Justin and I have very different interpretations about this subject. First of all, modern capital owes less to the abstinence of small primitive farmers than to the primitive accumulation by which people who worked the land were dispossessed... Michael Perelman
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(Yes, right on.) Anyway, I think David Harvey wants to add to this process of primitive accumulation (New Imperialism) with the idea of accumulation by dispossession. However, most of Harvey's examples are dispossession of the periphery by the center.
But I think these raw forms of Imperialism should be added to with Neoliberalism, the processes by which corporations take over what had been publicly held assets or property, mostly of the public commons variety---and the legalistic creation of property through laws that define such abstractions as ideas, processes, or techniques as patentable products, including of course categories of DNA and genetic materials---like those held by people in their own tissues---a commodity laying fallow and in need of entrepreneurial development if I ever heard one.
Whatever Brad's point, I would suspect the convenience of obfuscating swindles, fraud, and outright theft as part of the raison d'etre in the same vein as the home spun American farmer stories which begin with the American miracle of free land---the open frontier. Never mind the nasty rumors that the land was made available by US military occupation, small pox epidemics, and other natural and accidental disasters that liberated the wilderness from the people who lived there (Trail of Tears).
Ah, yes, the story of modern capital is just one long homespun yarn of productivity, goodness, and virtue. Thrifty farmers one and all.
Once upon a time natural gas pipelines and pumping stations were laying fallow and useless until the miracle of Enron capital with much abstinence, struggle, and research discovered how to bilk entire states out their inefficient public utilities and start charging for their outrageous abuse of free pipelines and wires... Yes, El Paso Gas brought law and order to the West.
``...it's highly plausible that for almost all corporations or capitalist firm, the exploitation if labor is the only long term reliable source of profit...'' Justin
Well, certainly there is Old Faithful---direct bloody extraction. However, I suspect that what makes up New Imperialism as well as Neoliberalism is the discovery that there are other reliable sources of profit than simplistic exploitation of labor. And, together these newer or more inventive forms constitute the new in New Imperialism along with the neo in Neoliberalism.
Among these are the grand scale expropriation of whole other country's public commons, atomizing their internal laws and political economy so as to liberate its resources (the totality of their people and land) and market them under the auspices of modernization, productivity, and improved capital efficiencies, like those in IMF development plans and WB austerity measures. This is of course Harvey's point to Accumulation by Dispossession in the New Imperialism.
None the less, personally I think Wolfowitz was a spectacular choice to head the World Bank. An old softy, a bleeding heart as David Brooks called him two weeks ago.
Well, failing these bleeding heart humanitarian methods, there is always the example of the Wehrmacht and Iraq. Then there is Israel's development plan for the empty wilderness of Palestine. Nothing but that good old American pioneer spirit thorough and thorough.
What's the German word for Pioneer?
Do you suppose that great capital pioneer I.G.Farben practiced the Lutheran virtue of farmer abstinence waiting for those lucrative state R&D contracts in East?
I imagine a new economic history book on how I.G.Farben liberated Poland through abstinence, self-sacrifice, and discipline! Valiantly, the petro-chemical cartel went against the grain as it were, in a country that had lost itsself to the decadent ways of state liberalism gone awry...
CG