Dossier on Empire

Abstract

Leo Panitch, in a recent article in New Left Review (2000), praised the late Nicos Poulantzas for his new and productive conceptualization of the role and character of the state as it was beginning to evolve in response to the pressures of a burgeoning economic internationalization in the capitalist nations from the 1960s onward. In the first phases of this new situation, marked by the postwar economic resurgence of Germany and Japan and the seeming decline of the United States (this was before the 1990s, of course), it was tempting, says Panitch, to believe that the United States was not able to exercise the kind of hegemony that had been available to previous imperial powers. Poulantzas, however, discerned that what was taking place was not so much an American political-economic “decline,” with a concomitant shifting of power and influence to the corporatist model of capitalism ostensibly responsible for the economic success of Germany and Japan, as a qualitative transformation in the kind of imperium that was now being exercised by the United States. This emerging imperium was part of the beginning of a new and significant response to the crisis of the previous system of capitalist accumulation (a dispensation that has been variously titled Fordism, social democratic capitalism, Keynesianism, the Bretton Woods institutional framework, etc.). From this change would emerge a new structure of accumulation associated with the onset of globalization. Writing nearly three decades ago, Poulantzas said that