How America’s Power Grew

Imperialism is a word that trips easily off the tongue. But it has such different meanings that it is difficult to use it without clarification as an analytic rather than a polemical term. I here define that special brand of it called ‘capitalist imperialism’ as a contradictory fusion of ‘the politics of state and empire’ (imperialism as a distinctively political project on the part of actors whose power is based in command of a territory and a capacity to mobilize its human and natural resources towards political, economic, and military ends) and ‘the molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time’ (imperialism as a diffuse political-economic process in space and time in which command over and use of capital takes primacy). With the former I want to stress the political, diplomatic, and military strategies invoked and used by a state (or some collection of states operating as a political power bloc) as it struggles to assert its interests and achieve its goals in the world at large. With the latter, I focus on the ways in which economic power flows across and through continuous space, towards or away from territorial entities (such as states or regional power blocs) through the daily practices of production, trade, commerce, capital flows, money transfers, labour migration, technology transfer, currency speculation, flows of information, cultural impulses, and the like. What Arrighi refers to as the ‘territorial’ and the ‘capitalist’ logics of power are rather different from each other. To begin with, the motivations and interests of agents differ. The capitalist holding money capital will wish to put it wherever profits can be had, and typically seeks to accumulate more capital. Politicians and statesmen typically seek outcomes that sustain or augment the power of their own state vis-à-vis other states. The capitalist seeks individual advantage and (though usually constrained by law) is responsible to no one other than his or her immediate social circle, while the statesman seeks a collective advantage and is constrained by the political and military situation of the state and is in some sense or other responsible to a citizenry or, more often, to an elite group, a class, a kinship structure, or some other social group.

All About Oil

My aim is to look at the current condition of global capitalism and the role that a ‘new’ imperialism might be playing within it. I do so from the perspective of the long durée and through the lens of what I call historical-geographical materialism. I seek to uncover some of the deeper transformations occurring beneath all the surface turbulence and volatility, and so open up a terrain of debate as to how we might best interpret and react to our present situation. The longest durée any of us can actually experience is, of course, a lifetime. My first understandings of the world were formed during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath. Then, the idea of the British empire still had resonance and meaning. The world seemed open to me because so many spaces on the world map were coloured red, an empire upon which the sun never set. If I needed any additional proof of ownership, I could turn to my stamp collection—the head of the British monarch was on stamps from India, Sarawak, Rhodesia, Nyasaland, Nigeria, Ceylon, Jamaica . . . But I soon had to recognize that British power was in decline. The empire was crumbling at an alarming rate. Britain had ceded global power to the United States and the map of the world started to change colour as decolonization gathered pace. The traumatic events of Indian independence and partition in 1947 signalled the beginning of the end. At first I was given to understand that the trauma was a typical example of what happens when ‘sensible’ and ‘fair’ British rule gets replaced by irrational native passions and reversions to ancient prejudices (a framework for understanding the world that was and is not confined to Britain and has exhibited remarkable durability). But as struggles around decolonization became fiercer, so the seamier and more nefarious side of imperial rule became more salient. This culminated, for me and for many others of my generation, in the Anglo-French attempt to take back the Suez Canal in 1956.

Accumulation by Disposession

Rosa Luxemburg argues that capital accumulation has a dual character: One concerns the commodity market and the place where surplus value is produced—the factory, the mine, the agricultural estate. Regarded in this light accumulation is a purely economic process, with its most important phase a transaction between the capitalist and the wage labourer. . . . Here, in form at any rate, peace, property and equality prevail, and the keen dialectics of scientific analysis were required to reveal how the right of ownership changes in the course of accumulation into appropriation of other people’s property, how commodity exchange turns into exploitation, and equality becomes class rule. The other aspect of the accumulation of capital concerns the relations between capitalism and the non-capitalist modes of production which start making their appearance on the international stage. Its predominant methods are colonial policy, an international loan system—a policy of spheres of interest—and war. Force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed without any attempt at concealment, and it requires an effort to discover within this tangle of political violence and contests of power the stern laws of the economic process. These two aspects of accumulation, she argues, are ‘organically linked’ and ‘the historical career of capitalism can only be appreciated by taking them together’. Luxemburg rests her analysis upon a particular understanding of the crisis tendencies of capitalism. The problem, she argues, is underconsumption, a general lack of sufficient effective demand to soak up the growth in output that capitalism generates. This difficulty arises because workers are exploited and by definition receive much less value to spend than they produce, and capitalists are at least in part obliged to reinvest rather than to consume. After due consideration of various ways in which the supposed gap between supply and effective demand might be bridged, she concludes that trade with non-capitalist social formations provides the only systematic way to stabilize the system. If those social formations or territories are reluctant to trade then they must be compelled to do so by force of arms (as happened with the opium wars in China).

Consent to Coercion

Imperialism of the capitalist sort arises out of a dialectical relation between territorial and capitalistic logics of power. The two logics are distinctive and in no way reducible to each other, but they are tightly interwoven. They may be construed as internal relations of each other. But outcomes can vary substantially over space and time. Each logic throws up contradictions that have to be contained by the other. The endless accumulation of capital, for example, produces periodic crises within the territorial logic because of the need to create a parallel accumulation of political/military power. When political control shifts within the territorial logic, flows of capital must likewise shift to accommodate. States regulate their affairs according to their own distinctive rules and traditions and so produce distinctive styles of governance. A basis is here created for uneven geographical developments, geopolitical struggles, and different forms of imperialist politics. Imperialism cannot be understood, therefore, without first grappling with the theory of the capitalist state in all its diversity. Different states produce different imperialisms, as was obviously so with the British, French, Dutch, Belgian, etc. imperialisms from 1870 to 1945. Imperialisms, like empires, come in many different shapes and forms. While there may be much that is contingent and accidental—indeed it could not be any other way given the political struggles contained within the territorial logic of power—I believe we can go a long way to establishing a solid interpretative framework for the distinctively capitalistic forms of imperialism by invoking a double dialectic of, first, the territorial and capitalist logics of power and, secondly, the inner and outer relations of the capitalist state. Consider, in this light, the case of the recent shift in form from neo-liberal to neo-conservative imperialism in the United States. The global economy of capitalism underwent a radical reconfiguration in response to the overaccumulation crisis of 1973–5. Financial flows became the primary means of articulating the capitalistic logic of power. But once the Pandora’s box of finance capital had been opened, the pressure for adaptive transformations in state apparatuses also increased.

Capital Bondage

The survival of capitalism for so long in the face of multiple crises and reorganizations accompanied by dire predictions, from both the left and the right, of its imminent demise, is a mystery that requires illumination. Lefebvre, for one, thought he had found the key in his celebrated comment that capitalism survives through the production of space, but he unfortunately failed to explain exactly how or why this might be the case. Certainly both Lenin and Luxemburg, though for quite different reasons and utilizing quite different forms of argument, considered that imperialism—a certain form of production and utilization of the global space—was the answer to the riddle, though in both cases this solution was finite and therefore replete with its own terminal contradictions. It was in this context that, in a series of publications beginning more than twenty years ago, I proposed a theory of a ‘spatial fix’ (more accurately a spatio-temporal fix) to the crisis-prone inner contradictions of capital accumulation. The central point of this argument concerned a chronic tendency within capitalism, theoretically derived out of a reformulation of Marx’s theory of the tendency for the profit rate to fall, to produce crises of overaccumulation. Such crises are typically registered as surpluses of capital (in commodity, money, or productive capacity forms) and surpluses of labour power side by side, without there apparently being any means to bring them together profitably to accomplish socially useful tasks. The most obvious case of this was the world-wide slump of the 1930s when capacity utilization was at an all-time low, surplus commodities could not be sold, and unemployment was at an all-time high. The effect was to devalue and in some cases even destroy the surpluses of capital and to reduce the surpluses of labour power to a miserable state. Since it is the lack of profitable opportunities that lies at the heart of the difficulty, the key economic (as opposed to social and political) problem lies with capital. If devaluation is to be avoided, then profitable ways must be found to absorb the capital surpluses. Geographical expansion and spatial reorganization provide one such option.