Is contemporary capitalism a kind of imperialism?

For Ellen Meiskins Wood, it is the ‘empire of capital’ that is shaping our world. For her, the empire of capital is the new form of imperialism across the globe. Capitalism, she argues, has become ‘universal’ and it spans the globe with pervasive and intrusive control over human life and nature. It is operating with its systemic logic of ‘accumulation, commodification, profit maximization, and competition’. The empire of capital has achieved its global and penetrating grip by setting free and directing the destructive forces of the capitalist market and ‘totalizing itself’ intensively and extensively to permeate all spheres wherever it establishes itself. It is alive and there's no sign of its demise in the near future. Wood argues that capitalist imperialism, driven by market imperatives, and unlike other imperialisms before it, ‘seeks to impose its economic hegemony without political domination wherever it can.’ Empire of Capital provides perceptive insights into the fundamental nature of capitalist imperialism and what drives it.

‘The Detachment of Economic Power’ she provides an explanation of and dissects capital imperialism. She shows how under ‘empire of capital’ (the new imperialism) the economic power of capital is detached from political and military power (extra-economic force) and discusses the relation between them, as well as the implication of the detachment on the relation between the economy and the state. The economy is linked to the state in the sense that it influences the class that controls the state. The state is often a substructure of the ‘empire of capital and operates in its interest.

The book brings into sharp relief the nature of today’s new capitalist empire, in which the political reach of imperial power cannot match its economic hegemony, and the global economy is administered not by a global state but by a system of multiple local states, policed by the most disproportionately powerful military force the world has ever known and enforced according to a new military doctrine of war without end, in purpose or time.

Wood, a professor at York University in Toronto and an orthodox economic determinist, argues that the source of an empire's wealth drives its military, administrative and ideological practices. She distinguishes between the Roman "empire of property," a land-based system that stimulated unending territorial conquest; the Arab, Venetian and Dutch "empires of commerce," dedicated to the protection of trade routes and market dominance; and the British "empire of capital," marked by the imposition of market imperatives on conquered territories.

It provides a coherent account of capitalist imperialism to explain the period we are living in.

Wood distinguishes between different forms of imperialism in history. She argues that capitalist imperialism is different from older forms, such as the territorial empires of ancient Rome and the Spanish conquistadors, or the commercial empires of the Arab Muslims and the Dutch. Old colonial empires dominated territory and subjected peoples by means of "extra-economic" coercion-by military conquest and, often, direct political rule.
Capitalist imperialism on the other hand exercises its rule primarily by economic means, by the force of the market, using weapons such as debt and structural adjustment programmes (eg, of the IMF). Capitalist imperialism originated with the development of capitalism in England, but came to fruition after 1945 under US hegemony.

Wood argues that to understand the specific, capitalist form of imperialism in the modern world, it is necessary to understand the nature of capitalism. The difference between capitalism and other class societies is rooted in the form of exploitation, which gives rise to a unique relationship between the economic and the political. Wood says: "In every class society, where one class appropriates the surplus labour of another, there are two related but distinct 'moments' of class exploitation: the appropriation of surplus labour and the coercive power that enforces it. In non-capitalist societies, these tended to be more or less united. The separation of economic and political spheres in capitalism has meant that these two moments have been effectively divided between private enterprises (or public enterprises operating on the same principles) and the public power of the state."
However Wood is clear that capitalism cannot dispense with the state. The state is vital to the existence of the system, playing an essential role in creating and reproducing the conditions necessary for this kind of economic domination.

" The argument here is not that of capital in conditions of `globalization' has escaped the control of the state and made the territorial state increasingly irrelevant. On the contrary, my argument is that the state is more essential than ever to capital, even, or especially, in its global form. The political form of globalization is not a global state but a system of multiple states, and the new imperialism takes its specific shape from the complex and contradictory relationship between capital's expansive economic power and the more limited reach of the extra-economic force that sustains it. it addresses the timely question of what form globalization will ultimately take.