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Title: Empire of Capital by Ellen Meiksins Wood ISBN: 1-85984-502-9 Publisher: Verso Pub. Date: June, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.75 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Empire of Capital
Comment: Marketed as a critique of American imperialism, this book offers fragments. Part comparative history of empires, part treatise on political economy, part analysis of globalization, and part polemic against the Bush administration's war on terrorism, the parts do not add up to a coherent whole. Using odd categories, Wood (York Univ., Canada) compares "empires of property" and "empires of commerce" with the British colonial empire, originating in Ireland. She asserts throughout the book that the coercive power of state always undergirds economic relations, a familiar theme to students of hegemony. Toward the end, she turns abruptly to the issue of globalization, arguing that antiglobalists are not radical enough: they oppose "capital's global reach rather than ... the capitalist system itself." The final chapter asserts that the Bush doctrine attempts to protect global capitalist interests. The war against Afghanistan "was undertaken with an eye to the huge oil and gas reserves of Central Asia." The war against Iraq, impending at the time of publication, was to control oil. Like many in the Marxist tradition, Wood reduces political or security concerns to economic ones. The analysis is unconvincing and adds little to previous knowledge.
Rating: 5
Summary: Timely Response
Comment: To quote from p. 5 of the book:
" The argument here is not that of capital in conditions of 'globalization' has escaped the control of the state and made the territorial state increasingly irrelevant. On the contrary, my argument is that the state is more essential than ever to capital, even, or especially, in its global form. The political form of globalization is not a global state but a system of multiple states, and the new imperialism takes its specific shape from the complex and contradictory relationship between capital's expansive economic power and the more limited reach of the extra-economic force that sustains it."
In a nutshell, this is the book's thesis, and it addresses the timely question of what form globalization will ultimately take. Against the de-centered, monolithically global state of the sort detailed in Hardt & Negri's fashionable work *Empire*, Wood argues that the only possible outcome is a multi-state system, presumably like the one already in place. For that reason alone her book is worth the read, given the wide popularity of H&N's thesis. Of the two perspectives, Wood's is certainly on firmer empirical ground. As currently experienced, globalization is very much a product of a multi-state system, led by American capital and the state's capacity to maintain financial and military hegemony. (In fact, much of current middle-east policy can be understood from that strategic standpoint.) On the other hand, H & N's fluid leviathan appears more visionary than contemporary, more theoretical than factual, and more the result of shrewd extrapolation and darkly compelling fantasy than of historical necessity.
Nonetheless, Wood at times goes too far in her insistance on a multi-state alternative. "Yet global capitalism without a system of multiple territorial statesis all but inconceivable." (p.24). Now whatever the shortcomings of Hardt & Negri's book, it appears that despite Wood's assertion, this is precisely what H & N succeed in conceptualizing. Their deterritorialized empire is predicated precisely on the rise of a complex, etherialized framework of international capitalist controls, supra-national in scope and monolithic in nature. In short, the emergence of a single, invisible empire of capital, beyond the confines of nation-state, and operating on post-modern cultural and political trends. It's possible to argue the likelihood of this scenario or, given the contradictions of capital, how long it could last, but as an alternative to a multi-state system, it is scarcely inconceivable.
Overall, Wood's slender volume remains deceptively accessible, with none of the heavy weather of Hardt & Negri, and, despite the thematic association, is quite useful apart from the latter. Her brief history of imperialism is informative, with a revealing emphasis on Locke, and I especially like her observations on the role of corporations in the modern world of capital; anti-corporate activists should take heed. And though I think she fails in showing the necessity of multi-state globalization, she does succeed in putting the focus of empire back where it belongs -- on the global role of state-sponsored capital, particularly that of American capital. For that alone, she's owed a debt of thanks.
Rating: 5
Summary: Amazing book
Comment: This is a wonderful book that deserves to be read widely. It works its way through the history of empires and seeks to establish what is distinctive about the present 'Empire of Capital'. For Wood, the current form of imperialism is not simply a new US imperialism, but she manages in a glorious way to show the contradictions that result from the universalization of capitalism (which creates a new type of world market imperialism) on the one hand, and the pursuit of global domination by the US on the other. This book, grounded in real historical understanding, offers so much more if you want to understand the nature of the present than the currently popular discussions of empire and imperialism by ideologues like Max Boot, Niall Ferguson and Robert Kagan.
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Title: The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood ISBN: 1859843921 Publisher: Verso Pub. Date: July, 2002 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Debating Empire (New Left Review Debates) by Gopal Balakrishnan, Stanley Aronowitz ISBN: 1859844529 Publisher: Verso Pub. Date: 04 December, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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Title: Incoherent Empire by Michael Mann ISBN: 1859845827 Publisher: Verso Pub. Date: October, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: The New Imperialism by David Harvey ISBN: 0199264317 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic by Chalmers Johnson ISBN: 0805070044 Publisher: Metropolitan Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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