I MPERI ALI SM OF OUR TI ME

AI J AZ 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 govern-
ment unites with corporations a term which for Mussolini meant something
not unlike what President Eisenhower meant when warning of the US govern-
ments convergence with the military-industrial complex. Kaleckis 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. Kaleckis 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 contain-
ment/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 Lenins
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 demon-
strably 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 poten-
tial 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 some-
times 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
SOCIALIST REGISTER 2004 44
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 disci-
plinary neoliberalism in conditions specific to each territorial unit.
The singular merit of Luxemburgs 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 logi-
cally. 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 conti-
nents 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 break-
through 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 accu-
mulation 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 rela-
tively 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 disso-
lution of colonialism and the right of nationalities, an ideological precursor for
todays 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 Wilsons dominating presence at Versailles as well as the leading
role the US always played in the containment-of-communism crusades, espe-
cially 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 capi-
talist 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 decolo-
nization 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 Nassers or Nkrumahs or Sukarnos or
SOCIALIST REGISTER 2004 46
even Prince Sihanouks in Cambodia. Instead, it kept monarchies in power where
it could and imposed dictators wherever it needed to. The failure of the national-
bourgeois 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 capi-
talist 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, eventu-
ally even susceptible to all kinds of irrationalism, with little popular legitimacy for
the indigenous nation-state. This phenomenon itself has required not only glob-
alized 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 move-
ments, 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, trans-
ethnic 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 11
th
. Terrorism is now where
national liberation used to be, and the US today chases these handful of terror-
ists 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 funda-
mentalists, zionists, far right neo-conservatives and militarists.
IMPERIALISM OF OUR TIME 47
It is here that the specificity of the current Bush regime in the United States
lies. We shall return to the fact that the US has fought a war of position not just
against communism throughout much of the twentieth century, not only against
radical nationalisms in the second half of that century but also, crucially, for its
own dominance over its capitalist rivals and in pursuit of a role for itself as the
sole architect of the global capitalist system. In that sense, of course, the current
Administration continues a much older project, and some of the most aggressive
of its policies can be traced back to not only Bush Sr. or Ronald Reagan but to
Clinton and Carter as well. The first specificity of this regime lies in the fact that,
thanks to the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, this is the first time in human history
that a single imperial power is so dominant over all its rivals that it really has no
rival, near or far, precisely at the time when it has the greatest capacity to domi-
nate the globe; Clinton in this calculus appears as a transitional figure and Bush
Jrs Presidency, the first US Presidency of the twenty-first century, seems to coin-
cide fully with this moment when historys greatest concentration of force can
be exercised without any restraint. That is the objective moment of this
Presidency. The second specificity is that never in the post-1914 epoch has so
concentrated a force of the far right taken hold of the governing institutions of
the US state, a force so overdetermined in their ideology and projects that they
recognize no limits to their own venality or criminality or global ambition. They
are in their own way quite as millenarian as the most irrational member of Al
Qaida but, unlike Al Qaida, they have power more power than anyone else
on earth. Thus it is that their actions by and large conform to the logic of capital
but also may well exceed that logic.
II
To properly understand where imperialism stands today its necessary to begin
by reconsidering Lenins conception hardly a theory, one might add of inter-
imperialist rivalry. His thinking on this subject arose in the course of a
conjunctural analysis required by an intense debate over whether a world war was
imminent or not, the line that European social democracy was to adopt in case
war did break out, the question of voting over war credits in the various coun-
tries (notably Germany), the question of what revolutionary possibilities might
or might not open up in the event of a war and what kind of a power bloc (class
alliances) the revolutionary parties were to try to constitute in that event, and
where if anywhere the likelihood of a revolution would be the greatest. The
notable feature of this conception was that it was not rooted in the dynamics of
the capitalist mode of production nor a historical analysis of the competition that
gave rise to recurring conflicts among colonial powers from the beginning. As a
conjunctural analysis, however, Lenins position proved to be unassailable. The
First World War, contrary to what Kautsky, the master theoretician of German
social democracy, believed, soon led to the Second, meanwhile creating a situ-
ation where the Bolshevik Revolution could be successful. At the end of the war,
SOCIALIST REGISTER 2004 48
countries like Germany and Italy did witness a level of revolutionary militancy
that was not to be matched again during the inter-war period. And it was in
consequence of that war and the Bolshevik Revolution that anti-colonial mass
movements arose in a number of Asian and African countries, with the alliance
of proletariat, peasantry and left-wing intelligentsia which Lenin had recom-
mended at the time becoming a common feature of those movements, whether
led by communists or not. Nor is there much doubt that as a latecomer to
advanced capitalism without being a colony-holding state (Luxemburgs
phrase), Germany was keen on a re-division of the colonial world.
The acuity of Lenins conjunctural analysis, and the recommendations on
matters of strategy he drew from it, has nothing to do with whether or not he
was right on other things, like export of capital, etc. The idea of inter-imperi-
alist rivalry was in fact much more closely integrated with the idea of the
weakest link (more revolutionary possibility in Russia than in Germany, for
example), the political strategy of multi-class alliances based on the strategic
alliance of the proletariat and the peasantry (a great innovation in Marxist revo-
lutionary theory for backward countries: Stalins fatal crime that he broke that
alliance), and the national-colonial question (the possibility of anti-colonial revo-
lutions thanks to the weakening of the colonizing bourgeoisies, the rise of mass
anti-colonial movements after the First World War, general decolonization after
the second). One can appreciate the merits of the conjunctural analysis and the
accompanying political theory without having to subscribe to the letter of the
whole of the economic theory with which he sought to buttress it.
The conception of inter-imperialist rivalry, however, presupposed a stage in
the global evolution of the capitalist mode of production in which national capi-
tals are essentially discrete in nature and with little inter-penetration. And, it
therefore presupposed a kind of state that represents the national bourgeoisie as
such, in competition with other national bourgeoisies and their states. Rooted
as the conception was in a debate over the inevitability and imminence of war
among these competing and discretely organized states, rivalry itself had a
meaning far exceeding mere competition because it excluded the possibility of
even any lasting collaborative competition in those circumstances. The idea that war
was imminent similarly presupposed some equivalence, or at least illusion of
equivalence, in levels of military capability, i.e. the rivals had to be seen to be
erecting military structures that were capable of fighting each other.
This brief excursus on Lenin serves to make a point: one cannot lift the
conception of inter-imperialist rivalry out of a conjunctural analysis of almost
a century ago. As one now re-visits those texts, one is struck by their belonging
to a different epoch, entirely. The specificity of the conjuncture in the imperi-
alism of our time, as different from Lenins, is that its core consisting of
advanced capitalist countries is comprised of neither rivals nor equals. The total
population and the collective GNP of the EU is certainly equal to that of the
United States, marginally greater in fact. Thats where the matter ends, however.
It has no centralized state structure even remotely comparable to that of the US,
IMPERIALISM OF OUR TIME 49
no singular language, no standing army or security structure of its own, no
foreign policy that is binding on member states, and its laws supersedes national
laws only certain circumscribed fields. Its proposed constitution in 2003 was so
bound by conditionalities and ifs and buts that it looked more like a statement
of principle and vision than a proper constitution. The Brussels bureaucracy, the
new Euro, and a whole host of good intentions seem to be the unifying factors.
All this became transparent during the decision-making process over the inva-
sion of Iraq. Britain threw in its lot with the US, with complete disregard of even
procedural consideration for the EU but in keeping with the role of loyal subor-
dinate that the US imposed upon it soon after the second World War, and from
which neither Wilson nor Thatcher nor Blair have ever deviated. Then, as
France and Germany sought to distinguish themselves from that position and the
US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld dismissed them contemptuously as old
Europe, everyone from Derrida to Habermas marched to television studios to
express dismay on Europes behalf. Eventually, Rumsfeld did line up Britain,
Italy, Spain, Portugal and a host of little/new countries of Europe on his side,
and it was in the Azores that Bush made the final decision to ignore the Security
Council and proceed with the invasion. Equally significant is the fact that in the
last round of negotiations at the Security Council before the invasion began, the
Franco-/German alliance proposed a thirty-day warning to Saddam (and the
inspectors) after which they too were willing to condone the invasion. Bush
pointedly snubbed them by keeping to the schedule set by the Pentagon and
ignoring the Security Council from that point on. The US instructed the UN
to withdraw its inspectors forthwith and Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of
the United Nations, did not even bother to call the Security Council in session,
even though the inspectors had been sent there not by the US but by a Security
Council Resolution; Annan simply instructed the inspectors to comply with US
orders. Hans Blix, the chief inspector, was to say later that he had long believed
that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and the whole thing was a charade
anyway. Once the invasion got into full swing, even the Franco-German alliance
began to pray publicly for a quick US victory and, only slightly less publicly,
began begging for contracts for European firms in the reconstruction of Iraq.
When the US decided to establish itself as the occupying force and grant the UN
no appreciable role in it, the Franco-German alliance complied.
Meanwhile, on the completely different issue of a Belgian law which grants
Belgian courts the jurisdiction to try foreign nationals for war crimes, a stern
warning from Rumsfeld that he might move the NATO headquarters from
Brussels if the laws were not changed brought a swift promise of compliance
from the Belgian government. So much for the claim by high-minded European
intellectuals that respect for universal human rights is an integral aspect of the
emerging European identity. Belgium apparently has no right to have laws of its
own even on issues such as war crimes, even though these laws have no relevance
to global trade, finance or commercial contracts. The doctrine of limited sover-
eignty that is emerging as a major component in US policy, with its vast
SOCIALIST REGISTER 2004 50
implications for the new imperial constitutionalism, is to be applied, apparently,
not only to the Third World countries but even, selectively, to Europes own
ability to promulgate laws for itself.
In the theoretical field, developments of this kind concretely bring into ques-
tion the Negri/Hardt conception of a supra-national sovereignty, which,
according to them, has been so thoroughly globalized that it is hard to locate it
anywhere in particular, just as this sovereignty is to be opposed by a multitude
which too is beyond class or any other determinate identity or boundary. In
actual reality, it is of course the United States that claims a sovereign right to act
in its own interests (which it calls defence) while flouting the sovereignty of
others, so that the sovereignty of the imperial state seems boundless. Indeed, it
was Ms. Albright, a former professor at Georgetown University, who became the
first high official of US administration, as Clintons Secretary of State, to expound
the notion that nationality as well as sovereignty belong to an outdated reper-
toire of political theory and need to be abandoned in view of new structures of
globalization and imperatives of humanitarian intervention.
The declaration of the Bush administration that it has the sovereign right to
make war what it calls pre-emptive war against any or all states that it
perceives as a threat, while reserving the right to judge what constitutes a threat,
is in fact an extension of a doctrine already in place since earlier Administrations.
What we are witnessing is the making of an imperial sovereignty claimed for itself
by a state which is at once the state of a nation as well as a globalized state of
contemporary capitalism. The US arrogates to itself a limitless sovereignty which
is arbitrary by nature, and can only exist in so far as its might is so superior to that
of all others that its action would necessarily go unchallenged by other compo-
nents of the global state system however resentful they might be otherwise.
While we are still on the question of inter-imperialist rivalry, as contrasted to
the global sovereignty of the US imperium, it is worth recalling that there is yet
another, even less plausible and more or less futuristic idea which locates this
rivalry not in the Atlantic zone but the Pacific zone, so that the rival arises not
from Europe but from East Asia. In an earlier version, the rivalry was to come
from Japan but the deeply crisis-ridden nature of its current economy, contrasted
with the remarkable growth rates sustained by the Chinese economy over the past
more than a decade, seems to have shifted the attention to China. This too is
implausible, however. Whatever its recent rates of growth, the scale of the
Chinese economy is nothing compared with that of the EU, and whatever the
immense size of its land army, the high-tech component of its military capability
is still far behind even that of Russia. The preponderant role of its military estab-
lishment is internal, with respect to management of civil society and dominance
over other institutions of state; for the rest, its war-making capabilities are largely
defensive in character. Its economic growth itself has aggravated internal social
contradictions, along fault-lines of class and region, and China will be lucky if it
can survive, through this extremely difficult and lop-sided growth period, in its
present territorial shape, and may face increasing mass unrest along class lines as
IMPERIALISM OF OUR TIME 51
well. One can be fairly certain that the US will exploit that internal unrest to foster
separatist movements, especially in the outlying regions such as Xinjiang, just as
it closely watches Tibet as a possible staging area. Meanwhile the remorseless
export orientation of the Chinese economy has served to integrate it deeply into
the US consumer market, so that China today is beset by the nightmare that if
there is a full-scale American recession Chinese exports will decline dramatically
and its economy will consequently grind to a halt. Integration of China into the
US-dominated global system as a way of increasing its dependency is an impera-
tive that Bush Sr. and Clinton well understood. The current Administration may
pursue a policy (in which India is likely to play an important role) of forcing upon
China stupendous expenditures on building its military defences, taking those
resources away from economic growth and thus exacerbating internal conflicts.
In any case, China is extremely vulnerable to the United States, militarily and
economically, and any idea of it as competitor is fanciful at best.
III
Unlike inter-imperial rivalry, the question of colonialism is or should be
central to our thinking today. In the history of imperialism, the role of colo-
nialism generally conceptualized these days in terms of a contrast between
formal and informal empires remains a contentious issue. Four initial obser-
vations can be offered without fear of much contradiction, except from
devoutly Westocentric circles. First, colonialism was not an incidental, epiphe-
nomenal or episodic feature of the development of capitalism, and the neglect
of this fact has marred much Marxist theory of capitalism; colonialism was from
the beginning an intrinsic part of the primitive accumulation of capital and
former colonies continue to play this role in the primitive accumulation of capital
on the global scale in postcolonial imperialism of even today (primitive accu-
mulation, as David Harvey argues elsewhere in this volume, being a constant
feature of capitalism throughout its history, right up to the present conjuncture).
Second, there is a sharp contrast between different kinds of colonialism, as for
example between settler colonialism (which succeeded in the Americas and
Australia but failed in Africa) and the so-called colonies which were occupied,
administered and exploited by bourgeoisies so external to them that they never
put their roots down in the conquered lands (the experience of most colonies in
Asia and Africa). Some of the white settlements in the temperate zones made a
transition to advanced capitalism (notably North America and to an extent
Australia-New Zealand) while others did not (South America). None of the
occupied-but-unsettled colonies did, not even India which arguably had some
potential at the moment of colonization. Much capital and technology was trans-
ferred to the settler colonies, very little to the unsettled ones. All this had rather
consequential effects on the class structure of the respective sub-systems. The
settler-colonies which made the capitalist transition are marked by the dominance
of industry over agriculture, and they have a demographic balance in which the
SOCIALIST REGISTER 2004 52
employed greatly outnumber the army of the unemployed; in those which did
not make that transition, the army of the unemployed and the indifferently
employed tend to exceed the employed sections of the working class.
Third, the so-called informal empire (imperialism without colonies) has been
a recurring feature from the beginning, and full-scale colonialist conquest often
came as an aftermath of other forms of imperialist exploitation. Coastal outposts
in western Africa, combined with raids and incursions into the interior, were
enough to empty it of much of its population via the slave trade and to disrupt
its economic networks; conquest of the interior came much later. Even the
beginnings of territorial conquest of India came very much later than the estab-
lishment of coastal outposts for purposes of commercial imperialism, and the full
territorial conquest not to speak of the transition from a possession of the East
India Company to a crown colony took a hundred years; by contrast, ninety
years were to elapse between full conquest and decolonization.
Fourth, the global history of formal and informal empires not to speak of
colonial conquest and decolonization is parallel but non-synchronic. Latin
America was fully decolonized well before the interiors of Africa and Asia were
fully colonized; the history of Anglo-American rivalry over the informal empire
in Latin America after decolonization predates the rise of mass anti-colonial
movements in Asia and Africa by roughly a century. The fact that Latin
American states originated in settler-colonial formations while most states in Asia
and Africa did not experience even the attempt to impose that form has had
enormously differentiated consequences for the development of languages,
cultures, religions, demographic compositions, etc. in the respective continents.
And some of the consequences of imperialism were rather similar in formal and
informal empires so far as the colonized territories and the semi-colonies
(Lenins term) are concerned. India shifts to the status of a crown colony in the
1830s; Turkey, never colonized, undertakes modern bourgeois reforms under the
Tanzimat at roughly the same time; by the 1920s both had developed remark-
ably similar property relations, legal structures, reform movements etc, not to
speak of the modes of dependence on Europe (e.g., debt servitude) with the
difference that India had been colonized and Turkey not.
The United States occupies a unique place in this whole history of colo-
nialism. It was the only former colony that turned itself into an empire, but even
during the nineteenth century when colonizing was quite the fashion in Europe,
the US sought not to colonize Latin America but to dominate it. Born in geno-
cidal annexation of vast territories, its initial Thirteen Colonies made a
revolution, turned themselves into a nation, wrote for themselves a constitution
which combined stirring rhetoric of what we today call human rights with
defence of slavery, so that the settlers could now go on doing what they were
doing anyway race-based slavery for the plantations, profits from the triangular
trade, commerce and industry concentrated mostly on the eastern seaboard, petty
commodity production in New England without having to share profits with
the mother country. The expansionist ideology that arose out of it was annex-
IMPERIALISM OF OUR TIME 53
ationist rather than colonial in the European sense; what lay beyond the frontier
was there to take, and frontiers could be extended through much of the nine-
teenth century. To the west, only the Pacific proved to be the limit; to the south
and north, borders with Mexico and Canada were determined in warfare and
annexation of territory, not conquering these neighbours as colonies. Unlike the
colony-holding states of Europe it never had the problem of surplus labour; it
constantly accumulated for itself a massive surplus of resources. European colony-
holders exported their populations to achieve a favourable demographic balance;
the US thrived on importing slaves, skilled labourers and vast intellectual
resources from other countries. Its first informal empire was in the Americas
itself, while the heart of the empire lay in the annexed territories that were
constantly converted into more and more national territory; empire and nation
were, in that originating moment, one.
IV
The US entered World War I not for re-division of the colonial world but
as arbiter of European disputes, and emerged out of it as the first among equals.
The Nazis initiated the Second World War with the ambition of turning the
whole world into a vast and permanent German colony. Once the US entered
the Second World War, it explicitly adopted the goal of persuading or forcing
all the colony-holding states to unburden themselves of the colonies and get
on with the business of joining a unified capitalist empire on the global scale.
Later, the US was to fight and fund many wars, the most lethal and protracted
ones in Indochina of course, but never to colonize, only to obtain client regimes
and make the world safe for capitalism.
The post-Second World War settlement was based on a combination of a
clear-cut US leadership and a complex network of multilateral institutions. The
most useful were the institutions such as the IFIs and NATO which the US
could control more firmly. The UN was always treated as a necessary and useful
nuisance because the USSR had veto power in the Security Council and
because membership in the General Assembly was so numerous that, in the
heyday of communism and Third World nationalism, majorities were not
always easy to obtain; there even came a fleeting moment, in the 1970s, when
UN itself became a forum for the pursuit of Third World nationalist projects
through such subsidiary organizations as the UNCTAD. Now that those adver-
saries have been vanquished, a paradoxical situation has arisen in which the UN
itself has become much more pliant but the US is now so determined to take
the management of the capitalist world into its own hands that it is undermining
not only the UN, but even, on occasion, the IMF and the World Bank which
had been until recently among its chief instrumentalities for governance of,
especially, the Third World. With hindsight, one can now see that the great
emphasis on multilaterism in the past was itself perhaps a function of the fact that
the US faced challenges from communism and Third World nationalism and
SOCIALIST REGISTER 2004 54
needed at least an institutional framework in which to buttress the unity and
consent of its chief allies behind its own leadership. Now, with those challenges
gone, the leadership firmly secured, and a much more belligerent US
Administration in office, many aspects of this multilateralism are being allowed
to lapse. Bush Jrs hysterical assertions of US imperial sovereignty stand in sharp
contrast to the trilateralism of his father.
A very underrated aspect of the global hegemony the US established after the
Second World War was the role its knowledge industry came to play in training
and nurturing large elements of the ruling strata in the Third World, directly in
its own institutions on US soil and indirectly through national institutions
located in the Third World itself, through supply of teachers, syllabi, grants,
research equipment, libraries and so forth. Marx once remarked that a ruling class
is stable only to the extent that it presses the best minds of the subordinate classes
into its service. As it emerged as clear leader of the capitalist countries after the
Second World War, at a moment when European empires were being dissolved
in Asia and Africa, the US developed the largest, best funded, richest academic
establishment ever known to humankind, and systematically set out to bring key
intellectual strata from the newly decolonized countries into its own academic
institutions, across the diverse fields of physical and technical sciences, social
sciences and the humanities, arts, diplomacy, jurisprudence and so on. Many
stayed on and became part of the intellectual powerhouse of the United States
itself; from the 1960s onwards, certainly, the stupendous brain drain from the
Third World (principally Asia) gained momentum (as, by contrast, fewer
European intellectuals were now inclined to migrate out of their increasingly
prosperous and politically stable continent).
Those who returned became the home countrys economists, scientists, diplo-
mats, bureaucrats, professors, politicians, businessmen. By comparison, the role
of the European countries in the intellectual formation of the postcolonial Third
World intelligentsia declined sharply, and domestic institutions were re-fashioned
to correspond as closely as possible to their American counterparts. The
American imperial project was of course greatly aided by the fact that English
became during this period something of a world language, thanks to the fact that
it was the language of the two predominant imperial powers of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. The net result was that large parts of the state institu-
tions in Third World dependencies were taken over simply through the
intellectual takeover of many of their key personnel. The American worldview
became the practical common sense for those personnel. Nor was this a matter
of practical affairs alone. There was an attendant training of sense and sensibility,
of literary and artistic taste, of patterns of consumption, the telecasting and
absorption of news, the duplication of forms in the entertainment industry. Most
European intellectuals are known in much of Africa and Asia today through their
American re-packaging. The only Latin American literature that arrives in the
bookshops of Delhi is that which has been translated, annotated, commented
upon and published in the United States. The only universal musical forms
IMPERIALISM OF OUR TIME 55
today are the ones that either come from the US or are local duplicates and vari-
ants of the American form. Postmodernization of the world is actually
Americanization of the world, with considerable degree of local colour and
imitative originality no doubt. A good degree of this imitative originality can be
seen in Europe too.
V
That, however, is not the only impact modern imperialism has had on the
cultural and ideological spheres in the Third World. A general outbreak of irra-
tionalism across large areas of the former colonies and semi-colonies is the other
consequence of the defeat of the original anti-colonial project.
National liberation movements against colonialism and imperialism had risen
within a determinate field of force, which was constituted on the one hand by
anachronistic hierarchies of their own societies and foreign rule which was itself
much too complicit with those hierarchies and on the other hand, inspiration
from the radical side of Modernity: the Enlightenment ideas of secular reason and
the right of every social entity to emancipate itself through the exercise of that
reason; the practical example of the relatively emancipated social life in indus-
trialized societies; the ideas of the Bolshevik Revolution which had exploded
upon the world just as these mass movements were coming into being and which
itself inspired new mass movements. As such, they were, generally speaking,
secular reform movements secularization of religion itself was often an objec-
tive as well as anti-colonial movements. As mass movements, their notable
achievement was that they brought into the political field collective social actors
which had never acted politically in the past. And as national movements for
independence and social change, they sought to bring together diverse elements
of society which otherwise belonged to different ethnic, religious and linguistic
groups.
This was obviously not the only kind of opposition that grew against colo-
nialism. A traditionalizing backlash in defence of the older social hierarchies was
common enough, as hostile to secularizing reform movements as to colonialism.
However, as one looks at a broad landscape from North Africa, through West
and South Asia up to Indochina one is struck by how dominant the secular-
izing and reforming, even revolutionary, tendencies were. This would include
Arab nationalism as much as the Indian anti-colonial movement, and the same
was of course true of such reformist regimes as that of Ataturk which founded
the modern Turkish state. Mass communist parties were a phenomenon not at
all restricted to countries such as Vietnam where the communist-led national
liberation triumphed, but also in a whole range of countries, from Iraq and Sudan
to India, Malaya and Indonesia. Muslim societies seem to have been rather
hospitable to communist ideas, while entities like the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood and the Indian RSS remained marginalized until the last quarter of
the twentieth century. One might add that political Islam was nurtured in all
SOCIALIST REGISTER 2004 56
those societies by the US from the 1950s onward as a bulwark against commu-
nism, with eventually disastrous effects in Afghanistan and beyond. In class terms,
meanwhile, such movements usually represented an alliance of the urban middle
classes and the peasantry, and were led by the intelligentsia arising out of the
former who were themselves aligned with the national-bourgeois project.
What, then, happened to this project after independence? That is a complex
story, but as a broad generalization, one could say that every national bourgeois
regime that arose after decolonization in the larger agrarian societies had a stark
choice of alignment between imperialism and the peasantry, and in every
instance it betrayed the peasantry. This is a theme of great significance. Gramsci
argued that the European bourgeoisie that went through the experience of the
French Revolution became so thoroughly frightened by the prospect of the
peasantry carrying its own revolution to its logical end that no bourgeoisie was
ever again to play a revolutionary role against the landholding classes. In the
agrarian economies of the larger former colonies certainly, agrarian revolution
was the only way out of imperialist dependence and lack of that revolution lies
at the heart of the defeat of the national bourgeois project and the eventual
acceptance of imperialist dictation and the formation of neoliberal regimes by
the local bourgeoisies. This internal factor was certainly decisive in India, where
the post-colonial state begat quite a powerful industrial/financial bourgeoisie
hothouse-fashion and created a widespread class of rich farmers in the coun-
tryside but never emancipated the vast bulk of the poor and landless peasantry.
That type of state itself began to decay by the mid-70s, and when the appro-
priate moment arrived the bourgeoisie cut loose from the project of state-led
growth strategies and reconciled itself to a greatly subordinated status in the
structure of global capitalism. A major external factor contributing to the fate
of the national-bourgeois project was the existence of the Soviet bloc which
provided key supports for it in terms of technological inputs, finance and
markets; the demise of the Soviet bloc also ended what little had remained of
that project. Imperialist pressure was in any case the largest element in the
demise of that project.
The defeat and/or decline of the democratic, secular, anti-colonial nationalism
has given rise, in a host of countries, from India to Egypt to Algeria, to hyster-
ical, irrationalist forms of cultural nationalism and atavistic hysteria. I have been
arguing elsewhere in my writings that in the whole history of modern nation-
alism, from the early years of the nineteenth century onward, there has been a
ferocious struggle between the Enlightenment project of equal citizenship and
rational self-emancipation on the one hand, and the romanticist, identitarian,
racialistic, religiously bigoted nationalisms. What we are seeing today is that the
defeat of the Enlightenment project has necessarily led to the rise of savage iden-
tities based on race or religion. As Clara Zetkin once put it, fascism is a just
reward for the failure to make the revolution.
This brings us to Al Qaida. In the Arab world, where the zionist state was a
chief instrumentality of US imperialism, it was in the crucible of the Six Day
IMPERIALISM OF OUR TIME 57
War of 1967 Israels professedly pre-emptive invasion of Egypt, instant
destruction of its Air Force, occupation of the Sinai that the radical-nation-
alist project of Nasserism collapsed; the re-stabilization of the monarchies and
resurgence of political Islam in the Arab world can be dated back to that cata-
strophe. Defeat of the left and of the secular-democratic forces of national
liberation in Palestine accounts for the latter-day rise of Hamas and the suicide
bombers. In Iran, the destruction of the communist movement and forces of
secular nationalism by the joint efforts of the CIA and Shahs secret police paved
the way for the Islamic regime to fill the vacuum and hijack the anti-monar-
chical, reformist sentiments of the Irani people. In Afghanistan, the US
sponsored an elaborate, ferocious war against the reformist regime brought
about by the communist forces, assembled a huge international force of
Islamicist extremists to fight against communism and brought to the world stage
the so-called mujahideen, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and the rest; that is
the monster of its own making that came to haunt the United States on 11
th
September 2001.
VI
We may now, finally, return to the question with which we began, namely
wherein lies the specificity of Bush Jrs regime. It does not lie, in the first instance,
in the invasion of either Afghanistan or Iraq. In the case of Afghanistan, the US
has only come back to profit from the war it initiated in 1978, under Carter,
against the then new and deeply secular regime of the Peoples Democratic Party
of Afghanistan (PDPA), through their Islamicist proxies who called themselves
mujahideen (fighters of the faith); Brzezinski, Carters National Security
Advisor, has written that he sponsored that war with the explicit objective of
drawing in the Soviets and the Soviets obliged by walking into the trap. Taliban
(literally, students) arose from among the youngsters and children who grew up
in the refugee camps that the war itself had produced; they were trained in semi-
naries established with the express purpose of producing more fighters of the
faith in American service; and the regime of their Islamicist faction was foisted
upon that wretched and bleeding country by the Pakistani intelligence agencies
upon US advice. The so-called Arab Afghanis, among whom Osama was a
leader, were CIA agents recruited to fight the Soviets. When the Taliban refused
to cooperate fully with the US in its designs on Central Asian oil, the US decided
to invade. Niaz Naik, the dean of Pakistans diplomatic corps, said on the BBC
that he had been told by the Americans during the summer of 2001 that inva-
sion would begin in October. The events of 11
th
September came between the
making of the design and its execution.
War against Iraq began not in 2003 but in the course of the so-called Gulf
War, in 1991, which continued through sanctions and no-fly zones, for over a
decade longer than the combined duration of the First and Second World Wars
under three consecutive US Presidents, two Republicans (father and son) and
SOCIALIST REGISTER 2004 58
one Democrat (Clinton, the New Democrat who inspired New Labour across
the Atlantic). It was during the Clinton Presidency that the US Congress passed
the Iraq Liberation Act, in 1998. When the sanctions regime was estimated by
some UN agencies to have killed half a million Iraqi children, and journalists
asked Clintons Secretary of State Madeleine Albright whether their death was
worth the price of upholding the sanctions, she said the price was worth it. The
so-called no-fly zones in northern and eastern Iraq were declared by Boutros
Boutros-Ghali, the UN Secretary-General, to be illegal, and yet under that
scheme the Anglo-American bombardment of Iraq became the longest aerial
campaign since the Second World War; in 1999 alone 1800 bombs were
dropped and 450 targets hit. Cumulatively, over some twelve years, the tonnage
dropped on Iraq came to equal seven Hiroshimas.
Regime change is a catchy phrase, and the Bush Administration has
undoubtedly raised it to the status of a legitimate right of imperial sovereignty.
However, the US has been doing it for decades. It did so in Iraq itself when the
CIA helped overthrow the progressive regime of Abd al-Karim Kassem in 1964
and brought in the Baath party regime (We came to power on a CIA train,
exulted the General-Secretary of Saddams parent party), paving the way for the
eventual personal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein who remained a close US ally
throughout the 1980s when he fought a US-assisted war against Iran. Regime
change is what the CIA brought to Iran in 1953 and the US military to Grenada
and Panama more recently. And the history of the US coming as liberators and
staying as occupiers goes back to the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth
century.
What is specific to the Bush regime is the combination of an intensification
of such long-standing trends as well as a cluster of novelties which, taken
together, amount to something of a historic break. Intensification of trends is
obvious enough. What are the novelties internal to Bush Jrs Presidency? First,
the manner of his election: he was elevated to the Presidency by a judicial deci-
sion of dubious merit, combined with widely suspected disenfranchisement of a
considerable section of the black electorate in the state of Florida which happened
to be run by his brother, Jeb. Jeb Bushs other major contribution to Bush Jrs
campaign was that he was the one who assembled that cabal of the neo-conser-
vatives, drawn from the think-tanks of the far right and supervised by Dick
Cheney, who came to define the domestic as well as foreign policies, the civilian
as well as military structures, of the United States after the elections: they
captured the Pentagon, hence the US military machine, just as the Bush brothers
captured the White House.
The second novelty of this Presidency, which distinguishes it from the
preceding ones, is the will to radically re-make the United States itself as it sets
out to re-map the globe. Dick Cheneys bland prediction that the war against
terrorism may last for fifty years or more, and General Tommy Franks predic-
tion even before the invasion of Iraq that US troops may have to be stationed
there fairly indefinitely, on the model of Korea, is matched by a politics of
IMPERIALISM OF OUR TIME 59
permanent hysteria at home, invoking a mixture of extreme insecurity and
atavistic patriotism. The general populace is being persuaded to surrender many
of its own fundamental rights, and to endorse distinctions between those born
on US soil and the naturalized citizens, between immigrants from one part of the
world and another, between good and bad members of one faith, Islam all
this buttressed by a historically new and now very extensive alliance between
extreme zionism and Christian fundamentalism. The assault on American liber-
ties is itself being coded as Patriot Act I & II. This tie between hysterical
patriotism and a docile populace whose own rights are being abridged is itself
something of a quasi-fascist move. Meanwhile, the already existing policies of
shifting incomes upward and offering tax bonanzas to corporations and the rich
while bankrupting the social state have been accelerated to a degree that a
successor government may not even have the resources to save such things as
Social Security in its present form even if it had the desire to do so.
What is being reversed, thus, is not only the so-called Vietnam syndrome but
even aspects of American social life dating back to the New Deal. In Re-
Building Americas Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New
Century, a report prepared by an impressive cross-section of the neo-conserv-
ative elite including Paul Wolfowitz, and issued by The Project for a New
American Century in September 2000, the authors remarked that the kind of
sweeping changes they are proposing may take some time unless some cata-
strophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbour, were to occur. 11
th
September 2001 was the event they were waiting for. Condoleeza Rice urged
her colleagues the next morning that ways be found to capitalize on these
opportunities, while Donald Rumsfeld urged immediate invasion of Iraq.
How does one comprehend this peculiar mix of continuities and discontinu-
ities as a whole? One way of putting it is that the rightwing backlash which began
in the United States in the late 1960s (in response to the military defeats it was
facing in Indochina, on the one hand, and, on the other, the immense successes
at home of the Anti-Vietnam War movement, the radicalization of Afro-
American politics, and the rise of the womens movement) has finally grown and
matured to the point where it has actually captured state power. This offensive
was prepared over a quarter century or more and Bush Jrs Presidency represents
something of a historic break in the sense that these trends had remained scattered
and subordinated to other exigencies of power, and its representatives, even as
they began occupying positions in the Reagan and Bush Sr.s administrations,
were not in charge of all the key institutions of state, as they now are. One notable
feature of this counteroffensive has been the role that think tanks and foundations
of the far right have played in funding, training and delivering the requisite
personnel transforming the intellectual climate in the US, and now the state appa-
ratus. Another notable feature is the role quasi-messianic evangelical Christianity
has played in preparing popular sensibilities receptive to all these changes.
A group of New York intellectuals had begun arguing as far back as the Nixon
Presidency that the New Left, the anti-war movement, black nationalism,
SOCIALIST REGISTER 2004 60
womens liberation movements et al collectively comprised a disruptive but
highly vocal minority and the real task was to organize and mobilize the Silent
Majority which was opposed to all that. Milton Friedman at Chicago University
formulated an assault on the social state and advanced the ideology of the market
as the final arbiter of the social good. His colleague Alan Bloom wrote best-
selling books on the destruction of the American Mind by the reforms that
leftwing/black/feminist pressures had forced upon the educational system,
including the formidable elite universities. Blooms teacher, Leo Straus, himself
trained some of those who were to emerge within the last decade as members
of the neo-conservative intellectual elite. Hundreds of large and small, inter-
locking, neoliberal organizations now dotted the American landscape, and a rash
of not very widely known rightwing foundations started appearing the
Carthage Foundation, the Henry M. Olin Foundation, the Phillip M. McKenna
Foundation, the Henry Salvatori Foundation etc, etc. which then helped to
fund the more prestigious and influential ones: the American Enterprise
Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the elite of all neo-
conservative think-tanks, The Project for the New American Century, whose
founders include the core of the Bush Administration: Vice President Dick
Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defence Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz, Cheneys Chief Staff Lewis I. Libby, Reagans Education Secretary
William Bennet, and Zalmay Khalilzad, Bushs shadowy representative first in
Afghanistan and then in Iraq.
A word about evangelical Christianity. When Reagan was re-elected with the
largest electoral sweep in history, losing only one state, it was revealed that only
27 per cent of the potential voters had actually voted in his favour; the majority
had stayed home. At the same time, a Gallup poll showed that 27 per cent of
Americans subscribes to some variety of evangelical Christianity, and commen-
tators noted that if all of them were to be mobilized as a voting bloc the US could
have a permanent government of the far right. Not all of them have been mobi-
lized yet but that kind of government has now arrived. While Reagan gifted
us supply-side economics and Star Wars, and the Left thought that he was as bad
it could get, the rightwing of the Republican party thought of him as a Roosevelt
democrat. That rightwing is now in power.
We may be witnessing an imperial overreach. Overdetermined by their own
ideological delusions, Bushs neocons may be pursuing policies that far exceed
the logic of global capitalism or the requirements of the imperial US state; even
George Soros seems to think so. Two former Presidents, including the current
Presidents father, opposed the invasion of Iraq before it happened. Ever the
mildly Presbyterian Trilaterist, Bush Sr. emphasized that the US needed alliance
with Europe and the war on Iraq would undermine it. As we have seen, the
Franco-German alliance has accepted the consequences, however resentfully. But
Iraq may yet prove to be a quagmire that cures the US populace of any appetite
for the real wars that are fought on the other side of their TV screens. They may
yet come to comprehend what a menace this Administration is for their own
IMPERIALISM OF OUR TIME 61
security, especially as old age sets in, and to the security of their children. At the
same time, the global revolt against imperial America that we witnessed on the
eve of the Iraq invasion may regain momentum. This moment of neo-conserv-
ative extremity may yet pass as one of many murderous episodes in imperial
history.
SOCIALIST REGISTER 2004 62