We are sit­ting on blood mon­ey, and we will pay the price one day. Despite our his­tor­i­cal expo­sure to colo­nial­ism, today, we have far more in com­mon with the impe­ri­al­ists than with their vic­tims. It is an utter insult to their suf­fer­ing that we should even think about iden­ti­fy­ing with their pain in the present.

Sounds dra­mat­ic, right? Bear with me here.

What’s exact­ly going on with “tourism”?

If you read the tourism min­istry’s 2025 year­book, you will notice that a com­bined 67.1% of our tourist arrivals were from Europe, Amer­i­ca, Cana­da, Aus­tralia, New Zealand, Sau­di Ara­bia, and Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates (the impe­ri­al­ists and their allies) in 2024. These trends were more or less sim­i­lar in the past. On aver­age, 40.5% of our entire nation­al rev­enue is derived from tourism. In the last 15 years, on aver­age, resorts gen­er­at­ed 88% of our tourism rev­enue annu­al­ly. In 2024, that num­ber stood at a whop­ping 98.37% (2025 Year­book, p.39).

Even if we took spend­ing num­bers at a rough aver­age, con­trast­ing resort rev­enue to total arrivals in 2024 (see 2025 Year­book, p.23 and p.39), that’s about MVR 5,539 — or US$ 359.2 at the offi­cial exchange rate — or per per­son. That is exclud­ing flight tick­ets, which would aver­age around at least US$ 1,000 min­i­mum from des­ti­na­tions like Europe. Do you real­ly think most of our arrivals into the resorts are aver­age fam­i­lies from there? No, it’s almost always the rich­est of the rich­est who would be able to afford resort-prices in addi­tion to trav­el costs.

The post-2008 cen­tre-right “social demo­c­ra­t­ic” order only works because of blood mon­ey

We’re agreed that our dom­i­nant one-island one-resort mod­el of tourism isn’t acces­si­ble or afford­able at all to any work­ing class per­son from our main mar­kets, right? Good. That means if we were to reduce these prices even a lit­tle bit, our already shit-strick­en bud­get deficit and bum-fuck nation­al debt would take a mas­sive hit. The run­ning expen­di­tures for a pop­u­la­tion as small as ours should not be that high, but it is that way because of our stu­pid tharaggee scams and our elec­toral bureau­crats’ cor­rupt fun-and-games with those.

Do you under­stand? Our very liveli­hood was found­ed on the char­i­ty of the impe­r­i­al nations’ elites. Should they decide to pull the plug, we’re going to starve. Free health­care, pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary edu­ca­tion, stan­dards of liv­ing, and so on — all of these things are built on the blood of the vic­tims of Euro-Amer­i­can impe­ri­al­ism and the bones of our exploit­ed Bangladeshi immi­grant work­ers. With­out that, our fate would­n’t be any dif­fer­ent from island nations like Comoros, who don’t even make a tenth of what we do.

And what about our own nation­al dynam­ics of exploita­tion? Yes, our own nation­al work­ing class­es are sub­ject­ed to the worst kinds of cap­i­tal­ist tor­ture, but what about our Bangladeshi immi­grant work­ers — preyed on by “agents” look­ing for them in the most impov­er­ished regions, lured into this coun­try often under mis­lead­ing cir­cum­stances, and forced to sign doc­u­ments in lan­guages they can’t read — and the suf­fer­ing they go through? They slave away in the con­struc­tion indus­try and oth­er mass-indus­tries we take for grant­ed, and they don’t even have basic rights like a min­i­mum wage.

We don’t need to “become” the next Dubai or Sin­ga­pore, we already are just like them. Filthy rich from blood mon­ey, with most of our indus­try cap­tured and owned by the impe­r­i­al core (remem­ber, only about 20% of our resorts are ful­ly local­ly owned today), and drown­ing in nation­al cor­rup­tion. Cap­i­tal­ism only seems like it’s work­ing because we get enough mon­ey from the impe­r­i­al core to make it look like it’s work­ing. The minute you pull the plug for exploita­tion, our entire house of cards will crum­ble to the ground.

The “impe­r­i­al boomerang” con­cept applies to us too. The vio­lence we enable, even if we don’t do it our­selves, will even­tu­al­ly come back to us. We’re already see­ing that hap­pen with tight­en­ing media con­trol, police bru­tal­i­ty, etc.

So every time I talk about eco­nom­ic col­lapse here in the Mal­dives, it’s a mat­ter of when, not if. When glob­al colo­nial­ism and empires col­lapse, and when even their elites can no longer afford to vis­it — if their gov­ern­ments haven’t out­right sanc­tioned us by then — we will col­lapse with them. Vio­lent­ly. Thou­sands of peo­ple will suf­fer, starve, and die. It won’t look very pret­ty.