Abstract

Articles The World Market: Battleground for the 1990s James Petras* Peculiarities of the Decline of U.S. Empire While it is possible to draw large-scale, long-term parallels between the decline of U.S. imperial hegemony and other former hegemonic powers (mainly Great Britain), there are significant specificities to the American experience that require special attention. The particular combinations and contradictions are important in understanding the possible political and social responses peculiar to the U.S. experience. We can identify several crucial elements of the declining empire that define the particularities of the U.S. descent. First, the general decline of the national political economy is combined with a general increase in the rates of profit of particular major corporate and banking groups. In fact, the two phenomena are inter-related and do not represent a "paradox." For example, the conditions of growth of private banking is based on pillaging resources from the state and other factors of production. The cost efficient use of those factors and state resources is far below optimality from the perspective of the "whole economy," but not from the perspective of sustaining or increasing profit margins. The facile and doctrinaire neo-classical assumptions that link micro (enterprise) growth with macro (national