Latest update April 28th, 2026 12:30 AM
New paths?
We are at a critical juncture of world history when the influence of the old imperial powers is waning. India, China and Brazil are on the rise. There is a scent of real possibility for some in the old “Third World”. Increasingly, our political and corporate elites are suggesting that we look to India and China to find our own way forward.
Surely it would be positive if Third World elites could, on the back of growing economic power rooted in natural resources and expanding domestic markets, take a decent seat at the table of the new world order which is certainly on the way.
Wealth is a form of power. And it is a form of power that has, as a result of a history of violence and domination, been held in particular hands. So it is not surprising that the accumulation of native wealth, in Bombay and Beijing inevitably takes on a dimension that sets Indian and Chinese power against that of the old world order with its roots in colonial domination.
The growing excitement that travels the same circuits as the new fortunes in the global South is not just fuelled by the pursuit of money as an end in-itself. It’s also about the end of some forms of collective subordination, insult and contempt.
But in India and China, are the means of economic progress, a process that has lifted millions into the middle class, a kind of internal colonialism? People are being forced off their land, thrown out of the cities, subjected to the grossest exploitation in mines and factories and politically repressed at a scale and intensity that rivals some of the horrors of colonialism itself. This cannot be ignored.
They are doing to their own people what the English elites first did to their own people and then to the colonised at the beginning of capitalism. This has not been uncontested. Some would argue that in the hard world of realpolitik it is only money and military strength that really talk.
But it can be shown that elsewhere in the world there have been more democratic and inclusive attempts to undo the domination of the World Bank, old imperialists, military, rapacious global corporations, their local political partners and the other powers of the old system of domination.
And fortunately for us in Guyana, they are right next door.
Across Latin America there have been, for some time now, a set of innovative political experiments in and outside of states. The gains of these Latin American experiments have often been quite modest and in some cases have functioned to, as happened to some degree after apartheid, entrench rather than to oppose exploitative and exclusionary economic practices by offering them a new sense of legitimacy.
New elites have sometimes actively sought to stake their claim within these practices. But a break with the IMF, a refusal to accept new military bases and a reversal of water privatisation along with declining inequality, some land reform, important steps towards more participatory budgeting and policy making, the development of transport systems organised with more concern for people’s needs than private profit and direct action by movements of peasants and shack dwellers have enabled some real shifts in power relations within some countries and between these countries and the West.
And whatever the limits of the governments that have come to power on the strength of popular mobilisation in Latin America in recent years, they are vastly less political and economically harsh than the regimes in India and China.
In many Latin America countries there are routes, often constructed from below as much as opened up from above, towards political participation by the organised poor that are simply unthinkable in India or China.
While Latin America may offer us no firm blueprints for a better future, it does demonstrate that it’s not only money and military power that count in this world. Popular mobilisation can transform societies from below and it can strengthen states against private and imperial interests.
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