Unpayable Debt & the Assassination of the Third World
In Vijay Prashad’s words, “The Third World was not a place. It was a project.”
European imperialism and racial capitalism were, as Adom Getachew has observed, “world-constituting forces” that “violently inaugurated an unprecedented era of globality.”
Suffering in the wake of the advance of these forces, anti-colonial nationalists from Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean dreamt of an alternative anti-imperialist global order, and they organized to realize it. To quote Prashad:
From the rubble of World War II rose a bipolar Cold War that threatened the existence of humanity. Hair-triggers on nuclear weapons alongside heated debates about poverty, inequality, and freedom threatened even those who did not live under the US or Soviet umbrellas. [...] Almost unmolested by the devastation of the war, the United States used its advantages to rebuild the two sides of Eurasia and cage in a battered Soviet Union. Phrases like “massive retaliation” and “brinkmanship” provided no comfort to the two-thirds of the world’s people who had only recently won or were on the threshold of winning their independence from colonial rulers.
Thrown between these two major formations, the darker nations amassed as the Third World. Determined people struck out against colonialism to win their freedom. They demanded political equality on the world level. The main institution for this expression was the United Nations. From its inception in 1948, the United Nations played an enormous role for the bulk of the planet. Even if they did not earn permanent seats on the UN Security Council, the new states took advantage of the UN General Assembly to put forward their demands. The Afro-Asian meetings in Bandung and Cairo (1955 and 1961, respectively), the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade (1961), and the Tri-continental Conference in Havana (1966) rehearsed the major arguments within the Third World project so that they could take them in a concerted way to the main stage, the United Nations. In addition, the new states pushed the United Nations to create institutional platforms for their Third World agenda…. Through these institutions, aspects other than political equality came to the fore: the Third World project included a demand for the redistribution of the world’s resources, a more dignified rate of return for the labor power of their people, and a shared acknowledgment of the heritage of science, technology, and culture.
The Third World project was an unsuccessful one. Over the course of the Long Twentieth Century, Empire, under Amerikkkan hegemony, responded to the Third World project by sabotaging attempts to create reparative, ant-colonial institutional platforms through the United Nations and by instituting a global apartheid regime that cast nationality as proxy for race. This “assassination” of the Third World anti-colonial project was carried out according to an analytics of raciality that was consistent with Amerikkkan anti-blackness and settler colonialism. A highly stratified internal formation of ethno-racial classes and a ruthless internal hostility towards indigeneity, combined with the massive size of its internal territories, both primed the United Settlers for taking on the role of Imperial hegemon, and shaped their take on this role. This is to say, in other words, that the assassination of the Third World project, and the global apartheid that was its effective result, bear the signatures and hallmarks of the leading conspirator in the design and execution of the assassination.
The global (inter-national) apartheid regime that has emerged under United Settler hegemony effectively deploys nationality as a proxy for race in a manner fitting with the intra-national racial hierarchy found within the United Settler States. Indigenous peoples without nation-states of their own have effectively been excluded from the inter-national racial hierarchy and are deemed expendable to the global economic order. Those nations mostly populated by peoples said to belong to the “Negro” race — i.e., Black Africans and Caribbean Islanders — have been placed at the bottom of the inter-national racial hierarchy, still effectively regarded as socially dead, as slave stock. After the nations of Black Africa and the Caribbean, come the darker nations populated by peoples of the “coolie” races of Asia — a “conglomeration of racial imaginings that emerged worldwide in the era of slave emancipation, a product of the [white] imaginers rather than the [non-whites] imagined”. Amerikkkan racists regard the “coolies” of Asia to be a more “dependable” labor force than the “Negroes” of Africa and the Caribbean. After the African and Caribbean “Negroes” and the Asian “coolies”, come the settler colonial nations of Latin America whose peoples are demeaned and denigrated by white Amerikkkaners who look down upon Latin America’s “alloyed whites,” remarking upon their “racial impurities” and “poor racial hygiene,” as evinced by prevalent and highly visible populations of “mestizos,” “pardos,” and “mulattos” amongst them.
In sum, the global (inter-national) apartheid regime that has emerged under United Settler States hegemony puts the White nations of Europe and the Anglophone settler colonies on top; it puts the Black nations of Africa and the Caribbean at the bottom; it excludes Native Americans and other Indigenous peoples without nation-states from consideration and drives them to extinction; it compels the nations of Asian “coolies” to compete amongst themselves and against Latin American nations (deemed to be “polluted” by “mestizos,” “pardos,” and “mulattos”) in order to prove themselves more “dependable” subordinates; and, lastly, it fractions off “talented tenths” from all of the different non-white populations identified above and bestows “honorary whiteness” upon them provided that they offer dependable and loyal service as proxies and redeemers for white-supremacy. Exceptional in this last regard is the nation of Japan and the nations formed from the two crown jewels of Japan’s former Asia-Pacific empire, South Korea and Taiwan, which have been granted “honorary white” status as entire nations, in accord with Apartheid South African conventions, because their governments and their business leaders have dependably invested in the maintenance and advancement of United Settler States led Empire and acquiesced to an abject dependence upon the military might of the United Settler States for their survival.
Unpayable debt, as Denise Ferreira da Silva has written, is crucial to the maintenance of this inter-national racial hierarchy. To understand the workings of unpayable debt, just consider the following news headline published in the Guardian on the 3rd of February 2023, “Ontario says ‘colonization’ costs mean it does not owe First Nations billions.” Effectively, the government of Ontario in Canada has argued in court that, “It was costly for us to displace and genocide Native peoples and to wreck their lands to satisfy our needs. The costs of our deathly colonial enterprise cannot be borne by us as colonizers alone. The colonized whom we displaced and genocided are responsible for a large part of these costs.” Many white Amerikkkaners believe the same about slavery and respond likewise to demands for reparations, “Enslaving Africans for four centuries then instituting a de jure apartheid regime against them for another century following emancipation was costly for white Amerikkkaners: enslaved Africans and their descendants are responsible for a large part of these costs.” Writ large, one finds that this cruel miscomprehension is crucial to the maintenance of a global (inter-national) racial hierarchy following the same logic, “Euro-Atlantic racism, colonialism, and imperialism was a costly endeavor for the white-supremacists, colonizers, and imperialists of the Euro-Atlantic, and the victims of racism, colonialism, and imperialism are largely responsible for the costliness of these endeavors.”
Going further and digging deeper, it is worth quoting Silva on the circumstances that brought the figure of unpayable debt to her attention:
This image first came to me as I was trying to make sense of how those who lacked equity [and] had been forced to take on loans with exorbitant (variable) interest were blamed for the global economic crisis of 2007-8. Holders of subprime loans, Black and Latinx economically dispossessed persons, were presented in explanations for the crisis as profitable (economically) because their anticipated inability to pay made the loans more valuable. However, when that inability was realized, and the abstract financial instruments of which they were part vaporized, these Black and Latinx persons were found responsible (ethically) for the near collapse of the global economy.
In an all too similar manner, lacking equity in the global economic order, the darker nations have been forced to take on loans with exorbitant interest rates. Loans to the darker nations are considered profitable because they will never be fully paid off and creditors can reap the fees and interest on these loans in perpetuity. That being said, however, the loans remain profitable only provided that the darker nations can make the minimum payments needed to service the loans in perpetuity. When the darker nations fail to make their minimum payments, they threaten to undermine the basis of the global economy. This is to say, in other words, that the darker nations are being held ethically responsible for maintaining a global neocolonial economic system that denigrates and exploits them.
In the aftermath of the Civil War, the United Settler States deployed this very same logic of unpayable debt against the newly emancipated slaves, setting the template for many future deployments. It is worth quoting Saidiya Hartman writing in Scenes of Subjection on this exemplary deployment of unpayable debt:
Emancipation instituted indebtedness. Blame and duty and blood and dollars marked the birth of the free(d) subject. The very bestowal of freedom established the indebtedness of the freed through a calculus of blame and responsibility that mandated that the formerly enslaved both repay this investment of faith and prove their worthiness. The temporal attributes of indebtedness bind one to the past, since what is owed draws the past into the present, and suspends the subject between what has been and what is. In this regard, indebtedness confers durability, for the individual is answerable to and liable for past actions and must be abstinent in the present in the hopes of securing the future. [...] Debt was at the center of a moral economy of submission and servitude and was instrumental in the production of peonage. Above all, it operated to bind the subject by compounding the service owed, augmenting the deficit through interest accrued, and advancing credit that extended interminably the obligation of service. The emancipated were introduced to the circuits of exchange through the figurative deployment of debt, which obliged them to both enter coercive contractual relations and faithfully remunerate the treasure expended on their behalf. Furthermore, debt literally sanctioned bondage and propelled the freed toward indentured servitude by the selling off of future labor. [...] Thus the transition from slavery to freedom introduced the free agent to the circuits of exchange through this construction of already accrued debt, an abstinent present, and a mortgaged future. In short, to be free was to be a debtor — that is, obliged and duty-bound to others.
The circumstances of the slave turned freeman upon emancipation is isomorphic to the situation of the colony turned free nation upon decolonization. The transition from colony to free nation introduced the postcolonial nation to the circuits of exchange, likewise through the construction of already accrued debt, an abstinent present, and a mortgaged future. In short, to be a free postcolonial nation is to be a debtor nation — that is, (ethically) obliged and duty-bound to uphold a neocolonial world order that cruelly exploits postcolonial nations for (economic) profit.
It is important to recognize, however, that it is not being indebted that burdens the darker nations in our post-colonial/neo-colonial era but, more profoundly, it is the fact that the terms of their indebtedness bind the darker nations to a global order that exploits them. The whiter nations of Empire’s core are also debtor nations, but their debts bind them to a global order that privileges them. The richer, whiter nations of the imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal core, led by the United Settlers, effected their assassination of the Third World project by saddling the darker nations of the periphery with unpayable debts whose terms (ethically) bound them to the maintenance and advancement of a global (economic) order that privileged the richer, whiter nations of the core and stratified the poorer, darker nations of the periphery according to an analytics of raciality that was distinctively anti-black. The darker nations were compelled to take on such unpayable debts under extreme duress, upon being visited by one or more of the Four Horsemen of Empire: disease, famine, civil war, and foreign intervention. It is by and through unpayable debts that the richer, whiter nations of the core have managed to cruelly exact payments from the darker nations as their due contribution to their own colonization.
The radical Pan-Africanists of the Third World were keenly prescient in predicting this outcome during the Long Twentieth Century. This is because they were deeply familiar with and sensitive to the fact that Empire’s new hegemon, the United Settlers, had ruthlessly wielded unpayable debts against peoples of African descent upon their emancipation. The radical Pan-Africanists knew that, the moment the colonized won their independence, the United Settlers would be primed to wield unpayable debts against them according to an analytics of raciality that would force the peoples of Black Africa and the Caribbean to the bottom of the heap.
To interpolate Hartman: [T]he radical Pan-Africanists predicted that the new postcolonial states would be burdened by fictions of debt premised upon selective and benign representations of colonization that emphasized paternalism, dependency, and will-lessness. Given this rendition of colonization, responsibility would be deemed the best antidote for the ravages of the past; never mind that it effaced the enormity of the injuries of the past, entailed the erasure of history, and placed the onus of the past onto the shoulders of individual post-colonial nation-states. Recrimination and punishment were to be the rewards of decolonization. Decolonization would confer sovereignty and autonomy only to abandon the postcolonial nation-state in a self-blaming and penalizing neoliberal world order. In the wake of the assassination of the Third World project, each postcolonial nation-state would become an island unto itself, accountable for its own making and answerable to its failures; geo-political-economic relations would thereby recede before the “will of the nation” and the blameworthy and politically isolated government of the nation-state.
Ay, and in this way, Black Africa and the Caribbean would effectively remain the lands of the socially dead by another name; their peoples being instructed to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make do without reparations for centuries of dispossessions and denigrations, for mass kidnappings and the forced deportations of tens of millions, for slavery and social death, for mass slaughters and the organized abandonment of a hundred million and more to disease and famine — directed to forsake any thought of amends for the devastations that shredded the fabric of social life amongst them.
