Author: Sahan S. Karatasli

(Photo: Mill Children, South Carolina by Lewis Hine available at the Met Museum)

Tad Skotnicki

“The wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails,” Marx writes, “appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’” ([1867] 1977: 125). With these words he began Das Kapital, his wide-ranging, never completed analysis of capitalism. And whether inspired by Marx’s analysis or not, many have inquired into the meanings of this “immense collection of commodities.” These are sometimes inquiries into the character of consumption, a phenomenon that Adam Smith, nearly a century earlier, had deemed the “sole end and purpose of all production” ([1776] 2003: 839). We might ask what people do with all of these commodities. Or we might ask how we come to desire these commodities and about the consequences of their proliferation for our selves, societies, and environments. Further, we might ask about the historical emergence of this proliferation of goods. In so doing, we try to figure out or decipher their appearance in our lives. Of course Marx, we are told, supplies us with few resources for understanding what consumption in capitalist societies means. The consumer is, apparently, the mechanical appendage to a process that begins in the guts of capitalist production. To cast consumption as a mere appearance or epiphenomenon of capitalist production expresses a “productivist bias”. This productivist bias refers to interpretations that treat consumption as a consequence of production and to a purported disregard for the lives, thoughts, and experiences of people as purchasers and users. Thus, critics encourage us to look beyond Marx to make sense of these goods – bought and used – that populate our worlds.

For instance, we are encouraged to focus on the social dynamics and cultural contexts of consumption, which can help us understand how these goods matter to us. At its simplest, consumption matters as a form of communication. We can cement our relationships with friends and loved ones through acts of shopping. In provisioning for another or giving gifts, we can enact our concern for others and establish debts that bind us to one another. Or we can distinguish ourselves within and across social strata via our tastes. Thus, consumption matters not merely as communication, but as a competitive strategy. In feudal Europe and throughout colonial empires, sumptuary laws attempted to regulate the ability of lower class, caste, and status people to dress in the manner of their social superiors. Such laws attest to the longstanding power of consumption both to communicate with as well as distinguish from others in social life. But consumption matters further as a means of establishing and elaborating a sense of self – as a member of social groups and as an individual. This has been noted, repeatedly and with varying degrees of disdain, since the late nineteenth century. We consume as a means of establishing and embodying who we are.

Each of these interpretations of consumption – communication, distinction, and self-identification – have been elaborated in critical and laudatory directions. Moreover, communication, distinction, and self-identification suggest that the meaning of consumption – and those immense collections of commodities – arise with reference to its social and cultural contexts. Thus, the meanings of consumption, it follows, will vary in essential ways with the specific social and cultural contexts within which consumption occurs. There appears to be a yawning chasm between Marx’s “reduction” of consumption to production and the myriad meanings of consumption.

But consider, now, three brief examples. In 1792, with the abolitionist movement beginning to blossom, an anonymous pamphlet began with a verse from the Apostle James, “Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” It continued, “Now, if many thousands are made fatherless and widows, by the grievous oppression of our fellow creatures in the sugar colonies, and by the trade to Africa for negroes, to supply the place of those who are worn out, or destroyed by excessive labour and cruel treatment, is not the produce of such labour polluted with blood?” (1792: 2). The short pamphlet insisted that the rum and sugar produced by slaves were polluted, and that it was the duty of all Christians and those who sought the abolition of the slave trade to refrain from the “purchase and use” of slave-made goods (1792: 4). The author viewed the meaning of slave-made rum and sugar in terms of the goods’ origins and consumers’ responsibility for them: “it must be admitted that the consumers are supporters of those iniquitous proceedings; and without them the slave-trade, with its lamentable consequences, must soon cease” (1792: 4). As sugar and rum accumulated in the colonial metropole, some abolitionists understood their appearance, in part, as indelibly bound up with the labor behind those goods.

Just over a century later, in 1899, reform-minded women ushered in the “Progressive Era” by investigating working conditions in Chicago, New York, Massachusetts, and several other eastern U.S. states. They banded together to establish the National Consumers’ League (NCL). In their constitution, the NCL observed “that the responsibility for some of the worst evils from which producers suffer rests with the consumers who seek the cheapest markets regardless how cheapness is brought about” (1899: article II, sec. 2). On this basis, they concluded it is “the duty of consumers to find out under what conditions the articles they purchase are produced and distributed, and insist that these conditions shall be wholesome and consistent with a respectable existence on the part of the workers” (1899: article II, sec. 3). Once again, this group of reformers understood the meaning of these goods in terms of the labor that produced them. Furthermore, they also identified consumers as responsible for the inequities in the production process. The NCL went so far as to cast employers as “virtually helpless” to promote just labor conditions owing to the “stress of competition” (1899: article II). To organize people as ethical or thoughtful consumers, they thought, would spur changes in the production process. While differing in tone and style from the abolitionists, the members of the NCL were prepared to see the significance of consumer goods in relation to the workers and character of the labor that produced them.

Finally, over two centuries removed from the abolitionists, in 2015, a UK-based non-profit organization called Fashion Revolution staged a “social experiment.” In the heart of Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, they placed a vending machine that promised t-shirts for the bargain price of two Euros. When people inserted their money for the shirt, they were shown a video that traced the origins of this deal. “Meet Manisha,” the screen read, “one of millions making our cheap clothing for as little as 13 cents an hour each day for 16 hours.” The text was superimposed onto images of dignified, predominantly female workers in dingy factories. At the close of the video, people were given the option of buying the t-shirt or donating to the organization. Fashion Revolution promotes greater transparency in the fashion industry and spearheads social media savvy campaigns to ask brands #whomademyclothes. These campaigns draw attention to the laborers behind the goods and ask consumers to pressure manufacturers to reveal these working conditions. Like their abolitionist and NCL predecessors, Fashion Revolution invoke the labor behind commodities to evoke a sense of responsibility in consumers. The meaning of the cheap t-shirt and other products of fast fashion arises in relation to the labor that goes into it.

In these examples, spread out over three centuries, I submit that we may find crucial resources to understand the meanings of consumption in capitalist societies: consumers wonder, again and again, about their relationship to the workers who make the goods that they buy and use. There are obvious and relevant substantive differences in the manner through which abolitionists, progressive-era consumer activists, and contemporary consumer activists articulate the connection between consumers, commodities, and workers. There are also historically-specific strategies and practices for promoting this interpretation of consumption. Furthermore, the social and cultural contexts of consumption will surely inform who engages in and promotes this labor-oriented interpretation. No person needs to consider goods in terms of their origins, any more than a person needs to treat consumption as communication, distinction, or self-identification. What intrigues, though, is the almost uncanny repetition of this meaning across distinct periods in the development of capitalist societies (Sewell 2008). Confronted with growing collections of commodities, consumers have interpreted their appearance in terms of the labor that produced them. To make sense of this repetition, we can begin, following Marx, with the appearance of wealth in the accumulation of goods and seek the relations as well as principles that these goods embody. Rather than skip over the matter of production in relation to consumption, we must engage the relationship directly. This, after all, is what some consumers have been doing for centuries.

Tad Skotnicki is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He researches the history of humanitarian consumerism and capitalism, social movements, and social thought.

References

1792. “Considerations addressed to professors of Christianity of every denomination, on the impropriety of consuming West-India sugar and rum, as produced by the oppressive labour of slaves.” London: Ritchie and Sammels.

National Consumers’ League. 1899. “Constitution.” New York.

Marx, Karl. [1867] 1977. Capital: a critique of political economy, vol. I. Translated by B. Fowkes. New York: Vintage Books.

Sewell, William H. Jr. 2008. “The Temporalities of Capitalism”, Socio-Economic Review 6(3): 517-537.

Smith, Adam. [1776] 2003. The Wealth of Nations. New York: Bantham.

Manali Desai

The call for a ‘post-colonial’ turn in sociology in recent years has pointed to the neglect of colonial and imperialist histories that have constituted the modern world, and which have been elided from the key concepts that historical sociologists use in their research. Arguing that this elision leads to a form of ‘analytical bifurcation’ of European and other histories, and an unexamined Enlightenment scientism which, among other problems, leads to a variables-based approach to cases, a number of authors have instead advocated a ‘connected history’ that examines relations rather than essences (Bhambhra 2007; Go 2013). Implicit in the practice of sociology innocent of its colonial origins, is what has been described as ‘methodological nationalism’, that is, the analytical practice of treating nations as things that can be meaningfully compared, and that seemingly possess an ontological coherence.

In this blog article, I draw upon scholarly developments in India to question whether the domain of ‘nation’ poses particular challenges to such a postcolonial sociology. These challenges, I will argue, stem from the double elision implicit in calls for postcolonial sociology – of the domain of post-colonial nationalism, and of the nation’s own territorial bifurcation into India and Pakistan that occurred in the process of emergence from colonial rule.  From anti-colonial nationalism to territorial bifurcation and beyond, the idea of nation has simultaneously troubled and informed India’s political articulations. A renewed postcolonial sociology will need to confront this double elision of nation and nationalism by attending not only to the colonial relations that constituted an entity such as India but equally by attending to the semiotics of the internal struggle to define the terms of sovereignty. As Partha Chatterjee has shown in the case of India, these internal struggles split the putative ‘nation’ into a material and spiritual domain. This was further compounded by the territorial bifurcation of India and Pakistan as two separate entities, one purportedly secular and the other essentially religious. These bifurcations created a cultural, emotional and sensory legacies for future struggles, legacies that are continually adapted in the service of political hegemony. A reinvigorated postcolonial sociology that attends to this troubled history of the nation is better placed to offer a critical perspective on the contemporary crisis moment that manifests differently across the globe.

Let us look at this argument more closely. In The Nation and Its Fragments, Partha Chatterjee (1993) argues that early Indian nationalists created a template for sovereignty based upon the putative spiritual superiority of the incipient nation over the material progress of the colonial West. This bifurcation was a strategic setting out of the ground upon which the new India would lay claim to its future autonomy from British rule. This domain was defined through religion, culture, family – the antinomy of material-scientific rationality – which elite Indians later claimed themselves capable of achieving. These moments in the development of Indian nationalism, arguably, created a national whole through its fragments – women, peasants, castes – who were then pressed into the service of modernity during India’s moment of arrival into full post-colonial nationhood.

We do not need to assume a linear logic of movement from spirituality to rationality in this narrative of emergence of the Indian nation-state; indeed, these were two, not necessarily competing poles of nationalist discourse which have continued to animate political struggles in India. We can see this in the progression of Hindu nationalism over the past two decades, where the spiritual and material are both reactivated to claim the superiority of the Hindu nation over the ‘pseudo-secular’ versions of the past, which Hindu nationalists argue is derived directly from the problematic legacy of Nehruvian-secular imaginings of the nation. This re-activation is not a seamless development from a prior legacy. Instead, the degree to which claims about Hindu moral superiority are balanced with the claims to rational-scientific progress shifts, depends very much on the conjuncture in which such claims are being made. For example, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has sought to promote itself as the party of a technologically-led developmental revolution with claims to nuclear and military strength since the late 1990s, thus appealing to the scientific-business-professional community within India and its vast diaspora. Many successful businessmen and women flocked to India to jumpstart this revolution during the 1990s. While promoting this model of Western capitalism, the BJP has simultaneously enabled a range of Hindu spiritual gurus and healers to promote Ayurveda, yoga and other spiritual practices aimed at an audience that is constructed as needing an antidote to this form of capitalism. There are echoes in much of this discourse about the environmental consequences of unbridled Western consumerism. A key proponent of sustainable, organic farming Vandana Shiva, has expressed clear affiliation for Hindu nationalism in its anti-globalization incarnation.

What is important here is that the anti-colonialism of India’s nationalists during the 1930s and 40s has been replaced by a postcolonial sensibility that is incorporated into Hindu nationalist imaginaries. A growing emphasis on non-Western philosophy, and disavowal of eurocentrism is brought in as a key element in carving out the properly spiritual-material nation of India that is able to effectively claim its place in the modern world. Rajiv Malhotra, an academic trained at Syracuse University, and the founder of the Infinity Foundation think tank writes:

Ensconced thus in the driver’s seat, with its undeniably ethnocentric blueprint of what the world should look like, the Western collective ego has embarked on scores of missions – religious and secular (colonization), to bring about this Westernization. When such attempts collide with contrasting and contradictory worldviews, the response has been one of many tactics – acculturation, religious conversion, colonization, isolation, disparagement, genocide and appropriation. What matters most in this process is that Western identity must remain perpetually at the helm of human affairs, it’s own grand narrative further strengthened at each encounter, and the rest of the world only the frontier for it to play out its manifest destiny. . . . Hegelian views concerning India’s ‘lack of history’ are at the root of much of the past dismissal of India and they shape attitudes toward India even today. Hegel blinded the West to the parochialism of its supposed universals and consolidated the discourse on what was wrong about India. The degree to which Western scholarship has been influenced by his linear theory of history (including many Marxist and humanist accounts of history and the various philosophies built on such accounts) is truly amazing (Malhotra 2018).

There is little here that one might disagree with. And yet, the Infinity Foundation’s work draws upon such insights to promote an unabashedly Hindu revivalist narrative of Swadeshi (self-rule), blending seamlessly with the current political wave of Hindutva. A key element of this revivalism is to counter Western influence in the form of Marxist liberation movements (the ongoing Maoist insurgency in east and central India) and Dalit movements – both of which are seen as alien to the indigenous concepts of belonging and Swadeshi.

A number of other writers have occupied this postcolonial space, including Vamsee Juluri, a Professor of Media Studies at San Francisco State University, and G. N. Balagangadhar of Ghent University, who view contemporary discourse about inequality and oppression in India as evidence of a colonial consciousness. Dr. Prakash Shah, Reader of Culture and Law at Queen Mary University, argues that the caste system is a purely-Western construct. In India, he argues, there are castes but there is no caste system. It follows for him that caste violence is not endemic to the idea of caste itself, and Shah cites data showing that violence against Dalits and Scheduled Tribes is less than the violence experienced by members of other groups. While there are superficial analogies between this position and that of Bernard Cohn, who was concerned with the textual and discursive authority of particular castes under British rule, it is nevertheless telling that a socially-conservative proposition denying the existence of systemic caste oppression is able to draw so explicitly on the language of postcolonial and decolonial thought.

The invocation of Hindu-based ideology as a progressive counterpart to colonialism draws not only upon tropes that were invoked in the long history of the Indian nationalist movement, but also upon the post-colonial bifurcation of India and Pakistan into domains defined by a progressive but oppressed religious community (Hindus) and a regressive and fundamentalist religious community of Muslims in Pakistan. This bifurcation persists with great ferocity in contemporary India, criss-crossing with a powerful sense of victimhood. This, too, is part of the postcolonial condition for which sociology needs an adequate vocabulary.

Within the Indian context, postcolonial theory since the 1980s had a long and fruitful connection to Marxist social theory, and both were integrally connected with contemporary political questions. We might recall that, at its inception, subaltern studies was concerned with pointing out the ways in which nationalism, as constructed by elite leaders, could never quite contain the political desires of workers, peasants and other subaltern actors, who called for a more radical overhaul of indigenous forms of oppression (Chakrabarty 1998: 13). The essentially-postcolonial critique of nationalism set itself against two modes of historiography that were prevalent in the 1970s: the Cambridge historians who viewed nationalism as a project of narrow political and economic interests of a small elite, and some Marxist historians who saw nationalism as a fundamentally regenerative project that held the potential for radical transformation. The innovation of the subaltern school was to excavate materials on subaltern protest which showed that neither narrative quite fit. In Dipesh Chakrabarty’s view, this subaltern history was concerned not merely with inaugurating a ‘history from below’ in the tradition of E. P. Thompson, but with making a break from universalist histories of capitalism, nation formation, and the archive itself. In doing so, the very category of the ‘political’ would be revised; no longer confined to the distinction between the universalist, progressive political and the regressive, kinship and religious based pre-political. The degree to which the subaltern collective revised, rather than merely reversed, the importance of these categories can be debated. Yet it is clear that the postcolonial intervention in Indian historiography sought to break down the bifurcation of categories of perception about subaltern practices, and in doing so, attempted to widen the scope of what we consider ‘politics’. As Chakrabarty writes, “the history of colonial modernity in India created a domain of the political that was heteroglossic in its idioms, irreducibly plural in its structure, interlocking within itself strands of different relations that did not make up a logical whole” (p. 20).

For many writers, such as Partha Chatterjee, an engagement with Marxism (via Gramsci) continued (and continues) to be important, and grappling with the nature of Indian capitalism remained an important element of thinking outside Western universalism. Yet there was a clear trend through the 1980s and 1990s of the decoupling of postcolonial theory from Marxism, particularly as the latter became more embedded in Western academic departments. This led a number of scholars to lament that colonialism had become analytically isolated from capitalism, and had replaced the latter as the core object of theory. Susie Tharu, a Dalit feminist writer in India, suggested that for many in India, “postcolonial is not a useful category – it is restrictively attached to an isolated and definitive problematic – colonialism.” Her comments in a round-table discussion titled “The End of Postcolonial Theory?” were echoed by Fernando Coronil, Mamadou Diouf, and other writers whose self-identification remains outside the mainstream of Western academia As Tharu noted:

[g]iven the heterogeneity and the unstable unity of hegemonic formations, such global radicalism may be for nothing. After Marx we are persuaded that such concepts should be designed as instruments to cut with . . . and after Foucault that knowledge has always been an instrument of power. The tough question is: what and how is postcolonial studies cutting?

For Tharu, its distance from Third World problems, the lack of investment in actual intellectual and political tasks confronting the Third World (as outlined in the case of Hindu nationalism) renders the idea of ‘postcolonial’ insufficient.

What, then, of the idea of ‘postcolonial sociology’? At one level, this is an endeavour one cannot argue with, for it points to the erasure of colonialism from the disciplinary self-understanding and practice of Western sociology. For historical sociology, breaking down the analytical bifurcation derived from this self-understanding and practice undoubtedly challenges the variables-based analysis of discrete cases that continues to animate comparative work in the sub-discipline. But it is one thing to question the positivistic assumptions that remain embedded in a field that does not sufficiently account for the role of colonial relations in constituting the objects and categories we use in historical sociology. But this approach assumes that the representational politics of ‘postcolonial’ is a worthy counter-articulation to Eurocentric Sociology, when its own heteroglossia renders it incapable of consistently playing this role. In his brilliant and ever-relevant essay, “New Ethnicities,” Stuart Hall (1996) argued that the political category of Black, which had once assumed a certain clarity within the racist politics of the pre-Thatcher years, increasingly had to confront a second struggle – that of representation, i.e. the politics of representation. This meant the “end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject.” At issue, he argued, was the “recognition of the extraordinary diversity of subjective positions, social experience and cultural identities which compose the category ‘black’; that is, the recognition that ‘black’ is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category” (p. 443). Hall used the term ‘articulation’ to describe this process of construction and congealing of categories at certain historical conjunctures. The idea of articulation (see also De Leon, Desai and Tuğal 2009, 2015), holds much promise for a reinvigorated ‘postcolonial’ sociology, one which takes the politics of representation as a core element of concept formation. Colonial and imperial histories, and the histories of contestation (by no means amenable to singular representations in terms of class or nation) are analytically integral to these articulations. But replaying this through analytical categories, such as East vs. West, global North vs. South, however well meaning, risks reproducing rather than querying the forms of power that embody the very bifurcation itself.

Manali Desai is Lecturer in Sociology at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, whose research focuses on state formation, political parties, social movements, development, ethnic violence, gender, and post-colonial studies.

References

Bhambhra, Gurminder. 2007. Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 1989. Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890–1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chopra, Ritika. 2016. “Indian Caste System is a Western Construct, says Indian Scholar at ICHR lecture.” Indian Express, http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/ichr-lecture-indian-caste-system-western-construct-4371000/ (12 November). Accessed March 28, 2018.

Chatterjee, Partha. 1993. Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

De Leon, Cedric, Manali Desai, and Cihan Tuğal. 2009. “Political Articulation: Parties and the Constitution of Cleavages in the United States, India, and Turkey.” Sociological Theory 27 (3): 193-219.

De Leon, Cedric, Manali Desai, and Cihan Tuğal. 2015. Building Blocs: How Parties Organize Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Go, Julian. 2013. “For a Postcolonial Sociology.” Theory and Society, vol. 42, no. 1, pps. 25-55.

Hall, Stuart. 1996. “New Ethnicities.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. D. Morley and C. Kuong-Hsin. New York: Routledge.

Malhotra, Rajiv. 2012. “Challenging Western Universalism.” https://rajivmalhotra.com/library/articles/challenging-western-universalism/ (9 March). Accessed March 28, 2018.

Tharu, Susie. 2007. “Editor’s Column: The End of Postcolonial Theory?” PMLA 122 (3): 633-651.

(Photo : Mark Rolston)

Ho-fung Hung

Thanks to globalization, sociology has been transgressing the singular nation-state focus and paying more attention to global processes that encompass the whole world and to transnational processes that cut across national boundaries. With the recent rise of the sociology of empire, we discover yet another unit of analysis besides the national, global and transnational, i.e., the imperial. So many exciting works have been done on Western and Eastern, modern and premodern empires, with empire conceptualized as a multinational geographical space dominated by a single authority. How is the historical study of empires relevant to analysis of contemporary politics?

During the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, when neoconservatives prevailed in Washington, “empire” and “imperialism” become buzzwords in the study of global politics. Political science and sociology books with the “e” or “i” words in their titles abounded. Back then, the U.S. was seen as transforming itself into a global empire after the image of Rome as the center of a universal empire. But just as America was busy and then bogged down in West Asia in its imperial adventure, regional powers that used to be encircled by or freeriding on the U.S.-centered global order, most notably Russia and China, managed to rise as regional powers and tighten their grips on their respective spheres of influence at the expense of U.S. allies.

Over the last two decades, Putin’s Russia annexed territories from and bullied former Soviet republics like Georgia and Ukraine. It overtly or covertly cultivated proxies in Europe to undermine European Union and U.S. influence. In the meantime, China militarized the South China Sea despite competing territorial claims by its neighbors. It also started to turn its economic influence into geopolitical leverage against U.S. allies in Asia and beyond. In the most recent national defense strategy published in January 2018, The U.S. Department of Defense stipulated that its priority would shift from the War on Terror to countering China and Russia as two “revisionist” powers that allegedly coerced neighboring countries and challenged the multilateral world order that US had led since after the Second World War. What we see here is an emerging clash of three empires–the U.S., China, and Russia. We might add other lesser powers like Iran, too.

Understanding the dynamics and predicting the plausible development of this incipient inter-imperial rivalry is a daunting task. So far, the most developed theory on inter-imperial rivalry is Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), which employs Marxian political economy to explain the origins of the First World War. According to this theory, capital in advanced capitalist countries always responds to over-accumulation crises and the falling rate of profit in their home countries by investing in underdeveloped countries in hopes of a higher rate of profit. These capital export activities and the security risks they face drive the capitalist state of the home country to project its political and military powers to the destinations of capital export by establishing colonial control or spheres of influence. Major capitalist powers must expand their spheres of influence with the expansion of capital export. Eventually these powers clash when their spheres of influence collide, escalating into world wars.

This theory offers us insights into the escalating tension between the U.S. and China. Under the postwar world order, the U.S. provided security cover for the global flow of capital not only from the U.S., but also from all other capitalist powers, which were U.S. allies in the Cold War.  China’s rise as a new capitalist power has long been grounded on free riding on this U.S.-centric world order. More recently, over-accumulation within China is driving its companies to extend into other developing countries in search of new profitable investments. This wave of capital export is exposing Chinese companies to increased geopolitical risk, prompting the Chinese state to abandon its second-fiddle approach and experiment with ways to project its political and military power overseas. This has led China closer to conflict with the U.S.’s global security umbrella, although China’s capacity in power projection, despite all the hype, is still very limited.

On the other hand, the resurgence of Russia’s global imperial reach, in Eastern Europe and especially in Syria and the Middle East, is much more formidable than China’s. This resurgence is more difficult to understand under Lenin’s Marxian theory of imperialism. As a major gas and oil exporter itself, Russia has not much obvious economic interests to gain by seeking dominance in the Middle East except arms sales. Russia’s global projection of power has little to do with the profit of its corporations. It is driven more by the nationalist, territorialist quest for a return to the nation’s past glory. As such, Weber’s theory of imperialism, which sees “sentiments of prestige” and the will to status, honor, and tax bases of the state elite as the significant driving force of imperialistic expansion, is a more convincing lens through which to view Putin’s imperialist adventure.

If the Weberian theory of imperialism is more adequate in understanding the imperial resurgence of Russia, can the theory also offer insights into certain aspects of U.S. and Chinese imperialism that have been neglected under a seemingly-convincing Marxian framework? It is difficult to deny that the quest for prestige and honor plays a role in U.S.’s and China’s imperialist adventures, too. The question is how the Weberian and Marxian logics of empire are connected in different cases. This has to be dealt with both theoretically and empirically. We are living in a scary time of new inter-imperial rivalry. We are also living in an exciting time that allows us to develop new theories of empire based on empirical observation of events unfolding in real time.

Ho-fung Hung is the Henry M. and Elizabeth P. Wiesenfeld Professor in Political Economy in the Department of Sociology and the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His work focuses on China and the political economy of global capitalism.