The hegemony of US imperialism led to a global consolidation of capitalism. But the rise of China and its model of productive, anti-neoliberal globalization offers an opportunity for Latin America, and the world, to challenge neocolonialism.
Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff meets with China’s President Xi Jinping in 2014
These remarks were delivered at the International Manifesto Group panel “Summit of the ‘Americas’ vs. CELAC: Whither the Monroe Doctrine @ 200?“
What is the historic place of the US government’s so-called Monroe Doctrine almost 200 years after it was first pronounced?
The immediate answer is simple: none. It has no place. It is a neocolonial doctrine that inaugurated a particular historical form of imperialism.
US imperialism first colonized its own territory by murdering millions of indigenous people. Then, at the beginning of the 19th century, the United States began to try to submit Latin America to a new order.
In the case of Brazil, the sagacity of the Brazilian people and even of the Portuguese colonizers prevented the United States from establishing itself in the Amazon or from putting Brazilian territorial unity in check, as occurred in Spain’s former colonies.
Since then, the world has undergone several transformations, including the European revolutions of 1848, the unification of Germany, and then two global imperialist wars.
The United States, in the second half of the 19th century, managed to unify its national territory, forming an immense continental economy protected by two oceans. This was a feat that definitively marked the future of humanity.
In the same way, in 1917, another event, the Russian Revolution, pointed the world toward the overcoming of capitalism by socialism.
These are the two antagonistic historical processes that we must keep in mind when analyzing the beginning, the development, and the current state of imperialist domination over Latin America and Caribbean states.
With these two events, the conditions were set for a strategic clash, and one not only restricted to the struggle between capitalism and socialism.
The Soviet Union placed the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggle on the international agenda.
The creation of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) decades later cannot be seen outside the context of the centrality of the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggle.
This struggle is the noblest manifestation of humanity against the enemies of humanity itself. Being anti-imperialist is the noblest feeling a human being can aspire to.
The foundation of the Third International in 1919 by Vladimir Lenin elevated the anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggle to the level of the main aspect of the main contradiction.
The center of gravity of the struggle for socialism shifted from the center to the periphery of the capitalist world system.
The national and popular revolutions in China, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, and various parts of Africa demonstrated the strength of the people’s struggle against imperialism.
This struggle is more relevant than ever, with the new historical ways in which imperialism has been reinventing itself.
Imperialism is making the world an increasingly violent and unstable place.
This instability directly affects the weak link of imperialism: Latin America.
In the past 20 years, the movement to resist imperialist domination in the region has intensified, with the rise of progressive governments in several countries.
Meanwhile, Latin America has become a laboratory for new forms of coups d’état, lawfare, and hybrid warfare.
My country Brazil, for example, has been under imperialist domination since a 2016 coup.
We are living at a time when, despite the end of the first socialist experiments, the world is openly contesting the unipolar order and so-called “Western public opinion”.
Latin America and the Caribbean has strongly demonstrated its capacity for mobilization and resistance, after heavy defeats in the 1980s, when the government of US President Ronald Reagan launched a wave of counterrevolutionary violence against the region.
Neoliberalism brought Our America to its knees. But it also created new possibilities of organization and even what we could call particular paths to socialism.
In other words, the wave launched by the Russian Revolution in 1917 arrived victoriously in Cuba in 1959, and today is a real hope in the experiences we see in countries like Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
The possibility of the victory of a broad front of a patriotic and anti-fascist character in Brazil could be a necessary dialectical leap to open new horizons for Latin America and the Caribbean.
The Monroe Doctrine makes no sense on a continent that has already grasped its ability to resist, build, and rebuild itself.
Moreover, the presence of the People’s Republic of China and the productive, anti-neoliberal globalization that it promotes – as Professor Javier Vadell has argued – is a milestone in human history.
This new form of productive, anti-neoliberal globalization should serve Latin American leaders, not only as a way to export products or receive investments, but also a great opportunity to plan the foreign trade of our countries and to combine the grand project of continental integration with the second-largest economy in the world.
The productive, anti-neoliberal globalization inaugurated by China must be seen within a historical process of continuity of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and with an impact on the world that is on the scale of the formation of the gigantic economy in the continental United States.
If the formation of this continental economy in North America was a milestone in the global consolidation of capitalism, the formation of a continental economy in China and the inauguration of a productive globalization commanded by China is a new milestone in the historical transition that the world has experienced from 1917 until today.
This is a transition from capitalism to socialism. And Latin America and the Caribbean must understand the importance of this great historic event that is taking place at this very moment, right before our eyes.
