The crisis of US imperialism in historical perspective By Nick Beams
8 November 2006

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*The following is an edited version of a report delivered by Nick Beams to a
meeting of the Socialist Equality Party (Australia) on the weekend of
October 25-26. Beams is the SEP national secretary and a member of the
International Editorial Board of the *World Socialist Web Site*. He has
written and lectured extensively on Marxist political economy.*

The 2006 American elections have a truly global significance. They are
taking place in conditions where the Bush administration and the entire US
ruling elite is embroiled in a deep-going political crisis, precipitated by
the disastrous consequences of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. As
numerous books, articles and comment pieces—many of them echoing positions
articulated within the American military—have made clear, the invasion of
Iraq has been a fiasco. The underlying position of the various critics from
within ruling circles is that it has weakened both the immediate and the
long-term strategic position of the United States.

How to resolve this crisis? A *Financial Times* columnist recently suggested
that anyone who could do so, ought to be awarded the Nobel Prize. No one has
an answer. A situation has developed where all the options are bad—that is
to say, any proposal immediately throws up new problems and contradictions.

The Iraqi government, as has been widely reported, has been given about two
months to move toward bringing the situation under control. Just what that
means, however, is not clear. Having denounced the insurgents as terrorists
and Baathist dead-enders, the Bush administration is insisting that there
should be an amnesty and they should be brought into the political process.
But to bring back the Baathists means a bloody crackdown on the Shia
militias, and above all on the Sadrists. Such a military bloodbath is now
being prepared.

The report of Iraq Study Group headed by James Baker III will be issued
after the elections. Among the options being considered is the division of
Iraq into three—a Kurdish region in the north, a Shia-dominated region in
the south and a Sunni-dominated region in the centre. But this option
appears to have been rejected, at least for the present, on the grounds that
it would result in even bigger conflicts, coupled with large-scale ethnic
cleansing. The present sectarian conflict is largely the result of dividing
the polity along religious lines. What would happen if there were to be a
geographical division of the country? A Kurdish state in the north would
create problems for Turkey, and the Saudi regime could be weakened by a Shia
regime in the south, while Iran would be strengthened.

One proposal, which seems likely to come from the Baker report, is
discussions with Iran and Syria to try to stabilise the situation. But
concessions would have to be made to both Iran and Syria to effect such an
agreement—at least, some kind of normalisation of relations and a rejection
of the perspective of "regime change". In the case of Iran, this would
involve the reversal of US policy going right back to the immediate
aftermath of World War II. And any agreement with Iran and Syria would raise
the issue of US relations with Israel.

Aside from these immediate questions, the Iraq debacle has provoked
discussion in American foreign policy circles about the long-term position
of the United States.

Former State Department official and now president of the Council on Foreign
Relations, Richard Haas, wrote an article in the latest issue of *Foreign
Affairs* entitled "The New Middle East" which reviews some of these issues.
He begins as follows:

"Just over two centuries since Napoleon's arrival in Egypt heralded the
advent of the modern Middle East—some 80 years after the demise of the
Ottoman Empire, 50 years after the end of colonialism, and less than 20
years after the end of the Cold War—the American era in the Middle East, the
fourth in the region's modern history, has ended. Visions of a new,
Europe-like region—peaceful, prosperous, democratic—will not be realised.
Much more likely is the emergence of a new Middle East that will cause great
harm to itself, the United States, and the world.

"All the eras have been defined by the interplay of contending forces, both
internal and external to the region. What has varied is the balance between
these influences. The Middle East's next era promises to be one in which
outside actors have a relatively modest impact and local forces enjoy the
upper hand—and in which the local actors gaining power are radicals
committed to changing the status quo. Shaping the new Middle East from the
outside will be exceedingly difficult, but it—along with managing a dynamic
Asia—will be the primary challenge of U.S. foreign policy for decades to
come."

According to Haas, the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet
Union provided a situation that gave the United States unprecedented
influence and freedom to act. However, this era is now over.

"What has brought this era to an end after less than two decades is a number
of factors, some structural, some self-created. The most significant has
been the Bush administration's decision to attack Iraq in 2003 and its
conduct of the operation and resulting occupation. One casualty of the war
has been a Sunni-dominated Iraq, which was strong enough and motivated
enough to balance Shiite Iran. Sunni-Shiite tensions, dormant for a while,
have come to the surface in Iraq and throughout the region. Terrorists have
gained a base in Iraq and developed there a new set of techniques to export.
Throughout much of the region, democracy has become associated with the loss
of public order and the end of Sunni primacy. Anti-American sentiment,
already considerable, has been reinforced. And by tying down a huge portion
of the US military, the war has reduced US leverage worldwide. It is one of
history's ironies that the first war in Iraq, a war of necessity, marked the
beginning of the American era in the Middle East and the second Iraq war, a
war of choice, has precipitated its end."

In the future, he points out, the US will increasingly be challenged by the
foreign policies of other outsiders in the Middle East. Haas can offer no
way forward, warning that there are no quick and easy solutions for the
problems the new era poses and that the Middle East will remain a troubled
and troubling part of the world for decades to come—enough to make one
nostalgic for the old Middle East.

*The decline of the US*

Michael Lind of the New America Foundation, a thinktank established in the
recent period to promote alternatives to the Bush administration, points to
the decline in the long-term strategic position of the US and the collapse
of the perspectives developed in the post-Cold War period.

In a recent article entitled "The World After Bush", he writes:

"On 20th January 2009, George W Bush, barring his death, resignation or
impeachment, will be succeeded by the 44th US president. Whether Republican
or Democrat, the next president will not only inherit a number of crises,
but will be in a considerably weaker position to deal with them.

"Much of America's weakness will be the result of self-inflicted wounds: the
unnecessary invasion of Iraq, along with the Bush administration's
gratuitous insults to allies, its arrogant unilateralism and its hostility
to international law. But as tempting as it may be to put all of the blame
on the Bush administration, the truth is that most of the trends that will
limit American power and influence in the next decade are long-term
phenomena produced by economic, demographic and ideological developments
beyond the power of the US or any government to influence. The rise of
China, the shift in the centre of the world economy to Asia, the growth of
neo-mercantilist petro-politics, the spread of Islamism in both militant and
moderate forms—these trends are reshaping the world order in ways that
neither the US nor any of its allies can do much to control.

"In retrospect, we can view the period in US and world history that has just
ended as 'the long 1990s'. Those years began in euphoria with the fall of
the Berlin Wall in 1989 and expired in frustration in late 2003, when the
swift victory of the US and its allies over Iraq's armed forces was
succeeded by an insurgency that exposed the limits of US power. But even if
9/11 and the Iraq invasion had never occurred, the conventional wisdom of
the long 1990s would have crumbled at some point after colliding with
reality.

"Take the central assumption that at the end of the cold war a bipolar world
was replaced by a unipolar one. This was true only in the military
dimension—and even there American power was exaggerated. The US has no peers
when the task is breaking the conventional armed forces of second and
third-tier states like Iraq and Serbia. But when it comes to asymmetric
warfare, in the form of campaigns against insurgents like those in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the US military, like all conventional militaries, finds itself
in the position of a clumsy Goliath trying to quash a nimble and determined
David. Stealth bombers and world-class fleets are no help in house-to-house
fighting, and missile defences are no good against improvised explosive
devices. As the wars in Vietnam and Iraq tragically demonstrate, the US
military is not very good at 'military operations other than war'—and
America's enemies know it."

Turning to the underlying economic issues, he writes:

"The conventional wisdom of the long 1990s was correct that capitalism had
defeated socialism, but mistaken to assume that the libertarian capitalism
fashionable in the US in the late 20th century was the winner. The Japanese
never adopted laissez-faire capitalism and China and Russia in recent years
have devised their own mixes of state capitalism and free markets.

"The growth of China and India, which was supposed to herald a global free
market, may instead inaugurate a new age of mercantilism, as Asian
industrial powers like China, unwilling to rely on free markets for energy
sources and commodities, engage in negotiations with supplier countries.
Already bilateral contracts are displacing free markets in oil and gas, and
regional trade pacts are proliferating even as global trade talks are
stalled. The competition between the rising industrial nations of Asia and
the older industrial democracies enhances the leverage of authoritarian and
nationalist states endowed with critical resources, particularly
oil-producing countries like Iran, Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. These
countries view China not only as a customer but also as a counterweight to
the US."

Lind maintains that the "conventional wisdom of the long 1990s ... was
mistaken in every respect. The world did not become unipolar in the 1990s;
it has been effectively multipolar since the 1970s. Ethnic nationalism, not
liberalism or democracy, is the most powerful force in the world today. And
the competition of the industrial nations for sources of supply and markets
is bolstering mercantilism and economic regionalism, incompatible with the
laissez-faire utopia touted by panegyrists of globalisation in the long
1990s.

"All of these trends would constrain US foreign policy, even if Al Gore had
been inaugurated in 2001 rather than George W Bush. It will now be
additionally constrained by the legacy of the eight-year Bush
administration. When the next president is inaugurated, the US will almost
certainly still be in Iraq. Rather than have the world witness the
inglorious departure of US forces from a chaotic Iraq in the final years of
his presidency, Bush is likely to cede the problem to his successor."

He concludes that the collapse of the neoconservative perspective in the
Middle East and the world does not mean success for what he calls the
neoliberal perspective of the Democratic Party. "Neoliberals agree with
neoconservatives about the goal of US foreign policy—a global free market in
a world policed by a benevolent, hegemonic US. Their differences are in the
details. Although they are as opposed in practice to a multipolar world
order as neoconservatives, neoliberals argue that the US should make its
global hegemony more palatable to other countries by endorsing international
law and working through international institutions like the UN and NATO."

He notes that while some neoliberals call for a vast program of investment
in developing countries, the Middle East in particular—a kind of new
Marshall Plan—this will never be tested, because the money is not there in
the first place.

While Lind does not go on to develop the argument, this fact does point to
the underlying reason for the resort to militarism—the economic decline of
the United States. His perspective is for what he calls a "concert of great
powers, organised and led by the US" as the best hope for reconciling
international peace with liberal order.

But what happens if those powers do not find it in their interest to be led
and organised by the US? Such a concert is only possible provided the US is
prepared to make concessions to its rivals and potential adversaries. Here,
however, lies the fundamental problem. The US is not in a position to do
that. As we have previously noted, the invasion of Iraq was directed not so
much against Saddam Hussein, as against the European rivals of the US in the
Middle East. The aim was to establish a puppet regime in Iraq and in that
way reinforce the position of the US against its European and Asian rivals.
The same is true of Iran.

The reason the US pursues such a belligerent policy is rooted in its
long-term economic decline. In the immediate post-war period, the US
financed the Marshall Plan and consciously rebuilt the other major
capitalist powers—except Britain whose empire it was seeking to dismantle.
Under today's conditions, a "concert of great powers" can at best only be an
unstable truce.

*The historic context*

The present situation has to be placed within its broad historical
context—that is to say, examined on the basis of the historical development
of the world capitalist system.

Following Leon Trotsky, we can delineate very definite phases or periods in
what he called the curve of capitalist development, and a number of
important features of the present situation clearly emerge.

When Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1847, they pointed to
the stupendous achievements of capitalist civilisation. But in many ways
what they wrote was only a brilliant anticipation of what was to come. Over
the next 25 years, there took place the great Victorian upswing of the
mid-nineteenth century.

Following the revolutions of 1848, which cleared away the remaining feudal
encumbrances and barriers, at least in Western Europe, came a mighty
economic expansion. It was spearheaded by the railway industries and
organised by British capital. This was the heyday of British commercial
imperialism. British capital financed expansion in Western Europe and the
United States. Britain with its empire and navy was the pre-eminent
capitalist power, but it laid the basis for the expansion of the other
capitalist powers.

The first great upswing in the curve of capitalist development came to an
end with a series of financial crises in 1873. While the immediate crisis
passed, it did not signal a return to the previous period. Rather, 1873
marked the beginning of what is known in economic history as the Great
Depression of the nineteenth century. In contrast to the upswing of the
previous quarter century, this was a period of enormous downward pressure on
profits.

This pressure, in turn, was the driving force behind some of the great
changes of that period. In America, and to some extent Germany, new forms of
industrial organisation and industrial processes emerged—in steel-making, in
chemicals, the beginnings of assembly line production in the food and meat
industries, and the application of steam power to shipping, to name a few.
This was the period of the rise of colonial empires, exemplified by the
carve-up of Africa in just 20 years. But it was also, although not fully
recognised at the time, the beginning of the decline of British hegemony.
The very expansion of capitalism, financed by Britain in an earlier period,
created the conditions for a weakening of its relative position.

The period of the Great Depression also brought great social changes. The
development of new industrial processes saw the emergence of the industrial
working class as a powerful social force. In the days of the Communist
Manifesto, the working class, except in England, was not highly
concentrated. Old artisan forms still remained and factories tended to be
small scale. All that changed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

These objective processes found their expression in the development of the
mass trade unions and the socialist and labour parties. The rise of Marxism
as the theoretical and political guiding force of the socialist movement was
expressed in the founding of the Second International. The First
International had been wrecked by the anarchists and petty-bourgeois radical
forces and by the impact of the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871. But by
1889, Marxism had asserted its supremacy over these tendencies. Just 28
years after the founding of the Second International, the first successful
socialist revolution was carried out in Russia in October 1917.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx emphasised the global character of the
capitalist system. But here, again, this was more a brilliant anticipation
than an empirical description. In the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, the capitalist system started, so to speak, to catch up to Marx and
the process we now designate as globalisation went ahead in leaps and
bounds. Far-flung regions of the world were drawn into the capitalist
processes of production, united by new forms of transport and
communications.

Minerals and raw materials, some of them new, such as rubber, as well as
agricultural products, were transported in bulk to be processed in
factories. Finance capital spread across the world as banks financed vast
undertakings, in particular the development of infrastructure. The
cheapening of raw materials and food, which these developments made
possible, assumed vast importance for the development of industrial
capitalism, in the same way that the drive to secure ever-cheaper forms of
labour does today.

This "second industrial revolution" in the last quarter of the nineteenth
century eventually brought an end to the Great Depression in prices and
profits. A new capitalist upswing began from around 1895. But it was not a
repeat of the earlier upward phase.

Beneath the prosperity, all manner of problems were emerging. One of the
crucial differences with the earlier period was that rather than taking
place under the aegis of a dominant power, whose economic might worked to
ensure the expansion of the capitalist economy as a whole, the new upswing
took place amid growing rivalries and antagonisms among the major powers.

The old economic power, Britain, was losing its position. At the turn of the
century, it suffered a shock when the Boer War, which was expected to
present few problems, turned into a bloody disaster. Britain's weaknesses
had been exposed and, over the course of the next seven years, she abandoned
the previous policy of "splendid isolation" and entered into a series of
alliances—with Japan, France and Russia—which were to play a significant
role in propelling her into the Great War.

*War and depression*

The eruption of the war in 1914 marked the beginning of a new downswing in
the curve of capitalist development. But, as Trotsky was to remark later, it
was not so much that the war produced the downswing, rather that the
downswing was the key factor in triggering the war. The fundamental economic
shift that led to the eruption of the war can be seen in the fact that it
was not until the latter 1920s that post-war production in Europe began to
attain the levels reached in 1913—only to collapse again with the onset of
the 1930s Great Depression.

From the standpoint of globalisation, the inter-war period can be designated
as the period of the great reversal. By the beginning of the 1930s, the
world market had, to all intents and purposes, ceased to exist. Trade had
contracted by two-thirds, and international finance had come to a virtual
standstill. The world was divided among competing empires and spheres of
influence.

From the standpoint of the dominant capitalist power, the United States, the
Second World War was not a struggle against fascism, so much as a war waged
to end the empires of the rival capitalist powers, and to restore the world
market and the free movement of capital and trade, upon which American
capitalism, and the capitalist system as a whole, depended.

The defeat of Germany and Japan opened the way for the reconstruction of the
world economy and made possible the adoption on a world scale of the new,
more productive, techniques of the American production. This gave rise to a
new upswing in the curve of capitalist development.

One is struck today by the parallels with the mid-nineteenth century
upswing. Just as the 1848 revolutions removed constrictions on the expansion
of capitalism, so the Allied victory in the war, led by the US, opened the
way for the extension of the world market. Just as the mid-Victorian boom
rested on the economic might of the dominant power, Great Britain, so the
post-war economic boom took place under the aegis of the United States,
whose vast economic power and superiority over its rivals enabled it to
undertake the task of reconstructing the capitalist system as a whole.
However, the very measures it undertook weakened its relative position.

The world economic crisis of the early 1970s, when the profit rate began to
fall, signalled the onset of a new downswing in the curve of capitalist
development. Over the next two decades, the fall in the rate of profit
became the driving force for vast changes in the structure and functioning
of capitalist production. These changes, bound up with the application of
computer technologies to all aspects of communication and production, have
resulted in a quantum leap in the globalisation of production.

Whereas in all previous epochs, surplus value was extracted from the working
class within the confines of a given nation-state, this now takes place on a
global scale. Capital exists in three forms: as money (the end of the
capitalist production process with the sale of commodities and the start of
a new round of production), as commodity capital (which emerges from the
production process) and as productive capital (the means of production that
are employed to extract surplus value from the working class in the course
of the production process). Commodity capital and money capital became
citizens of the world in an earlier period. Productive capital, however,
still retained a certain national identity. But now the disaggregation of
the production process beyond the framework of the nation-state means that
productive capital has become truly global.

The globalisation of production since the mid-1970s has had vast social and
political implications. If the downswing in the latter part of the
nineteenth century was the trigger for the establishment of the mass
organisations of the working class that held sway for the majority of the
twentieth century, then the changes over the past three decades have brought
about their disintegration and collapse. This was the significance of the
demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Capital responded to the downturn in the rate of profit in the 1970s in the
same way as it had in the past. It undertook a desperate struggle to
revolutionise the process of production. The globalisation of production is
the outcome.

*The rate of profit*

The question now arises: has this produced an upswing in the rate of profit?
There is some evidence that it has. But whether this means a new period of
capitalist stability is altogether another question. In fact, an examination
of the way this profit upturn has been achieved reveals that it has the most
explosive social and political consequences.

An article published in the *Financial Times* on October 14 notes the
following: "In Britain, company profits were the highest last year since
records began in 1965; yet median weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation,
fell by 0.4 percent. It is the same story in all the rich countries of the
west. In a recent research note on the US economy, Goldman Sachs, the US
investment bank, said: 'As a share of GDP, profits reached an all-time high
in the first quarter of 2006. Several factors have contributed to the rise
in profit margins. The most important is a decline in labour's share of
national income.'"

According to a *New York Times* article published on August 28, the current
expansion in the US economy could become the first period of sustained
economic growth since World War II that fails to offer an increase in real
wages for most workers. The median hourly wage for American workers has
declined by 2 percent since 2003 in real terms. This means that wages and
salaries now make up the lowest share of GDP since the government started
recording the data in 1947, while corporate profits have reached their
highest levels since the 1960s.

In the first quarter of 2006, wages and salaries represented 45 percent of
GDP, down from almost 50 percent in the first quarter of 2001 and a record
53.6 percent in the first quarter of 1970. Each percentage point now
represents about $132 billion.

These aggregate figures tend to mask the real situation, because they
include income paid to the highest earners. In 2004 the top 1 percent of
income earners in the US, including many chief executives, received
11.2percent of all wage income, compared to
8.7 percent a decade earlier and less than 6 percent three decades ago.

The increase in the rate of profit, the result of the increased profit share
in GDP, is in part the outcome of the vast changes in the structure of the
world economy resulting from the integration of China and the former Soviet
Union into the world labour market. A recent study by Harvard labour
economist Richard Freeman notes that a process he calls "The Great Doubling"
has seen the global labour force available to capital increase from about
1.46 billion to around 2.93 billion. This has dramatically changed the
balance between capital and labour in the global economy. According to
Freeman, the ratio of capital to labour in 2000 was about 61 percent of what
it would have been had China, India and the ex-Soviet bloc not been
integrated into the world economy. Of course, these figures are only
approximations, but they do give a sense of the historic dimension of the
transformations taking place.

The process, which began with unskilled labour, has not stopped there. A
whole series of jobs that were once considered relatively immobile can now
be transferred. In effect, any process that can be digitised can be
outsourced to anywhere in the world.

Capital has thus been able to bring about a certain restoration in the rate
of profit. In other words, there has been a benefit to capital from the
dissolution of the Soviet Union and the integration of China and India into
the world market. Previously, capital boosted the profit rate by plundering
raw materials and resources. Today it does so by plundering cheap labour.
But it is far from establishing a new equilibrium. In fact, the situation is
highly unstable. Capital accumulation, as measured by the rate of profit,
depends more and more on the reduction of the share of national income going
to labour in the major capitalist countries. And even where there is a
tendency for wages to increase in China and India, the process of
accumulation is also highly unstable. Already sections of Chinese labour are
becoming too highly priced in relation to what can be obtained in Vietnam or
Bangladesh.

There are distinct parallels with the period before 1914. Then, the upturn
in capitalist profit was occasioned, at least in part, by the first phase of
globalisation—the exploitation of cheap raw materials and agricultural
products. Today, it is being fuelled by the increased supplies of cheaper
labour. But this mode of accumulation is bound to bring social and political
instability because it is dependent on ever-deepening social inequality,
which can have far-reaching consequences in both the advanced capitalist
countries and the new entrants into the global market.

Like the period before 1914, there is an intensifying conflict among the
major powers. The relative economic decline of the US, like that of Britain
before it, has extended over several decades. However, it has now become an
explosive factor in world politics, as the US attempts to compensate for its
loss of economic hegemony by military means. There are criticisms of the
Bush doctrine of militarism from within American ruling circles, given the
disaster that has unfolded in Iraq. But whenever one reads the alternative
proposals—a concert of powers, a return to multilateralism—one is struck by
the fact that they all involve some weakening of the position of the US. For
three and a half decades, ever since it unilaterally removed the gold
backing from the US dollar and ended the Bretton Woods monetary system
because it was not able to honour its obligations, the US has been seeking
to resolve its economic problems at the expense of its rivals. That process
is not going to be reversed. In a sense, the turn to military means
represents the intensification of a process that has been unfolding over the
entire preceding period.

Timothy Garton Ash of the *Guardian* wrote last year: "If you want to know
what London was like in 1905, come to Washington in 2005. Imperial gravitas
and massive self-importance. That sense of being the centre of the world,
and of needing to know what happens in every corner of the world because you
might be called on—or feel called upon—to intervene there. Hyperpower. Top
dog. And yet, gnawing away beneath the surface, the nagging fear that your
global supremacy is not half so secure as you would wish. As Joseph
Chamberlain, the British colonial secretary, put it in 1902: 'The weary
Titan under the too vast orb of his fate' ... The United States is now that
weary Titan'" (cited in Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, *The Political Economy of
American Militarism*, p. 36).

Just as in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the previously
dominant imperialist power, Great Britain, had to increasingly resort to
military means in the face of rising challengers (Germany, rival European
powers and the US) so today the US faces direct threats to its position.
These are the underlying driving forces of the deepening political
instability, growing great power rivalry and war that we are witnessing
today.

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