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The New Imperialism, or the Economic Logic of Late Postmodernism
*Allan G. Borst *
/ University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign/
borst@uiuc.edu
(c) Allan G. Borst.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
David Harvey, The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.
1. In The New Imperialism, David Harvey demonstrates once again the
adaptability and durability of a critical theory that grafts
geography onto cultural studies and historical materialism. In
publishing his Clarendon Lectures delivered in February 2003 at
Oxford University, Harvey sets out to rethink the "-ism" /par
excellence/, capitalism, in the context of the complex series of
cultural, military, political, and economic enterprises currently
warming the globe. Harvey's project, prompted by the current
amplification of U.S. imperialist initiatives, convincingly
targets "the deeper transformations occurring beneath all the
surface turbulence and volatility" in order to understand and
respond to contemporary global conditions (1).
2. Given the avalanche of books like Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri's Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004), Thomas Friedman's The
Lexus and the Olive Tree (2000), David Korton's When Corporations
Rule the World (2001), George Soros's George Soros on
Globalization (2002), Joseph Stiglitz's Globalization and Its
Discontents (2002), Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival (2003),
Ellen Meiskins Wood's Empire of Capital (2003), and Amy Chua's
World on Fire (2003), globalization, empire, and imperialism now
serve as the buzzwords of a vocabulary common to academics and
public intellectuals. While Harvey's book does deploy these
cultural keywords, part of the distinction of The New Imperialism
comes from its difference from the now-generic trends of the
globalization studies canon. Unlike Stiglitz and Chua, Harvey
appears less interested in engaging or reproducing discussions of
World Bank and IMF politics and avoids lengthy case studies of the
residuum and fallout from Cold War economic and military policies.
Harvey also resists the broad historical narratives and
genealogies of empire already detailed in books by Meiskins Wood
and others. Even though Harvey acknowledges the need for a
different global strategy, the theoretical panache of The New
Imperialism generates power by prizing a more rigorous Marxist
economic and geographical critique over the somewhat fast and
loose energy found in Hardt and Negri's Empire.
3. Nonetheless, before Harvey can focus on the "deeper
transformations" churning beneath the surface of globalization, he
frames his work within popular globalization debates in both the
first and the final (fifth) chapter. The first chapter's survey of
the conundrums of Middle East oil politics produces surprising
arguments that anticipate Harvey's interest in deeper
transformations by considering the immediacy of George W. Bush's
global policies through a nuanced Bush-post-Clinton understanding
of American empire. In a claim indebted to the cultural work he
performs in The Condition of Postmodernity (1990), Harvey
explains, "different and sometimes rival conceptions of empire can
even become internalized in the same space" (5). In the space of
American politics, a Clinton-based neo-liberalism seemingly rivals
the more recent Bush-led neo-conservativism. But Harvey deflates
much of the Democratic and political left nostalgia for
Clinton-era global policy by arguing that "the only difference
between the Clinton years and now is that the mask has come off
and bellicosity has displaced a certain reticence, in part because
of the post-9/11 atmosphere within the United States that makes
overt and unilateral military action more politically acceptable"
(22). While Harvey's brief introductory engagement with mainstream
American intellectuals' version of globalization fails to
demonstrate his true grit, it underlines the book's overall
emphasis on the United States as the primary determining force in
global politics. Indeed, although Harvey often tries to situate
his book within the broad terms of globalization studies, his
talent is not, in style, tone, or argument, that of the public
intellectual. Those readers already familiar with Harvey's oeuvre
and its notable blend of structural Marxism, historical
materialism, and geography may want to skip right to the middle
three chapters where the heart of his argument flourishes.
Afterward, consult the robust bibliography and the helpful list,
"Further Reading," in order to fill in the gaps between Harvey and
the broader globalization field.
4. The book's identity takes its shape and its major contributions
are made once Harvey establishes his concept of "capitalist
imperialism." The basic assertion is that if the United States
/is/ the new imperialism, then this imperialism is in turn a
specifically capitalist one. According to Harvey's diagnosis of
current global trends, this new imperialism marks
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). (26)
This complex definition clearly echoes the claims of Harvey's
earlier books, especially The Limits to Capital (1982), The
Condition of Postmodernity, and Spaces of Capital (2001).
Consequently, the new imperialism epitomizes Harvey's
long-developing thesis that adjoins a capitalist state apparatus
with the ideological and geographical construction of space and
time. These often contradictory, always dialectical impulses and
motivations that push the state or the capitalist market toward
one agenda or another are as crucial to Harvey's argument as they
are problematic for global stability.
5. That Harvey identifies the United States as the centrifuge of
globalization is not surprising, nor is the association of the
United States with an empire or imperial power. But Harvey overtly
rejects claims found in other globalization scholarship that
suggest that capitalism is the mere handmaiden of U.S. state power
or vice versa. Initially, these rejections appear to achieve a
clever sleight-of-hand and reveal Harvey's wariness of an
either/or logic. "Capitalist imperialism" is not about capitalism
/or/ the state setting the imperial agenda. Instead, Harvey
considers the neo-liberal U.S. empire to be a product of
capitalism /and/ the state simultaneously vying for control.
Employing the mix of geography and Marxist criticism that he calls
"historical-geographical materialism" (1), Harvey claims that most
discussions of capitalism and state hegemony perform
oversimplified misreadings of the global order. Harvey's book
suggests that /what/ the United States has been doing around the
globe should be subordinated to /how/ these military, political,
and economic maneuvers have been and continue to be made if we are
to understand the "new imperialism." While Harvey acknowledges the
widely reported examples of Halliburton and other corporations
directly interacting with and profiting from U.S. global affairs,
he asserts that a happy and cooperative alliance between
power-hungry politicians and profiteering capitalists does not
exist as it appears. Some popular versions of the happy alliance
claim argue that the state makes an initial foray into a new
region, usually through military intervention and then capitalism
follows with a stabilizing marketplace as the supposed seed of a
nascent democracy. A widely accepted alternative happy alliance
theory contends that capitalism opens new markets first and then
opens a door for the state through trade agreements, treaties, and
other mechanisms such as the World Bank or WTO, thus preserving
the profitable new market. While these scenarios dominate much of
the thinking about globalization and empire, Harvey argues that
they also overlook the "outright antagonism" (29) between the
state and capitalism:
The fundamental point is to see the territorial and the
capitalist logics of power as distinct from each other. Yet it
is also undeniable that the two logics intertwine in complex
and sometimes contradictory ways. The literature on
imperialism and empire too often assumes an easy accord
between them: that the political-economic processes are guided
by the strategies of state and empire and that states and
empires always operate out of capitalistic motivations. (29)
In short, Harvey highlights the overlooked fact that the alliance
between politicians and capitalists manages a balance of state
power and capitalism that is always already unstable. This
inherent instability always threatens to transform the state and
capitalism into their own gravediggers.
6. In an era of globalization and new imperialism, the postmodern
transition from Fordism to flexible accumulation that Harvey
discusses in The Condition of Postmodernity and elsewhere has
become exaggerated to extreme levels. By understanding
accumulation as a manipulation of space and time, Harvey explains
the workings of a state that must sustain capitalist disparities
over space in order to increase both profit and power. The United
States as new imperialism has seemingly mastered the techniques of
flexible accumulation by undermining the stable experience of time
and space, replacing such political and economic experience with
the ephemeral, the disjointed, the contingent. As flexible
accumulation applies to globalization, both capitalism and the
state generate geographical sites of ostensibly uneven development
in order to juggle the forces of competition and monopoly. As
Harvey claims, "the aggregate effect is . . . that capitalism
perpetually seeks to create a geographical landscape to facilitate
its activities at one point in time only to have to destroy it and
build a wholly different landscape at a later point in time to
accommodate its perpetual thirst for endless capital accumulation"
(101). For Harvey, capitalist imperialism survives through this
mutual maintenance of geographical "asymmetries" (97) in political
strength and capitalist accumulation.
7. The intrinsic imbalance of capitalist imperialism's exploitation
of asymmetries is the underlying "logic of power" responsible for
the readily visible problems of globalization and empire (104). At
any time one of two classical Marxist crises hovers over this
vulnerable condition of capitalist imperialism. Either the markets
overreach their limits through overaccumulation and thereby damage
the economic integrity of the state, or the state's
empire-building initiatives overreach levels of sustainable
control and render the supposed free markets defunct. As Harvey
sees it, "if capital does not or cannot move, . . . then
overaccumulated capital stands to be devalued directly through the
onset of a deflationary recession or depression" (116). The
success of capitalist imperialism relies on the joint efforts of
capitalism and the state constantly to manage these potential
crises and debacles.
8. Harvey claims that the solution and, in fact, the /modus operandi/
of capitalist imperialism exists in the "spatio-temporal fix"
(115). Because of the flexible accumulation in capitalist markets
and flexible state and military-run occupations, the
spatio-temporal fix solves the crisis of asymmetries by deferment
vis-`-vis geographical expansion. Markets and monies are literally
moved into new regions where capital can be easily absorbed and
labor surpluses quickly and cheaply accommodated. Instead of
dealing with the overaccumulation tied to a particular
geographical space, capitalist imperialism diverts this excess as
best it can into new geographies of trade, by closing markets,
sites of production and consumption, and then forcing open these
same markets and monopolies in new territories. Harvey argues that
"if the surpluses of capital and of labour power exist within a
given territory (such as a nation-state or a region) and cannot be
absorbed internally (either by geographical adjustments or social
expenditures) then they must be sent elsewhere to find a fresh
terrain for their profitable realization if they are not to be
devalued" (117). If Harvey is correct, the geographical expansion
of U.S. power and capital is not ordered or organized by
traditionally spatial empire building, but instead attempts to
manage the counterpuntal and dialectical logic of the marketplace.
In other words, the new imperialism avoids collapse by expanding
according to the viability of markets in different areas of the
globe, rather than simply becoming affixed to the commodity
values, labor power, and resources of a particular geography.
9. The resonance between his description of the strategies of U.S.
capitalist imperialism and Harvey's earlier writings on flexible
accumulation's tendencies toward contingency and the ephemeral is
further amplified when The New Imperialism factors finance
capitalism into the spatio-temporal fix. The sinister twist of
finance capitalism emerges out of what Harvey calls "accumulation
by dispossession" (145). Finance capitalism, because of its
liminal, almost anti-geographical properties, manipulates market
values, interest rates, exchange rates and so forth, essentially
generating money with money instead of through production. All the
while, this process deals in hot money and vulture capitalism to
exploit and destroy the local and regional markets it infects, as
was evident in the East Asian financial markets of the late 1990s.
Harvey explains: "An unholy alliance between state powers and the
predatory aspects of finance capitalism forms the cutting edge of
'vulture capitalism' that is as much about cannibalistic practices
and forced devaluations as it is about achieving harmonious global
development" (136). Not only does finance capitalism "dispossess"
the markets it infiltrates, but it also potentially dispossesses
its own proponents. Finance capitalism's cannibalism resides in
the quick-fix mentality that ultimately profits only investing
elites and yet constantly threatens to implode. At the same time,
finance capitalism undercuts the stability of the state and
production-oriented capitalism. Hence, Harvey's theories offer
explanations not only of foreign resistance to U.S. global policy
in the form of terrorism and other means, but also of the growing
disenfranchisement of American middle- and lower-class citizens.
10. Considering the disagreeable nature of finance capitalism for
those outside of the profiteering elite, Harvey suggests that U.S.
capitalist imperialism has shifted its hegemonic global influence
away from consent and directly toward coercion. By evaluating the
last thirty years of U.S. foreign policy in terms of a Gramscian
understanding of hegemony that moves dialectically between consent
and coercion, Harvey contends that the growing world distrust of
and resentment toward U.S. spatio-temporal fixes now renders
consent impossible for U.S. imperial strategy. Harvey asserts: "It
is in this context that we see the Bush administration looking to
flex military muscle as the only clear absolute power it has left
. . . . Control over oil supplies provides a convenient means to
counter any power shift--both economic and military--threatened
within the global economy" (77). As with the war in Iraq, the Bush
administration's claims of support and consent on behalf of the
Iraqi people are increasingly questionable. Harvey argues that
until the U.S. willingly scales back its search for external
spatio-temporal fixes and commits to solving internally its own
economic and political conundrums, U.S. global hegemony will take
the form of coercion.
11. At the end of The New Imperialism, Harvey offers the possibility
of a U.S. and European Union directed "New Deal" program that
extends it reach globally. "This means liberating the logic of
capital circulation and accumulation from its neo-liberal chains,
reformulating state power along much more interventionist and
redistributive lines, curbing the speculative powers of finance
capital, and decentralizing or democratically controlling the
overwhelming power of oligopolies and monopolies" (209). While
this admittedly hypothetical project sounds logical, Harvey's
proposal shifts tremendous power to the state--a very optimistic
enterprise considering the well-established and continuing
tradition of neo-liberal privatization and deregulation. Given the
strength of transnational corporations and the military-industrial
complex, this power shift constitutes an unlikely reconfiguration
of the current global order that would rely on a suddenly
benevolent state and surprisingly acquiescent capitalists.
Furthermore, Harvey's plan suggests a new system of global
governance that would likely produce new geographical and economic
asymmetries or exacerbate existing ones. Throughout The New
Imperialism, Harvey provides a salient account of pressing
questions about globalization and empire, while offering
convincing answers through the concept of capitalist imperialism.
Moreover, this book operates like an epilogue to Harvey's earlier
texts, particularly The Condition of Postmodernity and Spaces of
Capital. The updated discussions of spatial fixes and capitalist
accumulation across space reflect the anticipatory nature of
Harvey's earlier efforts. When read as a companion to these
earlier texts, The New Imperialism testifies to the endurance of
Harvey's theoretical methodology and its conclusions, while
opening up the possibility of extending these earlier arguments,
particularly those about the political-economic structures of
postmodernism. While postmodern theories of cultural play,
self-reflexivity, and performativity have largely been put aside
by globalization studies, Harvey's historical-geographical
materialist account of postmodernity still holds considerable
currency in the evaluation of capitalist imperialism. Harvey wrote
in The Condition of Postmodernity of the "sea-change" in cultural
and political forms that signals the budding of postmodernity:
"But these changes, when set against the basic rules of
capitalistic accumulation, appear more as shifts in surface
appearance rather than as signs of the emergence of some entirely
new postcapitalist or even postindustrial society" (vii). Perhaps,
then, it is enough to say the new imperialism is the economic
logic of late postmodernism.
/ Department of English
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
borst@uiuc.edu /
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