Global Capitalism and American Empire Essays

Global Capitalism and American Empire Essays Global Capitalism and American Empire Essay Global Capitalism and American Empire Essay the term imperialism was finally back on every leftist’s – and even a good many liberals’ lips. The popularity of Hardt and Negri’s tome, Empire, had caught the new conjuncture, even before the second war on Iraq. But their insistence (reflecting the widespread notion that the power of all nation states had withered in the era of globalization) that ‘the United States does not, and indeed no nation state can today, form the center of an imperialist project’ was itself bizarrely out of sync with the times. 4 The left needs a new theorization of imperialism, one that will transcend the limitations of the old Marxist ‘stagist’ theory of inter-imperial rivalry, and allow for a full appreciation of the historical factors that led to the formation of a unique American informal empire. This will involve understanding how the American state developed the capacities to eventually incorporate its capitalist rivals, and oversee and police ‘globalization’- i. e. the spread of capitalist social relations to every corner of the world. Central to this must be the question of what made plausible the American state’s insistence that it was not imperialistic, and how this was put into practice and institutionalized; and, conversely, what today makes implausible the American state’s insistence that it is not imperialistic, and what effects its lack of concealment might mean in terms of its attractiveness and its capacity to manage global capitalism and sustain its global empire. II 5 There is a structural logic to capitalism that tends to its expansion and internationalization. This was famously captured in Marx’s description in the Communist Manifesto of a future that stunningly matches our present: ‘The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. . . it creates a world after its own image. ’ But affirming Marx’s prescience in this respect runs the risk of treating what is now called globalization as inevitable and irreversible. It must be remembered that Marx’s words also seemed to apply at the end of the 19th century, when, as Karl Polanyi noted, ‘[o]nly a madman would have doubted that the international economic system was the axis of the material existence of the human race’. 15 Yet, as Polanyi was concerned to explain, far from continuing uninterrupted, there were already indications that the international economic system of the time was in the early stages of dissolution, and would soon collapse via two horrific world wars and the implosion of the Great Depression. The postwar reconstruction of the capitalist world order was a direct response on the part of the leading capitalist states to that earlier failure of globalization. Through the Bretton Woods infrastructure for a new liberal trading order, the dynamic logic of capitalist globalization was once again unleashed. During the brief post-war ‘golden age’ – through the acceleration of trade, the new degree of direct foreign investment, and the growing internationalization of finance – capitalist globalization was revived. And it was further invigorated through the neoliberal response to the economic crisis of the 1970s. The outcome of this crisis showed that the international effects of structural crises in accumulation are not predictable a priori. Of the three great structural crises of 6 capitalism, the first (post-1870s) accelerated inter-imperialist rivalry and led to World War One and Communist revolution, while the second crisis (the Great Depression) actually reversed capitalism’s internationalizing trajectory. Yet the crisis of the early 1970s was followed by a deepening, acceleration and extension of capitalist globalization. Nor did this, while promoting inter-regional economic competition, produce anything like the old inter-imperial rivalry. What this erratic trajectory from the 19th to the 21st century suggests is that the process of globalization is neither inevitable (as was conventionally assumed in the latter nineteenth century and as is generally assumed again today) nor impossible to sustain (as Lenin and Polanyi, in their different ways, both contended). The point is that we need to distinguish between the expansive tendency of capitalism and its actual history. A global capitalist order is always a contingent social construct: the actual development and continuity of such an order must be problematized. There is a tendency within Marxism, as in much bourgeois analysis, to write theory in the present tense. We must not theorize history in such a way that the trajectory of capitalism is seen as a simple derivative of abstract economic laws. Rather, as Philip McMichael has argued, we need to ‘historicize theory and problematize globalization as a relation immanent in capitalism, but with quite distinct material (social, political and environmental) relations across time and timespace†¦ Globalization is not simply the unfolding of capitalist tendencies but a historically distinct project shaped, or complicated, by the contradictory relations of previous episodes of globalization. 16 Above all, the realization or frustration of capitalism’s globalizing tendencies cannot be understood apart from the role play by the states that have historically 7 constituted the capitalist world. The rise of capitalism is inconceivable without the role that European states played in establishing the legal and infrastructural frameworks for property, contract, currency, competition and wage-labour within their own borders, while also generating the process of uneven development and the attendant construction of race in t he modern world. This had gone so far by the mid to late 19th century that when capital expanded beyond the borders of a given European nation-state, it was by then hosted in the capitalist orders that had been – or were then just becoming established by other states, or it expanded within a framework of formal or informal empire. Yet this was not enough to sustain capital’s tendency to global expansion. No adequate means of overall global capitalist regulation existed, leaving the international economy and its patterns of accumulation fragmented, and thus fueling the inter-imperial rivalry that led to World War One. The classical theories of imperialism developed at the time, from Hobson to Lenin, were founded on a theorization of capitalist economic stages and crises. This was a fundamental mistake that has, ever since, continued to plague proper understanding. 17 The classical theories were defective in their historical reading of imperialism, in their treatment of the dynamics of capital accumulation, and in their elevation of a conjunctural moment of inter-imperial rivalry to an immutable law of capitalist globalization. A distinctive capitalist imperialism did not suddenly arrive with the socalled monopoly or finance-capital stage of capitalism in the 19th late century, as we argue below. Moreover, the theory of crisis derived from the classical understanding of this period was mistakenly used to explain capitalism’s expansionist tendencies. If capitalists looked to the export of capital as well as trade in foreign markets, it was not so 8 much because centralization and concentration of capital had ushered in a new stage marked by the falling rate of profit, overaccumulation and/or underconsumption. Rather, akin to the process that had earlier led individual units of capital to move out of their original location in a given village or town, it was the accelerated competitive pressures and opportunities, and the attendant strategies and emerging capacities of a developing capitalism, that pushed and facilitated the international expansionism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The classical theorists of imperialism also failed to adequately apprehend the spatial dimensions of this internationalization. They made too much of the export of oods and capital to what we now call the ‘third world’ the latter’s very underdevelopment limited its capacity to absorb such flows. And they failed to discern two key developments in the leading capitalist countries themselves. Rather than an exhaustion of consumption possibilities within the leading capitalist countries – a premise based on what Lenin’s pamphlet Imperialism called ‘the semi-starva tion level of existence of the masses’ capitalism was then characterized by emergent working class formations able to achieve increasing levels of private and public consumption. 8 And rather than the concentration of capital in these countries limiting the introduction of new products so that ‘capital cannot find a field for profitable investment’,19 the very unevenness of on-going competition and technological development was introducing new prospects for internal accumulation – there was a deepening of capital at home, not only its spreading abroad. Far from being the highest stage of capitalism, what these theorists were observing was (as is now obvious) a relatively early phase of capitalism. This was so not 9 just in terms of consumption patterns, financial flows and competition, but in terms of the limited degree of foreign direct investment at the time, and the very rudimentary means that had been developed for managing the contradictions associated with capitalism’s internationalization to this point. Unfortunately, many Marxists continued to use the same kind of theory to understand every manifestion of imperialism over the subsequent century. It was, however, in their reductionist and instrumental treatment of the state that these theorists were especially defective. 20 Imperialism is not reducible to an economic explanation even if economic forces are always a large part of it. We need, in this respect, to keep imperialism and capitalism as two distinct concepts. Competition amongst capitalists in the international arena, unequal exchange and uneven development are all aspects of capitalism itself, and their relationship to imperialism can only be apprehended through the theorization of the state. When states pave the way for their capital’s expansion abroad, or even when they follow and manage that expansion, this can only be understood in terms of these states’ relatively autonomous role in maintaining social order and securing the conditions of capital accumulation; and we must therefore factor state administrative capacities as well as class, cultural and military determinations into the explanation of the imperial aspect of this role. Capitalist imperialism needs to be understood through an extension of the theory of the capitalist state, rather than derived directly from the theory of economic stages or crises. And such a theory needs to be open to the possibility not only of inter-imperial rivalry, and not only the conjunctural predominance of one imperial state, but also the structural penetration by one imperial state of former rivals. This precisely means we 10 eed to historicize the theory, beginning by breaking with the conventional notion that the nature of modern imperialism was once and for all determined by the kinds of economic rivalries attending the stage of industrial concentration and financialization associated with turn-of-the-century ‘monopoly capital’. In fact, the transition to the modern form of imperialism may be located in the British state’s articulation of its old mercantile formal empire with the informal empire it spawned in the mid-19th century during the era of â⠂¬Ëœfree trade’. Schumpeter’s theory of imperialism as reflecting the atavistic role within capitalism of pre-capitalist exploiting and warrior classes, and both Kautsky’s and Lenin’s conception that mid-19th century British industrial capital and its policy of free trade reflected a ‘pure’ capitalism antithetical or at least ‘indifferent’ to imperial expansion,21 all derived from too crude an understanding of the separation of the economic from the political under capitalism. This lay at the root of the notion that the replacement of the era of free competition by the era of finance capital had ended that separation, leading to imperialist expansion, rivalry and war among the leading capitalist states. Like contemporary discussions of globalization in the context of neoliberal ‘free market’ policies, the classical Marxist accounts of the 19th century era of free trade and its succession by the era of inter-imperial rivalry also confusingly counterposed ‘states’ and ‘markets’. In both cases there is a failure to appreciate the crucial role of the state in making ‘free markets’ happen and work. Just as the emergence of so-called ‘laissez faire’ under mid-19th century industrial capitalism entailed a highly active state to effect the formal separation of the polity and economy, and to define and police the domestic social relations of a fully capitalist order, so did the external policy of free trade entail an 11 xtension of the imperial role along all of these dimensions of the first state that ‘created a form of imperialism driven by the logic of capitalism’. 22 As Gallagher and Robinson showed 50 years ago, in a seminal essay entitled ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, the conventional notion (shared by Kautsky, Lenin and Schumpeter) that British free trade and imperialism did not mix was belied by occupations and annexations, the addition of new colonies, and especially the importance of India to the Empi re, between the 1840s and the 1870s. It was belied even more by the immense extension, for both economic and strategic reasons, of Britain’s ‘informal empire’ via foreign investment, bilateral trade, ‘friendship’ treaties and gunboat diplomacy, so that ‘mercantilist techniques of formal empire were being employed in the mid-Victorian age at the same time as informal techniques of free trade were being used in Latin America. It is for this reason that attempts to make phases of imperialism correspond directly to phases in the economic growth of the metropolitan economy are likely to prove in vain†¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢23 Gallagher and Robinson defined imperialism in terms of a variable political function ‘of integrating new regions into the expanding economy; its character is largely decided by the various and changing relationships between the political and economic elements of expansion in any particular region and time. ’ †¦In other words, it is the politics as well as the economics of the informal empire which we have to include in the account The type of political lien between the expanding economy and its formal and informal dependencies†¦ has tended to vary with the economic value of the territory, the strength of its political structure, the readiness of its rulers to collaborate with British commercial and strategic purposes, the ability of the native society to undergo economic change without external control, the extent to which domestic and foreign political situations permitted British intervention, and, finally, how far European rivals allowed British policy a free hand. 24 12 This is not to say there are not important differences between informal and formal empire. Informal empire requires the economic and cultural penetration of other states to be sustained by political and military coordination with other independent governments. The main factor that determined the shift to the extension of formal empires after the 1880s was not the inadequacy of Britain’s relationship with its own informal empire, nor the emergence of the stage of monopoly or ‘finance capital’, but rather Britain’s inability to incorporate the newly emerging capitalist powers of Germany, the US and Japan into ‘free trade imperialism’. Various factors determined this, including pre-capitalist social forces that did indeed remain important in some of these countries, nationalist sentiments that accompanied the development of capitalist nation-states, strategic responses to domestic class struggle as well geo-political and military rivalries, and especially the limited capacities of the British state reflecting also the growing separation between British financial and industrial capital to prevent these states trying to overturn the consequences of uneven development. What ensued was the rush for colonies and the increasing organization of trade competition via modes of tariff-regulation (serving as the main tax base of these states as well as protective devices for nascent industrial bourgeoisies and working classes). In this context, the international institutional apparatuses of diplomacy and alliances, British naval supremacy and the Gold Standard were too fragile to even guarantee equal treatment of foreign capital with national capital within each state (the key prerequisite of capitalist globalization), let alone to mediate the conflicts and manage the contradictions associated with the development of global capitalism by the late 19th century. 3 No less than Lenin, by 1914 Kautsky had accepted, following Hilferding’s Finance Capital, that ‘a brutal and violent’ form of imperialist competition was ‘a product of highly developed industrial capitalism. ’25 Kautsky was right to perceive, however, that even if inter-imperial rivalry had led to war between the major capitalist powers, this was not an inevitable characteristic of capitalist globalization. What so incensed Lenin, with his proclivity for over-politicizing theory, was that Kautsky thought that all the major capitalist ruling classes, after ‘having learned the lesson of the world war’, might eventually come to revive capitalist globalization through a collaborative ‘ultra-imperialism’ in face of the increasing strength of an industrial proletariat that nevertheless still fell short of the capacity to effect a socialist transformation. But Kautksy himself made his case for the possibility of ‘the translation of cartellization into foreign policy’ reductively, that is, by conceiving his notion of ultraimperialism ‘from a purely economic standpoint’ as he repeatedly put it, rather than in terms of any serious theory of the state. Moreover, had Kautsky put greater stress on his earlier perception (in 1911) that ‘the United States is the country that shows us our social future in capitalism’, and discerned the capacity of the newly emerging informal American empire for eventually penetrating and coordinating the other leading capitalist powers, rather than anticipating an equal alliance amongst them, he might have been closer to the mark in terms of what finally actually happened after 1945. But what could hardly yet be clearly foreseen were the developments, both inside the American social formation and state as well as internationally, that allowed a biographer of Dean Acheson to later write ‘only the US had the power to grab hold of history and make it conform. ’26 14 III The central place the United States now occupies within global capitalism rests on a particular convergence of structure and history. In the abstract, we can identify specific institutions as reflecting the structural power of capitalism. But what blocks such institutions from emerging and what, if anything, opens the door to their development, is a matter of historical conjunctures. The crucial phase in the reconstruction of global capitalism after the earlier breakdowns and before the econstitution of the last quarter of the twentieth century – occurred during and after World War Two. It was only after (and as a state-learned response to) the disasters of Depression and the Second World War that capitalist globalization obtained a new life. This depended, however, on the emergence and uneven historical evolution of a set of structures developed under the leadership of a unique agent: the American imperial state. The role the United States came to play in world capitalism was not inevitable but nor was it merely accidental: it was not a matter of teleology but of capitalist history. The capacity it developed to ‘conjugate’ its ‘particular power with the general task of coordination’ in a manner that reflected ‘the particular matrix of its own social history’, as Perry Anderson has recently put it, was founded on ‘the attractive power of US models of production and culture†¦ increasingly unified in the sphere of consumption. Coming together here were, on the one hand, the invention in the US of the modern corporate form, ‘scientific management’ of the labour process, and assembly-line mass production; and, on the other, Hollywood-style ‘narrative and visual schemas stripped to their most abstract’, appealing to and aggregating waves of immigrants through the ‘dramatic simplification and repetition’. 27 The dynamism of American capitalism and its worldwide 15 appeal combined with the universalistic language of American liberal democratic ideology to underpin a capacity for informal empire far beyond that of the 19th century British one. Moreover, by spawning the modern multinational corporation, with foreign direct investment in production and services going beyond portfolio investment in relation to railways and mining, the American informal empire was to prove much more penetrative of other social formations Yet it was not only the economic and cultural formation of American capitalism, but also the formation of the American state that facilitated a new informal empire. Against Anderson’s impression that the American state’s constitutional structures lack the ‘carrying power’ of its economic and cultural ones (by virtue of being ‘moored to eighteenth century arrangements’)28 stands Thomas Jefferson’s observation in 1809 that ‘no constitution was ever before as well-calculated for extensive empire and selfgovernment. 29 Hardt and Negri were right to trace the pre-figuration of what they call ‘Empire’ today back to the American’s constitution’s incorporation of Madisonian ‘network power’. 30 This entailed not only checks and balances within the state apparatus, but the notion that the greater plurality of interests incorporated within an extensive and expansive state would guarantee that the masses would have no common motive or capacity to come together to check the ruling class. 1 Yet far from anticipating the sort of decentred and amorphous power that Hardt and Negri imagine characterizes the US historically (and ‘Empire’ today), the constitutional framework of the new American state gave great powers to the central government to expand trade and make war. As early as 1783, what George Washington already spoke of ambitiously as ‘a rising empire’32 was captured in the Federalist Paper XI image of ‘one great American system superior to the 16 control of all transatlantic force or influence and able to dictate the terms of connection between the old and the new world! 33 The notion of empire employed here was conceived, of course, in relation to the other mercantile empires of the 18th century. But the state which emerged out of the ambitions of the ‘expansionist colonial elite’,34 with Northern merchants (supported by artisans and commercial farmers) and the Southern plantation-owners allying against Britain’s formal mercantile empire, evinced from its beginnings a trajectory leading t o capitalist development and informal empire. The initial form this took was through territorial expansion westward, largely through extermination of the native population, and blatant exploitation not only of the black slave population but also debt-ridden subsistence farmers and, from at least the 1820s on, an emerging industrial working class. But the fact that the new American state could conceive itself as embodying republican liberty, and be widely admired for it, was largely bound up with the link between ‘extensive empire and self-government’ embedded in the federal constitution. The American empire would not be mercantilist but in still another respect something new under the sun: the West was not to be colonies but states. ’35 Among the political units of the federation, ‘state rights’ were no mirage: they reflected the two different types of social relations slave and free that composed each successive wave of new states and by 1830 limited the activist economic role of the federal s tate. After the domestic inter-state struggles that eventually led to civil war, the defeat of the plantocracy and the dissolution of slavery, the federal constitution provided the framework for the unfettered domination of an industrial capitalism with the largest domestic market in the world, obviating any temptation towards formal imperialism via 17 territorial conquest abroad. 36 The outcome of the Civil War allowed for a reconstruction of the relationship between financial and industrial capital and the federal state, inclining state administrative capacities and policies away from mercantilism and towards extended capitalist reproduction. 7 Herein lies the significance that Anderson himself attaches to the evolving juridical form of the American state, whereby ‘unencumbered property rights, untrammeled litigation, the invention of the corporation’ led to ‘what Polanyi most feared, a juridical system disembedding the market as far as possible from ties of custom, tr adition or solidarity, whose very abstraction from them later proved American firms like American films – exportable and reproducible across the world, in a way that no other competitor could quite match. The steady transformation of international merchant law and arbitration in conformity with US standards is witness to the process. ’38 The expansionist tendencies of American capitalism in the latter half of the 19th century (reflecting pressures from domestic commercial farmers as much as from the industrialists and financiers of the post-civil war era) were even more inclined to take informal forms than had British capitalism, even though they were not based on a policy of free trade. The modalities were initially similar, and they began long before the Spanish-American War of 1898, which is usually dated as the start of external US imperial expansion. This was amply documented in a paper boldly called ‘An Indicator of Informal Empire’ prepared for the Center of Naval Analysis: between 1869 and 1897 the US Navy made no less than 5,980 ports of all to protect American commercial shipping in Argentina, Brazil Chile, Nicaragua, Panama, Columbia and elsewhere in Latin America. 39 Yet the establishment of colonies in Puerto Rico and the Philippines and the annexation of Hawaii ‘was a deviation †¦ from the typical economic, political and ideological forms of domination already characteristic of American imperialism. 40 Rather, it was through American foreign direct investment and the modern corporate 18 form epitomized by the Singer Company establishing itself as the first multinational corporation by jumping the Canadian tariff barrier to estab lish a subsidiary to produce sewing machines for prosperous Ontario wheat farmers that the American informal empire soon took shape in a manner quite distinct from the British one. 1 The articulation of the new informal American empire with military intervention was expressed by Theodore Roosevelt in 1904 in terms of the exercise of ‘international police power’, in the absence of other means of international control, to the end of establishing regimes that know ‘how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters’ and to ensure that each such regime ‘keeps order and pays its obligations’: â€Å"[A] nation desirous both of securing respect for itself and of doing good to others [Teddy Roosevelt declared, in language that has now been made very familiar again] must have a force adequate for the work which it feels is allotted to it as its part of the general world duty†¦ A great free people owes to itself and to all mankind not to sink into helplessness before the powers of evil. ’42 The American state’s genius for presenting its informal empire in terms of the framework of universal rights reached its apogee under Woodrow Wilson. It also reached, with his Presidency, the apogee of hypocricy, especially at the Paris Peace Conference, where Keynes concluded Wilson was ‘the greatest fraud on earth’. 3 Indeed, it was not only the US Congress’s isolationist tendencies, but the incapacity of the American presidential, as well as treasury and military apparatus, that determined the failure of the United States to take responsibility for leading European reconstruction after World War One. The administrative and regulatory expansion of the American state under the impact of corporate liberalism in the progressive era,44 and the spread of 19 American direct investment through the 1920s (highlighted by General Motor’s purchase of Opel immediately before th e Great Depression, completing the ‘virtual division’ of the German auto industry between GM and Ford45) were significant developments. Yet it was only during the New Deal, amidst a collapse of global capitalism to which the American policies had no little contributed, and in response to the remarkable domestic working class mobilizations, that the US state really began to develop the modern planning capacities that would, once they were redeployed in World War II, transform and vastly extend America’s informal imperialism. 46 Amidst the ongoing depression-era class struggles these capacities were limited by ‘political fragmentation, expressed especially in executive-congressional conflict, combined with deepening tensions between business and government ’47 America’s entry into World War Two, however, which ‘upended and re-oriented both national politics and business-government relations’ not only resolved ‘the statebuilding impasse of the late 1930s’ but also provided ‘the essential underpinnings for postwar U. S. governance. As Brian Waddell goes on to sum marize his outstanding study of the transition from the state-building of the Depression to that of World War II: The requirements of total war†¦ revived corporate political leverage, allowing corporate executives inside and outside the state extensive influence over wartime mobilization policies†¦ Assertive corporate executives and military officials formed a very effective wartime alliance that not only blocked any augmentation of the New Dealer authority but also organized a powerful alternative to the New Deal. International activism displaced and supplanted New Deal domestic activism. Thus was the stage finally set for a vastly extended and much more powerful informal US empire outside its own hemisphere. 20 IV The shift of ‘U. S. tate capacities towards realizing internationally-interventionist goals versus domestically-interventionist ones’48 (with much of the heavy lifting being done in the new conjuncture, at least inside the US Treasury, by key New D ealers themselves) was crucial to the revival of capitalism’s globalizing tendencies after World War Two. This not only took place through the wartime reconstruction of the American state, but also (and much more radically) the postwar reconstruction of all the states at the core of the old inter-imperial rivalry. And it also took place alongside and indeed leading to the multiplication of new states out of their old colonial empires. Among the various dimensions of this new relationship between capitalism and imperialism, the most important was that the densest imperial networks and institutional linkages, which had earlier run north-south between imperial states and their formal or informal colonies, now came to run between the US and the other major capitalist states. What Britain’s informal empire had been unable to manage (indeed hardly to even contemplate) in the 19th century now was accomplished by the American informal empire, which succeeded in integrating all the other capitalist powers into an effective system of coordination under its aegis. Even apart from the U. S. military occupations, the devastation of the European and Japanese economies and the weak political legitimacy of their ruling classes at the war’s end created a historically unprecedented opportunity which the American state was now ready and willing to exploit. In these conditions, moreover, the expansion of the informal American empire after World War Two was hardly a one-way (let alone solely coercive) imposition – it was often more properly characterized by the phrase ‘imperialism by invitation’. 49 21 However important was the development of the national security state apparatus and the geostrategic planning that framed the division of the world with the USSR at Yalta and led to the long Cold War,50 no less important was the close attention the Treasury and State Department paid during the war to plans for relaunching a coordinated liberal trading regime and a rule-based financial order. This was accomplished by manipulating its main allies’ debtor status, the complete domination of the dollar as world currency and the fact that the 50% of world production was now accounted for by the U. S. economy. The American state had studied and learned well from the lesson of its post-World War One incapacity to combine liberal internationalist rhetoric with an institutional commitment to manage an international capitalist order. Through the very intricate joint planning by the British and American Treasuries during the war51 i. e. through the process that led to Bretton Woods the Americans ensured that the British were not only ‘accepting some obligation to modify their domestic policy in light of its international effects on stability’, but also the liquidation of the British Empire by ‘throwing Britain into the arms of America as a supplicant, and therefore subordinate; a subordination masked by the illusion of a â€Å"special relationship† which continues to this day’. 2 But it was by no means only the dollars at its disposal that were decisive here, nor was Britain the only object of America’s new informal empire. The thinking behind this was not always hidden in secret memorandums. A pamphlet inserted in Fortune magazine in May 1942 on ‘The U. S. in a New World: Relations with Britain’ set out a program for the ‘integration of the American and British economic systems as the foundation for a wider postwar integration’: 22 †¦ if a world order is to arise out of this war, it is realistic to believe that it will not spring full-blown from a conference of fifty states held at given date to draw up a World Constitution. It is more likely to be the gradual outgrowth of the wartime procedures now being developed†¦ If the U. S. ejects a lone-wolf imperialism and faces the fact that a League of Nations or some other universal parliament cannot be set up in the near future†¦[this] does not prevent America from approaching Britain with a proposal for economic integration as a first step towards general a reconstruction procedure. Unless we can reach a meeting of minds with Britain and the D ominions on these questions it is utopian to expect wider agreement among all the United Nations. 53 This pamphlet was accompanied by a lengthy collective statement54 by the editors of Fortune and Time and Life magazines which began with the premise that ‘America will emerge as the strongest single power in the postwar world, and†¦it is therefore up to it to decide what kind of postwar world it wants. They called, in this context, for ‘mutual trust between the businessman and his government’ after the tensions of the New Deal so that government could exercise its responsibilities both ‘to use its fiscal policy as a balance wheel, and to use its legislative and administrative power to promote and foster private enterprise, by removing barriers to its natural expansion†¦Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ This would produce ‘an expansionist context in which tariffs, subsidies, monopolies, restrictive labor rules, plantation feudalism, poll taxes, technological backwardne ss, obsolete tax laws, and all other barriers to further expansion can be removed. ’ While recognizing that ‘the uprising of [the] international proletariat he most significant fact of the last twenty years†¦ means that complete international free trade, as Cobden used to preach it and Britain used to practice it, is no longer a an immediate political possibility’, nevertheless free trade between the US and the Britain would be ‘a jolt both economies need’ and on this basis ‘the area of freedom would spread – gradually through the British Dominions, through Latin America, perhaps someday through the world. For universal free trade, not bristling 23 nationalism, is the ultimate goal of a rational world. ’ And in terms that were uncharacteristically direct, the editors called this a new imperialism: Thus, a new American â€Å"imperialism,† if it is to be called that, will or rather can – be quite different from t he British type. It can also be different from the premature American type that followed our expansion in the Spanish war. American imperialism can afford to complete the work the British started; instead of salesmen and planters, its representatives can be brains and bulldozers, technicians and machine tools. American imperialism does not need extraterritoriality; it can get along better in Asia if the tuans and sahibs stay home†¦ Nor is the U. S. afraid to help build up industrial rivals to its own power†¦ because we know industrialization stimulates rather than limits international trade This American imperialism sounds very abstemious and high-minded. It is nevertheless a feasible policy for America, because friendship, not food, is what we need most from the rest of the world. The Bretton Woods conference towards the end of war confirmed as nothing else had yet done the immense managerial capacity the American state had developed to make this perspective a reality. The Commission responsible for establishing the IMF was chaired and tightly controlled by the ‘New Dealer’ Harry Dexter White for the American Treasury, and even though Keynes chaired the Commission responsible for planning what eventually became the World Bank, and though the various committees under him were also chaired by non-Americans, ‘they had American rapporteurs and secretaries, appointed and briefed by White’ who arranged for ‘a conference journal to be produced every day to keep everyone informed of the main decisions. At his disposal were ‘the mass of stenographers working day and night [and] the boy scouts acting as pages and distributors of papers’ – all written in a ‘legal language which made everything difficult to understand [amidst] the great variety of unintelligible tongues’. This was the ‘controlled Bedlam’ the American Treasury wanted in order to ‘make easier the imposition of a fait accompli. ’ It was in this context that every delegation finally decided 24 ‘it was better to run with the US Treasury than its disgruntled critics, â€Å"who [Keynes put it] do not know their own mind and have no power whatever to implement their promises. †Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ The conference ended with Keynes’s tribute to a process in which 44 countries ‘had been learning to work together so that â€Å"the brotherhood of man will become more than a phrase. † The delegates applauded wildly. â€Å"The Star Spangled Banner† was played’. 55 With the IMF and World Bank headquarters established at American insistence in Washington, D. C. a pattern was set for international economic management among all the leading capitalist countries that continues to this day, one in which even when it is European or Japanese financ e ministries and central banks which propose, it is the US Treasury and Federal Reserve that dispose. 56 The dense institutional linkages binding these states to the American empire were also institutionalized, of course, through the institutions of NATO, not to mention the hub-and-spokes networks binding each of the other leading capitalist states to the intelligence and security apparatuses of the US as part of the strategy of containment of Communism during the Cold War. These interacted with the economic networks, as well with new propaganda, intellectual and media networks, to explain, justify and promote the new imperial reality. Most of those who stress the American state’s military and intelligence linkages with the coercive apparatuses of Europe and Japan tend to root this in the dynamics of the Cold War57. There is of course no question that the Cold War and the later collapse of the Soviet Union were of historic significance, but this emphasis on the geopolitical context alone, does not capture the making of the new world order. The Cold War reinforced rather than shaped the newly emerging world, while the collapse of the Soviet Union – 25 hose significance we will return to in our conclusion did not end the basis of American dominance within Europe. What the concentration on the external military-intelligence-coercive apparatuses obscures is how far the American ‘Protectorate System’ (as Peter Gowan names it), was part of actually ‘alter[ing] the character of the capitalist core. ’ For it entailed the ‘internal transformation of social relations within the protectorates in the direction of the American â€Å"fordist† system of accumulation [that] opened up the possibility of a vast extension of their internal markets, with the working class not only as source of expanded surplus value but also an increasingly important consumption centre for realizing surplus value. 58 While the new informal empire still provided room for the other core states to act as ‘autonomous organizing centres of capital accumulation’, the emulation of US technological and managerial ‘fordist’ forms (initially organized and channeled through the post-war joint ‘productivity councils’) was massively reinforced by the penetration of these states by American foreign direct investment. Here too, the core of the American imperial network shifted towards to th e advanced capitalist countries, so that between 1950 and 1970 Latin America’s share of total American FDI fell from 40 to under 20 percent, while Western Europe’s more than doubled to match the Canadian share of over 30 percent. 9 It was hardly surprising that acute outside observers from Raymond Aron to Nicos Poulantzas saw in Europe a tendential ‘Canadianization’ as the model form of integration into that empire. 60 None of this meant, of course, that the north-south dimension of imperialism became unimportant. But it did mean that the other core capitalist countries’ relationships with the third world, including their ex-colonies, were imbricated with American 26 informal imperial rule. The core capitalist countries might continue to benefit from the north-south divide, but any interventions (as Suez proved) had to be either Americaninitiated or at least have American approval. Only the American state could arrogate to itself the right to intervene against the sovereignty of other states (which it repeatedly did around the world) and only the American state reserved for itself the ‘sovereign’ right to reject international rules and norms when necessary; it is in this sense that only the American state was actively ‘imperialist’. Though informal imperial rule seemed to place the ‘third world’ and the core capitalist countries on the same political and economic footing, both the legacy of the old imperialism and the vast imbalance in resources between the Marshall Plan and third world development aid reproduced global inequalities. The space was afforded the European states to develop internal economic coherence and growing domestic markets in the post-war era (with the European economic integration also explicitly encouraged by the US precisely as a mechanism for the ‘European rescue of the nation-state’, in Alan Milward’s apt formulation). 61 But this contrasted with American impatience even with import-substitution industrialization strategies by states in the south, let alone their hostility to comprehensive and planned approaches to developing the kind of auto-centric economic base the advanced capitalist states had themselves guaranteed for themselves before embracing a liberal international economic order. This, more than any geostrategic concerns of the kind that predominated in the American wars in Korea and Vietnam, determined the US state’s involvement in the overthrow of secular nationalist and socialist governments from Iran to Chile. ). The predictable result given limi ts on the development of internal markets and the implications of all the third world states 27 competing to break into international markets was that global inequalities increased, although a few third world states, such as South Korea, were able to use the space that the new empire afforded them for geostrategic reasons, to develop rapidly and narrow the gap. Still, in general terms, the new informal form of imperial rule, not only in the advanced capitalist world but also in those regions of the third world where it held sway, was characterized by the penetration of borders, not their dissolution. It was not through the territorial expansion of formal empire, but rather through the reconstitution of states as integral elements of an informal American empire, that the global capitalist order was now organized and regulated. Nation states remained the primary vehicles through which (a) the social relations and institutions of class, property, currency, contract and markets were established and reproduced; and (b) the international accumulation of capital was carried out. The vast expansion of direct foreign investment worldwide, whatever the shifting regional shares of the total, meant that far from capital escaping the state, it expanded its dependence on many states. At the same time, capital as an effective social force within any given state now tended to include both foreign capital and domestic capital with international linkages and ambitions. Their interpenetration made the notion of distinct national bourgeoisies let alone rivalries between them in any sense analogous to those that led to World War I increasingly anachronistic. A further dimension of the new relationship between capitalism and empire was the internationalization of the state, understood in terms of any given state’s degree of internalization of the responsibility to manage its domestic capitalist order in way that contributes to managing the global capitalist order. 62 For the American imperial state, 28 however, the internationalization of the state had a special quality. It ntailed defining the American national interest in terms of acting not only on behalf of its own capitalist class but also on behalf of the extension and reproduction of global capitalism. Th e determination of what this required continued to reflect the particularity of the American state and social formation, but it was increasingly inflected towards a conception of the American states’ role as that of ensuring the survival of ‘free enterprise’ in the US itself through its promotion of free enterprise and free trade internationally. This was classically articulated in President Truman’s famous speech at Baylor University in March 1947 against isolationism: Now, as in the year 1920, we have reached a turning point in history. National economies have been disrupted by the war. The future is uncertain everywhere. Economic policies are in a state of flux. In this atmosphere of doubt and hesitation, the decisive factor will be the type of leadership that the United States gives the world. We are the giant of the economic world. Whether we like it or not, the future pattern of economic relations depends upon us†¦ Our foreign relations, political and economic, are indivisible. 63 The internationalization of the Americans state was fully encapsulated in the National Security Council document NSC-68 of 1950 which (although it remained ‘Top Secret’ until 1975) Kolko calls ‘the most important of all postwar policy documents’. It articulated most clearly the goal of constructing a ‘world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish†¦ Even if there were no Soviet Union we would face the great problem†¦ [that] the absence of order among nations is becoming less and less tolerable. ’64 V 29 This pattern of imperial rule was established in the post-war period of reconstruction, a period that, for all of the economic dynamism of ‘the golden age’, was inherently transitional. The very notion of ‘reconstruction’ posed the question of what might follow once the European and Japanese economies were rebuilt and became competitive with the American, and once the benign circumstances of the post-war years so central to one of the most impressive periods of growth in world history were exhausted. 5 Moreover, peasant and workers’ struggles and rising economic nationalism in the third world (in the wake of the decolonization of the old empires that the American state generally encouraged), and growing working class militancy in the core capitalist countries (under the conditions of near full-employment achieved by the 1960s), were bound to have an impact both on capital’s profits and on the institutions of the post-war institutional order. In less than a generation, the contradictions inherent in the Bretton Woods agreement were exposed. By the time European currencies became fully convertible in 1958, almost all the premises of the 1944 agreement were already in question. The stable exchange rates established by that agreement depended on the capital controls that most countries other than the US maintained after the war. 6 Yet the very internationalization of trade and direct foreign investment that Bretton Woods promoted (along with domestic innovations and competition in mortgages, credit, investment banking and brokerage that strengthened the capacity of the financial sector within the United States) contribu ted to the restoration of a global financial market, the corresponding erosion of capital controls, and the vulnerability of fixed exchange rates. 67 30 Serious concerns over a return to the international economic fragmentation and collapse of the interwar period were voiced by the early sixties as the American economy went from creditor to debtor status, the dollar moved from a currency in desperately short supply to one in surplus, and the dollar-gold standard, which had been embedded in Bretton Woods, began to crumble. 68 In spite, however, of new tensions between the US and Europe and Japan, the past was not replayed. American dominance, never fundamentally challenged, would come to be reorganized on a new basis, and international integration was not rolled back but intensified. This reconstitution of the global order, like earlier developments within global capitalism, was not inevitable. What made it possible what provided the American state the time and political space to renew its global ambitions was that by the time of the crisis of the early seventies, American ideological and material penetration/integration of Europe and Japan was sufficiently pervasive to rule out any retreat from the international economy or any fundamental challenge to the leadership role of the American state. The United States had, of course, established itself as the military protectorate of Europe and Japan, and this was maintained while both were increasingly making their way into American markets. But the crucial factor in cementing the new imperial bond was the centrality of foreign direct investment as the form taken by capital export and international integration in the post-war period. American corporations, in particular, were evolving into the hubs of increasingly dense host-country and cross-border networks amongst suppliers, financiers, and final markets (thereby further enhancing the liberalized trading order as a means of securing even tighter international networks of production). Even where the initial response to the growth of such American investment 31 as hostile, this generally gave way to competition to attract that investment, and then emulation to meet ‘the American challenge’ through counter-investments in the United States (but this hardly meant a rev erse imperialism any more than the extensive Canadian investments in the US did). Unlike trade, American FDI directly affected domestic class structures and state formations in the other core countries. 69 Tensions and alliances that emerged within domestic capitalist classes could no longer be understood in purely ‘national’ terms. German auto companies, for example, followed American auto companies in wanting European-wide markets; and they shared mutual concerns with the American companies inside Germany, such as over the cost of European steel. They had reason to be wary of policies that discriminated in favour of European companies but might, as a consequence, compromise the treatment of their own growing focus on markets and investments in the United States. And if instability in Latin America or other ‘trouble spots’ threatened their own international investments, they looked primarily to the American rather than their own state to defend them. With American capital a social force within each European country, domestic capital tended to be ‘dis-articulated’ as a coherent and independent national bourgeoise. 70 The likelihood that domestic capital might challenge American dominance as opposed to renegotiating the terms of American leadership was considerably diminished. Although the West European and Japanese economies had been rebuilt in the post-war period, the nature of their integration into the global economy tended to tie the successful reproduction of their own social formations to the rules and structures of the Americanled global order. However much the European and Japanese states may have wanted to 32 renegotiate the arrangements struck in 1945, now that only 25% of world production was located in the U. S. proper, neither they nor their bourgeoises were remotely interested in challenging the hegemony that the American informal empire did indeed establish over them. ‘The question for them’, as Poulantzas put it in the early seventies, ‘is rather to reorganize a hegemony that they still accept†¦what the battle is actually over is the share of the cake. ’71 It was in this context that the internationalization of the state became particularly important. In the course of the protracted and often confused renegotiations in the 1970s of the terms that had, since the end of World War Two, bound Europe and Japan to the American empire, their nation states came to accept a responsibility for creating the internal conditions for sustained international accumulation (e. g. stable prices, constraints on labour militancy, national treatment of foreign investment, no restrictions on capital outflows). The real tendencies at work out of the crisis of the 1970s were ‘the internalized transformations of the national state itself, aimed at taking charge of the internationalization of public functions on capital’s behalf’. 72 In this, nation states were not fading away, but adding to their responsibilities. Not that they saw clearly what exactly needed to be done. The established structures of the post-1945 order did not, in themselves, provide a resolution to the generalized pressures on profit rates in the United States and Europe. They did not suggest how the U. S. might revive its economic base so as to consolidate its rule. Nor did they include an answer to how tensions and instabilities would be managed in a world in which the American state was not omnipotent but rather depended, for its rule, on working through other states. The contingent nature of the new order was evidenced by the fact that a ‘solution’ only emerged at the end of the seventies, two full decades after 33 the first signs of trouble, almost a decade after the dollar crisis of the early seventies, and after a sustained period of false starts, confusions, and uncertain experimentation. 3 The first and most crucial response of the Nixon administration, the dramatic end to the convertibility of the American dollar in 1971, restored the American state’s economic autonomy in the face of a threatened rush to gold; and the subsequent devaluation of the American dollar did, at least temporarily, correct the American balance of trade deficit. Yet that response hardly qualified as a solution to the larger issues

Significant Figures Example Chemistry Problem

Significant Figures Example Chemistry Problem Here are three examples determining significant figures. When asked to find significant figures, remember and follow these simple rules: Any nonzero digit is significant.A zero between two nonzero digits is always significant.Trailing zeros are significant if they are at the end of a number and to the right of the decimal point.Leading zeros to the left of the first nonzero digit are not significant. For example, placeholder zeros in the number 0.005 are not significant (only the 5 is significant).If a number ends with a zero, but it is not to the right of a decimal point, it may or may not be significant. Generally, its safest to assume it is not significant. If you take a measurement where the final zero is significant, be sure to include the decimal point to make yourself clear. Significant Figure Example Problem Three students weigh an item using different scales. These are the values they report: a. 20.03 gb. 20.0 gc. 0.2003 kg How many significant figures should be assumed in each measurement? Solution a. 4.b. 3. The zero after the decimal point is significant because it indicates that the item was weighed to the nearest 0.1 g.c. 4. The zeros at the left are not significant. They are only present because the mass was written in kilograms rather than in grams. The values 20.03 g and 0.02003 kg represent the same quantities. Answer In addition to the solution presented above, be advised you can get the correct answers very quickly by expressing the masses in scientific (exponential) notation: 20.03 g 2.003 x 101 g (4 significant figures)20.0 g 2.00 x 101 g (3 significant figures)0.2003 kg 2.003 x 10-1 kg (4 significant figures)