1 The unique American empire1
Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin
The use of the term âempireâ or even âimperialismâ to characterise the current American role in the world has suddenly become almost commonplace. Yet most of this usage is bereft of any serious political economy or pattern of historical determination that would explain the emergence and reproduction of todayâs American empire, and the dimensions of structural oppression and exploitation pertaining to it. This serves as a poignant reminder of why it was Marxism that made the running in theorising imperialism for most of the twentieth century. But the Marxist theory of imperialismâs roots in the interimperial rivalries before World War I increasingly lent it an anachronistic cast that diminished its utility as well as usage.2 The costs of this for the left were severe. The concept of imperialism has always been especially important as much for its emotive and mobilising qualities as for its analytic ones. This partly explains the popularity of Hardt and Negriâs Empire, which made the case that historical materialism needed to be revived on the basis of an entirely different theory of imperialism than the old one. Coming as it did even before the second American war on Iraq, their tome was of course extremely timely, but the notion at the core of their own theorisation (reflecting the widespread notion that the power of all nation-states had withered in the era of globalisation) that â the United States does not, and indeed no nation state can today, form the center of an imperialist projectâ was itself bizarrely out of sync with the times.3 For what is above all needed now is a new historical materialist theorisation of imperialism that precisely allows us to transcend the old theory of inter-imperial rivalry by understanding how it came to pass that the American empire incorporated its capitalist rivals, and how this was related to the establishment of a truly global capitalism.
Central to this project must be overcoming the reductionist and instrumental treatment of the state that tended to characterise the classical theories of imperialism at the beginning of the twentieth century. Capitalist imperialism needs to be theorised as an extension of the theory of the capitalist state, not of theories of economic stages and crises. Moreover, while the imperial activities of capitalist states develop historically in relation to the structural logic that tends to the globalisation of capitalist social relations, we must not theorise history in such a way that the trajectories of globalisation and imperialism are merely read off from abstract economic laws. Rather, as Philip McMichael has put it so well, we need to
historicize theory and problematize globalization as a relation immanent in capitalism, but with quite distinct material (social, political and environmental) relations across time and time-space. In this formulation globalization assumes specific historical formsâŚGlobalization is not simply the unfolding of capitalist tendencies but a historically distinct project shaped, or complicated, by the contradictory relations of previous episodes of globalization.4
After capitalismâs global march was interrupted by World War I and the Great Depression, the crucial phase in the reconstruction of global capitalism came during and after World War II, when the conditions came to exist that allowed for the emergence and realisation of an American imperial project (explicitly conceived as a state-learned response to the earlier breakdowns) of putting capitalist globalisation back on track. And the neoliberal reconstitution and extension of capitalist globalisation after the crisis of the 1970s also reflected the intervention of a unique institution acting as agency: the American imperial state. The role the US state has come to play in the making of global capitalism, as we shall see, was not inevitable but nor was it merely accidental; it was not a matter of teleology but of capitalist history.
The US imperial state in historical perspective
Perry Anderson has argued recently that the capacity of the US to âconjugateâ its âparticular power with the general task of coordinationâ in global capitalism reflected âthe particular matrix of its own social historyâ, and in particular, âthe attractive power of US models of production and cultureâ. Coming together here were not only the invention in America of the modern corporate form, scientific management of the labour process, and assembly-line mass production, but also Hollywood-style media forms of ânarrative and visual schemas stripped to their most abstractâ appropriate to appealing to and aggregating waves of immigrants through the ârecursive common denominators ⌠of dramatic simplification and repetitionâ.5 It was the economic and cultural infrastructure of American capitalism and its world-wide appeal combined with the universalistic language of American liberal democratic ideology that gave it a capacity for informal empire far beyond that of nineteenth-century Britain.
Andersonâs impression is that the American stateâs constitutional structures (by virtue of being âmoored to eighteenth century arrangementsâ) lacked the âcarrying powerâ of its economic and cultural ones. Against this stands Thomas Jeffersonâs observation in 1809 that âno constitution was ever before as wellcalculated for extensive empire and self-governmentâ.6 In fact, Hardt and Negri were right to trace the pre-figuration of what they call âempireâ today back to the Americanâs constitutionâs incorporation of Madisonian ânetwork powerâ. This entailed not only checks and balances within the state apparatus but the notion that the greater plurality of interests incorporated within an extensive and expansive state would guarantee that the masses would have no common motive or capacity to come together to check the ruling class. Yet far from serving as the basis for the sort of decentred and amorphous power that Hardt and Negri imagine characterises the US historically (and âempireâ today), the constitutional framework of the new American state gave great powers to the central government to expand trade and make war.
The state which emerged out of the alliance between Northern merchants and commercial farmers and Southern plantation-owners against Britainâs formal empire evinced from its beginnings a trajectory to informal empire. Despite the initial form this took through territorial expansion westward, largely through extermination of the native population, and despite blatant exploitation of not only the black slave population but also debt-ridden subsistence farmers, the fact that the new state could conceive itself as extending republican liberty, and be widely admired for it, was largely bound up with the link between âextended empire and self-governmentâ that Jefferson discerned as embedded in the federal constitution of the American state. State rights were no mirage: they reflected the two different types of social relations â slave and free â that composed each successive wave of new states. This mode of territorial expansion not only determined the shape of the conflict that finally led to civil war, the defeat of the plantocracy and the dissolution of slavery, but thereafter was the basis for the domination of an unfettered industrial capitalism with âthe crucial advantage of possessing the largest single domestic market in the worldâ, thereby obviating any temptation towards formal imperialism via territorial conquest abroad.7 The outcome of the Civil War allowed for a full reconstitution of the relationship between both financial and industrial capital and the state, so that its political function could be inclined away from mercantilism towards extended capitalist reproduction. Herein lies the significance that Anderson himself attaches to the evolving juridical form of the American state, whereby âunencumbered property rights, untrammelled litigation, the invention of the corporationâ led to
what Polanyi most feared, a juridical system disembedding the market as far as possible from ties of custom, tradition or solidarity, whose very abstraction from them later proved â American firms like American films â exportable and reproducible across the world, in a way that no other competitor could quite match. The steady transformation of international merchant law and arbitration in conformity with US standards is witness to the process.8
The expansionist tendencies of American capitalism in the latter half of the nineteenth century (reflecting pressures that emanated as much from domestic commercial farmers as from the industrialists and financiers of the post-Civil War era) were even more inclined to take informal imperial forms, even without a policy of free trade, than was British capitalism. It was through American foreign investment (epitomised by the Singer Company establishing itself as the first multinational corporation by jumping the Canadian tariff barrier to establish a subsidiary to produce and sell sewing machines to prosperous Ontario wheat farmers) that the American informal empire now increasingly took shape.9 As compared to the Canadian model of integration into the informal American imperium, the establishment of colonies in Puerto Rico and the Philippines and the annexation of Hawaii âwas a deviation ⌠from the typical economic, political and ideological forms of domination already characteristic of American imperialismâ.10
The broader ideological articulation of American military intervention, even as expressed by Teddy Roosevelt, already presented itself in terms of the exercise of âinternational police powerâ and âgeneral world dutyâ.11 But the American stateâs genius for presenting its informal empire in terms of the framework of universal rights reached its apogee under Woodrow Wilson. It also reached, with his presidency, the apogee of hypocrisy, especially at the Paris Peace Conference, where Keynes concluded Wilson was âthe greatest fraud on earthâ.12 Indeed, it was not only Congressâs isolationist tendencies, but the incapacity of the American presidential, treasury and military apparatus that explained the failure of the United States to take responsibility for leading European reconstruction after World War I. It was only during the course of the New Deal, amidst a collapse of global capitalism to which the American stateâs previous policies had no little contributed, that the administrative and ideological capacity was developed to transform and vastly extend Americaâs informal imperialism. But for the American state to assume explicit responsibility for the relaunching of capitalist globalisation, also crucially important was the pattern of wartime state-building, during the course of which âthe leverage of corporate executives from industry and financeâ inside the state operated to shift âU.S. state capacities towards realizing internationally-interventionist goals versus domestically-interventionist onesâ.13
The relationship between capitalism and imperialism took on new shape with World War II. In terms that were uncharacteristically direct, the editors of Time, Life and Fortune magazines jointly set out in 1942 a vision of the world that would emerge after the war, based on the premise that âAmerica will emerge as the strongest single power in the postwar world, and ⌠it is therefore up to it to decide what kind of postwar world it wants.â What was wanted, beginning with the integration of the American and British economic systems as the foundation for âa wider postwar integrationâ was a world âin which tariffs, subsidies, monopolies, restrictive labor rules, plantation feudalism, poll taxes, technological backwardness, obsolete tax laws, and all other barriers to further expansion can be removedâ. While recognising that âthe uprising of [the] international proletariat ⌠the most significant fact of the last twenty years ⌠means that complete international free trade, as Cobden used to preach it and Britain used to practice it, is no longer an immediate political possibilityâ, nevertheless âuniversal free trade, not bristling nationalism, is the ultimate goal of a rational worldâ. Yet,
a new American âimperialismâ, if it is to be called that, will â or rather can â be quite different from the British type. It can also be different from the premature American type that followed our expansion in the Spanish war. American imperialism can afford to complete the work the British started; instead of salesmen and planters, its representatives can be brains and bulldozers, technicians and machine tools. American imperialism does not need extra-territoriality; it can get along better in Asia if the tuans and sahibs stay home ⌠Nor is the U.S. afraid to help build up industrial rivals to its own power ⌠because we know industrialization stimulates rather than limits international trade ⌠This American imperialism sounds very abstemious and high-minded. It is nevertheless a feasible policy for America, because friendship, not food, is what we need most from the rest of the world.14
Among the various dimensions of the new relationship between capitalism and imperialism that emerged with World War II, the most striking and important was that the densest imperial networks and institutional linkages, which had earlier run northâsouth between imperial states and their formal or informal colonies, now came to run between the US and the other rich capitalist states. What Britain had been unable to do in the late nineteenth century now was accomplished by the US, integrating all the other capitalist powers into an effective system of coordination under its aegis. The devastation of the European and Japanese economies, the weak political legitimacy of their ruling classes at the warâs end, the US military occupation and subsequent subordination of its important rival capitalist centres â all this created a historically unprecedented opportunity which the American state was now ready and willing to exploit.
Most important here was the immense attention the Treasury and State Department paid during the war to planning for relaunching a coordinated liberal trading regime and a rule-based financial order via manipulating its main alliesâ debtor status, the complete domination of the dollar as world currency and the fact that 50 per cent of world production was now accounted for by the US economy. But it was by no means only the cache of dollars at its disposal that was operative here, nor was Britain the only object of Americaâs new informal empire. The American state had studied and learned well from the lesson of its post-World War I incapacity to combine liberal internationalist rhetoric with an actual institutional commitment to manage an international capitalist order outside its own hemisphere, and the Bretton Woods conference confirmed as nothing else had yet done the immense managerial capacity the American state had developed. And with the IMF and World Bank headquarters established at American insistence in Washington, DC, a pattern was set for international economic management among all the leading capitalist countries that also continues to this day, one in which even when it is European or Japanese finance ministries and central banks who propose, it is the US Treasury and Federal Reserve that dispose.
The dense institutional linkages that bound these states to the American empire were institutionalised, of course, not only through the institutions of Bretton Woods, but also through those of NATO, not to mention the hub-andspokes networks binding each of the other leading capitalist states to the intelligence and security apparatuses of the US as part of the strategy of containment of communism during the Cold War. However, most of those who stress the American stateâs linkages with the coercive apparatuses of Europe and Japan, as conceived for instance in terms of what Martin Shaw calls the âWestern Bloc Stateâ (tending to become a âGlobal Western Stateâ with the collapse of the USSR),15 fail to appreciate how far the American âProtectorate Systemâ, as Peter Gowan names it, actually âaltered the character of the capitalist coreâ. For it entailed, as he puts it, the
internal transformation of social relations within the protectorates in the direction of the American âfordistâ system of accumulation [that] opened up the possibility of a vast extension of their internal markets, with the working class not only as source of expanded surplus value but also an increasingly important consumption centre for realizing surplus value.16
But while permitting the other core states to act as âautonomous organizing centres of capital accumulationâ, the emulation of US technological and managerial âfordistâ forms (initially organised and channelled through the postwar joint âproductivity councilsâ) was massively reinforced by the penetration of these states by American foreign direct investment. Here, too, the core of the American imperial network shifted away from northâsouth linkages towards the advanced capitalist core, so much so that Latin Americaâs share of total American FDI fell from 40 to 20 per cent between 19...
