Reading: “Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century” by John Smith

This reading is part of the Imperialism Study Series put together by DSA Los Angeles and used in our own Socialist Night School study sessions on imperialism. The reading comes from module 2, “America’s Ascent Into Power.”

“Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century” (PDF) by John Smith is about 5400 words and has an estimated read time of 20 minutes.

Beginning:

The globalization of production and its shift to low-wage countries is the most significant and dynamic transformation of the neoliberal era. Its fundamental driving force is what some economists call “global labor arbitrage”: the efforts by firms in Europe, North America, and Japan to cut costs and boost profits by replacing higher-waged domestic labor with cheaper foreign labor, achieved either through emigration of production (“outsourcing,” as used here) or through immigration of workers. Reduction in tariffs and removal of barriers to capital flows have spurred the migration of production to low-wage countries, but militarization of borders and rising xenophobia have had the opposite effect on the migration of workers from these countries—not stopping it altogether, but inhibiting its flow and reinforcing migrants’ vulnerable, second-class status. As a result, factories freely cross the U.S.-Mexican border and pass with ease through the walls of Fortress Europe, as do the commodities produced in them and the capitalists who own them, but the human beings who work in them have no right of passage. This is a travesty of globalization—a world without borders to everything and everyone except for working people.

Global wage differentials, in large measure resulting from suppression of the free movement of labor, provide a distorted reflection of global differences in the rate of exploitation (simply, the difference between the value generated by workers and what they are paid). The southwards shift of production signifies that the profits of firms headquartered in Europe, North America, and Japan, the value of all manner of financial assets derived from these profits, and the living standards of the citizens of these nations have become highly dependent on the higher rates of exploitation of workers in so-called “emerging nations.” Neoliberal globalization must therefore be recognized as a new, imperialist stage of capitalist development, where “imperialism” is defined by its economic essence: the exploitation of southern living labor by northern capitalists.

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John Smith’s “Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century” is part of a larger work, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century: Globalization, Super-Exploitation, and Capitalism’s Final Crisis, published by Monthly Review.