actions of the Treasury Department
and the Federal Reserve Board, to
create a “world after its own image,”
subordinating European capital to
its influence. The argument, which
was inspired in part by Peter
Gowan’s critique of the “Dollar-Wall
Street Regime,” while informative,
was an almost exclusively political
one, systematically downplaying
the economic dimension of
imperialism, including finance
capital, multinational corporations,
continuing international rivalry, and
the deteriorating conditions of the
underdeveloped world. Panitch
and Gindin thus provided an
analysis of U.S. empire, much more
conversant with received views, as
opposed to the classical
conceptions of imperialism with
their numerous critical dimensions.
In The Making of Global
Capitalism, the older structure of
imperialist countries in the center
and the dependent countries in the
periphery gave way to smooth
“networks
of
transnational
production as well as finance”
revolving around “American
capitalism’s central place in global
capitalism.” What was conveyed
was a stable U.S. world hegemonic
order, rooted in a Washington-Wall
Street consensus and seemingly
destined to continue indefinitely—
a mirror image of the view
prevailing within U.S. foreign policy
circles but now emanating from the
left. In this interpretation, global
capitalism arising out of “American
Empire” and managed by the U.S.
state entirely subsumed the more
complex and multifaceted, and at
the same time more concrete
analysis of imperialism offered by
thinkers such as Lenin, Luxemburg,
Magdoff, and Amin.23
If Panitch and Gindin
emphasized the rise of political
empire, largely dispensing with
what John Hobson had called the
“economic taproot of imperialism,”
transnationalization theorist William
I. Robinson went in the opposite
direction, arguing that capital in the
10
age of globalization has completely
swallowed up nation-states and
created a new transnational order
dominated by free-floating
transnational corporations, giving
rise to a “transnational capitalist
class” and the “transnational
state.” W riting in A Theory of
Global Capitalism in 2004,
Robinson declared that “globali-
zation involves a supersession of
the nation-state as the organizing
principle of social life under
capitalism.”24
In 2018, in “Beyond the
Theory of Imperialism” (a chapter
in his Into the Tempest),
Robinson made a clean break with
classical theories of imperialism:
“The class relations of global
capitalism are now so deeply
internalized within every nation-
state that the classical image of
imperialism as a relation of external
domination is outdated” and must
be abandoned, together with
notions such as center, periphery,
and surplus extraction. “The end
of the extensive enlargement of
capitalism is the end of the
imperialist
era
of
world
capitalism.… It is not imperialism in
the old sense either of rival national
capitals” or the domination “by
core states of precapitalist regions”
that is needed, but “a theory of
capitalist expansion” as a
specifically transnational and
supranational process chara-
cterized by shifting “spatial
dynamics.”25
Meanwhile, Marxist geo-
grapher David Harvey leaped
beyond all of these perspectives,
claiming in 2017 that the flows of
capital have so changed direction
that “the historical draining of
wealth from East to West for more
than two centuries has…been
largely reversed over the last thirty
years” (emphasis added). He
admitted: “I don’t find the category
of imperialism that compelling.”
Imperialism was a concept not to
be found in Marx, but mainly
attributable to Lenin. The whole
notion of global “peripheries” was
said to be unclear as to its
boundaries, and Arrighi’s notion of
“shifting hegemonies” could be
seen as displacing earlier Marxian
theories of imperialism.26
In his 2003 New Imperialism
—a work he now says was not
meant to promote the concept of
imperialism so much as to combat
neoconservative attempts to adopt
the term as their own—Harvey
praised Hardt and Negri’s depiction
of “a decentered configuration of
empire that had many new,
postmodern, qualities.” His book
ended by advocating a new “‘New
Deal’ Imperialism,” viewed as a
more progressive imperialism
under a more enlightened
Washington Consensus, replacing
the current neoliberal/neocon-
servative global order. For Harvey,
the left was to be chastised for its
“icy reception” to Warren’s notion
of the progressive character of
imperialism.27
If Harvey’s position on
imperialism over the years has
been somewhat incoherent, his
current rejection of the notion of an
imperialist world system in the
name of a supposedly more
dynamic view focusing on
constantly
shifting
spatial
configurations, which have
“reversed” traditional center-
periphery relations, could not be
clearer in its implications. Referring
to contemporary globalization
tendencies, he explains that “it
didn’t even make sense to try to
cram all of this into some universal
concept of imperialism.” The entire
Marxian analysis of imperialism has
become a theoretical “strait-
jacket.”28 In conformity with Arrighi,
he discards the “rigid geography
of core and periphery…in favor of
a more open and fluid analysis.”29
In the process, however, it
becomes necessary to break with
the entire historical-materialist
critique of imperialism. In his 2014
The Seventeen Contradictions of
Capitalism, imperialism does not
Class Struggle