Dependency, neocolonialism, and the agrarian problem in Colombia
In the 1960s and ‘70s, the Colombian national government embarked on an ambitious agrarian reform program to address poverty in the increasingly violent countryside. Under the bipartisan project of the National Front, which alternated power between the Conservative and Liberal parties, these efforts sparked domestic and international debates around the nature of developmentalism in the country, especially since they coincided with a series of economic missions meant to tackle underdevelopment. Such interventions were influenced by international institutions like the World Bank and the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), as well as by discussions around economic growth and capitalism taking place in North America and Europe. Amid regional development debates, the Colombian approach would be determined by entrenched inequality in rural areas and the emergence of armed resistance against the state.
Proposals that viewed the national economy through the lens of neocolonialism and global dependency began to circulate in intellectual and policy circles, and Colombia soon became a testing ground for various developmental diagnoses. The 1969 publication of Mario Arrubla’s Studies on Colombian Underdevelopment (Estudios sobre el subdesarrollo colombiano) linked these dependency theory debates with other theories of global Marxism. Arrubla, an economist, led the magazine Estrategia, the original publisher of the essays that made up his 1969 book. At a time when Latin American intellectuals sought to distance themselves from local communist parties and political liberalism—while simultaneously advocating for a socialist revolution—the magazine brought together a group of left-wing intellectuals disillusioned both by the National Front and international institutions.
In the case of the Grupo Estrategia, the revolutionary fervor did not translate into armed action. The group exemplified a new intellectual left in Latin America, which advanced critical renewals in Europe and North America to overcome the “sclerosis” of Soviet Marxism and repudiate imperialist tendencies. Today, the contributions of Arrubla and the Grupo Estrategia help explain Colombia’s greatest injustices: the state’s absence in peripheral regions, a powerful oligarchy, high inequality, and persistent violence in rural areas.
Building the modern state
The victory of the Liberal Party candidate Alfonso López Pumarejo in 1934 brought an end to a long cycle of conservative hegemony in Colombia. The election resulted in a period of liberal policies and the expansion of social rights. López Pumarejo initially favored forms of national industry that relied on the masses to counterbalance landowners, who themselves opposed the comprador bourgeoisie. He promoted union organization and legalized the right to strike, which had been severely curtailed by previous governments. These pro-labor policies, however, proved to be too disruptive for his broad liberal coalition, and landowners began to oppose the popular movement. Under the succeeding government of Eduardo Santos Montejo, and even under López Pumarejo’s own government upon returning to power between 1942 to 1945, the Liberal Party abandoned the reforms and ultimately failed to halt a brewing conservative opposition.
A conservative political shift ended the brief period of cooperation between workers and the industrial bourgeoisie. Land concentration rose in rural areas, and landowners launched a reactionary enterprise that massacred the liberal masses, making Colombia the “top producer of decapitated heads per capita.” The “self-defense” of the campesinos—agricultural farm workers—was silenced with “blood and fire” during a historic period that was later known as La Violencia….
https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/underdevelopment-war/
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The Current Hegemony (criminality as policy)
Walter Benjamin: Capitalism as Religion (1921)
Eric Toussaint: Concerning the founding of the Bretton Woods’ Institutions
Lee Camp: The Dark Secret History of Capitalism
Kojin Karatani’s theorising on modes of exchange and the ring of Capital-Nation-State
The New Associationist Movement
Noam Chomsky: Savage capitalist lunatics are running the asylum
Big Tech is failing. The future of democracy depends on what happens next
Conceptualizing an Emancipatory Alternative: István Mészáros’s ‘Beyond Capital’
After the truth-shower 