Africa: Imperialism Goes Naked by Sarah Bracking and Graham Harrison
(clip)
Marx never used the term imperialism, but it remains a key part of any analysis of contemporary global capitalism. The sinews of political power and accumulation that are derivative of capitalism’s birth as a global creature might have twisted and turned, but they continue to connect African societies to a complex, combined, and uneven global political economy which has hardly served the people of Africa favorably. Imperialism has almost always been a concept used to evoke a critique of the global political economy: to identify the inequities of what is now called “globalization”; to condemn the bullying tactics of Western states; to investigate the cultural arrogance and discursive authoritarianism of liberalism’s marriage to “freedom, equality, property and Bentham,” that is, capitalism. Imperialism has also been associated with political struggle as a device to identify oppressive forces working at an international level as a means to political action.
Imperialism has come to encompass different meanings to the extent that one has to clarify what one means by imperialism before using the term. Imperialism has a much longer history than its contemporary pretender, “globalization,” and one can discern three principal “angles” that writers take with the concept. First, imperialism relates to a process of capital export from developed capitalist economies to the colonies. Second, it addresses itself to the economic dominance of the “core” of the world-system in the postcolonial regions of the world: the pernicious effects of transnational corporations, unequal exchange in trade and technological dominance. In this second sense inequities between states, and within the interstate system, create opportunities for exploitation of the periphery by the core. Finally, in a third context, imperialism refers to the predominance of the United States and its militarized bullying of so many postcolonial states since 1945. One might dub these three approaches as “expansive,” “dependency,” and “yanqui” imperialism respectively. Each has a kernel of truth, but each approach in itself tends to reduce the complexities and contradictions of global capitalism to a single argument. What is needed is to bring these themes together—to move beyond each of these three categories—in a global political economy of capitalism to demonstrate the relevance of imperialism to Africa’s contemporary global situation. The best way to do this is by looking at actual regimes of accumulation.
The three perspectives, and the political claims that they have generated, have produced much debate: is imperialism the last stage or pioneer of capitalism? Is imperialism a product of monopoly capitalism or the need for “peripheries” as Luxemburg argued? And most recently, has the world reached a stage of post-imperialism, where capitalism has become sufficiently de-centered that it no longer has a “home address”? The notion of post-imperialism is preemptive. Fred Halliday (in an essay in M. Rupert and H. Smith, ed, Historical Materialism and Globalization [2002]) demonstrates this by presenting a condensed “constitution” of imperialism, which hardly seems archaic, especially with respect to Africa:
--The inexorable expansion of capitalism as a socioeconomic system on a world scale;
--The necessarily competitive, expansionist, and warlike character of developed capitalist states;
--The unequal nature of capitalist expansion, and the reproduction on a world scale of socioeconomic inequalities;
--The creation on a world scale of structures of inequality of power and wealth not only in the economic, but also social, political, legal, and cultural spheres;
--The generation, through the very process of capitalist expansion, of movements of resistance, of anti-imperialism.
full: http://www.monthlyreview.org/1103bracking.htm
--
The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
