High levels of repression and corruption become the norm rather than the exception. When the developmentalist strategy ran into problems, something else accompanied the repression-the hollowing out of the mass organisations that used to tie sections of the middle class to the state and, via them, some of the working class and peasantry. The oppressive state became a weak state and looked to foreign backing to reinforce its hold.
All this happened as problems of profitability in the advanced countries drove their capitalists to look for any opportunity, however limited, to grab surplus value from elsewhere. There was not much to be got from the poorest of the poor anywhere in the world, but what there was they were determined to get. Imperialism meant that at the top level of the system rival capitalist powers argued vehemently with each other about how to satisfy their diferent interests. At a lower level, it meant constraining the local ruling classes of the Third World to act as collectors of debt repayments for the Western banks, royalty payments for the multinationals and profits for Western investors as well as for their own domestic capitalists. Debt servicing alone transferred \$300 billion a year from the "developing countries" to the wealthy in the advanced world. <sup>1</sup>08 A website dedicated to defending US overseas investment boasted:
Most new overseas investments are paid for by profits made overseas. Foreign direct investment by US companies was only \$86 billion in 1 996 . . . If you subtract out the reinvested earnings of foreign operations, the result was only \$22 billion . . . US companies' overseas operations also generate income that returns to the US . . . In 1 995, this flow of income-defined as direct investment income, royalty and license fees, and charges and services-back into the US amounted to \$ 1 1 7 billion.109
There could be no end to the squeezing. The share of foreign investors in the trading on the Brazilian stock exchange rose from 6.5 percent in 1 991 to 29.4 percent in 1 995,110 and the share of new Mexican government debt held by non-residents grew from 8 percent at the end of 1990 to 55 percent at the end of 1993.111
Under such circumstances, the instability of the world economy in the aftermath of the "golden age" found heightened expression in the countries of the Global South. Even those expanding rapidly and extolled by neoliberal media commentators could suddenly be faced with near insuperable debt problems, deepening slump and possibly accelerating inflation-as happened in Mexico in the early 1990s, Indonesia in the late 1990s and Argentina at the beginning of the 2000s. And the fate of the mass of people in countries regarded as marginal by international capital, like most of sub-Saharan Africa, was deepening poverty, repeated famines and, all too often, recurrent bouts of ethnic conflict spilling over into civil wars, often financed by foreign firms interested in control of raw materials. There may never have been a golden age for such parts of the world. But there was certainly a leaden one.
The End of the Golden Age
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