The following is an excerpt from Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004) by John Perkins. I copied this verbatim from Pages 212 and 213 of the print edition.
"Today, we still have slave traders. They no longer find it necessary to march into the forests of Africa looking for prime specimens who will bring top dollar on the auction blocks in Charleston, Cartagena, and Havana. They simply recruit desperate people and build a factory to produce the jackets, blue jeans, tennis shoes, automobile parts, computer components, and thousands of other items they can sell in the markets of their choosing. Or they may elect not even to own the factory themselves; instead, they hire a local businessman to do all their dirty work for them.
These men and women think of themselves as upright. They return to their homes with photographs of quaint sites and ancient ruins, to show to their children. They attend seminars where they pat each other on the back and exchange tidbits of advice about dealing with the eccentricites of customs in far-off lands. Their bosses hire lawyers who assure them that what they are doing is perfectly legal. They have a cadre of psychotherapists and other human resource experts at their disposal to convince them that they are helping those desperate people.
The old-fashioned slave trader told himself that he was dealing with a species that was not entirely human, and that he was offering them the opportunity to become Christianized. He also understood that slaves were fundamental to the survival of his own society, that they were the foundation of his economy. The modern slave trader assures herself (or himself) that the desperate people are better off earning one dollar a day than no dollars at all, and that they are receiving the opportunity to become integrated into the larger world community. She also understands that these desperate people are fundamental to the survival of her company, that they are the foundation for her own lifestyle. She never stops to think about the larger implications of what she, her lifestyle, and the economic system behind them are doing to the world - or of how they may ultimately impact her children's future."
Though Perkins never outright stated it, what he was describing here is a consequence of imperialism and capitalism, plain and simple. Very little of this has changed, and if anything, it's only gotten worse. There are more slaves in the world today than ever before in human history. Part of that is simply due to population growth. But population isn't the problem. It's the entire economic system. Capitalism is a profit-first system that demands ever more profit. A system of rentiers, for rentiers. If you're not collecting rent, you're paying it. If you don't own capital, you're growing someone else's capital. The only way we escape enslavement under neoliberalism is by becoming a slave master.
One significant flaw in Perkins' book was his tautalogy that American imperialism was once actually good and noble... because it was noble and good, and therefore America (and its imperialism) was noble and good.
In Perkins' defence, he somewhat humbles himself in the epilogue by reminding the reader that the point of the book was not a prescription, and I think the book is not simply platitudes. Perkins deserves plenty of credit for exposing the cracks in modern American imperialism and the lengths the nation-state goes to achieve its goals (especially the attack on Panama, numerous CIA assassinations, and US complicity in many "free" regimes around the world). But this does not excuse the American exceptionalism, and worse, individualistic bootstrapping, in which individual consumer choices and evangelizing international affairs will somehow bring down economies of a much larger scale than wherever "boycott [product]" is happening or some trending hashtag is trending.
Last modified 2 April 2026.