``...I don't agree with the hyperbolic Immanuel Wallerstein either, but his thesis at least has a virtue of clarity and attention to material conditions that Hardt & Negri's lacks...
What is noteworthy in today's imperialism is that, while capital has become global through the rise of productive forces in Western Europe and East Asia, the liberalization of financial regulations, etc., USA having lost its post-WW2 supremacy in production and capital export, political and military powers on the global stage are more concentrated in US hands than before.'' Yoshie
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Just to indulge in my own hyperbole. What is a little worrisome are the parallels to Rome. After the big imperial expansions in the first and second century, the era that followed was full of continual wars of consolidation putting down civil resistance and defense of military frontiers. Meanwhile the Roman productive core rotted under greed ridden and chaotic tyrannies at the top at the cost of increasing class separations and destablizations for the middle and bottom. Rome become increasingly dependent on imports, while its military power became its sole export. At some point during the second century(?) its wealth depended less and less on its own productive effort in core roman cities and lands, and more and more dependent on monetary, material, and human extortions from its imperial provinces---delivered by its military power.
It seems to me, the US is repeating this broad outline. What is particularly annoying is the decline of the US power elite in its unchecked and precipitous fall from predominately national based liberal mediocrities to globally based barbarous reactionaries. I suppose you could characterize this transformation as a form of evolving class self-knowledge and self-interest. It may be, that becoming a global hegemonic class was not entirely the result of rationally pursuing its own interests, but a process of realization through historical luck and opportunity. After all the ascension of this US power elite fundamentally depended upon both the competition and the collapse of the USSR, along with the gradual decline of socialist and nationalist movements in the third world. However, it is not in question that these were systematically confronted and destroyed outright whenever possible through the various political military and economic policies that comprised the Cold War. They obviously were. On the other hand there seems to have been only a relatively slow realization that the Soviet and Chinese complaint of US imperialism was, not only an accurate propaganda, but was also seen by the US as an economic and political opportunity.
Even so, it seems the entire process became the US empire in retrospect, and I don't think it was necessarily an seamless imperialism from first to last. In the post-WWII era this elite class and its interests were still predominately a liberal self-interest and protection system based mostly within the US political economy. It was only over the decades that followed that it became separated from its nationalism, national interests and national boundaries as such. I think of this separation as beginning within the US as the elite class realized that its own power that is to say its control of the political economy couldn't be sustained if it depended solely upon the human and material resources and economic dynamics within the US. Like a lot of others I think this realization became a consciously directed part of the policies of the US political economy within the Vietnam era. By the end of the 70s, the national political economy and its interests were made the primary center of US foreign policy, which could be represented symbolically by the Russian grain embargos.
Now, the classic Marxist critique of the US would have it that the US has been a self-identified imperial power since at least the turn of the 1900. Perhaps, but its dominion was restricted to some portion of Latin America and the Pacific islands. The US first expanded beyond these domains obviously in WWII, but more thoroughly in an economic sense in the Cold War through its geopolitical and military confrontations. On the other hand it was only in the Vietnam era with its technological and organizational instrumentalities that the US scope could be vastly expanded in a solidly material infrastructure. In the offing, the US's own internal economic needs became more blatantly imperial by design under the aegis of free market trade polices and their conflation with traditional US liberal rhetoric on democracy.
Part of seeing these imperial moves as stages of expansion and stages of power elite awareness has to do with both internal political economic developments and their co-evolution with advancements in technological development in everything from materials handling, transportation and communications, to organizational systems sophistication and the latter's subsequent computerization. These all co-evolved.
While it is entirely understandable to see steam, telegraph, and rail as 19th technological advances that both co-evolved and facilitated the development of a competitive imperialism among the EU great powers, it was the conjoining with shipping and naval power that pushed both the UK and later the US over the top. Nevertheless without developing the internal infrastructure of subjugated territories with land based technologies repleat with colonial military bureaucracies along the British and French models, most of the US dominions were restricted to ports and waterways such as in the Panama Canal, the Philippines or small land masses like Cuba and Central America. What makes the Cold War important was the conjunction of US military expansion and the various national and international aid agencies which facilitated such infrastructure development---naturally exporting US technological systems at the cost of the entire GDP of these countries where such loaned monies conveniently travelled back to US banks.
So then, getting back to the original issue noted above, what changed in US imperialism in the early 70s that Wallerstein identified as the loss of the US supremacy?
What I suspect is something very much like Rome in the second century, which is to say the core dependency upon its extortions from the periphery became established as a permanent feature of empire. It was accompanied by analogous depredations of middle and lower classes and the systemic separations between an irrationally avaricious and insecure top, and a generally depressed and futureless bottom.
In the US politico-cultural sphere that transformation was experienced as an internationally minded elite, ruling over a predominately national minded public. So that for example while millions demanded relief from inner city blight and collapsing domestic infrastructure the elites issued homilies for home consumption, and systematically channelled all available resources toward shoring up their own global expansion. At that point it was simply cheaper to extort from an empire than it was to fix its rotting core.
The core economic dependency on militaristic and civil imperial management of a periphery much like the Roman model, is at this point essential to maintaining an artificially standard of living and social control of a significant portion of the middle and lower class population of the US national core. At one time these same classes provided the wealth and their own standard of living under a nationalistically minded capitalists and power elite, but no more. The stripping of the productive capacity and material wealth and capital of the national core during the Cold War, brought the US to the point of either rehabilitating its national infrastructure and urban industrial centers, while undergoing a drop in the overall standard of living among the middle and lower working classes doing the work, or figuring out some other solution. The solution which was considered cheaper, easier, and potentially more profitable was to undertake a vast re-structuring of production and capital instrumentalies in a solidly imperialistic expansion toward the periphery where cheaper material and human resources would offset any initially greater costs. The exact same process was modeled out at home in the moves from urban industrial centers controlled by restrictive civil authorities, unions, and politically aware labor forces outward to suburban industrial sprawl with little or no civil controls, no unions and a much younger, more naive and therefore cheaper work force. Similar national based models were pursued in developing previously underdeveloped regions in the south and west where cheaper natural and human resources were also the draw.
Thus I suppose that I actually agree with both Wallerstein's hyperbole and Yoshie's modifications, since I don't see them in opposition, but simply different views of the same complex of phenomenon. While the US may have lost its domestic production and capital export supremacy, it has more than made up for those losses through its shift to imperial extortions delivered via global military and political domination. In other words, it has become completely dependent on its provincial holdings whose security is guaranteed through US military in support of a depreciated national productive core and a by now totally dependent national population.
Simply, the US bourgeois and middle class need the empire as the primary delivery system of a consumer culture in order to postpone the economic face plant these classes should have taken twenty to thirty years ago.
Chuck Grimes