Imperialism in the 21st century

Recently, we saw the retreat of globalisation, which was spurred by many factors, including the resurgence of economic nationalism by the global South, Trump’s anti-democratic posture, which started a trade war with China, Brexit, which undermined global cooperation, and the vagaries exposed by the Russia-Ukraine war.

Everything that has gone haywire, such as the fall in the effective demand of people and the sweep of the left in Europe, has its own history that has been engineered by the global north to assert ‘Americanization or eurocentrisization of the whole world.

The book ‘A theory of imperialism’ essentially exposes the exploitation and plunder that capitalism vis-à-vis neoliberalism is characterised by. Written by the noted professors Utsa and Prabhat Pattnaik, the work attempts to uncover the political economy behind the grand project of neoliberalism. To many, imperialism is a thing gone by that existed in the form of the territorial conquest of countries, and by turning them into colonies, resources were appropriated. However, they tend to oversee the imperialistic tendencies that are prevalent in capitalism. David Harvey divides imperialism into two categories: one, which he calls the territorial logic of power, and the current, which he calls the capitalist logic of power, which is based on coercion and passive appropriation strategies.

The authors divide the world into blocks: the temperate and the tropical regions. The tropical regions can produce any commodity, even those produced by the temperate regions, while the reverse is not possible. They specialise in producing primary commodities, which are mostly located in the global south. However, as per the authors, capital needs raw materials to reproduce itself, failing which the whole capital will get devalued or destroyed. In order to ensure a smooth supply, a measure is adopted by the capital-rich countries, which they call income deflation, to keep the domestic demand for the primary commodities down. In colonial times, it was done through taxes levied by the colonisers and the plundering of the export surplus; now it is done through various kinds of austerity measures.

David Harvey calls it accumulation by dispossession. In the guise of economic recovery, the prescription given is to sell off national assets, the government takes a back seat, etc. They recall how, after 1991, the agricultural sector in India was decimated because of wholesale privatisation, which made land augmentation difficult and impacted the welfare of many poor farmers in the country. Economists across the spectrum have been warning against the austerity measures that express themselves in the form of the loosening of capital controls, the retreat of government regulations on the private sector, and reduced spending on public welfare. Joseph Stiglitz says that measures like these are self-destructive because they inject money into the coffers of foreign MNCs at the expense of the local population. Instead, what should be done is a Keynesian approach coupled with tightened capital controls to prevent the flight of capital and speculative investments. The IMF and the World Bank have put the Third World’s economy into peril by way of structural adjustment programs and good governance. Such countries include Argentina, Indonesia, Greece, and Bolivia.

Then the authors turn to the exploitation of labour that underlies capitalism. They adopt the reserve industrial army concept of Karl Marx to say that in order to ensure low wages and high profits, numerous people are kept in reserve as unemployed, which has been done by including more people in the labour force like women, children etc. The recent debate on paying for the household work, they call it the feminisation of proletarization, which will only deepen structural inequalities. Historically, the workforce living in the developed world was immune to the effects of this huge industrial army.

Now with the coming up of globalization, it has started to be impacted. It is noteworthy to bring Rosa Luxembourg here, who says that in capitalism the relationship of this developed world with the capitalist world and the non-capitalistic world is distinctly different, in that coercion instead of consent is used in exchange. Capitalism, according to the authors, is characterized by two tendencies; underconsumption, which is defined by the prevalence of much poverty; and over accumulation, which exists by way of surplus of labour, capital etc. One of the best ways for capital is to travel to other countries and build various kinds of facilities. However, in that guise, it leads to the plunder of the local resources, the impoverishment of the people etc. This is done by the predatory lending practices of the IMF, that make them dependent on the US for everything. Between 2010 and 2018, the external debt payments by developing countries grew by 85% as a part of government revenue.

The authors call for a decoupling of the economy, which implies the resurgence of the socialist state that controls every sphere of society. The books succinctly exhibit the grand project behind the creation of various financial institutions, and the promotion of liberal values. The US and the UK have been on their road to becoming developed and also applied protectionist barriers. The agricultural subsidies in the US are a testament to that. The authors contend that there has been a parallel rise of neo-fascism, which is explained by the rise of the corporate world, inequality, the assault on the state, and culminating into the retreat of democracy across the whole world.

By: Azher Ahmad Dar

The author is currently a student at Delhi University.