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January 24, 2007
This review of David Harvey's The New Imperialism, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003) There is an interview with David Harvey by Harry Kreisler here.
The reviewers say that Harvey's position is that this new imperialism is based on two pillars:
The first concerns the use, on behalf of the State, of a set of political, military and diplomatic strategies and the second the development of economic power within an open space. Capital exports take place in space as well as in time, via huge investments marked by long- range profitability and via the creation of new products, new markets and news systems of production. It is also the combination of the two pillars that creates different forms of accumulation.The originality of Harvey’s analysis is that he succeeds, on the one hand, to highlight the correlation between American hegemony and neo-liberal strategy and, on the other hand, to underline the correlation between different historical phases of imperialist development and different accumulation regimes.
Harvey has a twofolded explaination for the war against Iraq. First of all, there is the need to access the most oil fields located in the Middle East. Secondly, the defeat of the Democratic ticket in the 2000 presidential election and the events of 9/11 resulted in a remarkable change in the policy-making of the White House: neo-conservatism displaced neo-liberalism and coercion replaced consent.
The neo-liberal strategy was that of the Washington consensus: a worldwide effort to open up markets and international institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, strengthen the position of American finance capital, impose policies of austerity on less developed countries and policies of privatization (telecommunications, transportation, social housing etc.) that created new spaces of profitability for the over-accumulated US capital. Harvey argues that there was an inner contradiction to neo-liberal imperialism:
the decline in American manufacturing meant that this whole emphasis on a violent form of finance capitalism was in fact some sort of recycling of finance capitalism that could not keep generating income for too long. Not only was neo-liberal imperialism inherently volatile — Harvey describes it as a way to orchestrate volatility and credit and liquidity crises ...but also it was based on the actual decline of American manufacturing and the emergence of sub-imperialist competitors.
So the neo-conservative stress on military power and interventionism was a sort of reaction to the economic competition from rival capitalist countries, an effort to counterbalance the economic advancement of the other developed capitalist economies (Western Europe, Japan and South-east Asian economies), through the use of military and political force.
This means a new balance between the territorial and capitalist logic of power. It is also important that neo-conservatism is not only a foreign policy agenda; it is also a turn towards more authoritarian rule at home, and a more conservative ideological agenda
Finally, we have a consideration of the political by a Marxist that does not reduce it to the economic.
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