Accumulation by Dispossession and Imperial Competition

Delta Magazine
Aug 22, 2017 · 5 min read
from Globalsecurity.org

the following is an excerpt from Christopher McAndrew’s dissertation, Accumulation by dispossession and Imperial Competition: The Political Economy of the Crisis in Ukraine, available in Delta Magazine.

In 2014, Sakwa writes that “history returned to Europe with a vengeance” with a crisis that has bought “not only the spectre but the reality of war, on the one hundredth anniversary of a conflict that had been spoken of as the war to end all war.”As McMahon writes, the crisis in Ukraine began “as a protest against the government dropping plans to forge closer trade ties with the European Union,” which went on to spark “a global standoff between Russia and Western powers.” McMahon states that the most dramatic moment of the confrontation, the seizure of the Crimean peninsula and the port city of Sevastopol in the weeks following Yanukovych’s ousting “signaling Moscow’s intent to expand its sphere of 12 influence into Eastern Europe.” Some writers, such as Trenin, speak of a new age of interstate competition, stating that the crisis “has ended the period in Russian-Western relations that began with the fall of the Berlin Wall…Great-Power competition is back.”

So far, most explanations of the Ukrainian Crisis have come from a realist perspective. Mearsheimer, for instance, places the blame squarely on the West. In his view, the taproot of the crisis is NATO expansion, driven by a misguided liberalism which intends “to make the entire continent look like western Europe.” Putin, meanwhile, is portrayed as a “first class strategist” who is merely reacting to the “legitimate security concerns” posed by Western expansionism. Alternatively, Stestanovich sees Putin as a leader who made “impulsive decisions that subordinated Russia’s national interest to his own personal political motives.” Van Herpen states those personal motives are to “put an end to Russia’s ‘humiliation’ and to restore the lost empire,” and laments Russia’s inability to become “a normal, post-imperial country” like those in the West. These authors see the conflict as primarily a clash of idealisms. To some, it is Putin’s Eurasianist vision which prevents Russia from becoming a ‘normal’ country, and that in turn prevents it from allowing Ukraine to do the same. From this perspective, the West has only acted rationally towards this Russian delusion of grandeur. To others, it is the West’s liberal internationalism that compelled it to naively expand into Russia’s sphere of influence. Meanwhile, Russia only acted rationally in defending its own national interests. The conflict is explained in terms of the ‘bad ideas’ of whichever state the author wishes to criticises, which contrasts the rational realism of those they wish to defend. In both these explanations, the problem is that the actor they wish to criticise is not being rational enough, unlike those they wish to praise, who are seen as paragons of realist thinking.

It is undeniable that these ideas have played a huge part in putting West and East on a collision course. However, it is rarely discussed where these ideas come from, what purpose they serve, or whose interests they seek to protect. Obsessed with Putins and Obamas of the world, there has been little discussion of the internal forces that have demanded expansions, of which classes have benefited from the movements which sparked this confrontation, and which groups stand to lose out. The niceties of the prelude of the crisis, Ukrainian President Yanukovych’s rejection of an EU Association Agreement (AA) in favour of a $15bn agreement with Russia’s Eurasian Customs Union (ECU), is only interpreted in terms of power politics. Stestanovich dismisses the rejected AA as a “mere free trade agreement,” while Mearsheimer only sees it as a “stalking horse for NATO membership.” But within the Association Agreement, and within years of growing investment in Ukraine by both Western and Russian capital, lie a factor in the crisis that has yet to be properly discussed.

Therefore, I propose to look at the conflict from a Marxist perspective. A Marxist perspective proposes to examine international relations through two lenses — the contradictions of the capitalist system and the crises generated by them, and how states manage conflict between different social classes. In particular, I wish to focus on the role economic crises have played in spurring these two blocs to compete over access to Ukraine. Since 2008, the world capitalist economy has experienced severe social, political, and economic crises. In the past, capitalist states have turned to expansionism to resolve these crises. Arendt notes that the colonisation of Africa was preceded by “a curious kind of economic crisis, the overproduction of capital and the emergence of ‘superfluous’ money, the result of oversaving, which could no longer find productive investment within the national borders,” a process which Lenin states caused an “intense struggle for the division and re-division of the world” between the great powers that proved fatal in the 1914–18 war. In my view, the current crisis requires us to go beyond the classic Marxist studies of imperialism through the use of David Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession. Harvey advances that to solve this problem of ‘superfluous money’, the overaccumulation of capital, “non-capitalist territories should be forced open not only to trade…but also to permit capital to invest in profitable ventures.” State-run industries must be denationalised, family farming replaced by large-scale agribusiness, and increasingly intellectual property rights must be enforced. This is the process of accumulation by dispossession, a process which sees assets previously seen as common property released at a cut-price rate which international capital can “seize hold of…and immediately put to profitable use.”

This dissertation shall be split into three sections. In the first section, I wish to survey a selection of the existing Marxist literature on imperialism, and examine the economic and social crises of capitalism that capitalist states seek to resolve with expansionism and dispossession. I will pay particular attention to the chronic rise of “superfluous money”, the overaccumulation of capital, since the 1970s and demonstrate how accumulation by dispossession, particularly through the privatisation of state assets both at home and in imperial conquests abroad, is currently the main means by which capitalism is attempting to resolve this crisis following the 2008 recession. In the second section, I wish to examine the political economies of two of the main players in the Ukrainian crisis, the European Union and the Russian Federation, and demonstrate how and why these powers have resorted to the dispossession of countries on their periphery in recent years. In the final section, I wish to demonstrate that the conflict in Ukraine is ultimately a conflict over the ‘right to dispossess’, and show how Ukrainian workers can and are fighting this dispossession.

read more at Delta magazine

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