GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND AMERICAN EMPIRE LEO PANITCH SAM GINDIN This is the first draft for the lead essay in The New Imperial Challenge: The Socialist Register 2004, L. Panitch and C.Leys eds, forthcoming October 2003. ‘American imperialism… has been made plausible and attractive in part by the insistence that it is not imperialistic.’ Harold Innis, 19481 1. The American empire is no longer the world and doing so in the American concealed. In March 1999 the cover of the interest.’2 Of course, even before it was Sunday New York Times Magazine taken up by the American newspaper of displayed a giant clenched fist painted in record, the American state’s own the stars and stripes of the US flag above geopolitical strategists had already taken the words: ‘What The World Needs Now: this tack. Among those closest to the For globalization to work, America can’t Democratic Party wing of the state under be afraid to act like the almighty the Clinton Presidency, Zbigniev superpower that it is’. Thus was featured Brzezinski did not mince any words in his Thomas Friedman’s ‘Manifesto for a Fast 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: World’, which urged the United States to American Primacy and Its Geostrategic embrace its role as enforcer of the Imperatives, in asserting that ‘the three capitalist global order: ‘…the hidden great imperatives of geo-political strategy hand of the market will never work are to prevent collusion and maintain without a hidden fist…. The hidden fist security dependence amongst the vassals, that keeps the world safe for Silicon to keep tributaries pliant, and to keep the Valley’s technologies is called the United barbarians from coming together.’3 In the States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine same year, the Republican wing’s Core.’ Four years later, in January 2003, intellectuals, who eventually would write when there was no longer any point in the Bush White House’s National pretending the fist was hidden, the words Security Strategy, founded The Project ‘The American Empire: Get Used It ’ for a New American Century with the took up the whole cover of the Magazine goal of making imperial statecraft the to feature an essay by Michael Ignatieff: explicit guiding principle of American ‘…[W]hat word but ‘empire describes the policy.4 awesome thing that America is 2. Most of what passes for serious becoming? …Being an imperial power… analysis in justifying the use of the term means enforcing such order as there is in ‘American empire’ is what might be GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND AMERICAN EMPIRE.. 1 called theory by analogy, implicitly or imperialism was the extent to which the explicitly harkening back to imperial words that opened Kautsky’s infamous Rome.5 But analogy, of course, does not essay in 1914 — the one that so attracted constitute theory. The neglect of any Lenin’s ire - increasingly rang true: ‘First serious political economy or pattern of of all, we need to be clear what we historical determination that would understand from the term imperialism. explain the emergence and reproduction This word is used in every which way, of today’s American empire, and the but the more we discuss and speak about absence of the dimensions of structural it the more communication and oppression and exploitation pertaining to understanding becomes weakened.’8 it, serve as poignant reminders of why it 3. The confusion was apparent in debates was Marxism that made the running in in the early 1970s — the last time the theorizing imperialism for most of the concept had much currency on the left - 20th century. Saying this, however, over the location of contemporary immediately raises anew the question a capitalism’s contradictions. There were leading Indian Marxist posed to the left a those who focused almost exclusively on decade ago. Prabhat Patnaik’s 1990 essay the ‘third world’, and made its resistance ‘Whatever Happened to Imperialism?’ to imperialism bear all the weight as the lamented that ‘Marxists look bemused source of transformation.9 Others when the term is mentioned’ and that ‘the emphasized increasing contradictions topic has virtually disappeared from the within the developed capitalist world, pages of Marxist journals.’ The costs of fostering the impression that American this were severe for the left. The concept ‘hegemony’ was in decline. This became of imperialism has always been especially the prevalent view, and the notion that important for the left as much for its ‘the erosion of American economic, emotive and mobilizing qualities as for its political, and military power is analytic ones. Indeed, in Patnaik’s view, unmistakable’ grew into a commonplace the silence over imperialism had little to by the mid-1980s.10 Even so, it was do with the analysis itself; rather than ‘a notable that very few went back to the old theoretically self-conscious silence’, it Marxist theory of inter-imperial rivalry in was the ‘very fact that imperialism has this context, since despite increased become so adept at “managing” potential economic competition from Japan and challenges to its hegemony [that] made us Germany, it was recognized that ‘things indifferent to its ubiquitous presence.’6 are a long way from a military trial of Yet the left’s silence on imperialism did strength’, as Glyn and Sutcliffe put it. All also reflect severe analytic problems in it was ‘safe to predict’ was that without a the old Marxist theory of imperialism. As hegemonic power ‘the world economy Giovanni Arrighi had argued in 1978: will continue without a clear leader....’11 ‘[B]y the end of the 60s, what had once Meanwhile, the widespread notion that been the pride of Marxism — the theory the power of the nation state had withered of imperialism — had become a tower of away in the era of globalization added to Babel, in which not even Marxists knew the confusion. Against this, there were any longer how to find their way.’7 What very few who had the temerity by the in good part lay behind the left’s mid-1990s to say, as did Peter Gowan in disenchantment with the concept of concluding his analysis of the West’s GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND AMERICAN EMPIRE.. 2 imposition of neoliberal shock therapy in inter-imperial rivalry by understanding Eastern Europe: ‘…this does not so much how it came to pass that the American suggest a new era on the globe as empire incorporated its capitalist rivals, something rather old—fashioned which, and how this was related to the in the days of Communism, used to be establishment of a truly global capitalism. called imperialism.’12 Central to this project must be the 4. There was indeed no little irony in the questions of wherein the plausibility of fact that so many on the left continued to the American state’s insistence that it was turn away from what they thought was an not imperialistic historically derived, and old-fashioned notion, just while the how this was put into practice and ground was being laid for its current institutionalized. And no less central, in renewed fashionability in the New York the current conjuncture, must be the Times. At the end of the 1980s, Susan questions of under what conditions the Strange, in a little-noticed academic American state’s insistence that it is not essay, stood almost alone in pointing imperialistic become implausible, and ‘Towards a Theory of Transnational indeed jettisoned, and what implications Empire’ with Washington D.C. at its this has for its no longer being attractive. centre. Yet the understanding of 5. There is a structural logic to capitalism ‘American structural power’ she called that tends to its globalization. This was for was not only cast in non-Marxist famously captured in Marx’s description analytic terms but was explicitly oriented in the Communist Manifesto of a future to breaking ‘with the presumption of most that stunningly matches our present: ‘The writers on imperialism that imperialism is need of a constantly expanding market for undesirable’, and to advancing the goal of its products chases the bourgeoisie over making the America state live up to its the whole surface of the globe. It must responsibilities as a global empire.13 To nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, be sure, soon after the turn of the century, establish connections everywhere. it with the American state’s own avowal of creates a world after its own image.’ But its imperial role, the term was back on affirming Marx’s prescience in this every leftist’s lips. The popularity of respect runs the risk of treating what we Hardt and Negri’s tome, Empire, reflected now call globalization and its specific the new conjuncture. Their post- forms as inevitable and irreversible. It modernist Marxist case that historical must be remembered that Marx’s words materialism needed to be revived on the also seemed to apply at the end of the 19th basis of an entirely different theory of century, when, as Karl Polanyi noted, imperialism than the old one was by no ‘[o]nly a madman would have doubted means uninsightful, but their bizarre that the international economic system insistence that ‘the United States does was the axis of the material existence of not, and indeed no nation state can today, the human race’.15 Yet, as Polanyi was form the center of an imperialist project’ concerned to explain, far from continuing soon turned out to itself be out sync with uninterrupted, there were already the times.14 For what is above all needed indications that the existing system of now is a new historical materialist global accumulation was in the early theorization of imperialism that precisely stages of its dissolution, and soon allows us to transcend the old theory of thereafter it in fact collapsed by way of GLOBAL CAPITALISM AND AMERICAN EMPIRE.