Brief notes on late imperialism

rejoinder to a recent post

So after I made my post the other day on Epstein, finance and ‘late imperialism’, I received a few DMs asking for clarifications on a key points—namely, how the role of asset management as the ‘management of superfluous capital’ impacts foreign excursions, relations of power between the imperial core and the rest of the world, and how this really shifts about the dynamics of imperialist domination. These are all essential to unpack and I’d be lying if I said I had a totally firm conclusion… This blog is in many ways a notebook to work through thoughts, so positions are totally subjected (and expected!) to be changed over time and through debate. But here’s some tentative propositions.

1) A recap of the basic argument of what ‘late imperialism’ is: imperialism, in its classical, high capitalist era, was grounded upon the subordination of industrial capital by banking capital. This dreadful unity, which can be defined as finance capital, tended towards monopolistic concentration, gigantic combines, and the consolidation of many industrial branches into a common organization. Capitalism here is sufficiently socialized (the term here deployed in a functionalist sense, stripped of its egalitarian connotations).

2) Classical imperialism charted two courses: it exploited the so-called ‘peripheries’, using them as a source of cheap labor, agricultural zones, and the sites of violent extraction of various natural resources. At the same time, imperialism maintained developmental pretenses. Massive accumulation of capital in the core led a drive towards foreign direct investment in the countries toiling beneath imperialist domination.

3) Today, industrial capital and banking capital alike are subordinated to the rise of asset management monoliths. These changing relations exert a de facto transformation in the very nature of imperialism itself, but want of its own shifting ground. This is the passage towards ‘late imperialism’.

4) Imperialism now abandons all developmental logic. The continued appeals towards ‘developmental capital’, foreign direct investment, market formation, and poverty alleviation programs are masks for the relentless stripping of resources, the unbridled exploitation of local populations, and the pulverization of localized circuits of capital. Late imperialism is the force of permanent dismantling and looting at the global level, made possible through the liquefied nature of capital flows and the increasingly porous nature of national boundaries and distinct states themselves.

5) Imperialism, despite leveraging incredible violence and death as a tool, concerned itself with the vicious management of life. The deathly dimensions have overtaken the self-regulatory, ‘social’ factors of classical imperialism. Late imperialism is not a break from classical imperialism, but its logical conclusion. To slip into a different sort of theoretical language, imperialism was essentially a biopolitical regime (Foucault); late imperialism governs through necropolitical apparatuses (Mbembe).

So that’s the basic thesis. But how to bridge the gap between points 1 -3 and 4 - 5?

6) Capital has been in profound crisis for the past five decades. This is, in fact, no ordinary crisis, but a cascading regime of interrelated crises—an Omnicrisis. The trendlines of traditional capitalist development and their core paradox—the falling rate of profit—bottomed out in an increasingly difficult environment to realize profitability. Two primary solutions arose.

7) The first was a transformation in the nature of exploitation. The tendency to increase value extraction of labor through increased pace of work continued and accelerated, but was matched by the return of an archaic form of labor relations: the indefinite extension of the working day. Labor becomes the ultimate horizon of life. These two forces were joined by the third: labor pushed below its value, entailing the impossibility of the reproduction of one’s life and circumstances.

8) The second solution was the transformation of money into its superfluous form, realized in the form of state debt through the issuance of bonds and other financial instruments. The abandoning of gold—the final nail in the coffin of ‘old capitalism’—was compensated for through the wide proliferation of Treasuries. Here, fictitious capital began its climb to the status of universal mediator of social relations, and the financial markets (not the commodities market) achieves its supremacy.

9) This transformation further marked the subsumption of capital into the state—not a state that makes possible the external conditions of capital’s reproduction, but one that modulates, controls and affects the internal conditions.