Professor Wolff always talks about declining empire, but never explains what is imperialism as a term of political economy.
People may believe that we are living in times of classical empires, with emperors, imperial conquests, looting and exploitation of periphery, and other features of historical empire. This is not the case.
Even though the looting and exploitation part remains, being core purpose of domination and dependency system, modern imperialism system is based on capitalist mode of production. Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, it is dictatorship of monopolistic capital, it is global economic system. Declining of the today’s “empire” is the matter of the very nature of the capitalist mode of production, and does not simply happening due to some metaphysical destiny of any empire.
Professor of economy, that is presented to us as Marxist must’ve give audience political economy explanations of the nature of imperialist system instead of making comparisons with ancient empires. Such comparisons do not give us any knowledge about the world we are living in, neither offer us any plan or solution how to help “empire” to meet its last days sooner. As if we were sitting on the bank of the river called life passively waiting then the dead body of our enemy will float by, and not were in danger to be buried under rubble of collapsing “empire”.
{ Inspired by professor Richard Wolf’s commentaries on “declining empire” events: