The State of Empire and Imperialism without States
By Simon J Black
Published: 04/25/2006
Incoherent Empire
By Michael Mann
Verso, 278 pp.
The New Imperialism
by David Harvey
Oxford University Press, 275 pp.
“…as for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged…all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated…I did not even know…that the Empire was dying…”[1]
The
scribblings of an American soldier gone AWOL in Iraq? Maybe a passage from the
future memoir of Lyndie England? Unlike England, George Orwell never set foot
in Abu-Graib prison, but for those ordered to carry out its deeds the
experience of empire seems to transcend time and place. The empire was British;
the colony was Burma; the rule was despotic. After serving with the colonial
police, Orwell committed his life to the causes of anti-imperialism and
democratic socialism. The author’s famed essay, “Shooting an Elephant,” was
penned in 1936; the British Empire was in decline. In a mere three years it
would be engaged in a war of savage brutality. By World War II, Pax Britannica had been eclipsed, but
the outcome of that war set the stage for the emergence of a new empire and a
new imperialism. With the reconstruction of Japan and Germany under the
Marshall Plan, the United States embarked on an imperial quest to spread the
‘free market’.
Yet
from 1945 to 1989, empire and imperialism were words relegated to the history
textbooks; thought to be outdated concepts that did not fit the global
political reality of two superpowers locked in Cold War conflict. When in
polite company, if one wanted to reveal oneself as a Marxist (without singing
the Internationale) one could utter the word ‘imperialism’. ‘Empire’ was the
less offensive term: it was a place not a process. For the British elite,
‘empire’ conjured up images of smartly dressed army officers sipping gin and
tonics under the hot Indian sun after a long day of doing benevolent things to
grateful people. But imperialism, now
that was the language of the Left.
‘Empire’
is once again on the lips of its supporters and remains a sour taste in the
mouth of its opponents. Vaulted from academic obscurity to the front page of London
and New York’s book reviews, historian Niall Ferguson has made an industry out
of empire, as the Empire makes industry out of the world. Afflicted with a
Churchillian fetish, Ferguson sees the glory and good of a strong power
spreading liberal democratic values across the globe. He likens America’s offerings
to the best of the British Empire. Other intellectuals who have been seized by
this imperial moment – Benjamin Barber and Michael Ignatieff among them – are more
cautious supporters of the American modus operandi.
Yet
empire’s apologists have been engaged on the literary terrain by a number of
critical accounts of US dominance. Among these are Michael Mann’s Incoherent Empire and David Harvey’s The New Imperialism. Both Harvey and
Mann provide trenchant critiques of the US Empire and are a welcome turn from
much of the Left’s preoccupation with either global cosmopolitanism or empires
of the ether, not based in any state formation. However, despite the
commonalities of their subject, the two authors are engaged in fundamentally
different projects.
Mann,
a professor at UCLA and disciple of sociologist Max Weber, has written on the
topic of power for much of his academic life. Neoclassical economists have never
developed a theory of imperialism and apparently neither have Weberians. What
Mann provides is an account of the Empire,
its architecture and adventures. He claims that the new imperialism is little
more than a new militarism. US Marines in Iraq are not merely foot soldiers of
the free market; for Mann, Washington’s neo-cons truly believe in their mission
to spread democracy and freedom in the Middle East and are determined to carry
it out whatever the disastrous consequences. In keeping with the theoretical
framework that has served his scholarship so well, Mann puts forward an investigation
of the Empire that analyzes its military, political, ideological and economic
strengths and weaknesses. But he does so without a theory of imperialism in
which to ground his analysis.
In
contrast, David Harvey develops a theory of the new imperialism rooted in the
work of Hannah Arendt, Marxist political economy, and his own contributions to
what he calls “geographical-historical materialism” with its emphasis on the
spatio-temporal aspect of capital’s logic. Harvey traces the dialectical
relationship between the capitalistic logic and territorial logic constitutive
of imperialism. In this respect, of the two authors Harvey takes up the more
arduous task. But what Harvey fails to do is put forward a comprehensive theory
of the capitalist/imperialist state to work alongside his rigorous account of
the new imperialism’s economic drive. In this sense, while Mann gives us the
state of Empire, Harvey provides an imperialism without a state. Thus, both
books are ambitious but flawed attempts to come to grips with American imperial
power.
Mann
claims that the United States is a “military giant, back-seat economic driver,
a political schizophrenic, and an ideological phantom.” Apart from this abuse
of metaphor, there are some serious flaws to Mann’s characterization of the Incoherent Empire. Only a fool would
contest Mann’s claim that the United States is a military giant. Mann notes
that by 2003 US military spending accounted for 40 percent of the entire
world’s budget. Yet the US as “back-seat economic driver” requires a stronger
argument than what Mann provides. Although he acknowledges the continuing
dominance of the Dollar and the role seignorage plays in the world economy,
Mann’s approach to the economic mechanisms of the Empire leaves much to be
desired. Mann ignores the role of American capital in shaping the rules
governing domestic economies around the world. Sometimes this activity is brash
as in the current attempts of major US temporary employment agencies to ‘assist’
European states in rewriting their regulations governing work standards. Other
times, the imperial workings of US capital can be more subtle. Although Mann
recognizes how the US has forced economic liberalization on countries, he takes
the failures of liberalization (such as the East Asian economic crisis) to be
by-products of a bad economic model, not part and parcel of American economic
hegemony. More nuanced approaches to US imperialism have shown how financial
crises often benefit American capital (witness the inflow of US foreign direct
investment into East Asian economies
post-catastrophe) and the US is a sly architect when it comes to crises
containment, a point Harvey takes up in The
New Imperialism.[2]
Such activity belies Mann’s claim that the US “cannot directly control either
foreign investors or foreign economies.”[3]
In
addition, Mann states that East Asian capital’s possible “loss of confidence in
the health and stability of a permanent US war economy” would be detrimental to
American interests and beneficial to the EU.[4]
This supposed US vulnerability to East Asian capital flight (an element of the
much repeated trade deficit argument) overlooks the growing interdependence of
the two markets. East Asian investors will not rush to cut off their nose to
spite their face. Furthermore, Mann rightfully draws attention to the role of
structural adjustment programs and trade agreements in advancing American
interests in the economies of the Global South. Yet Mann sees these as a form
of US “pressure”, as “they do not actually drive their economies.”[5]
I am sure the late Michael Manley of Jamaica among other leaders who’ve felt
the grip of structural adjustment would beg to differ with Mann’s assessment.
With
an eye for detail, Mann dissects policy documents, news reports, and historical
accounts to lay bare the inner workings of the Empire from the prisons of
Guantanamo Bay to the roll of Hollywood as an ideological force for American
values abroad. Yet he often stops short of analyzing how the Empire’s machinery
has deep linkages in the US political economy. For instance, Mann provides a
laundry list of American firepower from smart bombs to dumb ones, chemical
weapons to WMD. Yet the American arsenal’s origins in the labs of General
Electric or M.I.T. are left unexamined. This blind spot may be due to the
structure of Incoherent Empire. Mann
separates the early chapters of the book into the military, ideological,
political and economic; the result being the cross pollination of these spheres
is often left unaddressed or undertheorized.
Mann’s
argument that the new American imperialism “is actually little more than a new
militarism” reveals its ultimate weakness when the author tackles Lenin’s great
question of What Is To Be Done? Mann writes “Luckily, the United States is a
democracy, with the political solution close at hand in November 2004. Throw
the new militarists out of office.” But the course of US imperialism has
changed little when Democrat’s have occupied the White House. It is because he
identifies imperialism too strongly with military adventurism than Mann comes
to the conclusion he does.
Of
the two authors, David Harvey has the deeper understanding of the economic
roots of the Empire. For Harvey, capitalist imperialism arises out of the
dialectical relation between territorial and capitalistic logics of power: “This
dialectical relation,” he writes, “sets the stage for an analysis of capitalist
imperialism in terms of the intersection of these two distinctive but
intertwined logics of power.”[6]
Harvey explicates the capitalistic logic of power in detail but its partner in this dance of imperialism is given less attention: Who is leading and to what tune are they dancing? At the beginning of chapter five, Harvey writes, “imperialism cannot be understood without first grappling with the theory of the capitalist state in all its diversity.”[7] Harvey fails to grapple with any significant theory of the capitalist state and does not put forward his own theory of the imperialist state with any coherence. The result being that the relationships Harvey sketches between the overaccumulation of capital, its need to be put to use, and the policies of the US state are very general and better explain broad shifts in the global political economy (the move from expanded reproduction to accumulation by dispossession post-1973) than specific policy initiatives (i.e. the invasion of Iraq).
Articulating
a theory of the state would add coherence to Harvey’s argument. How much
influence does the capitalist class have on the US state? Which faction of capital,
if any, pushed for the invasion of Iraq? Which departments of the state
apparatus are under the sway of the dominant class? Harvey fails to address
these questions in any serious depth. His repeated returns to Arendt’s insight
on imperialist logic – while illuminating and prescient – are not built upon in
any substantial way.
Harvey
hints at peaceful resolutions to the problem of overaccumulation. Surplus
capital needs to find an internal home. Harvey believes a “new New Deal” would
be a socially constructive outlet for capital (as opposed to Iraqi oil fields
and privatized Bolivian water systems). Yet this requires state intervention of
a type that the neo-cons find disturbing. For a committed Marxist, Harvey’s
solution to the new imperialism is peculiarly social democratic. Why doesn’t
Harvey discuss attempts to escape the capitalist logic altogether? If overaccumulation is a crisis inherent to
capitalism, as Harvey believes it is, then his argument lends itself to a discussion
of anti-capitalist alternatives much more than does Michael Mann’s. Maybe
Harvey thought that the Oxford crowd to which his lecture/book was first
delivered would recoil in fright at the suggestion that we collectively transcend
capitalism. Despite these flaws, Harvey’s historical account of how American
power grew and his concept of accumulation by dispossession (which he says is
“at the heart of imperialist practice”), are all helpful contributions to the
debate on the new imperialism.
Conclusion
In 1898, Mark Twain, among other notable Americans, established the Anti-Imperialist League in response to the US invasion and occupation of the Philippines. Twain and his compatriots stood for the anti-imperialist cause in the heart of the emerging Empire. The fate of US imperialism will be greatly determined by ordinary Americans. Whether the current conjuncture will produce another anti-imperialist movement like the League remains to be seen. The US anti-war movement grows as the situation in Iraq deteriorates. But with competing accounts of the nature of the Empire and its new imperialism, the defensive character of the anti-war movement is not likely to morph into an offensive anti-imperialism. Many Americans may not like what the Empire is or does, but without a clear understanding and agreement over why it does what it does, the struggle against US imperialism will remain mired in simplistic calls to “Bring the Troops Home”; a necessary step, yes, but not enough to combat the imperial beast that Mann or Harvey describe.[1] George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant.” In George Orwell: Essays. Knopf, Toronto: 2002.
[2] See also Christopher Rude, “The Role of Financial Discipline in Imperial Strategy.” In Socialist Register 2005: The Empire Reloaded eds. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys. Merlin Press, London: 2004.
[3] Mann, 74.
[4] Mann, 264.
[5] Mann, 265.
[6] Harvey, 30.
[7] Harvey, 183.
Published in Relay: A Socialist Project Review, Issue 11, May/June 2006