David Harvey – The Ways of the World: an excerpt
- January 16, 2016
Read an excerpt from “The Ways of the World”, David Harvey’s latest book that provides an overview of his most important works from the past five decades.
- Author
The Ways of the World presents a sequence of landmark works in David Harvey’s intellectual journey over five decades. It shows how experiencing the riots, despair and injustice of 1970s Baltimore led him to seek an explanation of capitalist inequalities via Marx and to a sustained intellectual engagement that has made him the world’s leading exponent of Marx’s work. Read an excerpt below, and visit Profile Books’ website to read the rest of the chapter.
The ‘new’ imperialism Capitalist social formations, often arranged in particular territorial or regional configurations and usually dominated by some hegemonic centre, have long engaged in quasi-imperialist practices in search of spatiotemporal fixes to their overaccumulation problems. It is possible, however, to periodise the historical geography of these processes by taking arendt seriously when she argues that the european-centred imperialism of the period 1884 to 1945 constituted the first stab at global political rule by the bourgeoisie. Individual nation-states engaged in their own imperialist projects to deal with problems of overaccumulation and class conflict within their orbit. Initially stabilised under British hegemony and constructed around open flows of capital and commodities on the world market, this first system broke down at the turn of the century into geopolitical conflicts between major powers pursuing autarky within increasingly closed systems. it erupted in two world wars in much the way that Lenin foresaw. Much of the rest of the world was pillaged for resources during this period (just look at the history of what Japan did to Taiwan or Britain did to the Witwatersrand in South Africa) in the hope that accumulation by dispossession would compensate for a chronic inability, which came to a head in the 1930s, to sustain capitalism through expanded reproduction.
This system was displaced in 1945 by a US-led system that sought to establish a global compact among all the major capitalist powers to avoid internecine wars and find a rational way to deal collectively with the overaccumulation that had plagued the 1930s. For this to happen they had to share in the benefits of an intensification of an integrated capitalism in the core regions (hence US support for moves towards European Union) and engage in systematic geographical expansion of the system (hence the US insistence upon decolonisation and ‘developmentalism’ as a generalised goal for the rest of the world). This second phase of global bourgeois rule was largely held together by the contingency of the Cold War. This entailed US military and economic leadership as the sole capitalist superpower. The effect was to construct a hegemonic US ‘superimperialism’ that was more political and military than it was a manifestation of economic necessity. The USA was not itself highly dependent upon external outlets or even inputs. It could even afford to open its market to others and thereby absorb through internal spatiotemporal fixes, such as the interstate highway system, sprawling suburbanisation and the development of its south and west, part of the surplus capacity that began to emerge strongly in Germany and Japan during the 1960s. Strong growth through expanded reproduction occurred throughout the capitalist world. Accumulation by dispossession was relatively muted, though countries with capital surpluses, like Japan and West Germany, increasingly needed to look outwards for markets, including by competing for control of post-colonial developing markets. Strong controls over capital export (as opposed to commodities) were, however, kept in place in much of Europe and capital imports into East Asia remained restricted. Class struggles within individual nation-states over expanded reproduction (how it would occur and who would benefit) dominated. The main geopolitical struggles that arose were either those of the Cold War (with that other empire constructed by the Soviets) or residual struggles (more often than not cross-cut by Cold War politics that pushed the USA to support many reactionary post-colonial regimes) which resulted from the reluctance of European powers to disengage from their colonial possessions (the invasion of Suez by the British and French in 1956, not supported at all by the USA, was emblematic). Growing resentments of being locked into a spatiotemporal situation of perpetual subservience to the centre did, however, spark anti-dependency and national liberation movements. Third World socialism sought modernisation but on an entirely different class and political basis
Continue reading at Profile Books’ website.
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