the fissures that exist within the current system and work together to prize them open, to let the light in. For us, the rewards are less concrete than those won by the early capitalists. They are rewards that accrue to all, not just to a privileged few: the protection of the planet we rely on to survive, an end to the psychic trauma of living in a world marked by such deep and pervasive suffering and alienation, and a world in which every human being has the chance to flourish into their fullest selves.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“We do not have to live in a society defined by such extreme inequalities of wealth and power. We do not have to spend the rest of our lives dealing with feelings of hopelessness and despair. We do not have to live in a world that is so unfree. We have only to peer through the cracks already emerging within capitalism to catch a glimpse of the real freedom that awaits on the other side.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“The US colonization of the Philippines was brutal, but it did not end with formal independence. The Philippines has existed in a state of what Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's independence leader, referred to as 'neocolonialism': a condition in which a state is, 'in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty,' but 'in reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from the outside.' This was a familiar situation for many newly independent nations.
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For decades, the development of the Philippines was hampered by collusion between the US, international institutions, domestic capitalists, and a corrupt political class, which together deprived Filipinos of basic human rights to ensure the country would remain a haven for international capital. Bello himself was referred to the situation faced by the Philippines after independence as neocolonial.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“Ultimately, the US state took it upon itself to ensure that no part of the world could close its doors to international investment. This desire to keep the world 'open' to capital, rather than overaccumulation or a struggle for resources, is what explains so many of America's imperial escapades in recent decades.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“Yet newly independent states were told they would have to adhere to free trade policies if they wanted to 'catch up' with the rest of the world. These countries were fed the lie that Britain and America had grown rich through free trade, and that if they only opened up their markets to international competition, they would too. Instead, these states found their national economies were dominated by corporations that had been protected by imperialist nations now preaching the benefits of the free market. This was the 'imperialism of free trade'.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“The fusion of economics and politics is a critical part of this model and is something early liberal theorists missed. States consistently seek to protect 'their' capitalists all over the world. Whether in the form of taxation, trade policy, or foreign policy, capitalists always rely on politicians to provide them with opportunities for profit-making abroad. Lenin, who in 1917 wrote that imperialism was the 'highest stage' of capitalism, realized that this fusion of state and corporate power would make it even harder for poor states to catch up with rich ones.

While this fusion of corporate and political power is largely hidden within modern capitalist economies, historically it was understood to be a central component of imperial power. We have already seen how early capitalist states sought to govern the world economy through corporate sovereigns like the East India Company. The Nazi Party also encouraged the creation of 'trusts, combines and cartels' on the basis that doing so would support the German state's imperial power at home and abroad. Unions, and any other threats to corporate power, were destroyed, and a law was passed to 'force industries to form cartels where none existed.' Unchecked corporate power -fused with that of the state- was a key component of Nazism.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“While claiming a grand civilizing mission to end poverty and promote development, rich countries have in fact underdeveloped the rest of the world in order to enrich themselves. In his book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Walter Rodney argues forcefully that the wealth of the rich economies comes through the exploitation of poor ones, through 'trade, colonial domination, and capitalist investment.;' The exploitation of the Global South is a cornerstone of production in the Global North, a relationship that yields great profit for corporations headquartered in countries that used to colonize much of the planet.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“But, with a few carefully chosen exceptions, the US wouldn't let them. If poor states had been allowed to industrialize, they would have been harder to exploit. As a result, when peripheral countries did try to industrialize in the mid-twentieth century, powerful states, corporations, and international institutions worked together to undermine these efforts. As home to the most powerful capitalists in the world, the responsibility for protecting the system fell primarily to the United States, which worked tirelessly over subsequent decades to maintain the hierarchy of global capitalism and its own position at the apex.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“The US government wanted to send a message to poor and downtrodden people around the world: they could not hope to resist the power of American capitalism. Such a show of force was necessary because many were already trying to do so.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“As should be clear from the examples outline in this chapter, the US military is the cornerstone of its power as an imperial planner. US imperialism is fundamentally about protecting the unequal structure of the capitalist world system and preventing the emergence of potential rivals to this system. Private actors also benefit handsomely from America's role as the guardian of global capitalism, and this fusion of public and private interests is what makes the US military-industrial complex so enduring.

But the exercise of imperial power is about more than brute force. As we have seen, the structure of the world economy privileges the interests of capital, concentrated in the core, over workers, concentrated in the periphery. This system does not reproduce itself on its own; it must be protected and upheld by both the force of the US state and the legal and political institutions it promulgates. Where poor countries have not been subjugated to the power of capital by force, as in Guatemala, Indonesia, and Iraq, they have been given little choice other than to submit voluntarily.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“Cooley had a view of 'ordinary people' that was diametrically opposed to that of thinkers like both Hayek and Keynes. In fact, he believed he had never met an 'ordinary' person in his life. Everyone he knew, all the people with whom he worked, had 'extraordinary... skills, abilities and talents,' as the Lucas Plan showed. For Cooley, the great crime of capitalism is that 'those talents are never used or developed or encouraged.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“If, after reading this book, you still believe such a system to be entirely unworkable, it might be worth asking yourself why you are so sure this is the case. Imagine for a moment that you are a medieval peasant working the land of a lord in exchange for a meager subsistence and some vague promises of protection. Your entire worldview is defined by unchanging, divinely sanctioned hierarchies over which you have little control. You were born a serf, and you will die a serf.

You don't waste much time thinking about why the world is the way it is - it just is. If you do bother to consider why you've been assigned such a rough lot in life, you're provided with ample justification for this state of affairs by people who, it seems, know far more than you about the ways of the world. If you just sit down, do as you're told, and work hard, then you'll be rewarded - perhaps not in this life, but certainly in the next.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“We may think the world in which we live is unchangeable, and therefore believe it makes more sense to submit than to fight back. Free-market capitalism might not be the best system in the world, but it's better than all the others we've ever tried.

Such thinking is based on the arrogant and implausible assumption that all possible ways of organizing society have - at this particular point in time- already been put to the test. When you look at the history of the world, it becomes quite clear that the ideals of democracy and socialism -as articulated by liberals and socialists- have never really been put into practice. True political and economic democracy has always and consistently been thwarted by those in charge.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“Today, there are plenty of examples of working people coming together to build real democracy from the ground up -often in extraordinarily difficult conditions and facing extremely powerful vested interests. The fact that many of these experiments have succeeded should provide some evidence that we have not exhausted all possible forms of social organization. And the fact that the powerful were so intent upon crushing movements like those led by Salvador Allende should be proof enough that, when undertaken at scale, they have the power to subvert and even uproot capitalism itself.”
― Grace Blakeley, Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom

“The final kick of a dying horse may appear forceful or harmful, but it does nothing to stop its inevitable demise.”
― Eduvie Donald

“The slavery of the future will not come with chains, but with dependence”
― ‘Yemi Success, MD