Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday signed a decree broadening the scope of when Moscow can use nuclear weapons in a clear message to the West and Ukraine.
Colonialism is a tool of capitalist expansion and exploitation, driven by the pursuit of profit and the need to maintain the capitalist system. It results in the domination and underdevelopment of colonized territories, while reinforcing the power and wealth of the colonizers. It is an inherent feature of capitalism, driven by the need for expansion and accumulation of capital, involving the political and economic domination of a nation by a foreign power, leading to the exploitation of resources and labor in the colonized region.
Colonies provide a source of cheap raw materials and labor, as well as new markets for the colonizer’s manufactured goods. Crucially, colonialism reinforces global inequalities and uneven development. The colonizers extract wealth from the colonies, hindering their economic growth and development, while the the population of the colonizing countries benefits from the plunder.
Sure. Regular colonialism is when you force a capitalist apparatus onto a group of people and force it to extract to the economic benefit of a different group of people who typically through the explicit threat of state violence enforce profitable conditions for this economic activity. Typically what distinguishes it from capitalism is that in capitalism both groups are forced to participate in the capitalist apparatus, where in colonialism the supreme group may choose not to. Lastly the economic form this takes the shape of is typically direct ownership of raw material extraction operations, all the material extracted, and profits from the extracted materials. Colonial relationships are primarily driven by economic engines of raw source extraction to fuel large scale industrial economies. Colonial relationships are limited by the resource mix of the colonized, thus they are inefficient because they tend to make commonly extracted material over available in your economy. Some examples are like you take over a state, and that state becomes your coal extraction venture where you can just ship coal over an ocean to your state. Or how you can take over a state, and you force a capitalist apparatus that exists to provide your state with a stable supply of bananas.
Neocolonialism is the recreation of the colonial relation purely through the paradigm of the market where the same types of unequal economic relationships between colonial states and their patrons occur, but it is not directly due to the paradigms of supremacy, it is only indirectly due to the imbalances of the material history between the two groups and the mediation of the market. In essence it is saying 100 years ago I would come to your country, set up a governate and a factory and force your people to work for me, but today in order for you to build a school you have to agree to the same unequal deal as you did before to get the money to build that school, but it’s not meeeee doing it, it’ the maaarket. It’s the supply and demand! Because neocolonial relationships are based on buyer-seller relations it allows for a more efficient economic extraction because you have more control of the kind of resources the relationship brings so it’s easier to protect your domestic industry. So there’s also no direct threat of state violence and it transforms the relationship between the two groups from owner and worker (or owner and property) to a more “pure form” of buyer and seller. Like if you have a country where it’s an outlier in its the demand for narcotics, and it’s kinda weird how its direct neighbor is a narco-state. Or how you have a group of capitalist entities, and they (and their countries) make the majority of the economic profit on the trade of a luxury crop like cocoa rather than the capitalist entities (and their countries) that actually harvest the crop. The important distinction in those two examples being that, for chocolate, Belgium and the Congo created a neocolonial relationship that previously existed as a colonial relationship, where for narcotics, the United States and Mexico created a new neocolonial relationship without a previous colonial form.
To sum up, both traditional colonialism and neocolonialism are acts of exploitation of a nation by another more powerful nation. The difference is in the methods used, but not in the fundamental nature of the act. In both cases, colonialism stems from capitalist relations because it is the capital owning class that seeks to maximize their profits through exploitation of the working majority domestically and abroad.
Now that we’ve established the definition, hopefully you can see how losing neocolonial influence is a big problem for the western economies that are fundamentally built on the ability to extract labor and resources from the global majority.
Colonialism is a tool of capitalist expansion and exploitation, driven by the pursuit of profit and the need to maintain the capitalist system. It results in the domination and underdevelopment of colonized territories, while reinforcing the power and wealth of the colonizers. It is an inherent feature of capitalism, driven by the need for expansion and accumulation of capital, involving the political and economic domination of a nation by a foreign power, leading to the exploitation of resources and labor in the colonized region.
Colonies provide a source of cheap raw materials and labor, as well as new markets for the colonizer’s manufactured goods. Crucially, colonialism reinforces global inequalities and uneven development. The colonizers extract wealth from the colonies, hindering their economic growth and development, while the the population of the colonizing countries benefits from the plunder.
Okay so what’s neocolonialism then?
Why don’t you explain what you think neocolonialism is and its relationship with regular colonialism. This ought to be good.
Sure. Regular colonialism is when you force a capitalist apparatus onto a group of people and force it to extract to the economic benefit of a different group of people who typically through the explicit threat of state violence enforce profitable conditions for this economic activity. Typically what distinguishes it from capitalism is that in capitalism both groups are forced to participate in the capitalist apparatus, where in colonialism the supreme group may choose not to. Lastly the economic form this takes the shape of is typically direct ownership of raw material extraction operations, all the material extracted, and profits from the extracted materials. Colonial relationships are primarily driven by economic engines of raw source extraction to fuel large scale industrial economies. Colonial relationships are limited by the resource mix of the colonized, thus they are inefficient because they tend to make commonly extracted material over available in your economy. Some examples are like you take over a state, and that state becomes your coal extraction venture where you can just ship coal over an ocean to your state. Or how you can take over a state, and you force a capitalist apparatus that exists to provide your state with a stable supply of bananas.
Neocolonialism is the recreation of the colonial relation purely through the paradigm of the market where the same types of unequal economic relationships between colonial states and their patrons occur, but it is not directly due to the paradigms of supremacy, it is only indirectly due to the imbalances of the material history between the two groups and the mediation of the market. In essence it is saying 100 years ago I would come to your country, set up a governate and a factory and force your people to work for me, but today in order for you to build a school you have to agree to the same unequal deal as you did before to get the money to build that school, but it’s not meeeee doing it, it’ the maaarket. It’s the supply and demand! Because neocolonial relationships are based on buyer-seller relations it allows for a more efficient economic extraction because you have more control of the kind of resources the relationship brings so it’s easier to protect your domestic industry. So there’s also no direct threat of state violence and it transforms the relationship between the two groups from owner and worker (or owner and property) to a more “pure form” of buyer and seller. Like if you have a country where it’s an outlier in its the demand for narcotics, and it’s kinda weird how its direct neighbor is a narco-state. Or how you have a group of capitalist entities, and they (and their countries) make the majority of the economic profit on the trade of a luxury crop like cocoa rather than the capitalist entities (and their countries) that actually harvest the crop. The important distinction in those two examples being that, for chocolate, Belgium and the Congo created a neocolonial relationship that previously existed as a colonial relationship, where for narcotics, the United States and Mexico created a new neocolonial relationship without a previous colonial form.
To sum up, both traditional colonialism and neocolonialism are acts of exploitation of a nation by another more powerful nation. The difference is in the methods used, but not in the fundamental nature of the act. In both cases, colonialism stems from capitalist relations because it is the capital owning class that seeks to maximize their profits through exploitation of the working majority domestically and abroad.
Now that we’ve established the definition, hopefully you can see how losing neocolonial influence is a big problem for the western economies that are fundamentally built on the ability to extract labor and resources from the global majority.