The configuration of 21st century imperialism combines patterns of exploitation from the past as well as new features which are essential to understanding the contemporary forms of plunder, pillage and mass impoverishment. In this paper we will highlight the relatively new forms of imperial exploitation, reflecting the rise and consolidation of an international ruling class, the centrality of military power, large scale long-term criminality as a key component of the process of capital accumulation, the centrality of domestic collaborator classes and political elites in sustaining the US – EU empire and the new forms of class and anti-imperialist struggles.

Imperialism is about political domination, economic exploitation, cultural penetration via military conquest, economic coercion, political destabilization, separatist movements and via domestic collaborators. Imperial aims, today as in the past, are about securing markets, seizing raw materials, exploiting cheap labor in order to enhance profits, accumulate capital and enlarge the scope and depth of political domination. Today the mechanisms by which global profits are enhanced have gone far beyond the exploitation of markets, resources and labor; they embrace entire nations, peoples and the public treasuries, not only of regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America but include the so-called ‘debtor countries of Europe’, Ireland, Greece, Spain, Portugal and Iceland, among others. Read more È

By now we are familiar with imperial states using their military power to attack, destroy and occupy independent countries. Boatloads of important studies have documented how imperial countries have seized and pillaged the resources of mineral-rich and agriculturally productive countries, in consort with multi-national corporations.

Financial critics have provided abundant data on the ways in which imperial creditors have extracted onerous rents, royalties and debt payments from indebted countries and their taxpayers, workers, employees and productive sectors.

What has not been examined fully is the over-arching legal architecture which informs, justifies and facilitates imperial wars, pillage and debt collection. Read more È

Tony Hall provides us with an overview of his recently released book Earth into Property, and discusses the relationship between the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the making of global capitalism, beginning with Christopher Columbus’s inception of a New World Order in 1492. He tells us how the US corporate state moved to fill the vacuum of power after the dismantling of the formal empires of Europe after the Second World War, and how the US government is seeking to replicate its Cold War era role by mounting the Global War on Terror. Professor Hall talks about Obama the brand, the National Security Act, the anti-imperial current, and more.

Anthony J. Hall is a professor of Globalization Studies at the University of Lethbridge. He is the author of The American Empire and the Fourth World, which introduces the series, The Bowl with One Spoon. “Earth Into Property: Colonization, Decolonization and Capitalism” is the second volume of the Bowl Project.

Here is our guest Tony Hall unplugged!

Interview with Tony Hall [ 1:01:59 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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