The Shift in the Pattern of Capitalist Accumulation: From Neoliberalism to Strategic Plunder
While it is not the purpose of this text to settle whether we are witnessing a continuity of the neoliberal pattern of accumulation or the emergence of a qualitatively distinct phenomenon, it is essential to note that understanding the neo-colonial state in its current forms demands a fundamental clarification. Within the framework of the multipolar reconfiguration of the international system and the persistent subordination of Latin America to US imperialism, the region finds itself at the point of imposition of a new pattern of capitalist accumulation, whose structural logics redefine the economic, political, and territorial role of neo-colonial states.
In this way, the analysis of the contemporary neo-colonial state can no longer be understood exclusively through the neoliberal paradigm. Although many of its institutional, discursive, and juridical forms remain, the historical pattern of accumulation that gave them meaning is exhausted. Insisting on reading current reality as a simple deepening of neoliberalism leads to partial diagnoses and, consequently, to strategic errors.
Neoliberalism is the regime of accumulation proper to a phase of imperial hegemony. Its functioning rests on the global expansion of financial capital, the opening of markets, the mass privatisation of public goods, and a peripheral subordination mediated by consumption, debt, and the ever-deferred promise of development. That model required functional states, integrated elites, and a sufficiently predictable international order. That historical world has collapsed.
The current phase of the international system is marked by the structural crisis of the liberal order, the loss of hegemonic capacity by the imperial centre, and the emergence of a conflictual multipolar scenario. In this context, neoliberalism ceases to be useful as the dominant pattern of accumulation—because it no longer responds to the material and strategic needs of declining imperialism.
Contemporary imperialism can no longer expand indefinitely or integrate peripheries through consensus and market. Its central problem has ceased to be the abstract maximisation of profit and has become an existential question: securing stable access to energy, critical minerals, logistical routes, territorial positions, and technological control in a world breaking with unipolarity.
From this transformation, we believe a new pattern of accumulation is emerging—still in the process of consolidation—characterised by strategic plunder and tribute.
Within this new framework, plunder ceases to be a concealed, exceptional, or indirect phenomenon and becomes a structural imperative. Access to resources and territories is no longer justified primarily as economic interest, but as a condition for the survival of the imperial state itself. The economy is openly subordinated to security; the market, to coercion and exception.
This shift explains the profound mutation in the role of subordinate states. The current neo-colonial state is not a passive heir of neoliberalism, but an active component within this new architecture of accumulation. Its function no longer consists in managing dependent development, but in guaranteeing the permanent flow of plunder towards the dominant centre, even at the cost of the social, productive, and political disintegration of its own territory.
The new US National Security Strategy must be read through this lens—not as a technical update of previous policies, but as the strategic articulation of this historical shift. Within it, security ceases to be an external framework for the economy and becomes its organising principle.
The defining feature of the new pattern of accumulation is not only its extractive character, but the total subordination of the economy to the logic of security and the survival of the imperialist state. In the current phase, the reproduction of imperial capital is no longer guaranteed by the expansion of markets or the financial integration of peripheries, but by the capacity of the imperial state to impose conditions of access, exclusion, and control over strategic resources and key geopolitical spaces.
This displacement marks a profound historical rupture. While neoliberalism discursively separated economy and politics—presenting the market as an autonomous sphere—the new pattern fuses them under a single command. The security of the imperialist state is transformed into a central economic category, and the economy is treated as a problem of defence.
Hence the growing legitimation of practices that, in the previous cycle, would have been considered exceptional: unilateral sanctions, asset confiscation, technological blockades, legal warfare, control of supply chains, and the systematic use of financial coercion. These tools no longer operate as conjunctural measures but as ordinary mechanisms of accumulation.
The market ceases to allocate resources—that function passes to the political-military power of the dominant centre.
In this context, neo-colonial states are functionally reconfigured. Their role is no longer to facilitate the free circulation of global capital, but to territorially guarantee the conditions for strategic plunder. This implies ensuring minimal political stability for extraction, controlling potentially conflictive populations, and offering flexible legal frameworks to the interests of the imperial centre.
Latin America, Africa, and other peripheral regions cease to be spaces of “integration” and become strategic reservoirs.
In this phase, imperialism does not require sovereign states capable of integrating their peoples, but administrative states of dispossession, capable of operating under conditions of permanent crisis. The stability sought is not social or economic, but strictly strategic: continuity of the extractive flow, territorial control, and international alignment. Everything else is secondary or dispensable.
The new US National Security Strategy acts as the ordering framework of this architecture. By defining resources, technologies, and territories as matters of imperialist state security, it automatically transforms the subordinate states that host them into spaces of direct strategic interest. The sovereignty of these states is, in practice, relativised and conditioned on their degree of collaboration.
This state does not govern in order to develop, but to render extraction governable. Its central rationality is not economic or social, but policing-strategic.
Understanding this framework is a necessary condition for thinking any sovereign project in the 21st century. Without this clarity, critique risks remaining anchored in exhausted categories, and political action risks confronting symptoms without attacking causes.
The Neo-Colonial State in the 21st Century: Political Form of Imperial Decadence
The contemporary neo-colonial state cannot be understood as a mere continuation of classical colonialism—it is rather a specific historical form, produced by the transformation of imperialism under conditions of structural decline of the hegemonic centre. In this sense, the current neo-colonial state is the necessary correlate of what we might define as the “State of Imperial Plunder”: an imperialism that no longer hegemonises or integrates, but extracts, punishes, and depredates.
Unlike previous stages of imperialist capitalism, where domination combined coercion with relative consensus, uneven development, and promises of subordinate integration, the current scenario is marked by the rupture of the international order that emerged after World War II. The so-called “rules-based international order” has ceased to operate as a common system, transforming into a unilateral instrument of imperial power—one that dictates rules it does not impose on itself and applies them selectively to peripheral states.
In this context, the neo-colonial state preserves the juridical form of sovereignty but has been emptied of its material content. It controls a territory, administers elections, and maintains national symbols, but lacks effective command over the central elements of power: strategic resources, currency, the financial system, foreign trade, technology, defence, and long-term planning. Sovereignty, in these states, is formal, while the substance of strategic decisions is externalised.
This state form does not emerge from accidental weakness or “mismanagement,” but fulfils a precise structural function within the imperial system in crisis: to guarantee the permanent flow of plunder towards the dominant centre and, simultaneously, to politically contain its own societies. The neo-colonial state is not designed to develop national productive forces, but to administer dependence and manage the social crisis that this dependence generates.
The US National Security Strategy (NSS), in its most recent version, makes this transformation explicit. Far from concealing practices of sanction, blockade, asset confiscation, peripheral militarisation, and global financial control, the NSS integrates them doctrinally as normal tools of security policy. Plunder ceases to be a concealed phenomenon and becomes a strategic imperative: accessing energy, critical minerals, logistical chains, and geopolitical positions is no longer presented as economic interest, but as an existential necessity of the imperial state.
Within this framework, neo-colonial states appear defined from the centre as zones of dispute, sacrificeable territories, and forced providers of resources. Their role is not to decide, but to obey rules they did not draft; not to plan, but to adjust to external agendas; not to protect their population, but to administer the social conflict derived from dispossession.
Local elites play a decisive role here: they act as internal managers of subordination, articulated with financial organisms, diplomatic apparatuses, and international legal structures that shield foreign investment and criminalise any attempt at sovereign rupture. The neo-colonial state is thus an unequal alliance between external power and internal dominant classes, sustained by a colonised legal order and selective coercion.
21st-century neo-colonialism is its characteristic political form in a stage of imperial decadence. It is no longer a matter of integrating peripheries into global capitalist development, but of rapidly extracting what is necessary to sustain a declining centre—even at the cost of the economic, social, and environmental destruction of vast regions of the planet.
The Economic Base of the Neo-Colonial State: Structural Dependence and Subordinate Extractivism
The economic structure of the neo-colonial state is characterised by an organic dependence on foreign capital that is neither conjunctural nor reversible within the margins of the existing system. This dependence defines the type of international insertion, the configuration of the productive apparatus, and the real limits of economic policy. The neo-colonial state does not decide its model—it administers it under external coercion.
In these states, the strategic sectors of the economy—mining, hydrocarbons, energy, agribusiness, critical infrastructure, finance, and, increasingly, water resources and land—are controlled directly or indirectly by the imperialist state. Foreign investment does not act as a complement to national development, but as a mechanism for the appropriation of rent, with legal frameworks designed to guarantee stability to capital and transfer risks to society.
This economic pattern is articulated around an extractive productive structure, organised as a system of enclaves. The economy is oriented towards the export of raw materials with minimal internal added value, scarce productive linkages, and zero significant technological transfer. Accumulation does not take place within the national territory but flows outward, reinforcing financial and technological dependence.
The direct consequence of this matrix is the impossibility of sovereign planning. Fundamental decisions—what to produce, for whom, with what technology, and under what social and environmental conditions—are conditioned by contracts, investment protection regimes, and international tribunals that strip the state of its effective regulatory capacity.
Capital flight completes the vicious cycle. Tax regimes favourable to foreign capital, open financial systems, and the absence of effective controls allow the permanent outflow of surpluses, reinforcing the scarcity of foreign exchange and justifying new cycles of indebtedness. Thus, the neo-colonial state becomes trapped in a logic of recurrent crisis, used to justify ever deeper structural adjustments.
The productive disarticulation of the periphery is not a collateral damage of the system, but a condition of its reproduction in times of decadence.
The Political Form of the Neo-Colonial State
The neo-colonial state is sustained not only by its dependent economic structure, but by a legal order designed to administer subordination. In this state form, law ceases to be an instrument of collective self-determination and is transformed into a technical mechanism for guaranteeing plunder, both internally and internationally.
Formally, the state retains constitutions, codes, and tribunals. However, the material content of this legal order is colonised by external norms, treaties, and commitments that radically limit sovereign capacity. Free trade agreements, bilateral investment protection agreements, and international arbitration systems function as parallel constitutions, hierarchically superior to internal democratic decisions.
These legal architectures shield foreign investment, guarantee the unrestricted repatriation of profits, and penalise any attempt at sovereign regulation. When a state attempts to reclaim control over strategic resources, modify contractual conditions, or implement redistributive policies, legal, financial, and diplomatic blackmail is activated. The so-called international law, far from being universal, operates in an asymmetric and disciplinary manner.
At the internal level, law is reconfigured to fulfil a dual function: to flexibilise the economy for capital and to harden control over society. Labour deregulation, the privatisation of essential services, and the commodification of social rights are promoted, while penal frameworks, security laws, and control mechanisms designed to contain the social discontent generated by these policies are strengthened.
This process articulates with a democracy emptied of popular content. Elections, parties, and parliaments persist, but strategic decisions—economic model, foreign policy, defence, control of resources—remain beyond the reach of popular will. Democracy is reduced to a ritual of legitimation, whose real margin of decision is previously bounded by external commitments.
When the vote threatens this neo-colonial order, the system activates mechanisms of indirect intervention: selective judicialisation of popular leaderships (lawfare), media campaigns of delegitimisation, economic pressures, external political financing, or directly institutional and electoral coups—as occurred in Honduras, with the direct intervention of Donald Trump. Popular will is accepted only insofar as it does not question the material bases of dependence.
The US National Security Strategy explicitly incorporates this logic. Democracy ceases to be presented as a universal value and becomes a functional instrument: it is valid when it produces aligned governments and disposable when it generates sovereign projects. Law, consequently, is subordinated to the “national security” of the imperial power, legitimising sanctions, blockades, and confiscations outside any common international legality.
In this scenario, the neo-colonial state becomes the local executor of a legality it does not control, applying external norms against its own people. The judicialisation of protest, the criminalisation of social resistance, and the restriction of political rights are not isolated authoritarian aberrations, but organic components of the neo-colonial state form.
The result is a permanent crisis of legitimacy. The state demands obedience but offers no project; it administers elections but does not decide; it invokes the law but uses it against those who seek to transform it. This structural contradiction explains chronic political instability, social fragmentation, and the recurrent emergence of cycles of protest and repression.
Coercion as a Pillar of the Neo-Colonial State
In the neo-colonial state, the function of security and defence undergoes a profound mutation. The defence of territorial sovereignty ceases to be the central objective and is replaced by a conception of subordinate security, oriented towards the stability of the internal order and the protection of external strategic interests. Coercion is no longer organised in relation to the external enemy, but against society itself.
The armed and security forces of neo-colonial states are typically doctrinally aligned with the imperial power. Their formation, equipment, training, and even intelligence depend on “security cooperation” programmes promoted by the United States and its allies. These doctrines redefine threats: the enemy is no longer external aggression, but social protest, territorial conflict, functional narco-trafficking, and any political expression that disrupts the extractive order.
The National Security Strategy legitimises this transformation by promoting the integrated use of military, police, technological, and intelligence tools to guarantee the “stability” of regions considered critical. Militarisation no longer requires formal occupation; it is exercised through bases, joint exercises, regional commands, technical assistance, and control of strategic information.
The neo-colonial state accepts this architecture because it lacks its own defensive project. Its military apparatus becomes subcontracted security, oriented to fulfilling functions of territorial containment and social control in the name of hemispheric stability. Sovereignty in matters of defence is thus fragmented and conditioned.
This logic is expressed clearly in Latin America, where the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) operates as the central articulator of the regional security architecture. Military exercises, anti-drug cooperation, maritime control, and aerial surveillance do not respond to nationally and sovereignly defined threats, but to imperial geostrategic priorities: commercial routes, energy corridors, critical infrastructure, and control of extra-hemispheric influences.
Poverty, migration, indigenous conflict, and informality fulfil a key function: depoliticising the structural causes of the crisis and legitimising repression. The neo-colonial state criminalises protest in the name of order, while keeping intact the economic structures that generate it.
By subordinating national defence to external interests, the state becomes exposed to induced destabilisations, diplomatic pressures, and indirect coercion operations whenever it attempts to deviate from its assigned role. Dependent militarisation is, paradoxically, a source of greater strategic vulnerability.
The NSS also introduces the notion of preventive destabilisation: to intervene, sanction, or pressure before a sovereign project consolidates. Within this framework, the mere possibility of an autonomous political shift can be treated as a threat to the security of the imperial power, justifying open or covert interventions.
Thus, the neo-colonial state becomes the local administrator of coercion, directed inward and aligned outward. State violence, far from protecting the people, is used to guarantee the flow of resources, the stability of transnational capital, and the geopolitical primacy of the imperial centre.
Elite Capture and Neo-Colonial Administration
The neo-colonial state could not sustain itself solely through external coercion or direct imperial pressure. Its relative stability rests on the existence of local elites functional to the order of dependence, who act as intermediaries between imperial power and society. These elites are not simply “bought” from the outside—they are historically constituted as the dominant fraction within the neo-colonial state.
The dominant classes in these states—business groups, technocrats, senior political, financial, and media figures—are deeply integrated into financial capital. Their material interests, ideological formation, and power networks are aligned with the reproduction of the extractive-financial model. They do not seek to develop the internal market or strengthen sovereignty, but to secure their position as junior partners in plunder.
This elite capture expresses itself on multiple levels. In the economic sphere, these fractions act as intermediaries for foreign investments, benefiting from concessions, privatisations, monopoly rents, and privileged access to external credit. In the political sphere, they occupy key ministries, central banks, regulatory agencies, and parliaments, legally shielding dependence.
Colonisation is not only material, but also cognitive and ideological. The formation of these elites takes place in academic centres, multilateral organisations, and think-tank networks linked to the imperialist centre. There, the idea is naturalised that no viable alternatives to subordination exist, that sovereignty is anachronistic, and that any attempt at national planning is “populism” or “fiscal irresponsibility.”
In this way, the absence of a national project does not appear as a deficiency, but as a technical virtue. The neo-colonial state does not plan; it manages indicators defined externally. It does not design development; it meets targets imposed by financial capital. Politics degrades into administration, and administration into the mere execution of external agendas.
This logic explains the deliberate fragmentation of the state apparatus. Ministries without real power, agencies captured by private interests, evaluation systems based on international standards that do not reflect national needs. Strategic planning disappears and is replaced by short-term policies oriented towards sustaining the macroeconomic stability necessary for extraction.
Democracy, in this context, functions as a mechanism for the controlled rotation of elites, not as a tool of transformation. Governments change, but not structures. Elites guarantee the continuity of the model, while the social costs are distributed onto the working population.
When political or social sectors emerge that attempt to break this enclosure—whether through nationalisations, sovereign regional integration, or redistributive policies—these same elites act as internal agents of destabilisation, articulating external pressures, lawfare, economic blockades, or institutional coups.
Thus, the neo-colonial state reveals its true nature: it is not a weak state, but a state strong in its specific function of sustaining dependence. Strong to repress, to legislate in favour of capital, to incur debt and to discipline; weak only when it comes to defending the people and the territory.
