U.S. hegemony today

Monthly Review, July-August, 2003 by Peter Gowan

This set of dependencies was supplemented by others as the West European empires crumbled. The core states found that their links to oil and raw material suppliers in the South and the protection of the investments in the South depended increasingly on American power and operations in the South. If the U.S. sanctions were imposed on, say, an important supplier of oil, the core state which had been buying that oil or whose company was extracting it, would be suddenly cut off. And if a revolution or coup d'etat threatened the foreign investments of any core capitalism, crushing the challenge would typically require either direct help from the United States or its acquiescence.

The U.S. role as leader of the core in controlling the South was weakened by its defeat in Vietnam, but it managed to use proxy forces along with its sea and air power and capacity for covert action to sustain this system. It is worth stressing that this set of Cold War arrangements was not some sort of trick or bluff. There was a genuine Cold War confrontation and it did, on the whole, serve the interests of all the core capitalist states very well. There was bound to be a degree of conflict between the Soviet Union and the capitalist world and there was bound to be deep hostility between Communist Parties and the various capitalist classes where Communism was a threat. But these antipathies did not necessarily mean a massive expansion of American power into Eurasia, turning the rest of the core capitalist states into subaltern allies. This was the achievement of the Achesonian system.

Combining Development Paths for Other Capitalist States with Structures Assisting the Dominance of U.S. Capitalism

This political system was a necessary but not a sufficient condition for sustained U.S. hegemony over the capitalist core. Sustained hegemony required that the United States could offer a development path for other core capitalist classes while at the same time structuring the patterns of international capital accumulation in ways that facilitated a leading position for American capitalism.

A development path is not just about economics. It is also about politics. Capitalist classes must be confident that they have a secure path towards their own enrichment--an effective way of extracting value out of production activity They must also have a path to the strengthening of the political authority of their state over their population: economics and politics must combine in what is at bottom an overall social power strategy of development.

But another central issue in this area is the obvious tension between providing a development path for other core capitalisms and assuring the continued dominance of American capitalism. For thirty years the United States triumphantly achieved this task, but its efforts to restructure patterns of accumulation from the 1970s on were fraught with tensions and problems.

In the first phase of the postwar period, war destruction and economic dislocation in Eurasia offered the possibility of a great postwar reconstruction boom. And American capitalism was the bearer of a new type of industrial capitalism with very dynamic possibilities. The so-called Fordist type of capitalism was different from the typical interwar and nineteenth century European form of capitalism. This had involved using workers only for production, while the products of the most advanced industries were to be sold to middle-class markets around the world. The Fordist idea gave the industrial workers the possibility of a role also in "realization," as consumers of the products of advanced industries. And when this idea was linked to the power of the labor movements that emerged in a number of West European societies after the Second World War, often Communist led, and was linked also to Keynesian ideas of class compromise in economics and to fears of Communism, the basis was laid for a powerful economic grow th dynamic in Western Europe based upon a great deepening of domestic product markets. (1)