A number of Democratic Socialists of America party members have been campaigning on defunding the U.S. military. This is apparently part of an agenda that seeks to dismantle American military power which is seen as supporting an imperialist history with a colonial agenda. Particularly concerned are these candidates with American “business” investment overseas which they see as uniformly evil, just making “profits” and protected by U.S. militarism.
Two books in particular have made this view popular, especially among college graduates. The first was Franz Fanon’s 1961 “The Wretched of the Earth” and the second was the 1977 Lappe and Collins “Food First”. Fanon advocated violent revolution to end colonialism in the third world. Lappe and Collins argued that U.S. agribusiness reflected the worst form of colonialism and was creating the very violent revolutions the U.S. military was putting down.
Collins and Lappe (also the author of the widely popular “Diet for a Small Planet”) wrote that luxury crops grown by American agribusiness in third world nations was so extensive that it was stealing land that otherwise could grow subsistence crops for the poor. If planted with food and not luxury crops, the new land could produce enough food to literally wipe out hunger in the poorer nations of the world. Written soon after the Sahelian food crisis and the publication of “The Limits to Growth,” “Food First” was part of a Marxist narrative that U.S. business investment overseas was oppressive not beneficial. Including forcing people off the land, into crowded “favelas” and eventually forcing them to migrate north. “Wretched” explained that forced specialization in raw export crops was designed only to enrich the colonial powers, relied solely on plantation violence, and failed to feed the native citizenry. [Fanon’s book was cited by one U.S. President as having markedly affected his view of the role of the USA in the third world.]
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