Imperialism on Class Letters

Chile, an Investigation of Aid as Imperialism

Sun, 11 May 2025 06:20:02 +0000

Teresa Hayter’s ‘Aid as Imperialism’, was one of the first somewhat critical texts written about the post world-war II monetary institutions, from a so called insider’s view. Having spent some time employed at the Overseas Development Institute, the World Bank financed Teresa’s research on the effectiveness of aid packages provided to Third World countries. Given it was intended as a publication on behalf of the ODI, one certainly encounters a report which offers an objective overview of the various policy approaches that these institutions taken. The first half of the text, is an outline, not a critique. The second half turns to evaluating the implementation of these approaches in several countries. Here is where we find a critical evaluation, which best portrays the inflexibility of foreign aid packages, which, Teresa believed, were given more so as blanket prescriptions, dogmas even. A standard buffet of currency devaluations and austerity measures — liberalize, liberalize, liberalize! It is for this reason that the Overseas Development Institute rejected the original report for publication. Fortunately, it eventually made it’s way to us common readers. The following is an excerpt from the text, focusing on the involvement of these aid agencies in Chile, a country which is emblematic of the deep difficulties of modernization and sovereignty in the global periphery.

An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 01:58:15 +0000

In The Fall of 1974 I was walking one day from the English Department at the University of Massachusetts to a parking lot. It was a fine autumn morning such as encouraged friendliness to passing strangers. Brisk youngsters were hurrying in all directions, many of them obviously freshmen in their first flush of enthusiasm.An older man going the same way as I turned and remarked to me how very young they came these days. I agreed. Then he asked me if I was a student too. I said, no, I was a teacher.What did I teach? African literature. Now that was funny, he said, because he knew a fellow who taught the same thing, or perhaps it was African history, in a certain community college not far from here. It always surprised him, he went on to say, because he never had thought of Africa as having that kind of stuff, you know. By this time I was walking much faster. “Oh well,” I heard him say finally, behind me: “I guess I have to take your course to find out.”

Global Neoliberal Practice: Institutions and Regulation in Africa

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 22:51:40 +0000

This is a chapter out of Graham Harrison’s Book “Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering”. Although the book is more of an essay containing fragmentary thoughts, I found this chapter substantial in the sense that it clearly outlined the various institutional avenues in which projects such as neoliberalism cement their ideology.

This chapter considers the global emergence of neoliberalism. It looks at the ways in which neoliberal practice has emerged, expanded and established for itself ‘paradigmatic’ status. In other words, it shows how neoliberalism has shifted from an ambitious and embryonic set of policy interventions to something resembling a framework or set of premisses within which policy is articulated. The practices of neoliberalism have been iterated over such time as to shift the habits, conduct and repertoire of development practice tout court. The layering of large numbers of neoliberal policies has not only led to a progressively more totalising implementation of liberalisation; it has also defined the terms upon which policy and development are thought about and articulated per se. This is, of course, not a completed process (in the last chapter we developed a framework which is anathema to the idea of completed processes, preferring instead a series of practices in place of means–ends distinctions), but it has enabled neoliberal ideas to aspire to ‘meta-development’ status: that is, as the terms upon which development is discussed rather than solely as a predominant model of development. At the level of ideas, this shift or tendency is rather like the analysis of Hay in which neoliberalism moves from normalising to normative (Hay 2004).