Global Capitalism and American Empire

Abstract

The left needs a new theorization of imperialism, one that will transcend the limitations of the old Marxist 'stagist' theory of inter-imperial rivalry, and allow for a full appreciation of the historical factors that have led to the formation of a unique American informal empire. This will involve understanding how the American state developed the capacity to eventually incorporate its capitalist rivals, and oversee and police 'globalization'--i.e. the spread of capitalist social relations to every corner of the world. The theory must be able to answer the question of what made plausible the American state's insistence that it was not imperialistic, and how this was put into practice and institutionalized; and, conversely, what today makes implausible the American state's insistence that it is not imperialistic, and what effects its lack of concealment might have in terms of its attractiveness and its capacity to manage global capitalism and sustain its global empire.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 222 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.