America Drinks and Goes Home: Empire in the Age of Capital

“American Imperialism” is a banality of our daily discourse, and yet its a term I struggle to make ontological sense of. "American Empire" seems an apt moniker for an overfed and bellicose international pariah state with a messianic mission to hoist its flag of limited democracy and free market capitalism over the entire world, yet it somehow fails to adequately describe the contemporary geopolitical configuration and the plurality of state power in which it obtains. Didn't Tony Blair walk arm in arm with Bush 43 into the Iraq catasptrophe? Didn't Nicolas Sarcozy lead the cheer for the invasion and destruction of Libya? What do we make of the naked Anglophilia of the US ruling class and its insipid fawning over British royals? Considering the broad changes in social and class relationships which have led us to this point in history, it seems reasonable to ask what does empire look like in the 21st century? Was empire under capitalism ever the sovereign domain of nation-states, or rather the province of an international ruling elite?

The American (counter) Revolution

The US was established as a bastion of European mercantilism at a time when Europe was being threatened by revolutions. Indeed, the American War of Independence was fought partly to protect the rights of slave owners. The African slave trade was arguably the most profitable market boom in human history, but it had its bust when the market became flooded with rebellious slaves who vastly outnumbered their owners. A new paradigm asserted itself in industrial capitalism. A labour force paid well enough to balance both supply and demand set the wheels of commerce in perpetual motion.

At the same time European mercantilism was also transforming the world economy on a structural level. Enter the British East India Company, arguably the world's first too-big-to-fail state-sponsored multinational corporation. Chartered by Elizabeth I in 1600, the EIC came to control trade across most of the Indian sub-continent, expanding into Qing China and maritime Southeast Asia. For two and a half centuries it accounted for approximately half of the world's trade in cotton, silk, salt, tea and opium.

Today capital moves freely across borders and the super rich hold multiple passports. Today’s multinationals have revenues larger than the GDP of most first world economies, and seem to exert unlimited power and influence in political circles. The appointment of Rex Tillerson to US Secretary of State was hardly remarkable. Neither was former US Vice President Biden's son, Hunter Biden, accepting a position on the board at Ukraine's largest private gas firm. Both serve to illustrate the incestuous relationship between state power and private capital.

According to received wisdom, the British and French economies were bankrupted by the two great inter-imperial wars of the last century, whereupon the baton of Western economic hegemony was passed to the United States (per the 1945 Bretton Woods pact.) The US, having already stamped its imperial footprint over Mexico and the native territories, Hawaii, Haiti, most of Latin America, Canada, and the Philippines, by this time came to occupy most of Western Europe and a large chunk of the Pacific as well.

In 1971 Richard Nixon tore up the Bretton Woods agreement, unilaterally terminating the rights of foreign central banks to convert dollars to gold. Then in 1973 US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger brokered a godfather deal with the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) demanding that oil exports be priced in US dollars. US treasury notes became indispensable currency to any oil importing country, allowing the US to rack up trillions in external debt while trading its worthless paper currency for real commodities.

The Political Economy of Global Finance

Capitalism is an insatiable beast, and not immune to bouts of anorexic indigestion. Even while gorging itself on the combined productive output of the rest of the world's economies, the US had its finger down its own throat, and soon began purging its internal labour markets and industrial base under the maxim of neoliberal globalisation. Lenin describes imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism, in which financial capital functions to generate profits from imperialist colonialism. But with anti-democratic supra-national institutions such as the G7, IMF, WTO, EU and NATO now safeguarding global capitalism, and the US playing a more isolationist roll under Trump, what does this mean for US imperium?

"The USA is nothing more than an Oil Company with an army" -George Carlin

Returning to our thesis, the US was established as a frontier trading post for a European merchant class; a shell company for a transnational oligarchy. It could be argued that it never became an empire in any permanent, trans-historical sense; because prevailing hegemonic institutional structures do not allow for an "american" empire (understood as a temporally and territorially defined property regime under its own sovereign.) I suggest that the current geopolitical configuration reflects a diminution of state sovereignty and a shift in the locus of political authority toward a heterogeneous, dynamic constellation of state, non-state and interstate actors holding property rights across multiple territories. In other words, a 'global' empire. If I had to give a name to this beast I'd call it the Atlantic World Economy.

Today’s inter-imperial rivalry takes place within a dialectic of completing globalisms. As Gramsci famously wrote, The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Alt-media pundits suggest that we are feeling the birth pains of an emerging 'multi-polar' world order, in which each country will be free to pursue its own path toward development according to the principle of sovereign equality. But is such a world even possible given the penetration of capital?

Today we see China and Russia stepping up to the plate, threatening Anglo-American hegemony with a range of new alternatives; alternative energy markets, alternative trade partnerships, even an alternative currency exchange to undermine US dollar primacy. Conspicuously absent seems to be any alternative system of economic organisation whose explicit and sole purpose is not the extraction of profit. Instead it's stock markets and multi-nationals as far as the eye can see. All of which leads us to an awkward question...

As China expands into new global markets and Russia performs its geopolitical balancing act on the world stage, and as new financial instruments begin to weaken the grip of the dollar, will we see rising wages in Africa and the Caribbean? Or just an increased market share for Rosneft, Sinopec, and China National Petroleum? When America finally packs up its missiles and goes home, will it usher in a golden age of peace and prosperity for all? Or will we find ourselves further along the road toward a globalised world under the dictatorship of capital?