How U.S. bankers underdeveloped Mexico

Below is an excerpt from Sam Marcy’s book “High Tech, Low Pay,” published by Workers World Party in 1986.

The U.S. bankers not long ago showed great eagerness to extend loans to Mexico in connection with the extraction and production for sale of its oil. Oil seemed the answer to all the burning questions of economic development and the means to make a real leap forward from underdevelopment to becoming a developed industrial country. This has not happened.

The collapse of oil on a worldwide scale has only emphasized the monocultural aspect of oil production. It does not create in and of itself the necessary scientific and technological infrastructure to build a modern industrialized country.

Of course it is helpful for any country to find oil or any other natural resource. But as in the case of Nigeria, Venezuela, Indonesia and other countries (with the exception of Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf states), the development of its oil resources did not make any substantial difference once the capitalist crisis overtook Mexico.

On the contrary, the introduction of capitalist technology has not decreased poverty but has disrupted existing social relations, accelerating the so-called illegal immigration of Mexicans into the U.S. The so-called immigration problem does not lend itself to solutions merely on the basis of the development of the oil industry, in which the imperialist countries, particularly the U.S., were most eager to participate. It should be remembered that the border itself is the product of a war of conquest by the U.S. against Mexico, and that millions of Mexican people inhabited the Southwest before it was annexed to the United States.

Oil is an extractive industry where the banks realize lucrative super-profits by making abundant loans readily available. The same does not apply when it comes to capital for the broad scientific and technological infrastructure needed to really develop the country given the contemporary stage of the scientific-technological revolution. The incubus of private ownership in the means of production, of subordination and control by imperialist monopolies, makes it prohibitive from the vantage point of imperialist interests.

Last year alone [1986--ed.], the U.S. government forcibly deported a million workers to Mexico. The immigration problem cannot be solved on the basis of the contemporary imperialist relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. It requires a reorientation of the productive forces. But this is impossible when all of the great advances in science and technology are kept under lock and key in the citadels of imperialist power, which only occasionally let some of them trickle through and then only on the basis of continuing dependence.

What is said in respect to Mexico applies equally to the Caribbean countries.

The hodgepodge of aid, of grants, even of the “generous” kind, so-called, in the long run is of no avail in the face of the widening gulf between the dependent countries and the metropolitan imperialist centers. Only a thoroughgoing socialist revolution can overcome the effects of imperialist bondage and get rid of the incubus of monopoly-capitalist private property. This is the only way to unearth the secrets which science and invention are daily yielding up but which are misused by the vested, predatory, monopoly capitalist interests.