What Is, and What Is Not, A Capitalist Empire

ABSTRACT

This study argues that a historical materialist theory of what a capitalist empire is has yet to be fully articulated. It proceeds to lay out such a theory. The paper outlines a theory of capitalist empire situated in relation to a historical materialist conceptualization of how capitalism operates. In this I distinguish state and imperialism as aspects of capitalist empires, but empire itself as something related to, but larger than these historical processes. I also locate capitalist empires in relation to the logic of capitalism and its crises tendencies, and the way the logic of capital plays out over uneven development and the exploitation of a variety of labor forms. Additionally, the paper examines the racialized, gendered, and ecological aspects of capitalist empires in an attempt to begin to explain the political economy of capitalist empires as total social wholes.

KEYWORDS:

• Empire
• capitalism
• imperialism
• hegemony
• Marxism

Acknowledgements

Thanks are to Sean Starrs and Radhika Desai for comments on earlier drafts of (what became) this paper; also thanks to Alvin Camba for helping me develop my conception of empire through our discussions; and to two anonymous reviewers for forcing me to clarify my own position among the many views discussed; finally, thanks to Canan Tanir for suggesting organizational changes to the structure of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

James Parisot is a PhD candidate in sociology at Binghamton University (SUNY). He has recently published articles on empire, hegemony, and global political economy in several journals, is currently finishing a dissertation on the origins of the American Empire of capital, and is co-editing a book in progress titled Global Cooperation or Conflict? The Rise of Emerging Powers and the Post-American World.

Notes

¹ I am not arguing, as the Brenner/political Marxist tradition does, that capitalism as a whole originated in England. England was part of a broader international order, and was not an isolated case. And it was through articulations with the broader international capitalist and non-capitalist order, which, even in parts of the capitalist world, included a continuum of labor forms, which English capitalism developed. But this is not the space to discuss the origins of capitalism debate in detail.

² Detailing this debate is outside of the scope of this paper. Overall, though, I suggest that what emerged was a consensus that, while the capitalist state is not an “instrument” of the capitalist class, it generally functions to support their power through law, police, surveillance, hegemony, etc., but its particular institutional forms have also been shaped through histories of social struggle. In other words, the imprint of class, gender, and racial struggle is built into all of the state's institutions.

³ While uneven and combined development is a useful concept to make sense of unequal power relations in international relations it is just that: a concept, not a theory or framework, as recent attempts to develop a general Marxist theory of international relations have attempted to turn it into. For a detailed discussion of this, see Rioux (2014).