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.After theheady decades o f sustained growth and increasing productivity during the long boom, the US economy entered a long period ofstagnation and declining profitability, a characteristically - anduniquely - capitalist crisis o f overcapacity and overproduction, notleast because its former military adversaries, Japan and Germany,had become extremely effective economic competitors.The problemnow was how to displace the crisis, in space and in time.4What followed was the period we call globalization, the internationalization o f capital, its free and rapid movements and the mostpredatory financial speculation around the globe.This was, as muchas anything else, a response not to the successes but to the failures o fcapitalism.The US used its control o f financial and commercialnetworks to postpone the day o f reckoning for its own domesticcapital, enabling it to shift the burden elsewhere, easing the movements o f excess capital to seek profits wherever they were to befound, in an orgy of financial speculation.Conditions were imposed on developing economies to suit thesenew needs.In what came to be called the Washington Consensus ,and through the medium o f the IMF and the World Bank, theimperial power demanded structural adjustment and a variety ofmeasures which would have the effect of making these economieseven more vulnerable to the pressures of US-led global capital: forinstance, an emphasis on production for export and the removal ofimport controls, which made producers market-dependent for theirown survival, while opening them, especially in the case of agricultural production, to competition from highly subsidized westernproducers; the privatization o f public services, which would thenbecome vulnerable to takeover by companies based in the majorcapitalist powers; high interest rates and financial deregulation, which 134 Empi re of Capi talproduced vast gains for US financial interests, while creating a debtcrisis in the third world (and ultimately, in one o f the perennialcontradictions o f capitalism, a recession at home in the imperialcentre); and so on.That, o f course, is not the end o f the story, but this is not theplace to explore the boom and bust cycles o f capitalism or itstendencies to long-term downturn and stagnation.It suffices to saythat the kind o f control o f the global economy enjoyed by the US,while it cannot resolve the contradictions o f the market economy ,can be used, and is being used, to compel other economies to servethe interests o f the imperial hegemon in response to the fluctuatingneeds o f its own domestic capital - by manipulating debt, the ruleso f trade, foreign aid and the whole financial system.One minute, itcan force subsistence farmers to shift to single cash-crop productionfor export markets; the next, according to need, it can effectivelywipe out those farmers by demanding the opening o f third worldmarkets, while protecting and subsidizing its own agricultural producers.It can temporarily support industrial production in emergingeconomies by means o f financial speculation; and then suddenly pullthe rug out from under those economies by cashing in the speculativeprofits, or cutting losses and moving on.The fact that, sooner orlater, the effects o f these practices will come back to haunt theimperial economy is only one of the many contradictions o f thisimperial system.Actually existing globalization, then, means the opening of subordinate economies and their vulnerability to imperial capital, whilethe imperial economy remains sheltered as much as possible fromthe obverse effects.Globalization has nothing to do with free trade.On the contrary, it is about the careful control of trading conditions,in the interests o f imperial capital.To argue, as some commentatorsdo, that the problem with globalization is not that there is too much Internati onal i zati on of Capi tal i st Imperat i ves 1 3 5of it but that there is not enough, that what poor countries need istruly free trade and access to western markets, is to miss the point o fglobalization in a fundamental way.If the openness of the globaleconomy were a two-way street, whatever else that might achieve, itwould not serve the purpose for which the system was designed; and,in any case, the principal danger to the poor economies is less theclosure of imperial markets than the vulnerability of their own toimperial capital.Let us be clear about what globalization is and, more particularly,what it is not.It is not, to begin with, a truly integrated worldeconomy.No one can doubt that movements of capital acrossnational boundaries are frequent and breathtakingly rapid in today sglobal economy, or that new supranational institutions have emergedto facilitate those movements.But whether that means that marketsare substantially more globally integrated than ever before is anotherquestion.The first and most elementary point is that so-called transnational corporations generally have a base, together with dominantshareholders and boards, in single nation states and depend on themin many fundamental ways
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