IMPERIALISM OF OUR TIME
AIJAZ AHMAD
I
begin with the phrase ‘imperialism of our time’ as homage to Michal Kalecki
who wrote his seminal essay ‘Fascism of Our Time’ at the juncture when the
American far right had made a serious bid for the Presidency with the emergence
of Barry Goldwater as the Republican candidate in the 1964 US election. Kalecki
did not refer to Mussolini directly, although he might have, since it was after all
Mussolini who first said that fascism is simply that form of rule in which government
unites with ‘corporations’ – a term which for Mussolini meant something
not unlike what President Eisenhower meant when warning of the US government’s
convergence with the ‘military-industrial complex’. Kalecki’s analysis did
suggest, however, that in its extreme form industrial capitalism does have an
inherent fascist tendency, and he wondered what fascism would look like if it
ever came to the United States in conditions of prosperity and stable electoral
democracy. Kalecki’s intent was not to suggest that the US was becoming fascist,
nor do I mean to imply that we are living in fascist times. Nonetheless, one of
the salient features of the present conjuncture is that the United States, the
leading imperialist country with historically unprecedented global power, is today
governed by perhaps the most rightwing government in a century. The
chickens of the most hysterical forms of authoritarianism that the US has been
routinely exporting to large parts of the globe seem to be coming home to roost,
with national as well as global consequences, including military consequences.
I also use the simple phrase ‘imperialism of our time’ with the more modest
aim of avoiding terms like ‘New Imperialism’ which have been in vogue at
various times, with varying meanings. Imperialism has been with us for a very
long time, in great many forms, and constantly re-invents itself, so to speak, as
the structure of global capitalism itself changes. What is offered here is a set of
provisional notes toward the understanding of a conjuncture, ‘our time’, which
is itself a complex of continuities and discontinuities – and, as is usual with
conjunctures, rather novel. I shall first offer a series of proposition and then, in
the remaining space for this article, some further elaboration of these points.
I
The fundamental novelty of the imperialism of our time is that it comes after
the dissolution of the two great rivalries that had punctuated the global politics
of the twentieth century, namely what Lenin called ‘inter-imperialist rivalry’ of
the first half of the century as well as what we might, for lack of a better word,
call the inter-systemic rivalry between the US and the USSR that lasted for some
seventy years. The end of those rivalries concludes the era of politics inaugurated
by the First World War and it is only logical that the sole victor, the United
States, would set out most aggressively to grab all possible spoils of victory and
to undo the gains that the working classes and oppressed nations of the world had
been able to achieve during that period.
This new face of imperialism arises not only after the dissolution of the great
colonial empires (British and French, principally) and colonial ambitions of the
other, competing capitalist countries (Germany and Japan, mainly) but also the
definitive demise of the nationalism of the national bourgeoisie in much of the
so-called Third World (anti-colonialism, wars of national liberation, the
Bandung project, non-alignment, the protectionist industrialising state) which
had itself been sustained considerably by the existence of an alternative pole in
the shape of the communist countries. The three objectives for which the US
fought a war of position throughout the twentieth century – the containment/disappearance
of communist states, its own primacy over the other leading
countries, the defeat of Third World nationalism – have been achieved.
Far from being an imperialism caught in the coil of inter-imperialist rivalries,
it is the imperialism of the era in which (a) national capitals have interpenetrated
in such a manner that the capital active in any given territorial state is comprised,
in varying proportions, of national and transnational capital; (b) finance capital
is dominant over productive capital to an extent never visualized even in Lenin’s
‘export of capital’ thesis or in Keynes’ warnings about the rapaciousness of the
rentiers; and (c) everything from commodity markets to movements of finance
has been so thoroughly globalized that the rise of a global state, with demonstrably
globalized military capability, is an objective requirement of the system
itself, quite aside from the national ambitions of the US rulers, so as to impose
structures and disciplines over this whole complex with its tremendous potential
for fissures and breakdowns.
Empires without colonies have been with us, in one corner of the globe or
another, throughout the history of capital, sometimes preceding military
conquest (commercial empires), at other times coming after decolonization
(South America after the dissolution of Spanish and Portuguese rule), and sometimes
taking the form for which Lenin invented the term ‘semi-colonial’ (Egypt,
Persia etc). However, this is the first fully post-colonial imperialism, not only free
44 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2004
of colonial rule but antithetical to it; it is unlikely that the current occupation of
Iraq will translate itself into long-term colonial rule, however long the quagmire
may last and even if the superhawks of the Pentagon take US armies into Syria,
Iran or wherever. It is not a matter of an ideological preference for ‘informal’
empire over ‘formal’ empire, so-called. It is a structural imperative of the current
composition of global capital itself, as Panitch and Gindin argue in this volume.
The movement of capital and commodities must be as unimpeded as possible but
the nation-state form must be maintained throughout the peripheries, not only
for historical reasons but also to supplement internationalization of capitalist law
with locally erected labour regimes so as to enforce what Stephen Gill calls ‘disciplinary
neoliberalism’ in conditions specific to each territorial unit.
The singular merit of Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism was that, unlike
Hilferding or Lenin or Bukharin, she sought to ground her theory in the larger
theory of the capitalist mode of production itself and therefore focused on the
question of the relationship between industrial and agricultural production which
had been a notable feature of the Marxist theory of capitalism as such. One of
her key propositions was that colonialism was not a conjunctural but a necessary
aspect of the globalization of the law of value because capitalist zones require
non-capitalist zones for full realization of surplus value; but she also went on to
say that once capitalism has reached the outer reaches of the globe a crisis would
necessarily ensue thanks to the increasing disappearance of non-capitalist zones.
This latter inference would appear to be unwarranted, historically and even logically.
Combined and uneven development does not strictly require that the
peripheries remain ‘non-capitalist’, i.e., outside the global operation of the law
of value. In actual history, the era of classical colonialism divided the world
between an industrial core and a vast agricultural hinterland. Then, however, the
dissolution of the great colonial empires and the postwar restructuring of global
capital opened a new era in which the world was increasingly divided between
advanced and backward industrial zones, while particular countries and continents
were themselves divided between islands of the most advanced forms of
finance and industrial production, on the one hand, and the most backward
forms of agricultural production, on the other. At the extreme poles within the
so-called ‘Third World’, one witnessed not only the stunning capitalist breakthrough
in countries like Taiwan and South Korea but also, in contrast, the
regression of parts of sub-Saharan Africa to levels below those obtaining at the
time of decolonization. This transcontinental production of extreme inequalities
is rife with potential for perennial violence, hence the need for state systems that
guarantee extreme forms of extra-economic coercion. Meanwhile, one can
witness across large parts of Asia and Africa all the processes of primitive accumulation
and forced proletarianization that Marx specified in his famous chapter
on the question, with reference mainly to England, and one remembers the
central role he assigns to the state in the process, which, in his words, ‘begat’ the
conditions for capitalist production ‘hothouse-fashion’. To the extent that relatively
similar processes are duplicated in a number of countries under regimes of
IMPERIALISM OF OUR TIME 45
both nation-state and globalized management (the World Bank, the WTO, etc.),
in a system that is itself trans-national, a supervening authority above national and
local authorities is again an objective requirement of the system as a whole; hence
the tight fit among the multi-lateral institutions, the US state and the local
managers of other states.
At the broadest level of generalization, one could say that it took two world
wars to decide whether the US or Germany would inherit the British and French
empires and thus transform itself into the leader of the bloc of advanced capitalist
countries, and hence the centre of a global empire. It is significant that while the
German vision was mired in the primitive notions of a worldwide colonial
empire, the US, already under Woodrow Wilson, was championing the dissolution
of colonialism and the ‘right of nationalities’, an ideological precursor for
today’s imperialism of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’. And, it was after World
War I, as the centre of global finance shifted decisively from London to New
York and the Bolshevik Revolution arose to challenge global capitalism as a
whole, that the US positioned itself as the leader of the ‘Free World’, as was
symbolized by Wilson’s dominating presence at Versailles as well as the leading
role the US always played in the containment-of-communism crusades, especially
after the Second World War.
Precisely at the time when the US has achieved all its long-standing objectives,
including the objective of full dominance over its partners in the advanced capitalist
world, there has arisen in some circles the expectation of an
‘inter-imperialist rivalry’ between the US and EU as competing centres of global
capitalist production, with reference mainly to the size of the European
economy as well as a futuristic projection of an East Asian power, be it Japan or
China or a bloc of East Asian states. This seems fanciful. The most the Europeans
do in the Third World is look for markets and investment opportunities. There
is no power projection, for the simple reason that there is no power. Not only
is the US military power far greater than that of all of Europe combined, it also
has a military presence in over a hundred countries of the world, in sharp contrast
to Germany or even France, and NATO goes only where the US tells it to go.
This military supremacy over its would-be rivals is supplemented then by the
overwhelming power of its currency and finance, and its dominance over the
global production of techno-scientific as well as social-scientific intelligentsias,
and its global cultural and ideological reach through its dominance over mass
entertainment and (dis)information.
The US fought as hard against radical Third World nationalism, as it did against
communism during the second half of the century. Having championed decolonization
as a precondition for the emergence of a globally integrated empire under
its own dominion, it set its face against national liberation movements, whether
led by communists (as in Indochina) or by radical nationalists (as in Algeria);
against non-alignment (the rhetoric of ‘for us or against us’ of Bush Jr. today
comes straight out of John Foster Dulles’ speeches during the 1950s); as well as
against particular nationalist regimes, be it Nasser’s or Nkrumah’s or Sukarno’s or
46 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2004
even Prince Sihanouk’s in Cambodia. Instead, it kept monarchies in power where
it could and imposed dictators wherever it needed to. The failure of the nationalbourgeois
project in the Third World has all kinds of domestic roots but the
implacable undercutting of it by the US was a very large part of it. One now tends
to forget that in his postwar vision, Keynes himself had recommended not only
state restrictions on rentiers in the advanced capitalist countries, but also regular
long-term transfers of capital to the underdeveloped countries to guarantee real
growth, and hence domestic peace, and hence stability of the global capitalist
system as a whole, not to speak of more prosperous markets for the advanced capitalist
countries’ own commodities. This latter recommendation was rejected out
of hand by the US which kept a tight control over the making of the Bretton
Woods architecture. This undercutting of the national-bourgeois project –
precisely because the project required high levels of protectionism, tariffs,
domestic savings and state-led industrialization, with little role for imperialist
penetration – certainly made all those states much weaker in relation to foreign
domination but also made those societies much more angry and volatile, eventually
even susceptible to all kinds of irrationalism, with little popular legitimacy for
the indigenous nation-state. This phenomenon itself has required not only globalized
supervision but also an increasingly interventionist global state. Little fires have
– more and more – to be put out everywhere and now the whole system has to
be ‘re-ordered’, as Bush and Blair keep saying. The Cold War was never cold for
many outside the NATO and Warsaw Pact zones, and US military interventions
in the Third World, direct and indirect, was a routine affair throughout that
period. Now, winning the Cold War has opened the way not to world peace but
for an ideology of permanent interventionism on part of the United States: ‘a task
that never ends’, as Bush put it some ten days after the 11 September catastrophe.
Defeat of all the forces which Hobsbawm cumulatively and felicitously calls
‘the Enlightenment left’ – communism, socialism, national liberation movements,
the radical wings of social democracy – has led to a full-blown ideological
crisis across the globe. Race, religion and ethnicity – re-packaged as just so many
‘identities’– are now where class struggles and inter-religious, inter-racial, transethnic
solidarities once used to be, and a politics of infinite Difference has arisen
on the ruins of the politics of Equality. Postmodernism is rife with thematics
taken over from European irrationalism and with nostalgia for the pre-modern.
Indeed, this idea of the pre-modern as the postmodern solution for problems of
modernity is even more widespread, with far more murderous consequences, in
the peripheries of the capitalist system, be it the ideologies of the Hindu far right
in India, the sundry fundamentalisms of Islamic mullahs, or the millenarian
ideologies of those who brought us September 11th. Terrorism is now where
national liberation used to be, and the US today chases these handful of terrorists
as assiduously and globally as it used to chase phalanxes of revolutionaries until
not long ago. Nor is it a matter any longer of the peripheries. The United States
itself is gripped today by a peculiar, cabal-like combination of Christian fundamentalists,
zionists, far right neo-conservatives and militarists.

Much more....

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