New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

MOOERS: Introduction 5
the fact that it was, above all, a social process through which the direct
producers were (often forcibly) separated from access to the means of
production and thus pushed into the ranks of wage labor. During the rise
of English capitalism, this involved the enclosure of what had been
formerly common lands accessible to peasant communities and their
conversion into private property concentrated in the hands of a new class
of capitalist farmers. “And this history,” Marx writes, “the history of their
expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and
fire.” 10 David Harvey has shown that primitive accumulation is not a
once and for all process restricted to the origins of capitalism, but an
ongoing imperative made necessary by the need to find new sources and
sites of capital accumulation. Accumulation through dispossession
involves the colonization, expropriation, and enclosure of preexisting
societal and cultural forms. Predation, fraud, and force are still commonly
used to privatize such things as water resources or to enforce
proletarianization. To these, over the past two decades, have been added
an array of financial instruments of dispossession such as hedge funds,
currency devaluations, asset stripping, and credit and stock manipulations.
In conjunction with these changes, a new set of global institutions
have been established to regulate and fortify market relations between
states and regional trade blocs. Whatever the means, the outcome has
been to unleash a new wave of “enclosing the commons.” 11
The current round of imperialism, therefore, has as its goal the export
and entrenchment of capitalist social-property relations throughout the
world; it is about the universalization of capitalism. And just as in earlier
phases of capitalism, state military power has been central to the
imposition of this new stage of primitive accumulation and enclosure.
However, if state military power is still essential for the imposition of
capitalism in some parts of the world, and if its spectacular display
remains vital to U.S. global hegemony, there is an important sense in
which the dynamics of imperialism have changed markedly. Unlike its
earlier forms, imperialism today no longer relies on direct colonization.
Nor does military rivalry between states over resources and territory exist
on the scale that it did in the time of Lenin and Bukharin. But if imperialism
is no longer defined by formal empire and military competition,
how have militarism and capitalist imperatives become so closely linked
in the new imperialism? The simple answer is that in a world comprised
of limited territorial states and the global reach of capital, the use of