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Historical Materialism, volume 14:4 (37)

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2006

Also available online www.brill.nl

1 Bacevich 2002; Ferguson 2002 and 2004. For a direct critique of the latter seeChibber 2005 and, for a proleptic one, see Davis 2001.

Sam Ashman

Symposium on David Harveys The NewImperialism: Editorial Introduction

The renewal of serious theoretical debate about

imperialism is now much remarked upon. It has been

produced by real-world events since the end of

the Cold War, above all by the Bush administrations

wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in response to 9/11

and, more recently, its support for Israels war in

Lebanon and sabre rattling against Syria and Iran.

And, if the Left has discovered new saliency in the

term, so too has the Right, from Niall Fergusons

populist defence of empire to Andrew Bacevichs

dissection of the USs war for the imperium.1

Many questions are raised by this new discussion.

How do we situate immediate events in relation todeeper theoretical understandings? How does the

present relate to the past? What is the role played

by oil in current events? There is general agreement

that the classical theorists of imperialism, whose

accounts are now nearly a hundred years old, may

be important reference points but they are not anadequate guide to the contemporary world and, for

some, they were not an adequate guide to the world

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2 For a clear statement in defence of the world-state thesis, see Robinson 2004.3 Harvey 2003, p. 183.

of their time. There is far less agreement on how developments in capitalism

impact upon understandings of imperialism, particularly the uneven and

unequal global geographic spread of capitalism and the system of nation-

states in the period since 1945. How precisely has the world moved on?Two short responses to these questions were published in 2003: David

Harveys The New Imperialism and Ellen Woods Empire of Capital. The editors

of Historical Materialism began with the idea that Harvey and Wood might

each agree to review the others book. The range and importance of the issues

raised led us subsequently to widen that discussion and in this issue we print

a number of responses to Harveys analysis, including that from Ellen Wood,whilst, in a future issue, we will print a number of responses specifically to

Woods account of what she calls imperial capital.

Harveys account deals with nothing less than the nature of global political

economy in the twenty-first century. As such, many issues are raised. Perhaps

three stand out. First, there is the thorny question of the state and of the

relationship between the state and capital. Interest in Marxist state theory has

revived, initially in the context of debates about globalisation and the alleged

demise of the nation-state, but now the discussion of imperialism has taken

this further. The contributions below point to different ways of approaching

the relationship between the state and capital and the possibilities for the

emergence of a world state.2 Harvey borrows from Arrighi and conceptualises

capitalist imperialism as arising from a dialectical relation between territorial

and capitalistic logics of power. The two logics are distinctive and in no wayreducible to each other, but they are tightly interwoven.3 What are the strengths

and weaknesses of such an approach? Is the former not really subordinated

to the latter?

Second there is the issue of oil, its role in the Iraq War, and the nature and

status of global geopolitics. Harvey suggests that the occupation of Iraq, and

the control of large reserves of this strategic commodity is one way the UScan compensate for its declining economic power and so hold off its rivals.

The Bush administrations actions in Iraq are thus designed to send a message

to its geopolitical rivals, particularly China. Yet how robust is Harveys claim

that whoever controls the Middle East controls the global oil spigot and

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Editorial Introduction 5

4 Harvey 2003, p. 19.5 For a general treatment of Harveys work see Castree and Gregory (eds.) 2006.

For a succinct account of his trajectory and influence see Merrifield 2002, Chapter 7.

whoever controls the global oil spigot can control the global economy, at least

for the near future?4 How sufficient is this as explanation?

Third is the role of what Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession in

the current phase of capitalist development. For Harvey, imperialism overthe last thirty years reflects a desperate search for surplus-value in the context

of a prolonged crisis of overaccumulation. Accumulation by dispossession

the predatory opening up new arenas for accumulation either through selling

off state assets in the developed world or forcing developing countries to

privatise, commodify and marketise areas of social life that previously resisted

the logic of capital is a major form through which capitalism has sought aspatial fix to its crisis tendencies. This has both created vast areas for the

absorption of surplus capital and allowed for costs of devaluation to be visited

upon the weakest and most vulnerable. But is Harveys understanding of

these processes adequate? Might it not be too general and all encompassing?

The symposium

Not all the contributions which follow chose to focus solely on the issues

raised in The New Imperialism. Some use the opportunity to discuss more

broadly David Harveys contribution to Marxist scholarship over a period of

more than three decades.5 Noel Castree after providing a clear summary of

the books contents which there is no need to repeat here opts to assess

Harveys intellectual trajectory more broadly, situating it within the fate of ageneration of postwar academic Marxists and the difficulties of being a Marxist

public intellectual. His prognosis about the future reproduction of Marxism

as a radical current is both thought provoking and pessimistic. He suggests

that the legacy of leading figures, many of whom are represented in this

symposium (Harvey, Brenner, Fine and Callinicos), may last only a further

generation at best in the Anglophone world.

Bob Sutcliffe combines a discussion of both Harvey and Wood, contrasting

their accounts to each other and to Hardt and Negris notion of Empire. He

argues that Harveys emphasis on capitalisms crises of overaccumulation

understates the extent of recovery in recent years, in particular Chinas

extraordinary economic growth in the last quarter century. China is not simply

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a site where surplus capital is absorbed and so crisis is held at bay. It is a

dynamic pole of accumulation and economic development in its own right.

A new period of capitalist expansion may well be underway, centred in Asia,

one which will only intensify the difficulties of sustaining US hegemony.Ellen Wood offers an alternative account from Harveys two logics of

power, based on the centrality of the separation of the economic and political,

which she sees as constitutive of capitalist social-property relations. The state

is critical to the extra-economic reproduction of capitalism and, as capitalism

has become more global than ever before, the state has become more rather

than less important. The fragmentation of political space persists, a globalstate is all but inconceivable and the organisation of capitalism through

multiple states entails military projects to ensure an international order suited

to capital. Military force is thus an ongoing necessity for imperial capital as

are oppositional struggles at the level of the national. For Harvey, in his

response specifically to Wood, this suggests too much detachment of capital

from the state: it suggests placeless capital now roams across the mosaic of

differentiated and unevenly developed nation-states using them at will for

its own nefarious purposes.

Robert Brenner also takes issue with the distinction between a territorial

and a capitalist logic of power, arguing that Harveys own account actually

demonstrates the subordination of the territorial logics to the capitalist logic

of power. For him, the issue of whether or not there is a conflict between the

interests of capital and the interests of states is better addressed throughunderstanding how the state undertakes the political functions necessary for

the reproduction of capital but that the form the state takes (a system of

multiple national states) is not accounted for by the capital relation itself but

by the historical process through which capitalism emerged from a system

of multiple feudal states, transforming them in the process but not the

multi-state character of the system. A world state would better suit globalcapital, however unlikely such an emergence may be.

Sam Ashman and Alex Callinicos are more sympathetic to Harveys

distinction between territorial and capitalist logics of power, suggesting that

imperialism be understood as the forms in which geopolitical and economic

competition have become interwoven in modern capitalism. They argue that

this conception of imperialism needs to be supported by a theory of the state

and capital that treats them as interdependent. They too question the catch-

all nature of accumulation by dispossession, suggesting instead that it be

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Editorial Introduction 7

broken down into distinct processes of commodification, recommodification

and restructuring.

For Ben Fine, it is not simply that Harvey gives undue empirical weight

to accumulation by dispossession but that he gets the dynamic upside down.Fine sees these varied phenomena as a response to the slowing of accumulation

and the deadening effect of the predominance of finance, not as the basis

of sustaining accumulation. Fines tour de force assesses the role of value

theory and its current prospects by setting Harveys work in the context of

understanding method, methodology and value theory and, secondly, in

relation to broader developments across the social sciences. Finally, Harveyprovides a brief rejoinder to the commentaries.

As all the contributors agree, there is much room for further theoretical

development and debate about all of the themes signposted above. We hope

that discussion will continue in the pages ofHistorical Materialism, as well as

beyond, as the Left globally strives both to understand and to resist an era

marked by neoliberalism and war.

References

Bacevich, Andrew 2002, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of AmericanDiplomacy, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.

Castree, Noel and Derek Gregory (eds.) 2006, David Harvey: A Critical Reader, Oxford:Blackwell.

Chibber, Vivek 2005, The Good Empire, Boston Review, February/March: 304.

Davis, Mike 2001, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the ThirdWorld, London: Verso.

Ferguson, Niall 2002, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and theLessons for Global Power, London: Allen Lane.

Ferguson, Niall 2004, Colossus: The Price of Americas Empire, London: Penguin.

Harvey, David 2003, The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Merrifield, Andy 2002, Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City, London: Routledge.

Robinson, William 2004, A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class and State in aTransnational World, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.