In addition to the DWSR and the renewed financial dominance of the United States, the US Empire maintains itself through its ability to influence multilateral organizations and pressure countries to apply neoliberal reforms. I have already briefly mentioned how international financial institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank serve the interests of US capitalism, but it is important to discuss this issue in further detail.
By the 1970s and 1980s, intensified competition and increasing congestion and saturation in world markets pushed the United States into seeking new ways of maintaining high levels of profit. Instead of continuing to rely on the normal capitalist method of accumulating wealth (by expanding production and appropriating the newly-created surplus), the US began instead to revert to primitive accumulation, or what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession.” This process, rather than generating new wealth, relies on the appropriation of the already-existing surplus of other countries. Neoliberalization is the primary tool the US uses for accomplishing this goal.
Neoliberal reform packages are often pushed onto countries as a prerequisite for gaining access to funds from international lending agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank, within which the US Treasury wields dominant authority (Mann, 232). Yet the pro-market agenda advanced by these bodies is not designed to foster economic growth. Instead, neoliberal restructuring is used as a means to expropriate land, capital, social infrastructure, and natural resources that are publicly owned and sell them at very low cost to transnational investors. Harvey explains this as a method of “open[ing] up new fields for capital accumulation in domains hitherto regarded off-limits to the calculus of profitability” (Harvey 160). Even sources of value such as indigenous knowledge and biological resources that were previously never even thought of as marketable products can be turned into commodities and monopolized (Parenti, 33).
This redistribution of assets from lower to upper classes by means of forced privatization and commodification is a principal method through which the US maintains its imperial relations with poor countries. The neoliberal strategy allows the United States to extract far more wealth from the developing world than it to puts in through investment. It is therefore no surprise that while during the 1960s, “only” three dollars flowed to the northern hemisphere for every dollar flowing to the southern hemisphere, by the late 1990s this ratio grew to seven to one (Rees, 258). The unfair trade and investment rules that the US promotes throughout the global South in order to enable accumulation by dispossession are thus principal means through which the United States maintains its global economic supremacy.
Conclusion
Ellen Meiksins Wood points out that “there is an analogous difference between non-capitalist and capitalist imperialisms” (Wood, 12). Whereas old colonial empires used “extra-economic” coercion (such as military conquest and direct political rule) to dominate territory and subject peoples, capitalist imperialism can exercise its rule by economic means-by manipulating the market and using financial leverage to indirectly colonize weaker countries. While these nations may be granted the trappings of sovereignty, an imposture often supported by associated native elites, foreign capital can still retain control over their most profitable resources.
It is in this sense that we can talk about the United States as a global empire. Although the US’s means of imperial domination and benefits (surplus) extraction may differ from those used by earlier empires, the economic result remains the same. Wealth is methodically extracted from the colonized periphery in order to feed the imperial core. While this arrangement continues to provide ruling interests within the United States with an unprecedented degree of wealth and power, chronic underdevelopment and poverty is the lot to be endured by the rest.
Bryn Lloyd-Bollard originates from North Hampton MA, and is currently a graduate student studying Global Politics at the London School of Economics. Additionally, Mr. Ballard is also a member of the Communist Party, USA, and an aspiring journalist. Mr. Ballard has written for such publications as the People’s Weekly World, Marxism-Leninism Today, The Valley War Bulletin, and SpeakLeft.
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