Ok, I will read Harvey, but my question was why the contemporary global process of capital accumulation takes the form of an empire?
Ulhas
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The answer has to do with seeking the tremendous advantages of monopolies and the security of outright theft. The over accumulation of capital has to find investments and those are best secured and have the maximal likehood of profit increases within tightly controlled environments like capturing of whole swathes of a subjugated earth, its people, and its societies through a complex set of repressive political, financial, production, and military arrangements. In other words an Empire.
The advantages of Imperialism are tremendous. First of all you pay no premium for exploiting the lowest waged labor with the highest skills in the world. Through the medium of international agreements, pressures, and formal agencies you are politically handed the master plan for the lives of millions to exploit at will. The local hierarchical scum get to call it development. You the capitalist pig hegemon get to call it efficient use of resources and wise investment opportunities.
According to Harvey, the key is the overaccumulation of capital forever seeking accelerated profit growth curves. That curve can not be a curve without acceleration, and acceleration can no proceed without maximizing exploitation. So the preamble to gaining this accelerated growth is destruction of all the checks and balances of the social welfare and social justice frameworks. Destroy all those, disintegrate and atomize the socio-political fabric, then re-constitute it along neoliberal lines. That process requires imperial power over finance, production, political hegemony, and military might. An Empire.
The atomization of Iraq is an example. Destroy and dissolve the entire civil infrastructure, then re-constitute it (or re-crystallize it--using a molecular metaphor) with a lattice or network of neoliberal privatizations schemes that exploit everything that breaths with minimal social justice checks and balances. Unfortunately the Iraqis don't seem to be going along with the plan.
CG