Joining Empire: The Political Economy of the New Canadian Foreign Policy by Jerome Klassen (review)

This book makes the case that “Canada’s new foreign policy is a class-based effort at joining empire.” (6; all emphases in quotes are from the original) “Empire” refers to the current system of collective imperialism dominated by the United States. The second notable term in the above sentence registers what is most distinctive about this book – “class-based.” I will raise some questions below about the third notable term, “new.”

Along with earlier works, including Todd Gordon’s Imperialist Canada (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2010), this book challenges understandings of Canada as some kind of rich dependency. The New Canadian Political Economy School held that one reason Canada does not qualify as an advanced capitalist country is that it lacks a real national bourgeoisie with its own class interests (see Wallace Clement, Continental Corporate Power [Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1977]). It is a fundamentally different framework for analysis and politics to recognize instead that a relatively independent Canadian imperialist bourgeoisie controls Canada’s economy and the Canadian state. To note this difference we should regard Joining Empire as part of a newer Canadian Political Economy School. The particularity of Canada’s relationship with the US remains central, but the dependency-premised justification for Canadian left-nationalism is gone.

Klassen first reviews theories of imperialism. His own account emphasizes that spatial expansion is inherent to capitalism, and that value is geographically transferred through trade. As indicated by adopting the term “empire,” he views collective imperialism by the advanced capitalist states as currently predominating over inter-imperialist rivalry.

The book then reviews the nature of the US-led empire of capital in order to address how Canada fits into this framework. It treats North American continental deep integration as an example of how secondary powers like Canada must find specialized roles to advance the interests of their own capitalist class. Continentalization is characterized as part of a broader “spatial fix” for the capitalist crisis of accumulation. It provided a broader base for Canadian capital to further internationalize: “The nafta relationship, then, has been critical for the expanded reproduction of Canadian capital on a global scale.” (134)

This recent expansion of Canadian capital beyond the domestic economy plays a central role in Klassen’s account. It is examined in more detail when the three circuits of capital approach (capital in the sphere of production, in circulation, and in the financial or money form) is used to evaluate Canada’s current role in the world economy. Despite certain particularities, the Canadian circuits are deemed typical of an advanced capitalist economy. “The Canadian state must be located as a secondary imperialist power in world accumulation … tightly bound with the political economy of US capitalism, but also linked to wider circuits of capital in the world economy.” (152)

The nature of Canadian capital is also evaluated in terms of the directorship linkages among leading corporations. In a chapter written with William Carroll, author of the seminal Corporate Power and Canadian Capitalism (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986), the corporate network in Canada is characterized as “largely dominated by nationally owned firms – in particular, by leading [transnational corporations] under Canadian ownership.” (176) Changes between 1996 and 2006 include a “growing set of directorship interlocks between Canadian-owned TNCs and the largest foreign-based firms in the world.” (176) Leading Canadian firms “operate not as continental ‘compradors’ but as active members of an ‘Atlantic ruling class’ with transnational reach into both developed and developing countries.” (177)

These points are applied to explain recent Canadian “security” and foreign policy. Klassen criticizes dependency-influenced writers for their “one-sided focus on the interiorization of US corporate power in the Canadian political economy, to the detriment of understanding the exteriorization of Canadian capital in transnational patterns of exploitation and accumulation.” (185) Joining Empire makes the case that “the transformation of the Canadian state since 2001 is the structural effect of the internationalization of capital and...