Terrorism is embedded in a propagation of imperial commodity exchange driven by capitalist logics

The capital relation, the internationalisation of imperial commodity exchange and the state terrorism in the era of neo-liberalism As already noted, the imperialism of informal empire delimits the scope of state action in the developing world. In the areas of monetary policy, trade relations in the international system and the organisation of productive relations, developing states’ policy options are constrained by the webs of ILs and regulations in which they are enmeshed (Stephen Gill terms this a ‘lock-in’ effect – see Gill 2008, p. 79). More overtly coercive policies are marshalled in the form of structural adjustment programmes (now called ‘poverty reduction strategies’) and ‘conditionality’ agreements that force indebted states, in exchange for help with balance-of-payments problems, to reconfigure the very means of social reproduction (see Peet 2003). Imperialist states may occasionally intervene directly to ensure the imposition of debt-relief programmes that deepen the logic of imperial domination or to deter recalcitrant developing states from following an independent development path (e.g. by supporting specific acts of state terrorism2), but these direct interventions are what David Harvey terms the ‘tip of the imperialist iceberg’ (Harvey 2003, p. 181). They are surface manifestations of deeper structural relations between dominant and dominated states, and it is to the structurally inscribed relations we must look to understand the deeper roots of state terrorism in the developing world. Driven by a capitalist logic that demands deepening commodification worldwide through ‘the pervasive penetration of the private profit motive in all spheres of human existence’, and in all countries (Overbeek 2004, Abstract), state terrorism is motivated from ‘above’ by an imperial logic of power that imposes, through law, a neo-liberal paradigm that (re)produces conditions in which particular acts of state terrorism are embedded. These imperial mechanisms are graphically illustrated in Figure 1. As depicted in Figure 1, imperial law imposes four general policies that tend to intensify social (class) conflict and, in the right circumstances, produce or intensify practices of state terrorism: deregulation, which removes impediments to the functioning of markets; privatisation and commodification, which opens up new areas for capital accumulation; the liberalisation of trade and finance, which opens up dominated social formations to inflows of foreign goods and capital; and decentralisation, which encourages ‘tightly controlled and carefully delimited forms of market-supporting [social] activity as empowerment’ (Cammack 2003, p. 12). In states beset with social conflict, the denationalisation of the state also tends to reinforce the role of para-state actors in (re)producing capital accumulation in what might be termed, to borrow a phrase from Robert Mandel, ‘domestic security substitution’ (Mandel 2002). Together, these policies set the scene for societal ‘creative destruction’; as the World Bank puts it in its World development report 2005: a better investment climate for everyone, this involves instituting in developing countries [l]ow barriers to the diffusion of ideas, including barriers to importing modern equipment and the way work is organized. And an environment that fosters the competitive processes that Joseph Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction’ – an environment in which firms have opportunities and incentives to test their ideas, strive for success, and prosper or fail. (World Bank 2004, pp. 2–3) Couched in terms of ‘diffusion’, ‘competitiveness’, ‘opportunities’ and ‘incentives’, what is missing from the Bank’s eulogistic summary of creative destruction are the challenges it presents to the material organisation of the fabric of society in dominated social formations. As depicted in Figure 1, these challenges are best understood in relation to two areas: (1) those areas where CER dominate; and (2) those areas where CER do not dominate. In the case of the latter, what is promoted are processes that Marx termed ‘primitive accumulation’, which denotes the ‘historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production’ on terms conducive to the development of the capitalist forces of production (Marx 1976, pp. 874–875). I return to this in due course. In the case of the former, attempts to reconfigure commodity relations in ways which structurally favour imperialist interests take place through a process that David Harvey terms ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (see Harvey 2003, 2005, 2010). To this we now turn.