The greatness of an estate, in bulk and territory, doth fall under measure; and the greatness of finances and revenue, doth fall under computation. The population may appear by musters; and the number and greatness of cities and towns by cards and maps. But yet there is not any thing amongst civil affairs more subject to error, than the right valuation and true judgement concerning the power and forces of an estate.

Francis Bacon

At the turn of the century, it seemed unlikely that American strategic planners would contemplate any course of action that might disrupt a number of exceptionally favourable international trends. All the main ones seemed to point to the dawning of another American century: an unopposed encroachment of nato into the void opened up by the elimination of the ussr, the apparent reversal of a quarter-century of economic decline in a climate of explosive speculation, the deft deflection of Europe back into the Atlantic fold, the deepening synergy with China as the low-wage supplier of the world market, and a compliant attitude at the un Security Council before the step-wise progression of us revisionism. Washington was allowed the exemptions and privileges of a super-state on the plausible assumption that it had committed its power to the protection and expansion of the zone of globalization. This accommodating hegemonic formula seemed to obviate the need for big and medium powers to have to concern themselves with the arduous task of balancing against the American ‘hyperpower’. Indeed, the two potential nuclear adversaries of this democratic peace—rising China, and declining Russia—exhibited little interest in an alliance, seemingly convinced of the pointlessness of security competition with the great enforcer of Open Door capitalism.

On the peripheries of this volatile circuitry of market forces, tightened neoliberal conditions of access to Western investment, aid and moral legitimation resulted in a far-reaching attenuation of the sovereignty of weak and failing states. Washington’s initiatives against small rogue regimes in the name of human rights and wmd interdiction appeared to have consigned to the past traditional statecraft based on great power rivalries. The new strategic doctrines authorizing us and Western interventions in violation of the un Charter derived their legitimacy from a vague but widely held assumption that the period was a transitional state of exception laying down the foundations of an international community to come. This assumption offered some consolation to liberals on both sides of the Atlantic, who rapidly embraced an airbrushed version of it as the credo of a new cosmopolitanism.

The scrambling of this picture in the aftermath of 9/11 has created a historical context whose elements have yet to settle into an intelligible pattern. In trying to determine whether 9/11 signals the beginning of a new era of international politics, it is necessary to begin by asking whether the aggressive ‘unilateralism’ of the us response to this event has been an atavistic regression from previously more ‘multilateral’ norms of neoliberalism, or, alternatively, their continuation by other means. It is here that the Retort group’s striking recent intervention, Afflicted Powers, poses a series of fundamental questions.footnote¹ This is an intricate piece of work, interconnecting the three constituents of its subtitle—capital, spectacle and war—at a remarkable level of imaginative intensity. In what follows, I will consider the principal themes of the book in turn, and end by offering some reflections of my own on certain of the wider issues it raises.

Afflicted Powers sets out, in the first instance, to examine the adequacy of certain Marxist concepts to the current geopolitical situation and ask if this can be made more intelligible by locating it within the historical pattern of capitalist development. One of the keys to understanding the sudden darkening of the horizon, its authors maintain, is Marx’s conception of ‘primitive accumulation’—the earth-shaking use of force to create or restore the social conditions of profitability. In the tradition of historical materialism, the periodization of eras in the history of capitalism has typically involved controversial narrative conjunctions of political and economic developments. Lenin’s explanation for the outbreak of an inter-imperialist world war as an effect of the passage from free-market to monopoly capitalism is a famous example. The attempt to do this today puts into the question the ability of the term ‘liberal-democracy’ to capture the latest, emergent features of advanced capitalist polities: indeed, not so long after it had been declared to be the culminating point of history, Philip Bobbitt went so far as to argue that the convergence of powerful trends in markets, media and warfare was spawning a new type of polity in the West. For Bobbitt, the line of historical development points to a national security regime committed to market freedoms, pre-emptive strikes against human rights violators and unauthorized wmd holders, and stage-managed televisual plebiscites.footnote²

By contrast, Retort’s analysis attempts to offer an explanation of the continuities of American foreign policy in terms of the general logic of capitalism, without reference to the structure and history of the capitalist, or more specifically, the American state. Afflicted Powers presents post-9/11 American ‘unilateralism’ as a response to the sputtering out of the first round of neoliberalism with the end of the stock market bubble and it boom of the 90s. But the story its authors tell by and large avoids any emphasis on the crisis dynamics of capitalism and the distinct periods to which these can be said to give rise. That, they dismiss as the outmoded preoccupations of an older generation. This is a more than questionable judgement, as even a cursory familiarity with the contents of a business magazine would demonstrate. Economics to one side, however, they cannily put their finger on a sudden change in the realm of appearances. In but a few years, the figures typifying contemporary capitalism have shifted from silicon to oil, guns and steel. This is happening, they claim, because neoliberalism is ‘mutating from an epoch of “agreements” and austerity programmes to one of outright war . . . those periodic waves of capitalist restructuring we call primitive accumulation.’footnote³ This conception of the role of force in jump-starting and lubricating accumulation comes from Rosa Luxemburg, although the name goes unmentioned. In effect, Retort wholly subscribe to Luxemburg’s definition of imperialism as ‘the political expression of the accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle for what remains still open of the non-capitalist environment’.footnote⁴ For them, this is no demarcated stage, but a continuous process in history since the dawn of capitalism. ‘Sweating blood and filth with every pore from head to toe’ characterizes not only the birth of capital but also its progress in the world at every step.footnote⁵