ABSTRACT
With the terrorist attacks on 9/11 coupled with the increased militarization of US foreign policy and the invasions and occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq, analysts and students of International Relations (IR) have increasingly sought to employ critical IR theories that can interrogate not just the dominant discourses and social constructions of the discipline, but also the political and economic aspects of the social world itself. Today, neo-liberal globalization is increasingly exacerbating concentrations of global wealth, with the richest 2 per cent of the world’s people owning more than half of global household wealth. The bottom half of three billion people own barely 1 per cent. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has shown that by the time you finish reading this sentence, a child will have died of hunger (a child dies every 5 seconds).1 They conclude that 24 billion dollars are needed to save five million children from starvation every year and yet the US-led war and occupation in Iraq could cost over three trillion dollars, which is a ‘conservative’ estimate according to Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank (Stiglitz and Bilmes 2008). This alone gives a clear indication of social priorities. Moving from a global to a national scale, wealth and power is still deeply concentrated with US households in the top 20 per cent of the income distribution earning more than 80 per cent of the nation’s wealth. According to Marxist theorists, these concentrations of wealth and power are an
inevitable result of capitalism, an economic system in which a minority own and control the means of production and the great majority are forced to sell their labour power in order to survive. The purpose of this chapter is not to provide a ‘Marxism 101’ introduction to Marxist theory per se. This has been done in numerous books. Rather, this chapter seeks to show how Marxism is being used to understand the role of the USA within global politics and the international political economy. As the key capitalist power within the global economy, the American state has been crucial in underwriting and supporting the expansion of capitalism as a mode of production across the globe throughout the post-war period. This support has ranged from economic reforms that have sought to maintain an ‘open-door’ global economy conducive to global business interests to strategic interventions to overthrow governments that are or have been considered hostile to either capitalist social relations or US political hegemony within the post-war order. Today, America’s power and the way it is used have become a crucial concern of IR, with a ‘long war’ declared against nebulous enemies while increased resource competition between great powers intensifies. This
concern with the exercise of American power is best illustrated with the return of the concept of an ‘American Empire’ across a broad range of theoretical and political sentiment. Crucially, the world that I have described above did not form itself, but was in fact
created through human actions and choices, as well as wider structural processes of historical transformation. As students of IR and US foreign policy we must thus ask: how did we arrive at a point in human history whereby the richest people on the planet, who often in turn come from the richest families, earn more in an hour than the poorest people earn in a lifetime? What can Marxism tell us about current trends in world politics and, as the world’s dominant state, how can we analyze the role that US foreign policy has played in the construction and defense of global capitalism?
