The start of the current wave of left-wing theorizing about imperialism was marked by the turn-of-the-century publication of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, which re-described the dynamics of what had until then mostly been known as “globalization” in terms of the imperial logic of network power.  In their review of that work, Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin expressed a mixture of admiration and frustration: while fully acknowledging Hardt and Negri’s essential insights into the imperial nature of global capitalism and the central role of American institutions in fostering that process, they also voiced considerable doubt about the specifics of the interpretation — above all the paradoxical statements about the role of labor in shaping and resisting imperialism and the lack of attention to the ongoing role of the American state in managing the empire it has spawned.

They traced these problems to a somewhat indulgent reliance on autonomist theory and the absence of a rigorous political economy framework. What remained to be done, they argued, was to analyze “the actual extent to which the American state has transformed itself so as to be able to act as the global state that global capitalism needs to keep order, to manage crises, and to close contradictions among the world nation-states and the diverse social forces that compose them.”

Panitch and Gindin have now produced that analysis themselves. For the purposes of this discussion, the argument of The Making of Global Capitalism can be telegraphed as follows. Contrary to common wisdom, globalization did not begin in the 1970s as international markets undermined a system of state-centered order. Instead, global capitalism was made, over the course of the twentieth century, through the penetration of distinctly American institutions and practices into the social, political and economic fabric of other nations. And this imperial system continues to be overseen by a configuration of states that pivots on the role of the US state, which acts to manage the contradictions and tensions that attend the dynamism of ongoing economic expansion.