A Comment on David Harvey's The New Imperialism and Ellen Meiksins Wood's Empire of Capital

Historical Materialism, volume 14:4 (59–78) © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006 Also available online – www.brill.nl 1 I am grateful to Andrew Glyn and Sam Ashman for comments on a draft of this article. 2 Patnaik 1990. Bob Sutcliffe Imperialism Old and New: A Comment on David Harvey’s The New Imperialism and Ellen Meiksins Wood’s Empire of Capital From drought to flood1 Only a few years after Prabhat Patnaik memorably complained about the disappearance of imperialism from the writing of the Left,2 it has suddenly become the word on everybody’s lists. The website which claims to be the world’s largest (anti-union) bookstore, in response to a recent search in book titles for ‘imperialism’, produced 23,519 items (starting, I was surprised to find, with a book by one V.I. Lenin), 2 items under video games and even 6 under ‘Home and Garden’; ‘hegemony’ came up with 23,757 items, headed by Noam Chomsky; ‘empire’ produced 78,303 books, headed by Niall Ferguson; while globalisation, the great buzz word of the 1990s, produced only 18,120 books, headed by Jagdish Bhagwati. Add to that an uncountable number of articles and you can see the complexity of providing a guide to contemporary thought about imperialism and related concepts. HIMA 14,4_f5_58-78II 11/9/06 3:39 PM Page 59 60 • Bob Sutcliffe 3 Harvey 2003. 4 Wood 2003. This flood has been produced by a political and ideological equivalent of the perfect storm: many forces coincide at one time and place to produce maximum possible impact. One of these components is the fact that imperialism is no longer always considered a crime committed by one’s enemies. Some authors have begun to confess to and even to celebrate imperialism, so now the book search includes works in favour of imperialism as well as works against. Second, as a result, it has become a term which no longer brands its users as Marxist. Third, a number of writers, some Marxists among them, are provocatively propounding the idea that imperialism is over and that we have arrived somewhere else. Hardt and Negri’s Empire, the best-selling Marxist book of modern times, argues this. Fourth, partly in reaction to this, many have re-asserted that the monster is not only alive but is threatening the world with new dangers. And, among the latter category, a number are trying to see what is new about the current state of the world and to explore how historical-materialist and related theories can help to analyse it and ultimately to combat it. This article is a comment on two such recent attempts, by David Harvey3 and Ellen Meiksins Wood.4 Empire and capital The distinctive feature of the Marxist or historical-materialist method of analysing imperialism consists in a special kind of dual vision which tries to integrate coherently two separate aspects of the world. One consists of the hierarchies, conflicts and alliances – political, military and economic – between countries; the other concerns the working of the productive system and the hierarchy of classes which it generates. The first is about dominance and exploitation of some countries by others; the second is about the stability of the productive system and the dominance and exploitation of some classes over others. Theories of imperialism could be categorised in relation to how these two layers are treated. Conventional thinking tends to look only at one level at a time. There is long tradition of viewing international relations, with their alliances and conflicts, as a story about national interests, quite independently of the production system and socio-economic relations. This perspective leads naturally to the search for parallels between international relations in all HIMA 14,4_f5_58-78II 11/9/06 3:39 PM Page 60 Imperialism Old and New • 61 historical epochs and, in particular, to the comparison of empires one with another over millennia. Capitalism, on this perspective, has little to do with empire. In a similar way, conventional economics sees a harmonious system of international economic relations based on mutually beneficial trading opportunities, just as it sees the harmonious involvement of capital and labour in the production process. And conventional development economics sees economic success or failure as almost entirely a result of whether a government pursues the correct economic policies (which – no prizes for guessing – are those which give freest play to the harmonious forces of the market). No imperialism here. Those who practise political economy, and Marxists in particular, try to break out of these disciplinary boundaries to say something about both of the superimposed layers, to recognise the elements of autonomy in each one as well as the links, complementary and contradictory, between the two. Nonetheless, there are instances of Marxists arguing that one of the superimposed layers of the complex map has become assimilated to the other. More than once it has been argued that the world has divided into bourgeois and proletarian nations so that class and nation are no longer distinct. Some versions of the still influential theory of dependency come close to this extreme, seeing the division of the world between developed and underdeveloped, imperialist and subjugated countries as more essential than the division between capitalist and working classes. Another, opposite, kind of vision sees the hierarchy of nations as having been reduced to the social relations of production. ‘Post-imperialist’ theorists have argued that the capitalist world has effectively fused into a single socio-economic unit ruled by a self-conscious global bourgeoisie and individual states have lost their importance. A newer version of this idea dominates the argument of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, which also contends that the importance of different states has all but disappeared, but that the most coherent class is not, as the post-imperialists had it, the world ruling class but a world ruled class (the ‘multitude’). Between these two reductionisms lie a large number of different interpretations of the meaning of the combined relations of country and class. The most interesting contributions of these do not reduce reality to one or the other layer, nor attempt simply to allocate shares of world exploitation (between class and country) but rather try to see how the two (or more) layers are intertwined, mutually causative and sometimes contradictory. HIMA 14,4_f5_58-78II 11/9/06 3:39 PM Page 61 62 • Bob Sutcliffe 5 Harvey 2003, p. 182. 6 Wood 2003, p. 152. 7 Harvey 2003, p. 182. Harvey and Meiksins Wood: a new imperialism? Marxists should welcome these two new books by David Harvey and Ellen Meiksins Wood. They both make a serious contribution to the renewal of theoretical debate about imperialism. Both of their books are short and readable (Harvey’s more vivid in style, having once been a series of lectures, Wood’s more rigorous). And both are serious attempts to make sense of the two superimposed layers of nation and class, of international politics and economy. They are ambitious books but neither of them lays claim to having any last word. Towards the end of his book Harvey admits that ‘whether of not this is an adequate conceptualization of matters remains to be evaluated’;5 and Wood argues that there is as yet no theory of imperialism in an epoch of ‘universal capitalism’: we have no theory of imperialism which adequately comprehends a world that consists not of imperialist masters and colonial subjects but of an international system in which both imperial and subordinate powers are more or less sovereign.6 Their contributions to the search for a systematic theory and an adequate conceptualisation have a surprising amount in common. But they make a number of points which are different from each other, some of them mutually contradictory. And there are a number of important things which neither of them say. Neither of these two authors questions for a moment that imperialism still exists nor that is it intimately connected to capitalism. But they do both tackle the same question as Hardt and Negri: what is new in the world of the last few decades, and, in particular, is globalisation a new form of capitalism entailing a new form of imperialism to support it? Answering that question leads them to a common central concern: what is the role and the future of US dominance in the world? They seem to agree that globalisation betokens something new but, in Harvey’s words, ‘the new imperialism appears as nothing more that the revisiting of the old, though in a different place and time’.7 Wood, too, stresses more the elements of continuity than those of rupture between the old and the new imperialism; in fact, a good part of her HIMA 14,4_f5_58-78II 11/9/06 3:39 PM Page 62 Imperialism Old and New • 63 argument is to dispute in crucial respects, in particular over the role of the state, the argument of many (such as Hardt and Negri) that everything has been turned upside down and that we are in a new world without maps or precedents. They are also both convinced of three things: that the world is qualitatively different from that described by Lenin in the period of the classical-Marxist writings about imperialism – one that was characterised by fratricidal competition for markets, power and territory by an élite of rich, industrialised, heavily armed and relatively equal states; nor do they regard it as very similar to the world described by theorists of dependency, in which the main emphasis is put on the progressive polarisation of wealth and power between a rich minority of imperialist countries and a poor majority of dependent ones; and they are particularly convinced that it is nothing like the world according to Hardt and Negri, in which imperialism has been replaced by a global capitalist system where national states have lost most of their power and influence. The history of imperialism The superimposition of the two layers, international hierarchy and capitalist economy, are at the heart of the method of both these writers. The first half of Wood’s book is about precapitalist imperialism in which dominant nations and groups employed extra-economic power to obtain booty or benefits in exchange, aided by force, often of the state. Even during the phase in which Holland was the leading power, imperialism was in this sense basically non-capitalist. Then, from the seventeenth century onwards, imperialism became increasingly associated with capitalist production. Profit could now be obtained through the circuit of capitalism operating in competitive conditions (in other words, the market). And, yet, the establishment of those conditions, the creation of capitalist markets, especially the labour market, under conditions favourable to the increasingly dominant capitalist class, still required extra-economic means including state military power. Thus, even though more and more of the surplus comes from capitalist exploitation, there is no diminution in the state power required to support it. So it was at first in settler colonies in Ireland, then in North America, until the main colonies there matured enough economically to become their own capitalist imperialist state. Meanwhile, in India and other parts of the British Empire, the precapitalist aspects continued to dominate. As the world has become more capitalist, the HIMA 14,4_f5_58-78II 11/9/06 3:39 PM Page 63 64 • Bob Sutcliffe 8 Wood 2003, p. 154. economic aspects of exploitation have continued to increase but the role of the state has never diminished. If anything, it has increased though its functions have changed and the interrelationship of states required to maintain capitalism and US domination within it has become more complex: ‘the more purely economic empire has become the more the nation state has proliferated’.8 The dominance of the USA is central to her argument. Capital’s empire depends both on the complex system of states and on their general subservience to one, which maintains its position due to overwhelming military force. By possessing an amount of force which it is unimaginable that it will ever use, the USA dissuades any other nation from challenging its dominance. But the cost of such dissuasion is also increasingly high, economically and politically, for the USA. Hence the system has become self-contradictory, even self-defeating. Harvey’s The New Imperialism also approaches the question historically. He does not go as far back as Wood, since he does not attach the same importance as she does to the distinction between precapitalist and capitalist imperialism. He dates the beginning of capitalist imperialism, not like Wood from the expansion of British settler capitalism in Ireland and then North America, but, following Hannah Arendt, from the time when the bourgeoisie internationally began to take political power, and that he dates from the revolutions of 1848. Both authors trace the sequence of national hegemonies which have characterised the history of imperialism. From Wood’s perspective, only British and US hegemony have been instances of capitalist imperialism; Spanish, Venetian and Dutch hegemonies were essentially precapitalist. Harvey is more inclined to follow the work of Arrighi and others who have traced patterns common to all these hegemonies, even though they appeared at different stages of maturity and extension of capitalism. There are the germs of an interesting historical debate here, but it hardly leads to a major difference between the main messages of these authors. Wood is more concerned about where the bourgeoisie ruled (especially in Britain and the USA, which therefore spawned the purest capitalist imperialism) while Harvey is more concerned with when the bourgeoisie ruled. But both of them are in no doubt that capitalist imperialism is a real and special phenomenon. And both of them are, perhaps above all, interested in the rise of US hegemony, its causes and consequences. HIMA 14,4_f5_58-78II 11/9/06 3:39 PM Page 64 Imperialism Old and New • 65 9 Wood 2003, p. 167. The policies of major capitalist powers are partly dominated by the attempt to expand the productive régime of capital as much as possible. But imperialist actions are not all designed to do this; often, they will have precisely the opposite effect at least in the short term and in particular places. This is because a worldwide system, Harvey argues (taking the terms from Giovanni Arrighi), has two logics: the capitalist logic (the actions necessary to support capitalist exploitation and the market) and the territorial logic (those actions necessary to support the hierarchy of nation-states). These are relatively new terms, but the ideas are quite old. They have been proposed by a number of historians of imperialism to explain why the actions of imperialist powers in the nineteenth century, for example, were apparently so perverse in relation to any possible economic gain. Harvey’s distinction between the capitalist logic and the territorial logic parallels Wood’s distinction between the increasing role of capitalist imperatives throughout the world and the maintenance in the importance of the state as a coercive institution. She, too, argues that the USA, like the British when they conquered India, ‘may be finding that empire creates its own territorial imperative’.9 In both cases, these are ways of describing the combined picture produced by superimposing the international and economic systems which, I argued above, is the essence of Marxist theories of imperialism. Wood vs. Harvey Both writers agree (who doesn’t?) that the end of World War II was a decisive point of inflection in the history of imperialism. The USA emerged as the great superpower, the germs of the Cold War existed and decolonisation of Africa and Asia was about to begin. While both writers use the phrase ‘new imperialism’ hesitantly, since they both see many elements of continuity with old imperialism, nonetheless, insofar as they dare to use the term, this postwar period is for Wood, though not for Harvey, the beginning of the new imperialism. The salient aspects of it are that it represents the beginning of a period of fifty years of the continuous extension of capitalist social relations around the globe. She is quite rightly dismissive of exaggerated claims that globalisation is the building of a complete, integrated, competitive, world- capitalist market. Nonetheless, a process has taken place over these fifty years which has resulted in capitalism now having the greatest global reach of its HIMA 14,4_f5_58-78II 11/9/06 3:39 PM Page 65 66 • Bob Sutcliffe 10 Wood 2003, p. 117. history. For the first time, there are ‘economic imperatives comprehensive and powerful enough to be reliable instruments of imperial domination’.10 But the globalisation of the capitalist economy requires a parallel globalisation of state and military power to protect it and, in particular, a greater amount of US hegemonic military force. Hence the continuous growth of US military power and imperialist activities over this period, culminating in the Bush administration, the power of the neoconservatives and the prospect of endless war. She tends to accept too much, however, the idea that what is actually happening is exactly what leading neoconservatives (especially Richard Perle) have argued should happen; it is surely more haphazard and pragmatic than that. For Harvey, the post-World-War-II moment is also an inflection point in the history of imperialism. He calls it the beginning of the second phase of bourgeois rule. The US is dominant and confident. It spreads both economic growth and its own version of freedom (particularly anticolonialism) on a world scale. Its imperial nature is hidden behind a democratic façade. But, for a time, it creates real consent and a growing capitalist economy on an international scale. It is only around 1970 that the new imperialism begins. This is associated with the outbreak of a major world crisis of overaccumulation around that time, something to which Wood attaches no special importance. This crisis has become chronic and continues to this day. It is associated with greater economic competition between the main capitalist powers, neoliberal economic policies, a decline in the welfare activities of states and a decisive shift in the nature of capital accumulation from accumulation out of produced and realised surplus-value to ‘accumulation by dispossession’, the original and useful name he gives to the series of processes which Marx called primitive or primary accumulation, and Rosa Luxemburg called the absorption of non- capitalist activities and regions into capitalism. Accumulation by dispossession includes the forcible opening up of markets, the forced sale of publicly owned capital (privatisation), the separation of workers from non-market rights – for instance, from the land which they own or control or from their welfare rights (the right to work, pensions, health care, education and so on). I would add the commodification of numerous activities and exchanges which people participate in outside of capitalist relations, a recent example being swapping music files and many other activities on the internet. HIMA 14,4_f5_58-78II 11/9/06 3:39 PM Page 66 Imperialism Old and New • 67 11 Armstrong, Glyn and Harrison 1991. The double dialectic of the capitalist and territorial logics and the inside and outside forms of capitalist accumulation (accumulation of surplus-value and accumulation by dispossession) become a centrepiece of Harvey’s analysis. ‘Accumulation by dispossession’, he argues has been the major form through which capitalism in a chronic crisis of overaccumulation has sought to ‘fix’ its plight. And a big part of this fix has involved the geographical spread of capitalism. In other words the ne