Again, it is the nature of large-scale industrial capital, as opposed to the earlier mercantilism, which determines the characteristics of this imperialism, as opposed to colonialism. The US Civil War was driven by the need of the Northern states, dominated by large-scale, industrial capital, to consolidate a large, single US market, within the context of a single, centralised state, as against the continued power and influence of the individual states. It requires that single, centralised state – which it still has not fully established – in order to create a level playing field within its single market, based on a single monetary and fiscal system, uniformity of laws, standards and regulations etc., and to, thereby, erect this structure and protect it against other, external capitals.
In other words, imperialism, the dominance of large-scale, socialised, industrial capital, which requires the involvement of the state to ensure planning and regulation, continually requires the construction of ever larger single markets, in which these conditions exist, and in which it can produce and realise surplus value. It does not require colonies, spread across the globe, as sources of cheap primary products, based on slave or very low paid workers, because the basis of the cheap primary products, itself, becomes a function of the introduction of machines and fixed capital, i.e. the capitalist development of those countries.
In the post-war period, with the hegemony of US imperialism, and the expansion of US multinationals across the globe, various para state bodies were created at a global level, with a distinctly social-democratic heritage, designed for planning, regulation and “stability”, such as GATT/WTO, World Bank, IMF. The breakdown of these global para state bodies, today, is not a consequence of the rise of a multipolar world, per se, but of the fact that, they were created in a context of US hegemony, in a world run to meet US interests. It is the US that can no longer enforce its interests, and those bodies no longer simply reflect its interests, which means that it is the US, which is collapsing them. Its response to the ICC and ICJ actions against Zionist war criminals, and genocide is simply a glaring manifestation of that.
What Engels saw in the militarisation of Europe, therefore, was the manifestation of this process, in the only form it could appear, at that time, given the similar level of development of France and Germany, both of which contended for the role of bringing about the unification of a European single market and state under their domination, as well as the role of the established hegemon, Britain, which had no desire to see such a development, which would rapidly have overwhelmed it.
It is the decimation of the power of both France and Germany, resulting from those wars, at the same time that, on the one hand, US imperialism becomes hegemonic, and, on the other, the USSR rises to challenge it, that the European imperialist states are driven to establish that single market, and single multinational state, by voluntary agreement, in the form of the EU, rather than by the process of war and annexation. It was the continued and accelerating pace of decline of British imperialism, relative to these other imperialists states, in the US and EU, as well as new emerging challengers such as Japan, that led Britain to also seek salvation inside the EU, a reality that demonstrates the utter lunacy, 50 years later, of Brexit.
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