Globalization as Imperialism

Abstract

Globalization... is not a serious idea. We, the Americans, invented it as a means for concealing our policy of economic penetration into other nations (J. K. Galbraith, interview, Folha de Sdo Paulo, October 2, 1997). Proclaiming that globalization implies an epochal transformation or that it is a break with the previous two centuries of the imperialist expansion of capitalism is at best a naive foolishness produced by a lack of historical information and analytical ability. At worst it amounts to acceptance of the ideological distortions of those who have promoted and benefited from the current mode of this expansion. But pretending that nothing has changed since the days of Lenin and Hilferding or since Bretton Woods reveals an equivalent incapacity for analysis and ideological dogmatism. If the first case is failing to see the forest for the trees, then the second is failing to see the diversity of the trees for the forest. Considered from a historical perspective, globalization is the present stage of economic imperialism. In accordance with the definition formulated by Hilferding and Lenin at the beginning of the twentieth century, imperialism is a set of basic characteristics: the development of monopoly capital, the emergence of finance capital through the fusion of industrial capital and the banks, the export of investments from the center to the periphery, and interimperialist competition for the control of foreign markets. In the present circumstances, these features are exacerbated. Recent technological innovations with regard to the flow of information and immense international liquidity have favored the increased growth of finance capital and huge transnational monopoly corporations. The magnitude and rate of international investment flows have also multiplied, and the implosion of the Soviet bloc has opened new spaces for investment in underdeveloped areas. Capitalist control of the world is greater today than it has ever been, leading to the