U.S.: 250 Years of Imperialism
By Isabelino Montes
The United States is preparing to celebrate its 250th anniversary. To mark the occasion, Congress has allocated $150 million in federal funds to commemorate the birth of the Republic. Celebrating a country’s independence is not, in itself, a negative act. But every celebration is stained by lies and falsehood when that independence has historically been subordinated to the enrichment of a bourgeois minority that has not only repressed its own working class, fragmenting it and dividing it into social categories, but has also built its wealth through the appropriation of the resources of other peoples and nations.
When this is the material reality upon which a nation rests, it is only logical that broad sectors of workers do not fully identify with the celebration. We must separate the wheat from the chaff: it is clear that the working class enjoys and celebrates holidays, and those days are well deserved. But behind these 250 years, the ideological control exercised by the U.S. imperialist bourgeoisie has cultivated ideas of patriotism and reverence for the state that conceal another reality: a history marked by exploitation, expansion, and domination.
And so, while the working masses set off fireworks and take part in the spectacle, the ideological machinery transforms the celebration into a grand bourgeois media show. The opening act of that spectacle has already taken place with Donald Trump, who turned the beginning of the festivities into a staged performance in which he combined the celebration of his 80th birthday with the 250th anniversary of the United States during a UFC event on the White House lawn—the first professional sporting event ever held at the presidential residence.
In the same vein, the events commemorating the 250th anniversary are being organized by a nonprofit organization created by Congress, but one that has been engulfed in controversy because of its ties to donors within Trump’s political circle and the Republican Party. According to reports originating from the other imperialist party, the Democratic Party, this organization has become a political vehicle for Trump and his business interests. In fact, congressional reports have indicated that the Republican-linked organization has sought millions of dollars in exchange for offering its largest donors direct access to the president, private events, and exclusive photo opportunities.
It is here that the true meaning of celebrating a bourgeois republic such as the United States is laid bare: a political structure historically removed from the interests of the working masses. And the contrast is brutal: in the midst of an economic and social crisis affecting millions, Trump openly uses his political position to multiply his fortune. Before taking office, his net worth was estimated at approximately $2.3 billion; today, it is estimated at nearly $7 billion. While promising to “make America great again” and offering prosperity to the working class, the cost of living continues to soar and economic inequality continues to grow. Meanwhile, Trump has made billions through cryptocurrency investments, royalties, real estate, and the sale of products bearing his brand: Bibles, watches, and sneakers. The sale of tokens linked to him and his family alone generated more than $526 million. His meme cryptocurrency generated another $635 million.
This is how 250 years of U.S. independence are being celebrated: as a private business venture for those who govern. Because these 250 years are not simply the history of a republic; they are the history of the consolidation of imperialism and of the bourgeoisie that has always held political power.
Indeed, these 250 years also reveal how the historical trajectory of the United States was shaped by the appropriation of immense wealth that allowed it to become a capitalist power. This primitive accumulation was built upon internal territorial dispossession, slavery, war, continental expansion, control of markets, and external economic subordination. In the nineteenth century, westward expansion meant the theft of Indigenous lands, forced acquisitions, and wars of conquest that allowed the United States to seize resources essential to its economic growth. This territorial expansion, combined with the enslaved labor of millions of people brought from Africa and Europe and with state protection for emerging industries, created the capital of the bourgeoisie that continues to hold political power to this day.
But its domination did not end at its borders. Beyond its territory, the United States consolidated its hegemony through military interventions, the imposition of conditions favorable to its corporations, and the economic subordination of Latin America and other regions of the world. In this way, U.S. capitalist monopolies were consolidated, dividing the wealth of the planet among themselves, concentrating financial surpluses, creating banking networks, and expanding foreign investment.
For this reason, the working class in the United States and around the world should not be surprised when millions are forced to leave their countries. To understand these 250 years of the United States is to understand the domination and concentration of wealth that produce structural inequality in our countries of origin. The wealth accumulated in the imperialist center and the precarity imposed upon the periphery feed one another through unequal trade, the extraction of value, indebtedness, and productive subordination.
And today, amid these celebrations, the old Monroe Doctrine is also being revived. Its historical purpose was clear: to declare the Western Hemisphere an exclusive sphere of U.S. influence and legitimize the exclusion of rival powers, thereby consolidating Washington’s supremacy over Latin America. Trump promises to revive it as though it were something new, once again deceiving sectors of the working class. But there is nothing new about it: this false promise of relative prosperity for sectors of the working class within the United States has historically been tied to the imperialist plunder of the rest of the world.
Puerto Rico has not been an exception to this domination. The island remains one of the most underdeveloped links within a region historically subordinated to the U.S. bourgeoisie. Within the framework of transnational capital and the neocolonial order, Puerto Rico remains a colony in forms that are still traditional.
These 250 years of imperialist domination will also be celebrated by Governor Jenniffer González and by the colonial two-party system on the island, which will celebrate 250 years of the formation and enrichment of an importing bourgeoisie subordinated to U.S. capital. However, transformations are also unfolding within this same bourgeois struggle on the island, as certain bourgeois and petty-bourgeois sectors—distinct from those that have historically fought for independence—become increasingly isolated from particular interests of transnational capital and begin to shift politically toward positions of bourgeois independence. And that, too, must be pointed out.
If the working class in the United States must oppose imperialism as a system of global profit, then the working class in Puerto Rico must recognize that, at this historical moment, integration into transnational capital is precisely what best serves the interests of both Washington and the local bourgeoisie. For this reason, the struggle against imperialism is a shared struggle of the working class in the United States and Puerto Rico and, at a higher level, an international struggle of the entire working class. In the face of these 250 years of imperialism, the task is not to align ourselves with any faction of the bourgeoisie—neither the national nor the imperialist bourgeoisie—but first to build our own political organizations as a class so that we may develop the strength to exercise power.
In Puerto Rico, let us enjoy the holiday as we normally do. But let us also make it a moment of reflection on the need for an independent political organization of the working class, organized through committees of workers in workplaces and communities.
May these 250 years serve not as an occasion to pay tribute to imperialism, but as an opportunity to draw conclusions. Let us break from the positions of the national bourgeoisie, divided between right-wing and left-wing sectors, and advance toward the perspective of a workers’ republic: an alternative to the current colonial status and to any bourgeois republic that perpetuates the exploitation of wage labor by capital.
