Print
Despite vast amounts of imperial data to the contrary, the great majority of writers on imperialism continue to describe and analyze US imperialism strictly in economic terms, as an expansion of capital accumulation, accumulation on a world scale.
In fact the major and minor US imperial wars have more to do with capital dis-accumulation, in the sense that trillion dollar flows have gone out from the US, hundreds of billions of dollars in profits from resource sites have been undermined, markets for exports have been severely weakened and exploitable productive labor has been uprooted. At the same time US imperialist state dis-accumulates capital, multi-national corporations, especially in the extractive sector are expanding, accumulating capital throughout Latin America.