These are comments delivered at a panel on The Making of Global Capitalism by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin. Jacobin published a symposium on the volume earlier this year.

I want to start by saying that I greatly admire this book, and pretty much everything these two guys have done over the years. Unusually for the genre, I meant every word of the blurb I supplied for it. A while back, I was on a panel with Radikha Desai, on which she argued that the US empire was not really much of a success compared to its British predecessor, which made me wonder what planet she’d been living on. (Given the stars of this panel, it can’t be her residence in Canada that led to this strange conclusion.) The thing has been incredibly successful on its own terms, and Leo and Sam are excellent at pointing out some of the mechanisms of its success, like the skillful incorporation of the second tier powers like Western Europe and Japan (I could say Canada as well, but it’s something of a special case). They have a high standard of living, and can even ride a moral high horse now and then while the US military does the dirty work of imperial policing. Of course, life in the third and fourth tiers of the empire is another story — one of debt and profit extraction and the occasional CIA-sponsored coup.

And the ability of the US planning elite to transcend immediate national interests to promote the health of the global system has been extremely impressive. Just to pick one example of something I found profoundly clarifying, I never really understood US strategy around Middle Eastern oil. Noam Chomsky likes to quote a 1940s planning document on what a strategic prize control of that oil is, but once the producing countries nationalized that oil in the 1970s, it didn’t seem like the US derived any great economic or strategic advantage from its influence and power in the region. After all, we produce far more hydrocarbons domestically than most of the second tier countries, and our immediate neighbors produce plenty as well. Leo and Sam offer a much more satisfying explanation: the US interest is in the free flow of oil for the health of the global system.