Brad’s Reviews > Empire of Capital > Status Update

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

"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."

"Capitalism has, at certain points in its development, appropriated to itself, and even intensified, non-capitalist modes of exploitation."

Worth bearing in mind re: "neofeudalism" discourse.

"Capitalism is uniquely driven by economic imperatives...But these economic imperatives require extra-economic force to implant and sustain them."

Crucial point. Idealists treat "extra-economic [i.e. state-backed] force" as something artificially imposed on capitalist markets. It's not. From primitive accumulation to arrested development (grabbing the stuff and 'kicking away the ladder')...

Force is formative.

The dominant feature of Venetian imperial rule was the symbiosis of commerce and war...the combination of a supremely commercial economy and extra-economic means of appropriation under a highly militarized urban rule: in a sense, an urban and commercial feudalism.

Loving this. Striking familiar notes to "Sinews of War and Trade".

"We must consider [the] inherent instability of any world empire that depends on extra-economic power but can extend the geographic reach of those powers only by diffusing them."