On Capitalist Imperialism

Building towards a theoretical framework

Capitalist imperialism structures the international system by premising the “order” amongst sovereign states in the imperial core upon a denial or diminishment of economic sovereignty to states relegated to the “periphery” of the capitalist world-system. This denial/diminishment of sovereignty has been historically central to the (re)structuring of Southern/peripheral economies in service of the economic development and capital accumulation imperatives of the imperialist core. Whereas colonialism has centered upon the denial of territorial sovereignty, imperialism is structured upon exercising military and economic power over the flow of capital between territories. This means that decolonization can deliver a form of territorial national liberation but leave untouched the imperialist military and economic power that enforces dependency and a value drain from periphery to core. Anti-imperialism, thus, must be grasped as an international scale military and economic power that has as its aim the re-assertion of sovereignty over both territory and the entry and exit of capital and core resources into and out of a territory and region. This sovereign reclamation is the necessary premise for disrupting the imperialist value drain and instead recycling the economic surplus generated in a territory into its own national development. The struggle between imperialism and anti-imperialism is a struggle between contending visions of world order: an imperialist world order structured upon a value drain from non-sovereign peripheries to the imperialist core versus a polycentric world order of sovereign development in which economic surpluses recycle back into the territories and regions from which they are generated.