Back in the nineteenth century, Indian Nationalists developed a 'drain theory' such that the Brits were creating poverty in India. But the Brits provided security and protected minorities. In 1947, many Indian Nationalists found they had to flee from their ancestral homes because the Nation they had been fighting for was on the other side of the border.
Over the course of the Fifties and Sixties, Indians realized that the 'drain theory' was nonsense. The Brits were gone but the country was getting poorer. By some calculations, material standards of living for the vast majority were no better than they had been under the Mughals. India would need to do sensible things rather than focus on historical grievance.
Michael Parenti, who passed away recently at the age of 92, was a champion of the 'drain theory'. Sadly, his ideas have not perished with him. The following is extracted from his book 'Contrary Notions'.
The impoverished lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are known to us as the "Third World" to distinguish them from the "First World" of industrialized Europe and North America and the now largely defunct "Second World" of communist states.
Why? The first two worlds were technologically advanced and had great military power. The Third World was technologically backward and militarily weak.
Third World poverty, called "underdevelopment," is treated by most Western observers as an original and inherent historic condition.
The meaning was that they had a lot of potential for 'catch up' growth. One may say of a person who does little exercise, this his muscles are underdeveloped. If he takes up weight training, he might soon become a fine figure of a man. We may equally say that a person who watches TV rather than reading good books is mentally underdeveloped. If they turn off the TV and start reading good books, they will soon find their mental powers have increased. Similarly a country with too few roads and schools and factories may quickly become richer and stronger by emulating what has been done by advanced countries.
In fact, the lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have long produced great treasures of foods, minerals and other natural resources.
Some did. Most didn't.
That is why the Europeans went through so much trouble to plunder them...
Why occupy them? Why not just keep returning every few years to plunder them again?
The Third World is rich.
Hobos are rich. Billionaires keep stealing all their wealth which is why they are homeless.
Only its people are poor-and they are poor because of the pillage they have endured.
Very true. A friend of mine was mugged when he was 18. Everybody thinks he is now a millionaire, but actually he is very poor because he was mugged 50 years ago.
The process of expropriating the natural resources of the Third World began centuries ago.
Rich countries can kill invaders or looters of any type. If the Third World was pillaged, it must have been underdeveloped relative to those doing the pillaging.
First, the colonizers extracted gold, silver, furs, silks, and spices; then flax, hemp, timber, molasses, sugar, rum, rubber, tobacco, calico, cocoa, coffee, cotton, copper, coal, palm oil, tin, iron, ivory, and ebony; and still later on, oil, zinc, manganese, mercury, platinum, cobalt, bauxite, aluminum, and uranium.
Why were those colonizers not killed? Was it because the colonized were very rich and technologically advanced? No. It was because they were poor and technologically backward.
Not to be overlooked is that most hellish of all expropriations: the abduction of millions of human beings into slave labor.
If your own people enslave you and sell you, the guilt lies with them.
From the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries Europe certainly was "ahead" of Africa, Asia, and Latin America in a variety of things, such as the number of hangings,
as opposed to human sacrifice?
murders, and other violent crimes;
Europeans invented rape and murder. Such things were unknown elsewhere.
instances of venereal disease,
Syphilis originated in the Americas
smallpox,
believed to have originated in North East Africa or India
typhoid,
we believe it originated at some early date in Africa
tuberculosis, cholera, and other such afflictions; social inequality and poverty (both urban and rural); and frequency of famines,
England's last famine was in 1623. For the Indian sub-continent, it was in 1974
slavery,
Europe got rid of slavery a long time ago. True, there was serfdom but it began to breakdown in the middle ages in most parts of Europe.
prostitution,
which seems to have existed everywhere
piracy,
see above
religious massacres and inquisitions.
This is a feature of Abrahamic religions. But there have been religious massacres for political reasons elsewhere.
Superior firepower,
based on superior technology
not superior culture,
a culture favourable to scientific discovery is superior.
has brought the Europeans and Euro-North Americans to positions of global supremacy.
it has also raised up Japan and now China.
What is called "underdevelopment" is a set of social relations that has been forcefully imposed on countries.
Very true. The reason I have no muscles to speak of is not because I am lazy. It is because King Charles is forcing me to watch TV and stuff my face with pizza. Left to myself, I would be working out in the gym.
With the advent of the Western colonizers, the peoples of the Third World were set back in their development sometimes for centuries.
If they hadn't been underdeveloped, they wouldn't have become colonies.
British imperialism in India provides an instructive example. In 1810, India was exporting more textiles to England than England was exporting to India.
But England started to substitute water power and then steam power for human muscle power.
By 1830, the trade flow was reversed.
because Indians wanted cheap cloth.
The British had put up prohibitive tariff barriers to shut out Indian finished goods
So what? They were a tiny island far far away. The fact is British ships were transporting Indian textiles to new markets around the world. Indians started opening British style textile mills in the 1850s. Sadly, they were a bit shit at manufacturing. But the Japanese weren't.
and were dumping their commodities in India, a practice backed by British gunboats and military force.
Who doesn't want cheap cloth? Poor people. They say 'ban cheap cloth! We want to pay more money to avoid being naked.'
Within a matter of years, the great textile centers of Dacca and Madras were turned into ghost towns.
Dacca's decline dates back to 1717- i.e. before the Brits took power. There was significant depopulation in the early British period but Jute exports enabled it to rise in the second half of the nineteenth century. Dacca muslin disappeared after a particular type of cotton plant- phuti karpas (Gossypium arboreum var. neglecta) disappeared. Even if the Brits protected their own textile industry, Indian textiles could be exported to other countries.
The Indians were sent back to the land to raise the cotton used in British textile factories.
No. The Brits bought cotton from the Southern States of the US.
In effect, India was reduced to being a cow milked by British investors.
Cows get milked because they are technologically backward.
By 1850, India's debt had grown to 53 million. From 1850 to 1900, its per capita income dropped by almost two-thirds.
It stagnated. It couldn't fall because it was already very low. But the number of very rich Indians increased. They enjoyed something their ancestors never had- viz security (save in some provinces during the Mutiny). The truth is the Indians paid the Brits for security because they couldn't trust each other.
The value of the raw materials and commodities that the Indians were obliged to send to Britain during most of the nineteenth century amounted yearly to more than the total income of the sixty million Indian agricultural and industrial workers.
Thus, once India became independent, its per capita income doubled. What's that? India got poorer and less able to feed or defend itself after the Brits departed? How can that be? The answer is obvious. Evil Wall Street bankers secretly entered the huts of starving Indians and stole all their gold and diamonds. The Indians cried and cried.
British imperialism did two things: first, it ended India's development,
It was so developed a handful of foreigners from a distant island were able to take over the country.
then it forcibly underdeveloped that country.
Not as successfully as Nehru's 'licence permit Raj'.
The massive poverty we associate with India was not an original historical condition that antedates imperialism.
But, being shit at fighting or- more accurately- being shit at coming together to oppose a foreign power- did not antedate imperialism. It was a sufficient and necessary condition for it to occur.
Wealth is transferred from Third World people to the economic elites of Europe and North America (and later on Japan) by the expropriation of natural resources, the imposition of ruinous taxes and land rents, the payment of poverty wages, and the forced importation of finished goods at highly inflated prices.
Similarly, the wealth of hobos is being forcibly transferred to Bill Gates & Elon Musk.
The colonized country is denied the opportunity to develop its own natural resources, markets, trade, and industrial capacity.
But colonialism ended long ago. It was Socialism which kept certain countries poor. Look at North Korea and then look at South Korea. Connect the fucking dots.
Self-sustenance and self-employment are discouraged at every turn.
By Socialists. Communists were worse in that they collectivized land and created big famines.
Hundreds of millions of Third World people now live in destitution in remote villages
which formerly had plenty of skyscrapers.
and congested urban slums, suffering hunger and disease, often because the land they once tilled is now controlled by agribusiness firms who use it for mining or for commercial export crops such as coffee, sugar, and beef, instead of growing beans, rice, and corn for home consumption.
This problem is even more acute in Scotland, where the UN rapporteur on food security has shown that lack of access to arable land is causing Scottish women to be unable to grow oats to feed their children.
Imperialism forces millions of children around the world to live nightmarish lives, with their mental and physical health severely damaged.
There is no fucking Imperialism anywhere- unless you count Putin's Ukrainian invasion as such.
In countries like Mexico, India, Colombia, and Egypt, children are dragooned into health-shattering, dawn-to-dusk labor on farms and in factories and mines for pennies an hour, with no opportunity for play, schooling, or medical care.
Whereas their distant ancestors used to attend fancy Prep Schools and Colleges- right?
In India, 55 million children are pressed into the work force.
by their parents.
In the Philippines and Malaysia, corporations have lobbied to drop age restrictions for labor recruitment.
Whom have they lobbied? Their own governments.
When we say a country is underdeveloped, we are implying that it is backward and retarded in some way, that its people have shown little capacity to achieve and evolve.
No. We are saying it doesn't have a lot economic development. That may be a good thing if we are speaking of a National Park or other protected landscape.
The negative connotations of "underdeveloped" has caused the United Nations, the Wall Street journal, and parties of contrasting political persuasion to refer to Third World countries as developing nations, a term somewhat less insulting than "underdeveloped" but equally misleading.
We should refer to them as countries which are being beaten, robbed and incessantly sodomized by evil Wall Street bankers.
I prefer to use "Third World" because "developing" still implies that backwardness and poverty were part of an original historic condition
whereas the truth is the ancestors of today's Third World people all had private jets and superyachts and penthouse apartments with a view of Central Park.
and not something imposed by the imperialists. It also falsely suggests that these countries are developing when actually their economic conditions are usually worsening.
Also, they are being incessantly sodomized. Do you really think the Imperialist will just be content with robbing poor people? Why not rape them as well? If you see a darkie, you should offer him rape counselling. He may beat you, but you should persist in tenderly inquiring into the state of his rectum.
What has emerged in the Third World is an intensely exploitative form of dependent capitalism.
Still preferable to Communism or Socialism.
Economic conditions have worsened drastically with the growth of corporate investment.
Also all the poor people have sore backsides which are dripping with the jizz of evil Capitalists.
The problem is not poor lands 'or unproductive populations but self-enriching transnationals.
who incessantly sodomize poor people. That's the real story here. People may not mind your telling them they are being economically exploited. What gets to them is the suggestion that Bill Gates has been wrecking their rectum.
The local economies of the world are increasingly dominated by a network of international corporations that are beholden to parent companies based in North America, Europe and Japan.
The parent companies are sodomizing trillions of Third World people even as we speak.
Historically, U.S. capitalist interests have been less interested in acquiring more colonies than in acquiring more wealth, preferring to make off with the treasure of other nations without the bother of owning and administering the nations themselves.
But they do insist on fucking all the poor people in the ass.
Under neo-imperialism, the flag stays home, while the dollar goes everywhere.
not to mention their jizz.
After World War II, European powers like Britain and France adopted a similar strategy of neo-imperialism. Left financially depleted by years of warfare, and facing intensified popular resistance from within the Third World itself, they reluctantly decided that indirect economic hegemony was less costly and politically more expedient than outright colonial rule.
Very true. Hobos are being indirectly controlled by evil Capitalists who steal all their gold and diamonds and then fuck them in the ass.
Though the newly established Third World country might be far from completely independent,
i.e. it was a client of Moscow or Beijing
it usually enjoyed more legitimacy in the eyes of its populace than a foreign colonial power.
Which is why the smart people ran away from it to some place still ruled by Whites.
Furthermore, under neoimperialism the native government takes up the costs of administering the country while the imperialist interests are free to concentrate on skimming the cream-which is all they really want.
No! They also want to fuck everybody in the ass.
After years of colonialism, the Third World country finds it extremely difficult to extricate itself from the unequal relationship with its former colonizer
they have become habituated to anal rape
and impossible to depart from the global capitalist sphere.
Coz they miss having sore bottoms.
Those countries that try to make a break are subjected to punishing economic and military treatment by one or another major power, nowadays usually the United States.
US sodomizes poor people wherever they may be found. Also, they steal all their gold and diamonds.
The leaders of the new nations may voice revolutionary slogans, yet they find themselves locked into the global corporate orbit, cooperating perforce with the First World nations for investment, trade, and loans.
and anal rape.
In many instances a comprador class was installed as a first condition for independence, that is, a coterie of rulers who cooperate in turning their own country into a client state for foreign interests.
Third World countries may well end up as kleptocracies.
A client state is one that is open to investments on terms that are decidedly favorable to the foreign investors.
Strangely, investors lose interest if you tell them they won't make any money by providing finance. You will steal the money and beat them into the bargain.
In a client state, corporate investors enjoy direct subsidies and land grants, access to raw materials and cheap labor, light or nonexistent taxes, no minimum wage or occupational safety laws, no prohibitions on child labor, and no consumer or environmental protections to speak of. The protective laws that do exist go largely unenforced.
Why? Because the guys running the place are being paid off handsomely.
The comprador class is well recompensed for its cooperation. Its leaders enjoy opportunities to line their pockets with the foreign aid sent by the U.S. government. Stability is assured with the establishment of security forces, armed and trained by the United States in the latest technologies of terror and repression.
Plenty of newly independent countries chose to ally with the Communist block. Look at Cuba. It is very rich now.
In all, the Third World is something of a capitalist paradise, offering life as it was in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century, with a rate of profit vastly higher than what might be earned today in a country with strong social regulations, effective labor unions, and higher wage and work standards.
There is a risk premium associated with shithole countries. A change in regime or a fall in commodity prices can turn your investment into a 'stranded asset'.
Third World countries understood that whining about Whitey won't help them rise. They need to mobilize national savings to invest in infrastructure and 'merit goods' like Education, Public Health etc. Also, don't send your students to study non-STEM subjects in the West. Their brains will turn to shit. Stick to STEM subjects and try to rise up the value chain.
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