Description:
American power rests on five pillars: the dollar and the financial system, the military, monopoly over advanced technology, fossil fuels, and soft power. Ben Norton's argument is that all five are now cracking.
In his lecture at the Fudan University Summer School on the Global South, Norton begins with theory, because the theories disagree in a way that matters. In the classical account, running from Hobson through Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, imperialism is a stage: overproduction and insufficient demand at home, markets forced open abroad.
In his lecture at the Fudan University Summer School on the Global South, Norton begins with theory, because the theories disagree in a way that matters. In the classical account, running from Hobson through Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, imperialism is a stage: overproduction and insufficient demand at home, markets forced open abroad.
For the Patnaiks, in Capital and Imperialism, the root is raw materials and the deliberate depression of incomes across the tropics. For the dependency school and the world-systems analysts — Samir Amin, Wallerstein — capitalism is a single global division of labour: a core that monopolises high value added, and a periphery kept from climbing the chain.
Norton is frank about which of the three he finds most useful, and about the difference that follows: for Lenin, imperialism is a stage of capitalism; for the others, the two were never separable. Colonialism, he notes, is older than capitalism by millennia.