You can't mention imperialism without an off-hand remark about 'American capitalism'. American corporations, colluding with the American government, are supposed to enforce their profit-driven agenda across the globe.

If this is true, it means there should be some way to measure American investments. Conversely, the rest of the world should be investing less in America - we're all under the thumb of Uncle Sam.

Now, check out this nifty graph I just made:
This is really about showing off my graph-making skills - I mean, hard-boiled political economy skills

Foreign Direct Investment - money being invested from America to the rest of the world, and vice versa - has declined dramatically since 1960, to almost -$250 billion a year.

FDI from the rest of the world has replaced it, an almost exact mirror image.

So, according to these figures, American capitalism is pretty weak. The capitalists are investing abroad, but capital from elsewhere is flooding in at a much greater extent.

You may be familiar with this argument. (You may not be used to seeing it expressed so prettily!) But you may not be familiar with some of the questions it raises:

1) These are 'financial accounts'. What about other indicators e.g. trade in goods & services, concentration of corporate ownership, overall debt, etc? Do they follow the same pattern?
2) Does the U.S. economy benefit from all this FDI?
3) Is this pattern being repeated in other major economies, like the EU and China?
4) Is U.S. militarism a response to this trend i.e. recapture more of the global economy for its capitalists, after a precipitous decline? Or is it a cause i.e. other nations can't compete militarily, so they compete economically?
5) Given the evident health of world capitalism, can we still speak of national capitalism? Are we moving towards 'transnational' capitalism?
6) These figures are, presumably, net: what's coming in minus what's going out. (If they were gross, total transactions, U.S. capital would have to be investing negative dollars - which is impossible.) Since each line measures out-in, and in-out, they should be mirror opposites. But they're not. Why? Is it a measurement problem? Is something else going on?


Making the world safe for capitalism - but whose capitalism?

Capitalism is a tremendously complicated thing. When we toss off phrases like 'imperialism' and 'American capitalism', we're using high-level abstractions that may - or may not - reflect reality. There is so much we don't know.

Post-thinking

This is, by the way, why I'm so fed up with Marxist cultural studies. I think the above questions are vital, because they're an imperfect snapshot of what the capitalists are doing. Something Marxists should be concerned with, no? Yet cultural studies - Marxist or non - makes no attempt to look at it. By way of illustration, here are some agenda items from the "Third Symposium on Gesture, Conversation and Dialogue":

- "Models of Dialogic Structuration: Setting Words to Music, Playing Baseball"
- "Foucault Dialogues with Aristotle: Both Have an Identity Crisis"
- "Sensuous Signs and Closed Systems: A Communicology of Fundamentalist Codes in Contemporary Culture"

Utterly, hopelessly irrelevant.