Superintending global capital

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 35, 2005, Pages 101-123

  Panitch, Leo ^a   Gindin, Sam ^a  

^a YORK UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

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EID: 27744569958     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (40)

1. See Giovanni Arrighi, 'Hegemony Unravelling-I', NLR 32, March-April 2005
2. and 'Hegemony Unravelling-II', NLR 33, May-June 2005.
3. See also David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford 2003.
4. This essay builds on our previous work, both in these pages ('The New Imperial State', NLR 2, March-April 2000) and in the Socialist Register:
5. see 'Global Capitalism and American Empire' in The New Imperial Challenge: Socialist Register 2004;
6. and 'Finance and American Empire' in The Empire Reloaded: Socialist Register 2005.
7. 'The fundamental principle of Empire is that its power has no actual and localizable terrain or centre ... the United States does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the centre of an imperialist project': Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA 2000, pp. 384 and xiii-xiv.
8. On the transnational state, see most recently William Robinson, A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class and State in a Transnational World, Baltimore, MD 2004.
9. The establishment of liberal democracy has, of course, been a long and uneven historical process, not realized in a great many developing capitalist states today; China among them.
10. Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital, London 2003, pp. 73, 100.
11. Bukharin's analysis was richer than Lenin's; but although he begins his essay by invoking 'The struggle between "national" states', his analysis of the state remains perfunctory. Nikolai Bukharin, Imperialism and the World Economy [1917], London 1987.
12. As Giovanni Arrighi pointedly observed at the end of the 1970s, 'the classical body of theories of imperialism ... had become irrelevant as outlines for interpretive accounts of world-historical events, trends and developmental tendencies since the Second World War': The Geometry of Imperialism, London 1978, p. 160. In this context 'imperialism', previously understood as a relationship of rivalry within the developed capitalist world that affected the periphery, was redefined so that the core-periphery relationship became imperialism's essence. Yet here, too, theorization of the state fell short, with the focus kept rather on the economic processes that generated underdevelopment.
13. Quoted in William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life, New York 1980, p. 189.
14. Geir Lundestad, 'Empire by Invitation? United States and Western Europe 1945-52', Journal of Peace Research, vol. 23, no. 3, September 1986.
15. See his recent United States and Western Europe since 1945, Oxford 2004, which describes the decade of the 1990s in terms of 'renewed invitations'.
16. Where this did not occur, as in Japan, imperial linkages relied rather on military and trade dependence.
17. See Greg Albo, 'Contesting the New Capitalism', in David Coates, ed., Varieties of Capitalism, Varieties of Approaches, New York 2005;
18. and Stephen Gill, Power and Resistance in the New World Order, New York 2003.
19. Economist, 3 February 2005.
20. See Leonard Seabrooke, US Power in International Finance, New York 2001.
21. For the historical comparisons, see Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective, Paris 2001.
22. Growth rates: Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA) tables, 1950-73; 1984-2004.
23. A contrasting assessment of us growth performance, based on a different periodization, is offered by Robert Brenner, 'The Capitalist Economy, 1945-2000: A Reply to Konings and Panitch and Gindin' in Coates, Varieties of Capitalism, pp. 215-16. By making 1973-96 rather than 1984-2004 his period of comparison, Brenner includes the crisis decade of the 19705 (whereas our concern is with economic growth following the turn to neoliberalism) and leaves out the relatively high growth rates of the late 1990s and after the 2001 recession.
24. Bureau of Labor Statistics productivity data; productivity is measured as output per hour. Real output per full-time employee more than doubled in manufacturing for 1977-2001, but fell by almost 13 per cent in services; since additional labour hours in the service sector bring down the average, overall productivity in the American economy has declined slightly.
25. Charles Kelley et al, 'High-Technology Manufacturing and US Competitiveness', Rand Corporation, March 2004;
26. National Science Board, Science and Engineering Indicators, 2004, Figure 6-5. South Korea and China increased from about 1 per cent to 7 and almost 9 per cent respectively.
27. OECD, Economic Outlook 76, Statistical Annex, Table 38. us exports did fall in volume terms between 2001-3, but have risen rapidly since.
28. BEA, Survey of Current Business, January 2005, p. 79.
29. BEA, NIPA Table 1.12, February 2005. A rising proportion of this is accounted for by finance, an issue we take up below.
30. Arrighi, 'Hegemony Unravelling-II', NLR 33, pp. 108-13.
31. BEA, Survey of Current Business, July 2004, p. 23.
32. BEA, US International Transactions Accounts, 15 March 2005.
33. A. G. Kenwood and A. L. Lougheed, The Growth of the International Economy 1820-2000, London 1999, p. 28.
34. See our 'Finance and American Empire', esp. pp. 60-6.
35. See Arrighi, 'Hegemony Unravelling'
36. and Harvey, New imperialism;
37. and, although on the basis of a different argument, Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, 'The Economics of us Imperialism at the Turn of the 21st Century', Review of International Political Economy, vol. II, no. 4, 2004.
38. Richard Duncan, 'How Japan financed global reflation', Finance Asia, 10 March 2005.
39. Arrighi, 'Hegemony Unravelling-I', pp. 74, 57.
40. Financial Times, 12 November 2003.