Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Sam Ashman
Symposium on David Harvey’s The New
Imperialism: Editorial Introduction
1 Bacevich 2002; Ferguson 2002 and 2004. For a direct critique of the latter see
4 • Sam Ashman
2 For a clear statement in defence of the world-state thesis, see Robinson 2004.
3 Harvey 2003, p. 183.
HIMA 14,4_f2_3-7II 11/9/06 3:33 PM Page 5
Editorial Introduction • 5
whoever controls the global oil spigot can control the global economy, at least
for the near future’?4 How sufficient is this as explanation?
Third is the role of what Harvey calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’ in
the current phase of capitalist development. For Harvey, imperialism over
the last thirty years reflects a desperate search for surplus-value in the context
of a prolonged crisis of overaccumulation. Accumulation by dispossession –
the predatory opening up new arenas for accumulation either through selling
off state assets in the developed world or forcing developing countries to
privatise, commodify and marketise areas of social life that previously resisted
the logic of capital – is a major form through which capitalism has sought a
‘spatial fix’ to its crisis tendencies. This has both created vast areas for the
absorption of surplus capital and allowed for costs of devaluation to be visited
upon the weakest and most vulnerable. But is Harvey’s understanding of
these processes adequate? Might it not be too general and all encompassing?
The symposium
Not all the contributions which follow chose to focus solely on the issues
raised in The New Imperialism. Some use the opportunity to discuss more
broadly David Harvey’s contribution to Marxist scholarship over a period of
more than three decades.5 Noel Castree – after providing a clear summary of
the book’s contents which there is no need to repeat here – opts to assess
Harvey’s intellectual trajectory more broadly, situating it within the fate of a
generation of postwar academic Marxists and the difficulties of being a Marxist
public intellectual. His prognosis about the future reproduction of Marxism
as a radical current is both thought provoking and pessimistic. He suggests
that the legacy of leading figures, many of whom are represented in this
symposium (Harvey, Brenner, Fine and Callinicos), ‘may last only a further
generation at best’ in the Anglophone world.
Bob Sutcliffe combines a discussion of both Harvey and Wood, contrasting
their accounts to each other and to Hardt and Negri’s notion of Empire. He
argues that Harvey’s emphasis on capitalism’s crises of overaccumulation
understates the extent of recovery in recent years, in particular China’s
extraordinary economic growth in the last quarter century. China is not simply
6 • Sam Ashman
Editorial Introduction • 7
References
Bacevich, Andrew 2002, American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of American
Diplomacy, Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.
Castree, Noel and Derek Gregory (eds.) 2006, David Harvey: A Critical Reader, Oxford:
Blackwell.
Chibber, Vivek 2005, ‘The Good Empire’, Boston Review, February/March: 30–4.
Davis, Mike 2001, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third
World, London: Verso.
Ferguson, Niall 2002, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the
Lessons for Global Power, London: Allen Lane.
Ferguson, Niall 2004, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire, London: Penguin.
Harvey, David 2003, The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Merrifield, Andy 2002, Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City, London: Routledge.
Robinson, William 2004, A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class and State in a
Transnational World, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press.