Commentary by Percy C. Hintzen
During the 1950s and 1960s, development economists Walt W. Rostow and Sir William Arthur Lewis convinced governments of the Global South that dependence upon Euro-America is the only path to what Rostow termed the “take off” to economic “maturity” and “high mass consumption.” Lewis, a West Indian from St. Lucia, received a Knighthood from Britain and the Nobel Prize in Economics. Rostow, an American, was rewarded with the Order of the British Empire.
This should have been a warning to the Caribbean that the project of economic growth and development was no more than a façade for the continuation of colonialism. “Development” became the episteme regnant of economic policy and practice in the Global South. Today, most of the world’s population is yet to see its realization. We are much worse off despite the trappings of “mass consumption” made possible by imports from the Global North—and now China—that we pay for by borrowing at exorbitant interest rates. We are mired in a perpetual and escalating “debt crisis.”
Rostow and Lewis were writing on the cusp of a global shift to an U.S.-centered imperialism. Exploiting a generalized “debt crisis,” the United States’ Department of Treasury coordinated and formulated a “Washington Consensus” with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Together, they imposed structural adjustment reform and austerity measures on almost every country in the Global South. It was backed by military, economic and political intervention aimed at preempting and defeating any challenges to U.S. power.
The Global South was told that it was our fault that development didn’t work. That we were locked in the “waiting room” of tradition and underdevelopment because of our own corruption, inefficiencies, inadequacies, incapacities, and moral failures. That we were led astray by our irrational commitment to dirigisme, or the adoption of “socialist inspired” forms of government organized around state control of the economy. This was notwithstanding the considerable successes enjoyed by the democratic socialist “dirigisme” policies of Western Europe.
Because state control of the economy was the raison d’etre of colonial governance, providing the material conditions for Western European industrial based modernity, when governments of the former colonies secured political independence, their so-called “irrational commitment” was driven by attempts to assume this very control based on the assumption that this was the only means available to gain and reclaim the right to ownership of their national assets and determine the conditions of their use. In this justifiable and entirely reasonable belief, they took their cues from Western European countries that were busy adopting policies of ownership and control of the commanding heights of their respective economies.
Caribbean economists such as Clive Thomas, Norman Girvan, and George Beckford joined with Latin American dependency theorists to beg acknowledgement that the developed industrialized economies of the Global North were built on the backs of colonial expropriation and exploitation. They exposed the bad faith of “orthodox” economists and all their talk of “savings” and “investments” (derived from a Harrod-Domar model cooked up almost a hundred years ago by two dead white men). However, there can be no savings and investments without resources and labor, period. And there would have been no European development without the resources and labor of the colonized and formerly colonized Global South.
The United States fashioned the post-World War II global order into a project of political, economic, and military intervention to maintain, sustain, and globalize the project of colonial exploitation, expropriation, and subordination. By the latter I mean reversion from the post-independence neocolonial form, characterized by the use of coercion, control, and cooptation backed by military, economic, and political interventionism, to forms of direct rule by a transnational oligarchy organized around U.S. global power. And, in its contemptuous cynicism, it labeled the project Pax Americana.
The latter laid the groundwork for the globalization of the colonial economy, whose central feature was political and economic domination by a merchant plantocracy located both in the colonies and the colonial center. This plantocracy exercised control over all aspects of production, trade, commerce, finance, and communication. For Pax Americana to succeed, ownership and control of the colonial economy, inherited by postcolonial governments, had to be destroyed.
This occurred under the guise of neoliberalism, adopted with near universal complicity, consensus, and compliance throughout the world. In this context, dirigisme became the source of all evil. But, neoliberalism was neither “new” nor “liberal” if the latter means freedom of choice. As they say in Trinidad, “it is the same old khaki pants”.
The case of Guyana brings the preceding analysis into sharp relief. The recent discovery of vast oil reserves there has provided the material base for the implementation of an exemplary form of American oligarchic imperialism in the region. ExxonMobil stands in that country at the apex of a “ruling group” legitimized by a narrative representation of the company and its partners as saviors of the people from a life of abject poverty.
Oil is the new deus ex machina, a notion fed by narratives of excessive wealth enjoyed by the people of the “oil rich Persian Gulf Nations” that hides the violent and repressive exploitation of the impoverished masses of immigrant and domestic workers upon whose backs their vaunted wealth is built. Workers, opponents, and critics are brutalized, killed, and dominated by Sheiks whose absolutist rule seems not to trouble Western governments that impose, underwrite, back, and subsidize oil colonialism.
The oil oligarchs and the plutocrats who exercise authority on their behalf brook no challenge to the transnational order with oil as its material base. The United States unleashes its militaries, its campaigns of economic and political retaliation, and its “security” apparatuses to overthrow governments and punish people when oil is challenged. The contemporary histories of Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Libya, and the Sudan, inter alia, need no elaboration.
And then there are the environmental costs of fossil fuel extraction that pose existential threats to human sustenance and survival. As an archipelago surrounded by low-lying coastal areas, some below sea level, the Caribbean is extraordinarily vulnerable to fossil fuel-derived global climate change and its consequential sea level rise, pollution and environmental degradation.
The frequency and intensity of hurricanes, and the destruction wrought on people, environments, economies, and social order stem directly from the use, production, and refining of fossil fuel. The cost of fuel imports, even for oil-producing countries, has been one of the major generators of foreign debt for many of the countries in the region.
And now the Caribbean is being transformed, once again, into a theatre of a war for oil with Venezuela as its target and regime change its objective—camouflaged as a “war on narco-terrorism.” This is notwithstanding the formal declaration of the region as “a zone of peace” by its governments, even while the United States violates all manner of international laws and treaties. Such impunity on a global scale is the signifying element of American oligarchic colonialism in its imperialist form.
Percy C. Hintzen is Professor Emeritus at the University of California Berkeley and until recently was Professor of Global and Sociocultural Studies in the School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University.
Source: anti-imperialists.com, December 31, 2025