The New Imperialism, or the Economic Logic of Late Postmodernism

Allan Borst

Department of English
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
borst@uiuc.edu

 

Review of: David Harvey, The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.

 

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).

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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-à-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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.