Former Carleton professor Leo Panitch returned to campus Oct. 9 to talk about how the American housing crisis spread to the global financial system so quickly, as part of the political science department’s Speaker Series. Panitch was delivered a speech entitled “American Crisis/Global Crisis” and promoted his new book “The Making of Global Capitalism: the Political Economy of American Empire.”
He is the current Canada Research Chair in Comparative Political Economy and is a research professor of political science at York University in Toronto. “[The speech is an] attempt to explain why a crisis that began in the United States in the housing market should have so quickly become a global crisis spreading everywhere, and affecting rates of growth even in India,” he said.
“I think people tend to think of empire and imperialism as military intervention and don’t understand the role, especially in the American example, of the management of the global economy.”
The speech pursued two key themes — the critical dependence on the organization of the state for capitalism, and the continuing centrality of the American state, which is an imperialist state in the organization of global capital.
This theme, the centrality of the American state, “pits Leo against certain currents of Marxism today, which prioritize the material dimension of capitalism and capitalist relations above all,” political science professor Randall Germain said.
Panitch argued that the US is not an empire in the sense of extended political rule through the conquest of territory. It is an empire through penetration and incorporation of other sovereign states under its umbrella in the management of capitalism and the reproduction and the spread of capitalism.
