ANALYSE THE DEVELOPMENT OF IMPERIALISM

Analyse the Development of Imperialism

Analyse the Development of Imperialism

Introduction

The analysis proposed here regarding the role of Europe and the Africa in the global imperialist strategy of the United States is set in a general historical vision of capitalist expansion that I have developed elsewhere. (Amin, 1981) In this view capitalism has always been, since its inception, by nature, a polarizing system, that is, imperialist. This polarization the concurrent construction of dominant centres and dominated peripheries, and their reproduction deepening in each stage is inherent in the process of accumulation of capital operating on a global scale.

In this theory of the global expansion of capitalism the qualitative changes in the systems of accumulation, from one phase of its history to another, shape the successive forms of asymmetric centres/peripheries polarization, that is, of concrete imperialism. The contemporary world system will thus remain imperialist (polarizing) throughout the visible future, in so far as its fundamental logic remains dominated by capitalist production relations. This theory associates imperialism with the process of capital accumulation on a worldwide scale, which I consider as constituting a single reality whose various dimensions are in fact not separable. Thus it differs as much from the vulgarized version of the Leninist theory of "imperialism, the highest phase of capitalism" (as if the former phases of global expansion of capitalism were not polarizing), as from the contemporary post-modern theories that describe the new globalization as "post-imperialist."

Permanent Conflict of Imperialisms with Collective Imperialism

In its globalised deployment, imperialism was always conjugated in the plural, from its inception (in the sixteenth century) until 1945. The permanent and often violent conflict of imperialisms has occupied as decisive a place in the transformation of the world as class struggle, through which the fundamental contradictions of capitalism are expressed. Moreover, social strife and conflicts among imperialisms are closely articulated, and it is this articulation that has determined the course of really existing capitalism. The analysis that I have proposed in this respect differs vastly from that of the "succession of hegemonies."

The Second World War ended in a major transformation in the forms of imperialism, substituting for the multiplicity of imperialisms in permanent conflict a collective imperialism. This collective imperialism represented the ensemble of the centres of the world capitalist system, or more simply, the triad: the United States and its external Canadian province, western and central Europe, and Japan. This new form of imperialist expansion has gone through various phases of its development, but it has been present ever since 1945. The hegemonic role of the United States must be located within this perspective, and every instance of this hegemony needs to be specified in its relation with the new collective imperialism. These questions pose problems, which are precisely those that I would wish to point out here. (Amin, 1981)

The United States benefited enormously from the Second World War, which had ruined its principal contenders Europe, the Soviet Union, China, and Japan. It was thus in a position to exert its ...