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1. How does a critical understanding of capitalism as a way of life encompassing economic, political, and cultural or ideological aspects help us to make sense of US global strategy since the Second World War?
2. How does such an understanding enable us to reframe the Bush Doctrine and Obama’s national security strategy as forms of twenty-first-century imperialism?
To answer these questions, it may help you to return to two of the core tenets of Marxist analyses of capitalism. The first tenet is an understanding of capitalism as a specific set of economic and social relations (p. 2-3) that divides societies into two classes: one, that owns the means of production; and one, that is forced to exchange their labor (their bodies) on the market (p. 3-5). The second tenet is an understanding of capitalism as a global system, where the pursuit of capitalist accumulation necessitates global expansionism beyond territorial state borders (p. 4-6). Taken together, these tenets reveal much about global distributions of power and wealth, as well as international dynamics among (capitalist) states.
As a global hegemon and one of the leading capitalist market economies of the twentieth century the US becomes a case in point. Yet, rather than an invasive state, it is the US’ position as a key agent in shaping international structures and norms since the second world war that is of interest here. Thus, we can read Fordist industrial capitalism as it was developed in the US, not merely as establishing global standards of dynamism and productivity, but also as an industrial process requiring the import of high levels of raw materials (such as oil) to the US from elsewhere. The need to maintain persistent access to such raw materials, in turn has fundamentally shaped US foreign and security policies (p. 9-11). The Bush Doctrine offers one such example. Read through this lens, a Marxist analysis of US invasion Iraq shifts our focus away from the discursive premise of liberal ideology and humanitarian intervention to the material dimensions of the doctrine as a means of securing natural resources in the region, integral for US industrial production. Similarly, we might view Obama’s national security strategy in its vigorous use of US military power to attack those perceived to be most hostile to American presence in the Middle East, south Asia, and east Africa, reinforcing the idea that capitalist accumulation is inclined toward global expansion and imperialism. This does not mean, however, that discursive rationales become irrelevant for foreign policy analysis. In fact, most Marxists – not least those engaging Gramscian notions of hegemony – would claim that discursive ideological rationales are integral to the pursuit of material interests and that it is a sensibility of the ways in which these are intertwined that we can best understand dynamics at play in the international.