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The Age of Imperialism: The
Economics of U.S. Foreign Policy
(1969), written just over fifty years
after Lenin’s great work. Taken
together with Magdoff’s collection
of historical and theoretical essays
from the late 1960s and ’70s—
Imperialism: From the Colonial
Age to the Present (1978)—The
Age of Imperialism stands as the
single most integrated economic,
historical, and theoretical analysis
of U.S. imperialism at its peak, in
the so-called golden age of
monopoly capitalism.9
Magdoff, more than any other
figure at the time, modeled the
dialectic of continuity and change
in the Marxian analysis of
imperialism, linking his work to
Lenin’s earlier analysis. Like other
major Marxian theorists of
imperialism from the mid–twentieth
century to today, such as Baran,
Sweezy, and Samir Amin, he
continued to lay stress on the
concentration and centralization of
capital, along with the rise of
monopolistic corporations, as the
key to understanding late
twentieth- and emerging twenty-
first-century imperialism. In
addition, Magdoff built on the
complexity and multifaceted nature
of Lenin’s original approach,
attempting to replicate this for a
later era. Magdoff had designed
the statistical productivity measures
(still used today by the U.S.
Department of Labor) for the Works
Progress Administration’s National
Research Project on Re-
employment Opportunities and
Technological Development during
the New Deal in the 1930s. He was
a pivotal figure in the organization
of U.S. war industry in the Second
World War as chief of the Civilian
Requirements Division of the
National Defense Advisory
Commission and in his role in the
War Production Board, where he
was put in charge of planning and
controls in the machinery
industries. He subsequently
June,July - 2019
headed the Current Business
Analysis Division of the Department
of Commerce where he supervised
the U.S. government’s Survey of
Current Business and then served
as economic adviser to U.S.
Secretary of Commerce (and
former U.S. Vice President) Henry
Wallace. This extraordinary
background in the construction and
analysis of U.S. economic statistics
and in wartime planning meant that
Magdoff was well equipped to
provide definitive empirical
demonstrations of economic
imperialism on the part of U.S.
corporations and the U.S. state,
along with its relation to the wider
dimensions of world imperialism.10
In Magdoff’s treatment,
imperialism could not be viewed at
the high level of abstraction
sometimes used for the analysis of
the logic of capital. Rather, a
reasonable
approach
to
imperialism required attention to
the inner workings of global
capitalism, informed by theoretical
abstraction,
but
ultimately
confirmed and made meaningful at
a concrete, historical level.11 This
conformed to the method of Karl
Marx himself, who developed his
critique of political economy by
means of successive approxi-
mations moving from the abstract
to the concrete. Marx thus began
his critique with Capital (originally
slated as volume 1 in a six-volume
work), representing the most
abstract level of analysis, and
intended to complete it with volume
5 on International Trade and
volume 6 on The World Economy
and Crises—that is, in terms of the
concrete analysis of what today
would be called the imperialist world
system. However, he never got
beyond volume 1 of the original
plan, which turned into the three
volumes of Capital.12
Imperialism, Magdoff argued,
was inherently complex and
changing in its configurations,
reflecting both the centripetal and
centrifugal forces governing the
system. Where U.S. imperialism
was concerned, it had to be
interpreted in such a way that the
“essential one-ness” between
economic, political, and military-
strategic objectives/tendencies
was revealed. The role of
multinational corporations abroad
could not be separated from the
role of U.S. military bases spread
across the planet or the need to
control oil and other strategic
resources. Magdoff was at his best
in refuting those who attempted to
claim: (1) that foreign direct
investment and trade were of little
economic significance to the United
States (he demonstrated that
foreign direct investment had risen
from around 10 percent of U.S.
after-tax nonfinancial corporate
profits in 1950 to about 22 percent
by 1964); (2) that the U.S.
economy was not dependent on oil
or other raw materials located
abroad and had no inherent
geopolitical interests; and (3) that
U.S. profits were only marginally
affected by surplus extracted from
the periphery of the world
system.13 The fact that the other
major capitalist countries all
acceded to U.S. hegemony did not
mean
that
intercapitalist
competition had entirely dis-
appeared or would not resurface
in the future. Responding to those
who
questioned
whether
“imperialism was really necessary”
to the United States, Magdoff
explained that “imperialism is the
way of life of capitalism.”14
For Magdoff, writing in the late
1960s and early ’70s, the main
changes in the structure of
imperialism since Lenin’s time—
beyond decolonization and the rise
of U.S. hegemony—were all
related to the further development
of monopoly capital: (1) the
emergence of the military-industrial
complex; (2) the rise of multi-
national corporations (including
multinational banking) and their
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