David Harvey, Duncan Foley, Nancy Fraser and Prabhat Patnaik discussed the contemporary relevance of the concept of ‘Imperialism’ in an event held at the The New School’s Center for Public Scholarship a couple of weeks ago:

In the age of financial globalization of the last few decades, we have seen elites in many countries of the South which were erstwhile colonies join the elites of Europe, North America… and it would seem, therefore, that now there is just the domination of global elites over the global working poor. Moreover the populations of many countries of the North are also suffering from chronic unemployment and inequality is acutely present in these countries as well. Does this mean that the very concept of imperialism is now an irrelevant category of analysis?