Imperialism: Is it Still a Relevant Concept? | The New School

good evening and welcome I'm Aryan Mac and the professor of psychology here at the New School for Social Research and the longtime editor of Social Research the Journal of the New School for Social Research since 1934 this is the 12th of our public voices series which we began under the auspices of the new school Center for public scholarship the public voices series of which this is a part began in 2012 and it has included many interesting events and speakers and try we try with it to address the most pressing issues of the day we've been fortunate enough to have such distinguished speakers as russ feingold steven pinker barney frank naomi Russkies and others our most recent events which took place thus a most recent recent event took place last month it was their America the u.s. and the eyes of the rest of the world which was a fascinating discussion among Laura Secours Marcia Keshan hosel vivanco and Jerome Conan ods Frankel moderated by Ari and ire and this fall we had we had a event or discussion entitled Obama race in politics which featured Michael Eric Dyson Julianne Malveaux Fred Harris and Deva Woodley and besides this series of public voices events we also organized large public conferences the most recently one several weeks ago entitled invisibility the power of an idea at which the keynote speakers were Brian Greene and Raveena Warner not only do the CPS do these things but it also is the home of our endangered scholars worldwide initiative which we began in 2007 to respond to the persecution and wrongful imprisonment of scholars and students around the world our frequently updated website provides information about imperiled scholars everywhere and the opportunity to sign letters and petitions me sorry in their support in light of the recent crackdown in Turkey and in Hungary that initiative is more important than ever and we urge you to visit our website where you can sign petitions and help join the outcry against what's been happening okay so now this evenings event which as you all know is entitled imperialism is still a relevant concept the idea for tonight's event is by no means mine discussion idea was brought to me by Akio by Bill Romney who's the Sydney Morgan VESA professor of philosophy at Columbia and a friend and whether or not the concept of imperialism is relevant today which is part of the title of this event we can vouch for the fact that it's a subject of great interest given the number of people who registered to come to this discussion now I will leave all the possible answers to the question is imperialism still relevant to our speakers and to that and I know that's why you're here so it is now my pleasure to introduce the moderator of today's discussion who will then begin the discussion the moderator is my colleague Sanjay ready who's an associate professor of economics here at the New School for Social Work research he's also an affiliated faculty member of the politics department and a research associate at the initiative for policy dialogue at Columbia University he has a PhD in economics from Harvard and previously taught at Columbia and a visit visited many other academic institutions in India and Europe and in the United States he is written to co-authored books and he's a member of advisory committees to the UN and it's now my great pleasure to in Andre thank you thank you so much Aryan as aryan mentioned this event was made possible by the background intervention of Akhil bill Graeme who has wanted to obscure himself but I'm afraid there's a limit to how obscure he can be so he sitting in the front row and not only did he bring the possibility of this event to our attention but also and very importantly he has an analytical introduction which I commend to to the book which is the occasion of today's event entitled a theory of imperialism by would support Naik and profit but Naik just published by Columbia University Press and I imagine there will be an opportunity for you to get a copy somehow somewhere if not here and now unusually and also very importantly it has a commentary from David Harvey that's published within it as well as a response by the author so it's a wonderful example of a rigorous dialectical and dialogic intellectual approach which I think we can all learn from it's a free and frank exchange of views as they would say in the diplomatic world and you will learn from it as did I and you'll be entertained by it to some degree as was I and you will certainly find that there's a lot of heat as well as light so please do read it now when I arrived here that due to the vagaries of the New York City subway unfortunately I was just slightly delayed about one or two minutes and I discovered that everybody was already seated here so I realized that between the worlds of north and south this was an event which was very much in the world of the north where everything starts on time which is no doubt why the level of income here is so much higher than in the south but public but Mike will talk about that and others later on but at any rate when I arrived I was told by one of the zealous guardians of this event that it was full and they were terribly sorry but they'd have to refuse me mission and that brought home the quantity of interest in imperialism here in the new school and in New York City but I would also like to well I also hope that there will be a sufficient quality of interest that all of you will stay until 8 o'clock which is when this event is going to end to permit sufficient discussion if you can't there will be an opportunity for you to leave earlier of course after the main presentations but I think this will be a sufficiently interesting event that many of you will hope want to stay now there is not much time to go into the detailed biographies and diverse forms of excellence of a co-panelist so I will not you all have access to Google you can read about them and you already know in any case how excellent they are in their diverse internally and externally diverse ways so I don't have to say anything about about their accomplishments and how great it is that they're all here but just a word on the format I will ask everyone if they could to speak not more than 15 minutes the shorter the better but not more than 15 minutes and we'll try to give some gentle indication when we've reached that point and we'll start with kebab and then have the respondents in alphabetical order of last name I think that was what was originally that's what I was originally told but I see or not yes you are seated in that way Foley Fraser and Harvey and if there's a little bit of time I will say word myself because I do have views on the topic in fact rather pointed ones but I will try and restrain myself from saying anything until and unless it's absolutely necessary and then we'll give Probot that chance to respond and then we will have general discussion let me just say one more word before turning to him to introduce the main themes of the book which is that this is I think a really fantastic exchange the exchange in the book and the exchange will have here too I hope because among other things it constitutes the mutual confrontation of two friendly but still very different intellectual traditions and in particular the dialogue between patnik and Harvey I would say is a dialogue that I hope I'm not misrepresenting anyone or anything reflects the different intellectual formations and political formations of people who come from north and south though those are not the words used here and the words used here are the words are words that will be or are among the matters that will be discussed this evening so without further ado provide Thank You Sanjay I'm very grateful for this opportunity to speak on a subject as important as this and the fact that our book is being discussed I suppose the answer to the question whether imperialism is relevant today or not obviously depends upon what one means by imperialism I should make it very clear that I do not mean by imperialism one country or a set of countries of pressing another set of countries I do not mean by imperialism the fact that some entity oppresses some other entity in a particularly intensified manner I see it as a relationship which underlies capitalism and a relationship which has characterized capitalism for a very long time in other words I see imperialism as underlying the colonial phase of capitalism I also see imperialism as underlying the contemporary phase of capitalism now when we come to this relationship almost everybody talks about or is aware of or discusses the role of oil in the relationship that exists between metropolitan capital and a lot of other outlying regions but oil as Alfred Marshall reported is in fact just a leading species of a large genus and it is a large genus that I really want to concentrate on because otherwise we would think of imperialism as basically a set of episodes or at most as something which characterizes the relationship with the Middle East but not necessarily with people in general in the third world now to get at this relationship therefore I would like to first say that that this large genus is one which arises from the fact that capitalism requires the number of commodities which basically have three characteristics the first is that it cannot do without them they're absolutely essential the second is that it cannot produce them either because their production is not possible here or alternatively their production which is possible here is insufficient for the requirements of capital and that being the case you find therefore that capitalism perforce has to rely upon supplies of these commodities which I absolutely essential from other places from outside its frontiers from the outlying regions and again when I say frontiers I do not just mean frontiers in geographical sense but outside its social frontiers and the third thing is that many of these commodities are subject to what economy is called increasing supply price namely that these are commodities in whose case for any given level of money wages or money incomes of the producers you find that as capital accumulates you'd find the cost of production or the cost of supplies of these commodities would go on increasing the classic example of a thing like this which we treat in our book which i think is very important is of course tropical and sub-tropical land there are a large number of crops produced and tropical and sub-tropical land which are required by capital required as raw materials required as food stocks and so on by capitalism at the same time these by their very nature cannot be produced within the confines of the boundaries of where capitalism developed or where capitalism predominantly resides you into beastie and that is so because either they are simply not producible or alternatively even if they are producible in certain seasons they are not producible in other seasons when for supplies of these you would have to rely upon inputs from other places particularly tropical and subtropical regions from where these commodities have to be obtained and certainly these are commodities even if they are producible here of course for additional I mean the domestic production is not sufficient you have to rely upon outside supplies and thirdly as I said these are commodities which are subject to increasing supply price the amount of tropical and sub-tropical lands that is available for producing these commodities is necessarily limited it is true that you could have land augmenting investment and technical progress irrigation for instance which makes possible multiple quadruple cropping but on the other hand many of these kinds of measures of land augmentation are measures that require substantial state involvement you may recollect that Marx had said that countries like India traditionally had governments in which there only three major ministries the Ministry of revenue which means blundering from your own people the Ministry of War which means plundering from others and the Ministry of irrigation which actually made possible this entire edifice of empires to survive and of course on the basis of which car with Fogel developed a whole theory of Oriental despotism many of you know so the point is that this requires state involvement and state involvement in the era of capitalism is typically frowned upon unless the state involvement is in favor of capital so state involvement that could actually raise peasant production peasant incomes is something that capitalism typically opposes and of course so on the basis of principle the sound Finance on the basis austerity on the basis of various such things which characterize the gold standard period and the also character is a contemporary billion therefore we have a situation where land augmentation is something which is rather limited secondly you have a situation therefore when growing capital accumulation would really require pressure on this land if these commodities have to be obtained and therefore they can be obtained only at an increasing supply price now this itself is not a new idea David Ricardo talked about it gains in his economic consequences of the peace talked about it so you have a situation where Ricardo for instance analyzed increasing supply price which arose because of what he called diminishing returns misleadingly but on the other hand because of that he basically visualized the situation where capital accumulation would be increasingly getting forted ultimately the economy moving towards the stationary state now I believe there was a fundamental problem with the Ricardian analysis and that problem arose from the following he thought that if you have certain commodities which are subject to increasing supply price because of what he called diminishing returns in that case you would simply have a gradual transition towards a stationary state and the terms of trade between those commodities which are subject to increasing supply price and the other commodities would be moving in favor of the former over time now if the terms of trade move in favor of the former that basically means the prices of those commodities would be rising for given money wages if the prices of those commodities are rising in that case money itself is something which people would progressively cease to hold in fact if there is a complete confidence that some commodities are going to have their prices rising in money terms then money would cease to be a medium in which wealth is held people would move to holding commodities the value of money would collapse and consequently a monetary system would be impossible to sustain so long before the Ricardian stationary state is reached in fact the system would have collapsed obviously therefore the logic of capitalism requires that there must be something that prevents the increasing supply price generated tendency for the prices of money prices of certain commodities to rise to be kept in check now I think there basically two ways this can be done one is firstly of course these commodities have to be open to trade it must be the case that international demand purchasing power of the metropolitan capitalist economies is something which must be allowed to elicit supplies from these lands so they must be open up to trade they must be opened up to trade secondly even when they are opened up to trade if you have increasing supply price their prices would rise but of course if along with the rise in prices you could actually have a depreciation in their exchange rate we serve a metropolitan currencies and the prices in the metropolis should not increase in other words you may have a ten percent rise in some scarce tropical crop price but on the other hand if every ten percent depreciation the exchange rate then of course there is no reason why there should be any increase in the cost of production as far as a metropolis is concerned now this however can occur only in a world in which capital is freely more by letras frontiers because then when there is a rise in price then you would find that people who have access to finance would anticipate a fall in exchange rates shift their money out and as they shift their money out exchange rate would actually fall and consequently there will be no increase in costs or the metropolis is concerned so the first requirement is that these regions must be open to trade secondly these regions must be open to financial flows but even that may not be enough to or door as we argue in the book the strikes for the value of money because additionally you would require something more and that's something more which has always historically characterized capitalism we survey these producers peasant producers petty producers typically producing this commodities in outlying regions is what we call an income deflation if it is the case that you can deflect their incomes so that the local demand for these commodities is suppressed then even as you have capital accumulation even without an increase in output you can actually have larger absorptions for the requirements of the metropolis so a regime in which there has to be an openness to trade that is introduced in all these regions an openness to free capital flows has introduced in all these regions and additionally a means of exercising income deflation on these regions particularly on the producers of these kinds of commodities is something which I believe is essential for a functioning of a capitalist economy which is endowed with a monetary system capitalism as you know is very important it's a money using economy pre-eminently and then and therefore very important for the value of money to be preserved and these a regime of this kind characterized by these features is essential for the preservation the value of money now colonialism actually achieved that colonialism achieved that because colonialism on the one hand meant the encroachment of metropolitan goods on a whole range of these economies where petty producers were displaced and dispossessed as a result if so factor their incomes went down there was an income deflation and what is more colonialism achieved it also through a system of colonial taxes which was then used to buy commodities for the metropolis and taken away gratis because effectively those taxes were used to purchase the commodities and take them over to the metropolis now this is a very significant factor underlying the diffusion of capitalism all over the world because you found that colonial taxes or what is what in Indian economic nationalist writings was called the drain of surplus from the colonies was then used to finance capital exports from metropolitan economies and it is interesting that the same countries to which capital was being exported were countries with which Britain for instance the leading capitalist power at the time not only had a capital account deficit which is the way capital exports take place but also a current account deficit which is Rhian usual but even after colonialism was over there was a period of delicious economic regimes in much of the third world in which you know which which which more or less is coterminous with the tropical and subtropical regions of the world during which there was some difference you had a situation for instance when income deflation was stopped when you actually had land augmenting investment and technological progress introduced the Green Revolution spread of irrigation and so on and therefore there were the substantial increase in peasant incomes but interestingly that actually came to an end around the early 1970s how little this whole issue is understood of income deflation or or or I should say when that came to an end then of course you had the development of a new kind of regime that regime being the regime of globalization with neoliberal economic policies whose main role is to introduce exactly the same phenomena of openness to trade openness to capital flows and of course a domestic income deflation which is imposed because of the pressure on the government's to cut back expenditures and so on how little this essentiality of income deflation is understood in much of the economic literature is something which I shall illustrate by giving just one example there is an article which was written by no less than Paul Krugman who actually argued that look between 72 and 75 there is a rise in all these prices but of course that was controlled because of increases in suppliers new lands came in new oil things were found etc this would suggest that they will supply adjustment as a matter of fact if you compare the period of 1980 let us say trainee around 1980 with a try name around 2000 teaching the world as a whole the world food drain output per capita declined the world serial output per capita declined you would have thought that this decline would be associated with a rising crisis and therefore a shift in terms of trade in favor of let's say food brains but during that period the terms of trade between cereals and manufacturers declined for serious by 46% now obviously therefore there is a drastic income deflation that was being introduced of course to some extent that was reversed earlier the centuries but once more after around 2013 we once more have a remarkable drop as far as the terms of trade are concerned but that's the story which I want to emphasize is precisely this that we actually have now in place a regime which is familiar to us from the colonial days which is reminiscent of the colonial regime and that regime is one which not only opens up all these lands to the pull of the demand from the international economy opens up all these regions to free capital flows and imposes income this deflation through a whole lot of fiscal measures which are then imposed on this countries and part of the globalization process I see imperialism as a relationship which arises and sustained by regimes of that kind and I see it as essential for sustaining the value of money now the fact that capitalism today is much more complex and in the colonial period the fact that you have this enormous architecture of Finance which is on superimposed on top of the earlier capitalism is something which far from weakening my argument should strengthen this argument because when you have this enormous architecture of finance preserving the value of money becomes extremely safe sure in fact there is a story in Hindu mythology where they believe that the entire world is sustained on the back of a turtle now even if the world becomes larger it's still according to that mythology suspend on the back of the turtle extra to the turtle will be groaning more and more that is exactly what is happening large segments of the peasantry in large parts of the third world in India where I know 300,000 peasants have committed suicide over the last 15 years and I believe the relationship of imperialism is essential for explaining that thank you well here we are it's May Day there is a big demo in Union Square with the cops lined up ready to charge in there and hit people I guess for someone who experienced Cambridge Massachusetts in the late 1960s it makes your blood kind of surged out of memory one of the things about a lasting long time in life which living for a while which we know is not without its downsides is that it one of the positive things they're upsides is that certain things start to have happened within my own living memory and as a result I kind internalize a little bit of the externality of historical process and so some of the things I'm going to say tonight are an attempt to look at look at these patterns from very much wrong end of the telescope view that is trying to see the bigger patterns and the longer term elements of that are going on okay as far as imperialism goes well my life all my life has been basically what I call the Imperial war in the United States I mean I was born in 1942 so the first damn historical recollection I have is of the Korean War I mean I have different views about the Korean War but the big event informative event for my generation was the Vietnam War which sure looked like an imperial war in fact it looked like a war largely to shore up the remnants of French colonialism in Indochina and since then we just seem as far as my experiences an American goes really hasn't stopped very much I mean sometimes it's more intense sometimes it's less intense it's a little like Orwell's 1984 that there's always the Imperial war going on sometimes it's in one play sometimes it's in another play sometimes we're going better sometimes worse now one of the things that struck have struck me about this pattern of Imperial war is first of all that it's largely unsuccessful has a huge amount of failure to it which is a quite an extraordinary thing given the disproportionate wealth and military power of the United States we don't ever seem to be able to win these wars and that suggests that we don't win these wars for the same reason that the engineers working on fusion energy never get the fusion energy going it's because they're getting paid not to do it and the Imperial war is not supposed to come to an end with a victory it's exactly intended to just keep going along now why does it keep going along I mean this is an aspect that is definitely a northern perspective I my observation is that the Imperial War is tremendously functional for the political stability of the metropolitan capitalist countries and it as as a result become kind of institutionalized almost like a fifth branch of government in fact people talk about the deep state or the national security state we have this thing which actually when I was born was only embryonic I mean we didn't have a huge CIA aid we didn't have a huge NSA listening to everybody's telephones so it's become almost an institution a political institution for as far as I can see for American politics and the dynamic through which it works is that the politicians can constantly invoke one or another atrocity or a scary incident and the public I don't see any prospect that the American public is ever going to get over falling for that they're going to keep falling for it and they're going to keep on being these incidents as long as it's in the interest as the politicians see it as being in their interest to sustain this infrastructure of Imperial war so in that sense it seems to me that imperialism is a pretty necessary category or concept but that's not exactly what profit is talking about and I was very struck in 2010 to read prophets book called the value of money and it's called the value money yeah because in it he outlines the point of view that he so Abele and lucidly summarized just now I must say though if you really understood all the things that profit said you can pass a PhD oral exam because he went over practically every topic that you could think of the economics monetary theory international trade theory supply price of production and so forth I mean it's really a an amazing synthesis of of thought and I was don't I was struck when I read products that first book and also this book that we are discussing tonight which extends and carries that point of view forward I was very struck because it you know in a very specific way told me that maybe this imperialist war which seemed to me be largely driven by domestic political forces might have at least some kind of logic or functionalist logic on a broader world stage and in particular I the way I summarized prophets point of view is that the colonial phase of the imperialism was based on what turned out to be a completely pointless idea which was a division of labor in which the metropolitan capitalist countries would in fact use colonial empires as sources of raw material and to some degree cheap labor and we know that that phase which Lenin talks about in his book on imperialism that phase of capitalist development came to this horrible wrenching long-term train crash from the first world war to the end of the second world war which managed to leave all the European capitalist countries completely wrecked and destroyed and capitalism in the world on in a very very fragile state since then we've had what we think I was the era of post-colonial or American imperialism or neo colonialism where which is the water in which I think probably is a fish I mean that's and his point that the early stages of neocolonialism involves some significant attempt on the part of the peripheral countries to organize themselves to control their own resources was has given way as of the 1970s and just why that's true to what we now think of as neoliberal globalization I think the burden of products argument here about the relevance of imperialism is to say look this is a case where the clothes have changed but the wolf is still under there and the wolf is still the pattern of the division of labor the colonial division of labor it's still functional for metropolitan capitalism and in this very interesting probably puts the emphasis on this very interesting angle of stabilization of money of world money which I think is something that hardly anyone but him and his and Goethe have have really pursued and it's I think it's something I wish more people would think about because I think it's a very interesting idea so you have the you have a pretty plausible idea which is that in the post-colonial or Neil imperialist Iran American imperialist era these same economic and financial forces are operative but operative in a different form with a different aspect I think it's pretty hard to argue with that I think and I think that anyone trying to seriously look who's brave enough to try to look at world history and world patterns it should take account of this point of view and take account of the extensive evidence that magnetics bring to bear on this and the interpretation on the other hand it seems to me that there's also a an onus on a product to give a little bit more a little bit more complete analysis of just what these changes were in the 1970s and 1980s that we think of as neoliberal estudia liberal globalization we now have discovered I think this is the way I would think of it the globalization is the weapon of mass destruction for the traditional class struggle the if you look at what's happening in the US you what's happening in Europe you can see that there is just wrenching destruction to the traditional working classes of these countries as a result of this well as as Marxist I think we got to take that into account too I mean what what is that about and how does that fit in with this ongoing pattern of stabilization or attempt to stabilize the monetary and financial institutions of global capitalism through the adjustment of incomes of poor petty commodity producers in the periphery I think those things are very connected and we really want to if you are not going to understand what's happening in trumps America or Lupton's France unless we can put those pieces together like a kind of a the jigsaw puzzle great well there are lots of really big and important questions on the table let me just write at OUTFRONT say that my view is that the concept of imperialism is indeed relevant today it's my view that contemporary globalised financialized capitalism is impure a list it is still siphoning value and resources from the global South to the global north and it is doing so in ways that reflect political power asymmetries which are grounded in social geography I'll unpack that in just a minute however the agents mechanisms and beneficiaries of present-day expropriations are different from those that characterize earlier phases of capitalist imperialism and the peculiar mix of political and economic coercion and the organization of their intersection is different and that's really what I want to focus on I'm going to in a sense try to D Center the discussion a little from economics and Duncan already led the way on that but I don't at all want to slight the economic dimension in fact I will start by defining imperialism multi-dimensionally I would say it is the systematically entrenched set of power relations through which what is sometimes called development in one region is systemic Lee connected to under development in another region and I think we can look at that process along four dimensions pardon I'm sorry I want to look at this process yeah among four dimensions and the first is of course the economic dimension here we're interested in the process by which the accumulation and concentration of wealth in one region is connected to impoverishment in another the political dimension on which I'll have a lot to say later is how the organization of what passes for freedom and democracy in one region is connected to subjection in another region there is also third and ecological dimension and that concerns the process by which solutions to ecological difficulties in one region create or exacerbate such difficulties in another region and finally I want to introduce into this discussion the social reproductive dimension of imperialism by which I mean the organization by which efforts to ensure the supply of care and other unwaged activities that are necessary to maintaining social bonds and replenishing new generations how the efforts just supply that in one region are connected to the creation of care deficits and care dreams in other regions my idea is that all four of these dimensions are intertwined none of them can be understood in abstraction from the other's efforts to understand imperialism from a perspective that is exclusively economic or inadequate efforts that encompass both the political and economic aspects are better but still inadequate and it will be necessary in the end to develop an approach that integrates all of those dimensions both of those dimensions with the under studied ecological and social reproductive dimensions well that's a general programmatic statement that I couldn't myself begin to satisfy here but I think it's especially pressing in the current era because today's imperialism does mobilize the ecological and social reproductive dimensions in ways that are crying out for analysis and critique and I wager that the present salience of those dimensions on ecological dumping land grabbing under the guise of environmental finding offsets for a carbon etc etc global care chains the migration importing of migrants to do low wage precarious care work that is being abandoned in the so-called - earner family where everybody is scrambling to offload care work so that they can get more hours of very poorly paid paid work in order to simply tread water well these are things that are crying out for inclusion in a theory of imperialism and my wager as I said is that given that we're now in a position to see these dimensions we might also be able retrospectively to identify the role that they played more or less unnoticed in earlier imperialism's okay I want to say however in line with the discussion of this very interesting book I want to focus here on the entwine meant of the economic and the political dimensions and I just want to start by saying that transfers the siphoning of wealth and the various other goods that I mentioned from one region to another that such transfers can be effected at first sight by two distinct means by political military coercion or by markets and trade that distinction sounds very clear but in reality it often blurs in modern capitalist imperialism as opposed to pre-capitalist imperialism's or for that matter socialist imperialism's of which there have been some trade and tribute are not really alternatives they go together indeed they're not always easy to distinguish at all my idea and I think this is in the spirit of profits book although I may differ with some of the details is that the the way these things are entwined takes different forms and combines in different proportions in the what I think are maybe the four principal phases capitalist imperialism history and by those four phases just to go quickly what I mean is the phase of mercantile capitalism the 16th to 18th centuries roughly in which assets were transferred from the hinterland to the center mainly by flat-out conquest and seizure nothing subtle about that then secondly we get the so-called liberal or less a fair industrial capitalism of the 19th century where transfers are effected it seems to me by an increasingly integrated combination of direct colonial rule political coercion and forms of what are presented as free trade including by the very specific mechanisms of drain that are very insightful II discussed in this book I really commend it on that basis alone to understand how the British used a colonial taxation system in England to appropriate surplus production literally gratis so that's a combination of political and economic coercion the third phase is the D colonial eyes state managed capitalism of the mid twentieth century in which the role of trade and market mechanisms visa vie straight political coercion is increased a slightly different balance of these things with the end of direct political rule and therefore of colonial taxation and that possibility of that sort of drain assets were increasingly transferred by unequal exchange but it's very important to remember that even that is not a purely economic mechanism those arrangements were politically constituted I would recommend Anthony andis book on post-war international law which recognizes and legitimizes as true ready the seizure all the whole previous history of seizure and that is very much a part of what makes unequal exchange possible and of course it's true as you can even you know go back against Duncan's point that these economic apparently economic mechanisms were always supplemented as necessary by invasions and sponsored coup d'etat but as the patna acts rightly insist the dirige yzma of newly independent post-colonial states during this period used their we have to say rather unequal in the grand scheme of thing political power to counteract some of those processes and just slow and diminish the rate of transfer now we have to talk about the present not 21st century financialized capitalism one thing that I don't find in the book but seems to me extremely important is the end of the Cold War the incorporation of the ex communist world into the global capitalist economy and the various forms of drains and transfers that happen there this is not discussed but somehow needs to be brought into the picture in this period the economic dimension in quotes remains very salient but the political has by no means disappeared today debt plays a major role in affecting the transfers of labor land care ecological values and that debt is enabled through political arrangements global financial institutions impose austerity on indebted post-colonial states also on some metropolitan states it must be said aided by pressures from the bond markets which threaten to destroy a current their currencies in a heartbeat these processes not only disabled or AHIMA they also force States to squeeze their populations and divert revenue to bondholders in the of death service there's also the private debt of peasants in thrall to multinational seed and fertilizer companies to landlords to middleman's all of which is well described in the book and new intensified rounds of land grabbing including the sort of green grabbing that I mentioned earlier in the wake of environmental stress now these transfers um it is true a company something else and that is flows of surplus value to multinational firms typically northern based but not always from relocated manufacturing to low-wage regions of the semi-periphery this is the point here though is that I want to distinguish between expropriated transfers and exploitative transfers I think you can see the difference here and both are going on today this is then a new mix of political and economic mechanisms I don't have too much time but I want to cut to the chase and say that given this this deep intertwine Minh the political and the economic I am myself hard-pressed to understand exactly what the pet Nayak's mean in their book when they appeal to capitalism spontaneous propensity Xand logics in their account of imperialism to me it seems that the only thing that is spontaneous about capital that is not politically organized in some form or another is its orientation to endless accumulation but of course that imperative can only operate on the basis of some specific political institutionalization some organization of coercion and let's not forget legitimacy command and cent so um let me skip all this other stuff I had here I've got an argument here that I don't have time to spell out that explain that argues that both and this in a way is close to David both exploitation and expropriation are essential to capitalism historically they have been understood not entirely accurately as quite separated with exploitation in the core and yes and expropriation from the periphery in fact that dualism was always more complicated and in any case they are deeply entwined I would say that expropriation is the necessary condition for the possibility of profitable exploitation in capitalism and that then raises the question about whether or not imperialism is necessary to capitalism and before I close I just want to say a word or two about that the pet Nayak's answer that imperialism is necessary to capitalism I have to say I'm a little less sure their reasoning as you've heard has to do with the necessity of protecting the value of the world's leading currency by imposing wage deflation on inhabitants of the so called tropical landmass for reasons that David Harvey elaborated in his reply in the book and that I hope he will recapitulate here I don't find that reasoning entirely persuasive but I'm interested in whether there might be other reasons for concluding that imperialism is necessary to capitalism one might hold that capitalism could not generate surplus value in sufficient quantities to sustain itself as a class system if it had to the full reproduction cost of all of its inputs suppose in other words that it had to pay the full cost of Labour's reproduction and for for all of the inputs that is for all those who produce every input including not just wage workers but the peasant proprietors that are central in the Patna X book also housewives grandmothers caretakers and so on suppose also it had to pay the full reproduction cost not only of presently living workers but of the processes needed to ensure that there are future workers suppose that it had to pay the full ecological costs associated with production what would remain of surplus value and would that remainder be sufficient to sustain a class system well I'm hoping that my economist colleagues here can shed some light on that but if it if such a system would still be capitalism I mean that's the question would it still be if not then expropriation in the sense of non politically enforced non-payment of some cost of reproduction would be essential to capitalism does it follow that imperialism is essential as well that conclusion would follow only under a double condition first position capitalism requires both expropriation and exploitation and secondly it also requires that they be clearly separated from one another geographically and demographically that is assigned to two different populations cited in two separate regions the conclusion would not follow by contrast if only the first but not the second conditions were met well the sort of question then for the present is our world is starting to look a lot messier than that neat idea of exploitation over here procreation over there I would say that expropriation is becoming quite generalized it we've got it affects not only yes its traditional subjects but also those who are previously shielded politically by their status as free citizen workers in the Metropole and at the same time the relocation of industrial manufacturing to the bricks for example is bringing intense exploitation it might be that today expropriation and exploitation are increasingly superimposed on one and the same set of people although not exactly in the same proportions and not necessarily with equally burdensome consequences that's where I'll stop right now thank you yeah I have a lot of disagreements that there's being a commercial occasion I'm not going to talk about them so you'll have to read the book and buy it except by now it's already freely available in a Russian sand website with PDF so there's a certain bias and this by the way because were left to always buys always get some free right actually buys them and so publishers have the illusion that right-wing books are much more popular than left-wing books my my agreement my disagreements partly stemmed from the fact that I'm a geographer and as a geographer me interested in where things happen where things go to and the flows and intricate movements of capital in and around the world when I used to teach a course on intro to geography to undergraduates I used to begin with the question where does your breakfast come from and I used to take that and after about three days of this the students would get up and say I didn't have breakfast this morning which of course is precisely my point they would starve without having actually that whole network of all sorts of flows coming from all over the world millions of people involved in just putting something like a breakfast on your table so where it comes from and where it goes to is I think terribly important and I found the last book far too crude about things like that too much far too general and I'm not asking it seems to me the very specific questions about where things happen and just to give you a taste of that his example of food grains that he used well one of the biggest producers and exporters of food grains in the world is the United States and of course agribusiness is highly subsidized by the main exporters of cotton in the world is the United States and it's all very well to talk about the tropics and subtropics a part of the United States is in the subtropics so orange juice actually gets exported from the United States so what so when you have something like that happening it seems to me that you can't sort of simply take a crop configuration like food grains and stick it on top of the world and say it's all due to that area and this kind of waves and of course there are different food grains I don't know whether soybeans is a food grain but most of Latin America has been converted in the case of about 15 years into one vast soybean plantation but who's it producing it for not for the United States because the United States exports soybeans who's taking it China is taking it China is the big market for it so is China and interior espouse this is extracting you know these kinds of things so I think these these are the sorts of questions that immediately come to mind simply by looking at the the geography of where that something is produced and where it goes and then of course things have got much more complicated and I think we have to take account of the complications and in this I'm also so the geographer I sort of read my marks and if you read the wonderful letter that Marx wrote to hand coffin I think it was 1847 something like that when he's commenting on qoodles book and he kind shows basically you know we always have to be prepared to adjust our categories according to the historical transformations that are occurring and that as divisions of labor changed as productive forces change and as social relations change and all the rest of it then we have to be prepared to change what it is we're talking about and one of the problems I have with many people on the left is they're very reluctant to actually pursue those changes I think imperialism was an obviously relevant term to what was going on in the 19th century it continued in a different form with indirect rules structures which began to emerge at the end of the 19th century and then we had the period of decolonization after 1945 and as many people have mentioned and 1970s things started to change all over again and one of the big changes have occurred in 1970s was you could actually create a global car you could manufacture the engines of a car in in Brasilia the hubcaps could come from Mexico it could be assembled in Detroit and actually a lot of production processes have exactly that kind of character furthermore it became more and more evident to me that where value is produced is not necessarily the same place where it's realized for instance I read the Financial Times and it tells me that the profit rate on Foxconn and zhang jian is 3% the profit rate on Apple computers is 20x and and course Apple computers are realizing that in the United States so value produced in China is being realized in the United States now Apple will claim it does design an other function so actually it's not quite true that all the values for Houston in China and then when you kind of actually look at all of the you know the chips that are in in the computer they are not produced in Shenzhen either so you've got a whole kind of set of questions here as to where is what is happening and where the value is being created and where it's being extracted and this is a very complicated kind of question and I think particularly since the 1970s become more and more complicated and for that reason I increasingly was drawn to the idea that it was not didn't make sense to try to cram all of this into some concept you know universal concept of imperialism unquestionably there are there are redistributions of value going on and their geographical but they're but they're but they're complicated very complicated and therefore we have to come up with a new way of looking at it and simply put it into the straightjacket of imperialism was going to lose something so when I when I was partly persuaded of this because in 1974 or somewhere like that Giovanni Arrighi wrote a book called the geometry of imperialism you would expect from his title that this would be about imperialism and since I was a geographer and geometry and geography sort of go together I was looking for great enlightenment on it but actually it's mainly a book saying the concept of imperialism doesn't work actually what you really need to do is to look at shifting hegemonic configurations of political and economic power and they're unstable and they're moving and they're constantly in motion and that put some sort of fixed structural constraint on and all of this is in fact a wrong thing to do so what giovanni then kind of says is we've got a look at shifting hegemonies so that who's the hegemony power and he didn't deny at the time that the United States could make the claim to be fairly hegemonic but is it so hegemonic anymore let me tell you something that I read the other day which is actually quite shocked me I knew in in 2008 when Leyland Brothers went belly-up now the United States was not prepared again my source is the Financial Times great newspaper the only one worth reading in my view I understood from that that the United States was extremely reluctant to let AIG Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac go bankrupt because to do so would have destroyed all of the Chinese investment the Chinese would have been furious to put it mildly and that this would be an authentic disaster for the United States at the time it's now become apparent from all of the leaks we now get from everywhere but actually Russia proposed to China that they did a fast sale on all their assets in all of those institutions and crash the whole global financial system and that would have happened it's no question about it China and Russia owned 50% of the capital in those institutions 50% if you add Japan you up to 60 or 70% but Russia was actively negotiating with China the Chinese refused now this is a moment when you're kind of saying what is the concept of imperialism help you deal with that it doesn't but hegemonic games yeah that's what it's about whose hegemony what is world money right now it's big question yeah the dollar still seems to be hit but you know these other kinds of things like market baskets of recurrences and all the rest of it and the global indebtedness question is getting kind of curious I mean the IMF or the other day did a total thing on total global debt and it turns out the total global debt is 225 percent of global GDP 225 percent now most people if you'd said that you know 40 years ago people would say holy this at the end of the world you know but the IMF puts it out and everybody goes well well I guess it's 225 percent of GDP but you know that was the kind of thing if a nation had done that you know 20 years ago the IMF would and done a structural adjustment program on him immediately and said you can't do this he's got to have you know something something something else has got to go on so I didn't think we're situations of this kind that again talking about these kinds of things which are very very important and what's happening and who's borrowing from whom and who's carrying the debt and where there are the bondholders and what are they doing well yeah those kinds of questions seem to me to be crucial to look at and to follow up in in some detail and I don't find the concept of imperialism which is historically being was useful particularly useful in that in that in that situation and actually in the 1970s I started to work with other concepts Marx never is that far as I know have never ever used the concept of imperialism we did certainly talk about colonialism but imperialism was essentially Lenin's a big contribution to the argument but math did have some very interesting things to say about space relations and redistributions that could occur one of the interesting things Marx says about redistribution is that the equalization of the rate of profit reduce redistributes value from labor intensive sectors to capital intensive sectors so the transfer of value that goes on through the equalization of the very profit now a certain point Marx also recognizes would be true of relations between nations then a nation with a very high labor intensive configuration would in fact supplement or subsidize a nation with a capital intensive configurations Martha's rule and the in the third volume of capital is that he said he kills it a system of capitalist communism it's from each capitalist according to the labor they employ and to each capital caught into the labor according to the capital they advance and I think that also flies nationally so marks actually looks at that in a couple of places and theories of surplus-value who says you know these redistributions are occurring but only says something very interesting it says but don't kid yourself that this is a nation to nation thing this is the capitalist class which gets it all so the redistribution goes to the capitalist class not to the people so when Trump goes after the trans-pacific agreement you can say actually it's correct that that agreement does not actually necessarily help the working class in this country but it certainly helps capitalists the argument about NAFTA is the same it was no accident when NAFTA was signed there were no representatives of labor in the room because all the benefits of NAFTA have been go to the capitalist class the working class was going to be hollowed out and we see what some of the consequences of that have been so there are these kinds of transfers taking place and here there's a very interesting configuration emerging all around the world which is that for instance in Germany the headquarters of a company can be in Munich by the production takes place in Poland here the company can be located in Atlanta or Dallas the production takes place in Mexico in Monterrey or so and actually of course you now got the technology where you can actually control a production line from Dallas into Monterrey and you can do it from Munich into now these are transformations technological transformations the kinds of things that Marx talked about in 1847 and said these things make a real little big difference and you can't use the old categories in these kinds of situations so to me again these are the sorts of situations and actually a lot of the organization of capitalism now is cross-border so that certain after is a very good example of that and actually then you kind of start to say what is going on with the formation of say something like the European Union who benefited from the European Union clearly Germany did you say but no the German working class didn't necessarily at all which German corporations did so this is the point there is a class way in which these things get get worked out and if you if you start to sort of again I'm very very concerned that we look very closely at that the dynamics of this and what is happening with it and to me like I say I just don't find the category imperialism that compelling now that may sound odd to you because I wrote a book in 2003 called the new imperialism but the point about that was that at that time the neocons were actually saying we need to be imperialist in fact there was an ideological kind of attempt by the neo cons to advertise the imperialism as the proper role for the United States I mean it took the disaster of what happened in Iraq and so on to say well maybe back off that but at that time this was their language about what the imperialism was about and in exactly the same way when Giovanni wrote his book on the geometry of imperialism so it was not about you know in favor of Imperial soon as the saying this is not the way you should look at it so the new imperialism was an attempt to sort of say well that ideology of imperialism has become very powerful and potent in the United States right now but we need to something else one final point actually I think there are all sorts of things going on in different parts of the world just going back to the tropical land mass for example I think there's no accident that about 80 percent of the special economic zones that are producing goods are in the tropics so the tropics is a labor reserve and this gets back to some of the things that Nancy is talking about that actually the cost of social reproduction or all the rest of it are lower there and can be repressed their value of labour-power is lower there and so we get these kinds of relations being set up between productive activity in various parts of the world much of which has been going to those those parts of the world so to me is you know the tropics if it's a reserve of anything is a reserve of labour and it's being used as a reserve of labour in this kind of way so I just make a plea for much more sophisticated kind of understanding of how speciality works how countries which have a surplus of capital exported and when they export it what kind of things they do and you can actually track each country Japan so to have surpluses of capital in the 1960s starts to export capital all around the world what the Rockefeller Center did also a daft things lost permanent money didn't in doing it South Korea end of the 1970s suddenly the world floods with South Korean capital Taiwan 1982 almost starts to take thing I looked at a map the other day of Chinese foreign investment in 2002 the world is almost empty with a few dots here and there you look at the world now a Chinese foreign investment it big blobs everywhere there's a huge pouring out of capital investment in China and imperialist power no it's simply engaging in what I call a spatial fix - it's over accumulation problem it's got surplus capacity and steel so what does it do it says it's going to have a one belt one Road it's going to build the steel and put the steel into building the new networks of rail right right across Europe from you know China to Istanbul and way into Europe it's building all the railroads in South African in East Africa it's doing major projects in Latin America because it's got surpluses it's got surpluses of money and it's got surpluses of steel so what does it do it lands the surpluses of money to Ecuador so the Ecuador can buy the steel to build the hydroelectric plant this is what it does these are the practices which are there which are old practices and they still exist but we have to I think find a different language to talk about them or if we talk about imperialism just recognize it's a sort of metaphor rather than anything very real thank you I hope you feel that this was a good use of your May Day evening I would like to give rabat as much time to respond as possible as well as for there to be time for general discussion so I make a very brief set of remarks and questions based upon the very rich contributions that have been made already in part one of my primary concerns when reading the text and here I'm going to focus on the economic aspects much as I am Alive to in deeply appreciative of Nancy's insistence that we must take an integrated approach to understanding a phenomenon such as imperialism which extends to the political the economic the social and the cultural something which killed the drama also mentioned in his mentions in his foreword one of the themes that in questions which was very much in my mind concerns that concerned that of mechanisms as many of you are aware a big part of the debate in the late 1970's and early 1980s in and around Marxism concerned the question of whether and not just Marxism social scientific explanation generally concerned the question of whether it's enough to say that a system has a certain requirement or a certain need in order to provide an explanation or whether one has to do something beyond that in order for one to have provided an adequate explanation and here I would pose as a the question for Baba to answer whether he has something more to say than he said in the book about the mechanisms because what I have seen in the book is a is a regular it is a is a repeated insistence that capitalism has a certain requirement namely to maintain the value of money in the contemporary order that's the US dollar in particular by repressing the value of other things and here he is referring specially two commodities which arise from the tropical zones of the world though not exclusively but primarily and of course labor power Prabhat is insistent that he is not suggesting that this is the only imperative of capitalism but it is one important imperative to consider and he provides a series of examples mainly historical largely derived from the colonial experience but also from the post-colonial experience to which one might get some inkling of what those mechanisms are but to my mind there is an under specification of the mechanisms and I wonder whether he would speak more to that or at least to bring to the surface what understanding he has of how it is that the imperative is realized I mean systems can have imperatives that are not adequately realized and indeed insofar as there are multiple imperatives they may come into conflict with each other which can give rise to the need for interventions by the state or other agencies for example and not to belabor the point because there's much more to to the issues that I'm sure all of you will bring up which I don't have to talk about but I would have liked to have also heard more about what are the degrees of freedom in the international system which are available to countries and of course arrey he was mentioned by Harvey we know that there is one at least set of outstanding examples of late development namely those in East Asia and the question of to what extent and in what ways they managed to take advantage of degrees of freedom that were available within global capitalism and to what extent those degrees of freedom remain available is obviously a crucial one is it really a set of options or or possibilities of escape that are closed off today and if so by what mechanisms and personally what mechanisms did they take advantage of or how should we understand the theory in light of that I'm very much aware also that in the Indian context there has been a debate on poverty and what's up at Naik the co-author of the book has been one of the important contributors to that debate one of the issues that arises there is that although the calorie consumption of the Indian people appears to have decreased the monetary value of their consumption appears simultaneously to have increased after adjustment using official price indices even considerably and that's the reason that by most estimates poverty has fallen whether it has fallen dramatically or fallen to some degrees an open question but by many estimates it is fallen what's up but Naik is one of those who thinks that does not fall into all is increased but that is of course because she is focused very much on calorie intake and not on the monetary value of consumption there of course other indicators as well such as the diversity of the food basket even if one is interested in nutrition alone the facts according to the National Sample Survey in India and I offer this is one example not because India is all important but because robots argument Edward says argument concerns India the consumption basket has become more diverse over time people are consuming it appears for example more dairy products more egg eggs fish meat and so on now to what extent that's absolutely more or just relatively more as a question one would have to tease out by going into the data I'm not sure that puts up with my case but perhaps she has this is just by way of suggesting my own concern that one might jump to two too quickly to the idea that the mass of the people are absolutely worse off in India or indeed in the world as a whole on the basis of one statistic involving food grains and that might obscure quite a lot as you may know food grains consumption buying large been falling even in rich countries for other reasons perhaps but it has been falling so one has to I think have a composite picture which looks at the pattern of living standards generally in order to arrive at a view as to whether in fact the mass of people are being absolutely are being made absolutely worse often that this is in fact a consequence of a structural necessity of capitalism which is by the way the thesis of the book so I think there's much to discuss my own view about imperialism would be that it's it because it is a reality but it consists of plural mechanisms and it operates in a contested space and to some extent it may be effect rather than cause of wealth and power because when wealth and power is concentrated it is tempting to use it in ways that are economically advantageous by suppressing prices to the extent that oil is an example that many people think of in this connection I think it can indeed be thought of as having both an element of structural necessity and an element of the use of available power to advantage given that it is in fact available so let me leave it at that and invite a prophet to respond he will have I hope another chance to respond at the end of the remarks at the end of the evening in in about half an hour so perhaps you could take three to five minutes now or 10:15 if you must but that will really cut into our discussion thank gosh that's a very rich set of comments I don't think I'd be able to really respond to them adequately at all let alone in in in five minutes or so I think some of the issues which were raised by Duncan were very important in particular I found very interesting what he said about the role of globalization in terms of its destroying the capacity of class struggle you know buddy and I think that's that's very important because in India for instance with which I am very familiar a number of mechanisms have come together one is privatization of the public sector trade unions are always far more powerful in the public sector than in the private sector in fact in the United States as you know 33 percent of the public sector workers which includes education are unionized while in the private sector is just 8 percent the same is true in India and elsewhere one of the reasons why France still has a very strong trade union movement is because it still has a strong public sector so the you know privatization of the public sector enormous increases in the reserve arm your flavour which I'll come to in a moment because of whiz's casualisation all of which as we has really destroyed in sense in a sense the capacity of unions the last real militant trade union action we had in India was in 1974 there was a railway strike after that there has been nothing comparable we have one or two day strikes you know bye-bye all but but not so yes I think very important changes are taking place some of these changes are related to what I'll be coming to now I think I'll come to Nancy's points in the moment but you know I under a you don't understand what David or his argument is of course it is true that capitalism has been changing of course it is true there's a lots of things happening of course it is true is that you know you have you have the the the nature of hegemony changing now nobody is denying all that but at the same time I mean it's also true that the diffusion of activities from from the United States to China to India and so on but at the same time what is also true is that there is a huge attack on the petty production peasant sector all over the world now I'll come to Sanjay's point about whether it has led to absolutely miseries a shoe but the fact is that there is a huge a gradient crisis now why is it that precisely in the period of globalization when you have this diffusion of activities and so on instead of this actually giving rise to some kind of capitalist development that absorbs relative surplus property that let's say absorbs the reserve army of labour you actually have a huge a gradient crisis that is increasing the reserve on your flavour now that in a sense is a kind of question which I'm interested in and that's what the book is trying to raise and to the extent there is this agrarian crisis I think it also acts to you know I mean lots of peasants have left their land they come to the towns in search of jobs which are not non-existent and this increase in the reservoir means one of the reasons why the capacity of unions for instance and so on to be militant is something which is impaired greatly I think that is a distinction when exploitation and expropriation is extremely important in fact the whole point about imperialism is that it was associated traditionally with expropriation that you know that that quite apart from the exploitation the extraction of surplus value from from from production you also had this expropriation from the petty production and other sectors the outlying regions outside of the capitalist sector now that is precisely the phenomenon which I believe is going on today which is why I think David's example about the shift of surplus value from you know less labor-intensive to capital intensive or you know whatever means the production intensive or higher organic composition of capital activities if something which takes place within the domain of exploitation but in addition to the there is this whole business of expropriation Marx talked about it in his writings and colonialism he actually talked about the drain he says what the British take away without any quid pro quo so so the point is that it is the expropriation aspect that that imperialism is concerned with I don't disagree with David about the enormous numbers of changes and their importance of course in analyzing capitalism but I wanted to say that nonetheless this expropriation is important now Nancy is right that expropriation occurs not only we survey the peasants Betty produces occurs also we survey the you know housewives and so on just two points I want to make the first is that I think there is basic dynamics whereby the expropriation tends to increase because of the increasing supply price that is that is the argument I think put forward and the second point is that of course we find that because of this the I mean when you have an increasing supply price you can have an increase in intensity of expropriation across the board but certainly that may well be happening but there is visible evidence of an increase in expropriation which is manifested in terms of an agrarian crisis all over the world you know I mean it's not just India and so on the Chinese have become more conscious about it in China as you know exactly the same thing was going on until they started you know this towards the socialist countryside and so there has been a shift in Chinese official policy towards agriculture which may have brought about a bit of a change we don't even know how much of a change but even in China there was a decline in crude grain consumption till about 2004 there has been some kind of increase after that but but this is a general phenomenon and I think is a general phenomenon that actually stimulated us to to examine and write this book because this is the phenomenon we had characterized capital colonialism that was also a period in which there was an acute in radiant crisis prolonged worsening conditions of business resin production output falling per head and so on now it is this which I believe is ignored in the official literature at least in official economic literature for instance most of you her students or the economics would have read about something called the agrarian River a great cultural revolution that preceded the Industrial Revolution and it's supposed to have it were laid the ground for it do you know during the so-called agricultural revolution per capita corn output in Britain actually fell so you have a real miasma of concepts which tend to hide the fact that really there was massive expropriation going on which is why we actually wrote this because I mean as far as the food grain business is concerned maybe we'll we'll talk it out later thank you so thank you for being patient for those of you who have questions for the panel I've been advised that you should come here to ask them because it is going to be videotaped so if there is anyone who'd like to ask a question please do come up and you could of course a formal line in the aisle if there's a happy circumstance that we have more than one person please and we will take I suppose one question at a time for now since there's no excess demand please weather was it such a wonderful panel is hardly one question but I'm intrigued by David Harvey's mention of what is commonly called global value chains and the redistribution of value-added versus value realized but I think it's possible to bring that concept into a question about the role of China where there are industry clusters developing because of the location of the global value chains assembly is not also production in the role of China expanding out our D for resource acquisition in Africa and elsewhere and it's increasing role in funding development projects throughout the world and Howard Frantz is a recent book about China's historic edge' monic ambitions so I'm wondering if the concept of imperialism is still alive but it's just a different country now and perhaps Ariki would also agree with this so if any of the members of the panel would like to respond on the general theme and or to respond to prophets response at this stage that most welcome any takers Duncan you look it's really for David but I would while he's thinking I'm wondering if I could sort of turn it to prophet and ask why um does it my must it be the case that only states of governing the tropical landmass countries can undertake land augmentation why isn't the Chinese funding of the railroads in East Africa a land augmentation project why can't private FDI on a large scale do that it seems to me that you somehow assumed that it had to be States and if that's not the case then there's a problem maybe with one part of the argument yeah on the again you see it's if you start to ask who's doing what where for instance if you're interested in extractivism in Latin America you're pretty soon come up with the Canadians and they're you know right in the middle of it or if you sort of say who's who are the main operators in the Zambian Copperbelt the two largest corporations one is Indian and the other is Chinese so are we talking about Indian imperialism and Chinese imperialism and Canadian imperialism and Luxembourg's imperialism and all the rest of it this is work this is why you know the concept doesn't make any doesn't doesn't make sense to me in that in that form there are processes which are described in the analysis of the imperialism's of the 19th and 20th century which are alive and well and that therefore can be learned from and those processes like for example the way Britain lent money to Argentina to build the railroads that actually fostered the demand for British steel and you know all of that which is what the Chinese are doing with Ecuador Ecuador ran out of money and borrowed money so Ecuador's building big hydroelectric plants and it's Chinese steel Chinese generators and all the rest of it so you know this that game has been going on for a very very long time and you can you can say this is a practice which is very very traditional but then that comes back to the issue of who has the big the surplus is that they don't know what to do with and when did China get to a point where it largely absorbed saito surpluses and by the way which is the other thing when you talk about imperialism the scenarios about between nation-states but there's a lot of internal geographical redistributions going on I mean in other words I would also want to say I'm interested in uneven geographical development within the United States for example or if you look at something like the Euro on the uneven geographical development of what's happening to Greece you know versus Germany you've got some extractions of value going on there now we're going to say that's an imperialist configuration no it's a transfer of value and I think that value transfers geographical and all the rest of it has to be looked at in terms of their quantity and their scale the thing about the Chinese thing is a certain massive scale internally and externally I mean China has consumed half of the world cement half of the world's steel half more than half of the world's copper nearly half of all of the world's mineral resources since 2008 I mean so you can't analyze much of what's going on in the world without looking at this huge demand and I mentioned there the demand for soybeans coming out of China and the revolution that's gone on in China I mean and and just give you the peace of day that always blows my mind between 2011-2013 China consumed 45% more cement that United States consumed in a hundred years okay so this is a sort of enormous kind of transformation that's going on and I don't think we can say oh let's fit it into some box called imperialism this is a kind of radical transformation urbanization is going on at a huge rate close of investment between capital cities every city I go to there's a huge investment going on in terms of property but it's it's luxury condominiums and spectacular car you know everywhere and you can say what's going on why it globally are we building cities for people to invest in and not cities for people to live in so in this city we have a crisis of affordable housing and huge amounts of construction going on in terms of luxury condominiums and the rest of it so so all those things are going on just one one point one point you mentioned which i think is very very important it's clear that one of the themes which I think you do get at but I think you get at it in the wrong way if you don't mind me saying so but it is yes the destruction of the economic basis of agrarian life but this is going on not only in India it's going on in Brazil it's going on throughout Africa it's going on everywhere it's connected to what Nancy was talking about of land grabs and all the rest of it so that is indeed a huge huge process and if you just wrote about that I'd be fine you know I mean I know no problem it's just that somehow everything is then locked into this concept of imperialism that dunt dunt me work to Duncan and probe us to say our global value chains at this point or we could take another question please and if you feel comfortable introducing yourself please do that as well ah hi I have a feeling that you're going to be repeating yourself just a bit because you kind of touched on certain things in your critique of imperialism now at least I haven't heard what you how you define it I think Nancy Fraser did but like how do you define it just so I understand it sorry Harvey how Bobby would define it because my sense is that from what you're saying is that it was never a relevant concept or it never had was a relevant concept no it's always it was a relevant concept in the 19th century it was relevant concept absolute certainly up until around 1970 okay so my thing is what so just so I understand and how you contrast it from what provides is developing what what is it it was alive at a particular time why did it die and just yeah if I make could we have a couple of questions maybe even three since we don't have so much time thank you thank you very much professors for coming here I have a question for a professor up at night as a student I found your second book idea about imperialism a bit confusing if I put it in perspective with the other book you read the value of money where in the first book the value of money the central aspect of it is how the monetarist tradition sees the value Dermott the determination of the value of money from the supply and demand side whereas the superiority as you explain it of what you call the properties tradition Marx Kingdom tell it key comes from the fact that the value of money is determined from outside of the realm of supply and demand so money wage for Kayne's and the condition of production for marx Princeton's and you say that the incompleteness of properties of perverse ism is the fact that these thinkers ie marks Kanan Kazuki considered capitalism as a closed system and they were not able to explain how was it possible for capitalism to remain sustainable in a long term it having an adequate rate of profit and so on and so forth and here you introduced the concept of the reserve army of labor and of imperialism and from this aspect I found your explanation very much I would say compelling and convincing however in your second book by focusing on tropical lands and and tropical projects it makes a bit the argument confusing where we don't really know what is the core aspect of imperialism and as you answer your answer to David Hartley's comment might suggest you say that the main element of your argument is not tropical ends but the increasing supply price which is related to their value of money so I was wondering if you could explain why in the second book you really focused on this aspect thank you yes I must say um I found David Harvey's argument very very convincing and very important even even if your argument is completely correct and accurate I mean this is to me another example of just how profoundly we have to rethink the concepts of the left and there's a lot of other concepts if you would ask me at the beginning I would have said yeah of course the concept of imperialism is still relevant but no I find that it is not relevant I think there are a lot of other concepts that are linked to it north/south distinctions for example that we take for granted that we really have to rethink and I was struck also by in relationship to David Hartley's point I was struck by Duncan's point I was thinking about Duncan's point all of the decimated cities and the decimated working classes where are they they're in the old centers of imperialism which of France Britain and they're in another sense the United States they are not really in Germany and the global the nautical of the European south is something else and what is what what is the world picture look like that makes sense that includes these you know what has happened to so many people in in in these countries is the fantastic advance of a large number of middle class people in China and I think which I think it's not a question as a comment in China and in India and let me just end also from an anecdote with from the Financial Times I just read I think was yesterday that it's the Chinese consumer that drives the global luxury market that's sort of an amazing fact and when we think in terms of how we thought about the last 50 years ago or a hundred years ago we need some new concept now I feel bad to burden and any member of the panel with seven questions there's one more from Akhil bill Graeme but there's very little time so if you don't mind we'll burden you with seven questions three more here and Akhil but I have to ask all of you to be very very short so we can at least hear from the panelists a tiny response to the key points that you make thank you okay so I'll try to do this in the most compact fashion possible which is it strikes me that another way of framing this disagreement is not just about the the relevance of imperialism but its usefulness as a critical category for sort of opening up our understanding of political possibilities and solidarity so it was certainly the case in the 19th century that imperialism was a useful critical category for organizing political solidarities across much of what is now the post-colonial world along the lines of nationalist movements and I would wonder whether any of the panel would would like to comment on sort of the the usefulness of or not usefulness of the category in relation to where they see the possibilities for large-scale political solidarity is in the present so if if imperialism is still a useful category are those political solidarity is still going to be organized along kind of national anti imperialist lines and if not then then what do they look like this is another one in the category of what's the use of imperialism theory when we talk about imperialism theory classically we talk about two clusters of Marxist ideas right like the first one is the kind of looks and for Glendon thing about how capitalism produces too much surplus to be reinvested in the system so the system has to open up new markets in the global periphery and that from my reading anyway and I'm just a student so I don't know anything but like from reading people like robert allen and you know hydrogen chung and the dependency theorists it seems like that theory is just ass backwards like what actually happened up through the 19th and 20th century was the opposite that raw materials were extracted from the colonial periphery rather than consumer markets being created there and they were used to feed the economies of the rich countries the industrialized rich countries that actively prevented everybody else from industrializing until as professor Harvey said in the 70s when that started changed the other kind of cluster of ideas starting around like I don't know the 70s is like the United States is the big hegemonic imperial power and anybody who opposes the United States is anti imperialist this is more like a vulgar activist thing that you see a lot of and obviously the thing that it opens up to is like well okay but then anybody who opposes the United States are progressive my question is given the I think pretty transparent bankruptcy to me of both of those clusters of ideas and I hope I'm not character during them my question is what would a theory of imperialism that works actually look like is it a theory of power politics is it a theory of why big countries bully little ones does it have to always have primarily economic motives or could you have a Marxist theory of imperialism that includes the state what what what would we want in a theory of imperialism that wouldn't make it useful thank you I also try to make it very short so the question would basically be to David Harvey and if taking into account the concept of unequal ecological exchange so per capita energy consumption or per capita carbon emissions which are geographically very concentrated in someone's traditionally associated with northern imperialism changed the picture and then make the category as relevant today if not more relevant today and in the 1970s I I wonder if I can use remark on Nancy's to bring some clarity to what I found unclear and exchanged between David and Bravo David the tendency of David's currents were to point to whole range of bad things going on which he wanted to account for by something more complicated than was an offer from provide and I just want to know if Probot wants to assent to the claim that his view is that all bad things are the same bad thing today which is imperialism I didn't get the impression that he has any reason to assent to that but what I do think a remark of Nancy's does to bring clarity to to the ceiling dispute here between David and privada is that Nancy put it as far as she said is it the case that imperialism isn't a necessary element of capital through history and that's perfectly I mean it's perfectly possible for it to be a necessity for capitalism without it being the case that all the other bad things that David rightly points to is the same bad thing and flows from imperialism so the question of is it is this the form of of stress on the petit production peasantry etc and what happens to then is that an absolutely necessary aspect of capitals and through history to the present day that would be sufficient to say it's a bad thing that abides and imperialism therefore is relevant without it being the case that all the things that they would rightly points to is the same bad thing that must flow from the pillars thank you okay I was just reminded Arion mentioned at the beginning that Akhil is the 'sydney morgan Besser professor of philosophy at sydney Morgan vesser has a two-part article each part of which is incredibly lengthy on the concept of imperialism in philosophy and public affairs from the nineteen 1970s because of the Vietnam War there was a huge interest in the question and I've actually tried to read these articles Sydney Morgan Wester was famous for his quips most many of which had were one or even two words I've been to or even one word in them but this is an example of the other side of Sydney Morgan VESA extremely prolix not unnecessarily so because he thought that the concept of imperialism was as they say these days complicated so we have very little time we have four or five minutes depending on how one counts and there have been many many questions so we can prey on the patience of the audience in case they want to stay an extra three or four minutes but I don't think we can do more than that so please try and be as concise as possible maybe we can proceed in exactly the same order as we well I don't know I'm going to disappoint the question askers because I really just want to comment on something a Nancy said that really I thought brought things into one set of issues into sharp perspective when she said that capitalism has a hard time internalizing the cost of reproduction of a labor and I think it's really important to understand that's what the social welfare of what the welfare state does and the exact questions that you asked about that are in my view behind the crisis of the welfare state and the crisis of left left wing traditional left-wing politics in Europe and it raises it makes me very dubious that the tide of populism can be pushed back as the current journalistic phrase is and it also makes throws a little light on that this is a kind of a last stand of the European working-class that we're seeing and if you expect and of the American working I mean the parts of the American working class are still functioning and if you expect these people to conduct this class struggle in a politically correct fashion I think we're also off the off the reality Channel well there were so many um rich questions and I do think there's a possibility that some of this is semantic and it's really a question of what we mean by this term imperialism I think David is defining it very narrowly as a leading nation state right extra either through mainly through direct political rule if I understand you commandeering resources from subject people's I like profit I'm assuming that imperialism continues these kinds of coercive transfers continue long after direct political rule is gone and I think they still continue even in the best period that you discuss in some form or another the only other point I wanted to respond to and I'm just choosing surfaces or so little time was to Aaron Jakes and that is about the usefulness of the category Rory for organizing political solidarities and I want to suggest that and I think the categories that I offered as a way of sort of unpacking some of this and the relationship between exploitation and expropriation is an extremely useful category in a world where those things were apparently separated from one another it was very easy to pit one population against another if it's the case as I suspect that the there's a much closer in of these two mechanisms of extraction and you know a predation let's say and and these and the populations are not as neatly separated to me that opens up lots of possibilities for solidarity and and then I guess I have to say one word at the risk of scandalizing the audience to Duncan I myself I and I wholeheartedly agree with your analysis but for this reason I am in the much abhorred camp of the nee-nee-nee bulkini fest show Matt crawl or you know whoever it is is not the answer to lepen for exactly the reasons that you suggested sorry yeah I think the problems for me are derived not from imperialism but from capitalism so my foundational tau concept is capital capital is value in motion its motion is terribly important to understand it is motion as a spiral it's constantly expanding geographically temporarily and in the process it absorbs many parts of the world into its net and does it differentially when Marx is writing capital social relations were dominated in only a very small part of the world it's now global so this is a different story we're in a period of imperialism in the classic sense that Nancy says that I hold was that one which was in the middle of the 19th century the the neo-colonial form of imperialism has been dominant was dominating in many ways after that although there were imperial structures as you know they went to war in the 1930s and this was you know regionalization of capital into distinctive struggles elements of which you see in the current situation there are regional hegemon surround that are essentially exercising dominant power within their region and as geopolitical conflicts emerging these are the kinds of things we need to track and I my objection it's kind of interesting for that agreed with everything I said but he didn't mention it in his book about imperialism it was it was ignored yeah so so that's my problem that it puts something higher so I would want to talk about the dynamics of capital and what the dynamics of capital is about and how necessary uneven geographical development is to that dynamic and how there is not only accumulation by expanded reproduction but there's what I call accumulation by dispossession but there's also appropriation through realization and distribution that is appropriation in the market and that is a terribly important category that Marx didn't really get to we've got to change a lot of our categories to deal with this situation even as we base what we're doing very much in Marxist theory of capital that's the way I tend to look at it I'll be very brief I am NOT talking about Indian Chinese Canadian imperialism I am actually talking about the situation where the main driving force today is globalized finance capital and the effect of globalized finance capital particularly on the petty production sector is what I am talking about and that to my mind is a continuation of the colonial relationship you agreed with me about agrarian life getting destroyed a gradient life was getting destroyed in the colonial period a gradient life is getting destroyed today what is common between then and now that's basically what we are trying to ask in this book and what is common is of course this whole question of the attack on petty production is essential for value of money and so on the domestic bourgeoisie in most of these countries is in fact complicit is integrated to this globalized finance capital and that's a big change compared to the colonial period when bush was in many of these countries led the anti-colonial struggle today is on the other side there was a very important question raised about program quite frankly one does not talk about imperialism just for scholastic reasons I think it's very important in order to derive a program from it and the program I would derive is that because of this attack on pity production is very important in these countries certainly in big countries like India China and so on that there be a worker-peasant Alliance which is willing to be linked from globalization in order to put an alternative agenda in place as long as you are integrated with globalization no alternative agenda and that I believe is a problem with the European lift finally I agree with the Akhil that you know there are many bad things are going on but one particular bad thing is what we are talking about namely the attack on petit production the attack on agrarian life which had been going on earlier and is going on now finally value of money you know I I wrote two books before this one was called accumulation stability in the capitalism the other was called value of both those I don't refer you must be a student of economics both those books are basically based on assumption of constant returns that while this a theory of imperialism introduces increasing supply price as the additional theoretical elements thank you thank you all for coming and thanks to Arian Mack in the center for public scholarship for making this event possible and to our panelists

Channel: The New School

Views: 78,542

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Keywords: The New School, NYC, Colleges in New York City, Social Research, Philosophy Major, Political Theory Major, Economics Major, Political Economy, Sociology Major, Liberal Studies, Historical Studies, PhD, masters, graduate degrees, interdisciplinary, Anthropology Major, Psychology Major, Center for Public Scholarship, Imperialism

Id: nRvcGP1ALvI

Length: 123min 1sec (7381 seconds)

Published: Wed May 10 2017