Imperialism and disorder: the global ambitions and internal decay of the United States

Labour/Le Travail, Fall, 2005 by Geoffrey Wood

Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire (London: Verso 2003)

Robert Pollin, Contours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity (London: Verso 2003)

Neal Wood, Tyranny in America: Capitalism and National Decay (London: Verso 2004)

THE TWIN PHENOMENA of the increasing volatility of the liberal market economies and the resurgence of overt US militarism have become the central concerns of a growing body of radical scholarship. On the one hand, there is little doubt that both rising social inequality and key US foreign policy decisions reflect long-term trends and continuities. On the other hand, these developments do also incorporate ruptures, and shed new light on some of the central contradictions of contemporary capitalism, having far-reaching consequences for both working people and organized labour. The three volumes that form the subject of this essay all deal with themes and issues central to the neo-liberal era, above all the interconnectedness of domestic and international policy trends.

Order and Disorder: The Bifurcation and Interconnectedness of Resource Contestations

Echoing an abiding concern of Engels, Gumplowicz (1) noted that the institutionalization process follows primitive forms of accumulation; institutions legitimize and seek to secure inequalities at whose origins lie violent acts of expropriation. Institutions may be nested at a range of levels--transnational, state, and local--yet remain concentrated at the intermediate, state level. (2) On the one hand, this weight of institutional resources the state has at its disposal provides the basis for orderly accumulation. On the other hand, resource inequalities are not specific to national boundaries; the relative weakness of transnational institutions makes conflict at transnational levels endemic.

The crisis and breakdown of the post-World War II social structure of accumulation [SSA] in the early 1970s has been followed by a neo-liberalism that undermines regulation and promotes capital mobility at both international and national levels. (3) However, neo-liberalism does not so much represent a new SSA as the temporary dominance of capital over labour; (4) it constitutes a period of volatile and sluggish growth, characterized by rising inequality and exploitation. (5)

The bifurcation of resource struggles between international and internal ones, and the successes of the post-World War II SSA in mediating and pacifying the latter did not mean that the two do not remain interconnected, or that internal class divisions have become less important. (6) Indeed, Harvey (7) argues that under neo-liberalism, a common feature of both trans-border and internal resource contestations is a reversion to accumulation by dispossession. Examples of the latter would include privatization, with state assets being handed over on extremely favourable terms to politically well-connected private firms, financialization characterized by the maximization of shareholder value through "downsizing and distribution" at great cost to other stakeholders, and "free trade" on extremely unfavourable terms to vulnerable states and regions. (8) Importantly, the neo-liberal period has been characterized by the use of overt coercion, a process that in the US has ranged from the disciplining of the domestic poor through workfare, to the flexing of military power abroad. (9) Militarization and war on the one hand, and the worsening position of the poor within the advanced societies, on the other, thus rep resent two sides of the same coin, and the shared central concern of the Pollin, Wood, and Mann volumes.

Robert Pollin: Contours of Descent

The origins of this book lie in a project exploring both the nature and effects of US economic policies in the Clinton era, later developed to encompass the domestic and international consequences of the policy agenda adopted by the Bush II regime. In Chapter 1, Pollin correctly notes that the bubble economy of the Clinton years provided the context in which accounting malpractices flourished; the subsequent WorldCom, Tyco, and Enron scandals were not simply a product of the Bush regime's ineptness. The neo-liberalism of both Clinton and Bush II represented a departure from classical liberalism in that support for free market policies became visibly circumscribed by a desire to bail out wealthy asset holders during the frequent financial crises of the 1990s and 2000s. The globalization of markets had the effect of greatly weakening the bargaining power of workers in the advanced societies; this can only be overcome through the operation of non-market forces, and/or the revitalization of labour unions worldwide. Nonetheless, what distinguished Bush II was an unabashed desire to mobilize government to exclusively serve the wealthy.

In Chapter 2, Pollin looks at the relative performance of the US economy during the Clinton years. Under Clinton, the US moved further towards the opening of markets, and adopted labour market policies that, rhetoric notwithstanding, did little to advance the interests of organized labour. Cutbacks in state spending were compensated by a rise in private consumption (mostly by those in higher income brackets), and booming private investment, inflating a bubble economy. Productivity gains were mirrored by a rising wage gap, characterized by wage stagnation or decline amongst the most vulnerable categories of labour. In the subsequent chapter, Pollin notes that, in part, this reflected the ability of firms to threaten to exit from existing employment contracts through relocation to low-wage economies. This is followed by a closer look at the makings of the bubble economy. The Internet bubble reflected not so much a moment of temporary madness but rather an inevitable tendency in poorly regulated stock markets. Similarly, the speculative consequences of temporary share buy-backs reflected not so much rational decision making but the deliberate harnessing of the effects of imperfect knowledge and rumour to maximize returns for the managers involved.