Status Updates From Empire of Capital

"Grotius’s argument had clear affinities with the Roman law principle of res nullius, which decreed that any ‘empty thing’ such as unoccupied land was common property until it was put to use – in the case of land, especially agricultural use. This would become a common justification of European colonization"

"It is, for instance, significant that modern revolutions have occurred not in advanced capitalist societies but in societies where the state has presented a visible target, with a prominent role in direct exploitation."

"Although the sovereign territorial state was not created by capitalism, the distincively capitalist separation of the ‘economic’ and the ‘political’ has produced a more clearly defined and complete territorial sovereignty than was possible in non-capitalist societies."

"Today, it is harder than it was in earlier colonial empires to detect the transfer of wealth from weaker to stronger nations. But even when it is painfully obvious that such a transfer is taking place, how it is accomplished is no less opaque than the relation between capital and labour, and this opacity leaves a great deal of room for denial."

"In the disparity between global economic power and its local political supports, there is surely an expanding space for opposition."

"The principal function of NATO, now more than ever, has less to do with forging an alliance against common enemies than maintaining US hegemony over its friends."

Even more apt today than 2003.

"Actually existing globalization, then, means the opening of subordinate economies and their vulnerability to imperial capital, while the imperial economy remains sheltered as much as possible from the adverse effects. Globalization has nothing to do with free trade. On the contrary, it is about the careful control of trading conditions, in the interests of imperial capital."

"Huge profits drawn from extra-economic appropriation are possible only with wholesale and relentless coercion such as King Leopold employed...By contrast, the profitability of capitalist imperialism comes into its own only when economic imperatives become strong enough [to] extend beyond the reach of any [extra-economic] power and to impose themselves without day-to-day administration [by] an imperial state."