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Title: Colonialism Author: Maia Ramnath Date: February 2012 Language: en Topics: colonialism, Lexicon, Institute for Anarchist Studies Source: https://anarchiststudies.org/lexicon-pamphlet-series/lexicon-colonialism/
Colonialism can refer to a transnational process of domination, the
policies by which it is carried out, and the ideologies that underwrite
it. Modern colonialism has taken various forms since the Iberian,
British, and French (and later German, Belgian, and Italian) incursions
into Asia, Africa, and the Americas—whether for armed trade, armed
missionizing, or armed settlement—began to escalate from the late
fifteenth century onward.
In its “classical” historical form (roughly the late eighteenth to
mid-twentieth century), the colonial relationship consisted of a
metropolitan center ruling its conquered satellites from afar, through a
combination of proxy rulers and local colonial administration answerable
to the “home” power. For the metropole, holding colonies maximized its
advantage relative to other so-called Great Powers by securing access to
resources and strategic points. Meanwhile, a colony would be cemented
into a position of economic dependency by which the metropole sucked
surplus value from its claimed possessions in the form of plundered raw
materials (mineral wealth, flora and fauna, and plantation cash crops),
while selling manufactured goods back to them. The residents of a
conquered region thus played the roles of superexploited cheap or
coerced labor and captive consumer markets, while their own prior modes
of subsistence and production were decimated. This economic pattern
required colonial rulers to maintain a strong military presence as well
as a trained class of native collaborators to make its local
administration and policing feasible.
The act of initial takeover, from the perspective of surplus wealth
extraction (aka developmental aid), is sometimes called the moment of
primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession. The latter
term makes it clear that this wasn’t just a singular, originary event
long in the past but rather a process that constantly continues to
expand, regularized through a symbiotic combination of direct
governmentality and subsidized corporate activity.
This kind of formalized system collapsed when the two world wars broke
up the European imperial powers. New superpowers, however, were already
emerging to take their place as global imperial rivals. As international
politics froze into their cold war polarization while the newly
independent countries of Asia and Africa attempted to maintain their
hard-won independence outside either bloc, Kwame Nkrumah popularized the
phrase neocolonialism to describe the situation they now risked. What he
meant by calling neocolonialism “the highest stage of imperialism” (in
reference to Vladimir Lenin’s famous formulation of imperialism as “the
highest form of capitalism”) was that even if formal political
independence was recognized, “freedom” was in substance meaningless if
global economic power imbalances still replicated or even exceeded those
of the classical colonial period.
Nkrumah was Ghana’s first democratically elected leader, and one of the
key figures in both the Pan-Africanist movement and Non-Aligned Movement
of decolonizing countries in Africa and Asia as well as in India, Egypt,
Indonesia, and Yugoslavia. Joined by Latin America—which by then had
already been struggling for almost 150 years against exactly that kind
of relationship to the United States—the countries of what we now call
the Global South formed the “Tricontinental” alliance against
recolonization in all but name: by proxy in local conflicts, covert ops
to install dictators subservient to the desired interests, or economic
domination.
More recently still, what’s been called globalization since the 1980s
and 1990s manifests as more of the same, but in a drastically
intensified form. With the Soviet Union out of the way, the Washington
Consensus laid out the principles of neoliberalism to be exercised on
the same regions, now primarily through mechanisms like the
International Monetary Fund, World Bank, G20, and World Economic Forum.
The conditions for International Monetary Fund loans required adherence
to structural adjustment programs demanding that the entirety of a
recipient country’s social programs be eliminated, privatized, and
deregulated, and that all its financial resources previously geared
toward public goods like health, education, housing, and transportation
be moved toward servicing debt—that is to say, wealth redistribution
toward a transnational capitalist elite, or a tiny point of a pyramid
supported by a vast base of the dispossessed.
In this way, decolonizing or “developing” countries have been locked in
perpetual debt, sacrificing collective welfare to the demands of
corporations and their sponsors—by no coincidence, the same pool of
corporations that have profited the most from the U.S. occupations of
Afghanistan and Iraq over the last ten years. What we’re now seeing in
North America and Europe—the widespread loss of homes and
livelihoods—are the effects of neoliberalism, or exactly what’s been
going on for decades in the Global South. (Here’s a parallel: when
fascism overtook Europe in the 1930s, many recognized that the same
genocidal logics and draconian techniques had long been routine in the
colonies. What was new was the application of these dehumanizing
techniques and ideologies to the metropoles, to people previously
classified—though in some cases precariously—on the near side of the
racial and cultural divide instead of to those conveniently far away.)
Hence, what North Americans now experience resonates in form with the
most recent manifestation of colonization. But there’s an important
difference: history, along with our resulting locations, literally and
figuratively.
The continued expansion of capitalism has always depended on
colonialism—that is, on externalizing its costs and reaching ever
farther afield for inputs. This means that a political entity with an
interest in generating profit has to project its power outside its
territorial jurisdiction in order to do so—and that’s imperialism. This
may occur through economic or military means, hard power or soft, or
some combination thereof.
Furthermore, colonial projects and imperial projections require some
form of racism as a legitimizing base. The stability of all colonial
systems has ultimately depended on maintaining, at great effort, a
strict line, supposedly existential but in truth ideological, of which
one side must be portrayed as irredeemably alien, primitive, inferior,
evil, scary, and/or less human. That was the only way to create
justification for enslavement or genocide, whether to a public whose
participation was required or another power. Some forms of this have
included Christian missionary efforts, Orientalism, racialist
pseudoscience, and the liberal civilizing mission, aka the white man’s
burden. This is why anticolonial resistance movements in the Global
South have so often been interconnected with antiracist mobilizations in
the Global North; they were both linked manifestations of the same
phenomenon, same logic, and same historical processes.
Two of these processes—two related techniques of colonization—are of
particular relevance to contemporary repertoires of civil disobedience
and their relationship to space. The first is military occupation, in
which an imperial power moves its army into a place to demand its
submission by brute force. The second is a subset of the colonial
enterprise known as settler colonialism—in which an imperial power
engages in what amounts to ethnic cleansing or a massive population
transfer, by moving its own people permanently into a region, rather
than just defending bases or enclaves. Occupation in these contexts
means the illegitimate claiming of space: invasion, conquest, sanctioned
vigilantism against prior residents. That, of course, is the dirty open
secret on which the United States was founded: there is no unoccupied
land here.
This is why decolonization may actually be a more accurate term for what
protest movements that utilize occupation as a tactic intend to do when
they establish a sustained presence in a space claimed by government,
military, or corporate entities, such as (to name just a few examples)
the American Indian Movement did at Alcatraz, the Bureau of Indian
Affairs headquarters, and elsewhere since the 1970s; students did at
universities throughout California and New York in 2008–9; and
Argentinean workers did in their factories in 2001. The first example is
certainly a more direct opposition to explicit colonization and conquest
in the textbook sense. Nevertheless, all such actions are essentially
moves toward reversing the process of dispossession; dismantling
relationships of inequity and the legal/governmental structures that
protect them; halting the suck of wealth extraction from the bottom to
the top of the pyramid; restoration of the commons; and refusal to
sacrifice the priorities of collective social well-being to the profits
of an elite few. When externalized and mapped onto racialized divisions
between an elite and a population to which it is seen as external, these
grievances are all aspects of the colonization process.
To struggle against it, then, must also include historically
contextualizing our own economic, political, and geographic locations.
This enables us, among other things, to understand the connections
between the rights of immigrants and indigenous peoples, both forcibly
displaced by the demands of the global economy and militarization of
borders, and recognize, unweave, and replace persistent racism, sexism,
and all other related patterns of oppression by which colonial dominion
has been justified.