Late Imperialism

Notes on its Recent Debate

Abstract

This article aims to present part of the debate, during the 2010s, between economists and Marxist social scientists about contemporary imperialism. We focus on contributions from collaborating intellectuals of the Monthly Review journal, such as Samir Amin, Prabhat Patnaik, Utsa Patnaik, John Smith, and Intan Suwandi, and their formulations about late-imperialism, that is, the mature phase and apex of imperialist domination in the world economy. These authors propose to update the theory of imperialism through new research and theoretical categories with different levels of abstraction such as global labor arbitrage, globalization of the law of value, income deflation in peripheral countries, global labor value chains, etc. In the end, we present, in general lines, the controversies of these authors with the geographer David Harvey about the actuality of imperialism as a theoretical category.