Tony Rakhal-Fraser
In addition to the domination through military might and political influence, more precisely, because of it, the exercise of control over the political economy of the world by the Industrial North is built into the world system. It’s one which has been operational for centuries, but got formalised post-WWII into the Bretton Woods system, and with additions.
Among the main devices of control in contemporary usage are the imposition of sanctions on trade; tariffs, economic structures handed down from on high, such as those enforced/recommended by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; protective trade barriers; and the determination of who gets to trade with whom and in whose currency. US President Trump has been threatening the BRICS countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—about their efforts to develop a trading currency, and/or trading amongst themselves in their national currencies.
Then there are the preventive measures instituted against the transnational corporations to prevent them trading with a sanctioned country—Cuba and Venezuela; the fixing of prices said to be determined by market forces; the control of raw materials and the processing of same—the US President under his fictitious claim against the Venezuelan President Maduro, recently effectively seized control of that country’s oil and gas; transfer payments made by multinational corporations, which choose to pay taxes in low-cost taxation jurisdictions as opposed to the one in which the taxes were due; licensing arrangements on copyrights and products; the freezing of the assets of countries which have been banked in the US and Europe; they all have and continue to operate as levers of control and underdevelopment in the non-industrial West.
At the institutional level, the international financial environment, established in the post WWII period, ie, the Bretton Woods system, consisting in the main of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, has dictated policy prescriptions to developing countries which have resulted in social and economic upheaval, and seriously impacted on workers and those at the lower end of the economic ladder; privatisation of state assets is part of the “shakedown” of developing countries.
During the 1990s, the IMF medicine was dispensed through the Washington Consensus, dictated to Latin American countries such as Argentina and Mexico, as a means of countering the debt crisis of the previous decade. That crisis was caused, among other things, by what was said to be an “over-reliance on short-term foreign capital, pegged exchange rates, and financial liberalisation.”
As far back as the 1980s, Fidel Castro deemed the debts being incurred as “unethical and unpayable”.
Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, at different points in the 1980s, had their own dosages of the IMF medicine—generated in part by the national governments through inappropriate spending, etc, and also by the terms of trade which have always favoured the industrial world—the fixing of prices for raw materials as opposed to finished goods.
The above is a sampling of the modern methods of financial chicanery—“smartman thing nah.” However, the foundation for the “Pillage of the Third World”—Pierre Jalee, goes back to the 19th century, Scramble for Africa. Then, the European powers divided portions of the continent amongst themselves. Even before that period of time and historically important event, the British took charge of China, India and their resources, and held them into the 20th century. Imagine the audacity and assertion of the right to such an act by the British over civilisations which long predated theirs, and countries which the British Isles could fit into one of the rivers of continental-sized India and China.
The historical record includes those researched and written by Williams and Rodney, among others, covering the wholesale capture of raw materials to fuel the Industrial Revolution as it gathered impetus.
A couple of centuries before, Spain and Portugal took charge of Latin America and its resources. Such capture was given distributive blessings by Pope Alexander VI’s drawing the original line of demarcation as to the portions of South America which were to be shared between the above two European powers.
All of the above statements are well-documented; however, the intensification and modernisation of the methods have been identified and utilised in the Neo-liberal Order made popular by Regan and Thatcher.
The reaction and search for a New Economic and Political Order was initiated in Latin America by the Raoul Prebisch “Dependency Theory” which pointed to the system and methods of exploitation which created a “dominant centre”—the Industrial World, and the “Periphery” made up of the developing/underdeveloped world—which determined that the latter countries were to be producers of raw materials, leaving the focus of the industrial world producing the finished products, the former at starvation prices, while having to find large sums for the finished products from their exported raw materials.
Lloyd Best and Kari Levitt, Norman Girvan, George Beckford and others of the New World Movement also researched and wrote around the subject of planned and executed underdevelopment of the countries of the South by those of the North through many of the above measures.
Tony Rakhal-Fraser—freelance journalist, former reporter/current affairs programme host, and News Director at TTT; programme producer/current affairs director at Radio Trinidad; correspondent for the BBC Caribbean Service and the Associated Press; graduate of UWI, CARIMAC, Mona, and St Augustine—Institute of International Relations.
