| The
Illusions of Empire - Bashir Abu-Manneh |
Michael Hardt and Antonio
Negri’s Empire, published by Harvard University Press
in 2000, took the intellectual world by storm. After
the declared demise of “grand narratives” and projects of
human emancipation, here came a book that told the grandest of
all stories, the totalization of capital, and anticipated the
most magnificent of all revolutionary outcomes, communism.
Postmodern taboos were shattered, or so it seemed. The
prophets of the multitude, Hardt and Negri, were duly
acknowledged and celebrated in the liberal press. In the
United Kingdom, the New Statesman ran an interview with
Negri entitled “The left should love globalization.”
Globalization, Negri stated, leads to real democratic
“global citizenship.” In the United States, New York
Times reviewer Emily Eakin hailed Empire as the
“next big idea,” announcing the arrival of a badly-needed
“master theory” to overcome the “deep pessimism,”
“banality” (Stanley Aronowitz’s term), “crisis,” and
“void” that have characterized the humanities in the last
decade. Empire (both book and concept) was good news
for everyone, ushering in a period that, while difficult to
define, is, in Hardt’s words, “actually an enormous
historical improvement over the international system and
imperialism.”1
The response of the
conservative press was not so kind. While emphasizing Hardt
and Negri’s championing of globalization as the end of
imperialism, the Sunday Times (London), for example,
struck a strong critical note at the end of an interview with
Hardt. John Gray, it said, was left “unimpressed” by the
book: “It looks to me more a response to the sorry condition
of the humanities in the United States than a serious critique
of globalization.” And David Pryce-Jones in the U.S. magazine
National Review read the book as a farcical attempt to
resurrect the “Last Big Idea Which Did Not Come Off”:
communism. He went on to accuse the liberal press of being
fooled by the ’68 generation of “fashionable
intellectuals” who were “occupied in updating
old-fashioned Marxism-Leninism with their brand-new lingo of
deconstruction and poststructuralism.” His most venomous
attack is on Hardt and Negri’s reading of the Soviet Union
as “death from the socialist victory of modernization”:
“Such a travesty is a tribute to the higher idiocy which
only an imagination unconnected to reality is able to
confect.”2
On the left, the book has
been both praised and criticized. In fact, Empire has
become a point of focus for a larger debate about
globalization, contemporary forms of imperialism, and the
post–cold war era, subjects of great importance. It is in
connection with these subjects that I examine Empire in
this essay. My aim is twofold: first, to examine the validity
of the conceptual and theoretical apparatus advanced in Empire;
and, second, to contribute to the understanding of the
politics and ideology of contemporary global capitalism. As I
will argue below, the defining issue of the debate surrounding
Empire is whether capitalism has now entered into a
“post-imperialist” stage, as Hardt and Negri argue, or
whether it has consolidated a new phase of imperialism. The
answer to this question is crucial not only because it defines
the actuality of global capitalism but also because it
determines the potentiality of its transformation.
Post-imperialism or new
imperialism?
In order to understand the
nature of Hardt and Negri’s project, it is important to map
out Lenin’s ideas on imperialism. Not long before the
Bolshevik revolution, Lenin said,
Can one, however, deny that in
the abstract a new phase of capitalism to follow
imperialism, namely, a phase of ultra-imperialism, is
‘thinkable’? No. In the abstract one can think of such a
phase. In practice, however, he who denies the sharp tasks
of to-day in the name of dreams about soft tasks of the
future becomes an opportunist. Theoretically it means to
fail to base oneself on the developments now going on in
real life, to detach oneself from them in the name of
dreams.3
This was Lenin’s judgement
on Kautsky’s notion of “ultra-imperialism.” It is both a
political and a theoretical rejection. Kautsky was imagining
peaceful capitalist coexistence and cooperation exactly when
inter-imperialist contradictions were sharpening and
intensifying. Lenin says that Kautsky’s notion is a
“lifeless abstraction,” which has no truck with “the
concrete realities of the present-day world economy.” Its
main flaw lies in ignoring one of the basic laws and
conditions of capitalism, its combined and uneven
development. In a world of powers whose strength is
unequal, uneven development can only become more acute. In an
epoch characterized by “the striving for domination, not for
freedom,” “truce” is only possible as a prelude to war:
there can be no permanent joint exploitation of the world,
Lenin affirmed. Indeed, it is a “profoundly mistaken idea”
which says “that the rule of finance capital lessens the
unevenness and contradictions inherent in the world economy
today, whereas in reality it increases them.”4
Politically, Lenin thought
that Kautsky’s vision constituted a form of political evasion,
an opportunist abdication of responsibility: “And why not
wave aside the ‘exacting’ tasks that have been posed by
the epoch of imperialism now ruling in Europe?” Bukharin had
a similar position: “This possibility [of
‘ultra-imperialism’] would be thinkable if we were to look
at the social process as a purely mechanical one, without
counting the forces that are hostile to the policy of
imperialism.”5 The potential for revolutionary
transformation should never be discounted or excluded from the
political equation. The tasks of the present moment,
therefore, exclude turning to “innocent dreams of a
comparatively peaceful, comparatively conflictless,
comparatively non-catastrophic” future.6 For
Lenin, the real challenge was to unify the proletariat behind
a policy of anti-imperialism in the present conjuncture. His
1916 pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism sought
to do exactly that.
In Imperialism Lenin
argued that imperialism was a stage that capitalist
development had reached. It wasn’t only a policy or an
ideology, as Bukharin had argued in his seminal Imperialism
and World Economy; neither was it only the rule of finance
capital, as Hilferding had exhaustively shown in his
pioneering Finance Capital; and nor was imperialism a
choice that capitalists could decide to opt out of to revert
back to “free competition,” as Kautsky and others thought.
The economic essence of imperialism is monopoly capitalism,
Lenin argued: “If it were necessary to give the briefest
possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that
imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.”7
Due to the concentration of capital and production, there is a
greater propensity towards monopolies. Competition is not
eliminated, however, as imperialism “‘ties up’ monopoly
with free competition.” Imperialism “cannot do away with
exchange, the market, competition, crises, etc....The
essential feature of imperialism, by and large, is not
monopolies pure and simple, but monopolies in conjunction with
exchange, markets, competition, crises.”8 While
stating that all definitions are “conditional and
relative,” Lenin recounts the following main economic
features of imperialism:
Imperialism is capitalism at
that stage of development at which the dominance of
monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the
export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in
which the division of the world among the international
trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories
of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been
completed.9
Historically, Lenin saw
imperialism as a decaying, moribund capitalism, where a
revolutionary transition to socialism is possible—as
happened in Russia in 1917 but not in the rest of Europe. Its
most destructive effect on the labor movement, he argued, lies
in its strengthening of opportunism, generating reconciliation
between the proletariat and bourgeois parties—as witnessed
by the collapse of the Second International.
The “composite
picture” Lenin draws of the capitalist system in the era
of imperialism is therefore one of global rivalry among
national capitals over repartitioning the world market,
resulting in colonial oppression abroad and increased
domination and opportunism at home.10 It is a
dynamic picture of conflict and struggle, both interimperial
and social, resulting in war, uneasy peace, and war again: a
universal dialectic of development and destruction, progress
and stagnation, only to be overcome in socialism.
Hardt and Negri find
Lenin’s notion of imperialism no longer relevant to
understanding our world today. Empire is what comes after
imperialism, they argue, a new form of global juridical
sovereignty “composed of a series of national and
supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule”
(xii).* If imperialism was
characterized by the struggle of sovereign national capitals
for world domination, the rise of Empire indicates the demise
of this era: “The distinct national colors of the
imperialist map of the world have merged and blended in the
imperial global rainbow” (xiii). Empire is therefore
spatially limitless, temporally eternal, socially
all-encompassing, politically centerless, and universally
peaceful. Though this description has clear Kautskyian
overtones, Hardt and Negri insist on anchoring their argument
in Lenin’s own thought. It is Lenin himself, they argue, who
“was able to anticipate the passage to a new phase of
capital beyond imperialism and identify the place (or really
the non-place) of emerging imperial sovereignty” (232). Even
though they do admit that this is an “exaggeration” (234),
they still go on to say that “Lenin’s analysis of
imperialism and its crisis leads directly to the theory of
Empire.” “This is the alternative implicit in Lenin’s
work: either world communist revolution or Empire, and
there is a profound analogy between these two choices”
(232). This is clearly wrong. The only thing Lenin anticipated
was revolution; Empire (or ultraimperialism) was never even a
possibility. Lenin insisted that,
There is no doubt that the
development is going in the direction of a single world
trust that will swallow up all enterprises and all states
without exception. But the development in this direction is
proceeding under such stress, with such a tempo, with such
contradictions, conflicts, and convulsions—not only
economical, but also political, national, etc., etc.—that
before a single world trust will be reached, before the
respective national finance capitals will have formed a
world union of “ultra-imperialism,” imperialism will
inevitably explode, capitalism will turn into its opposite.11
If Hardt and Negri were
really repeating Lenin, they would have to categorically deny
the possibility of Empire/ultra-imperialism. If after
imperialism comes socialism, then Empire/ultra-imperialism is
premised on the denial of socialism. Herein lies the crux of
Lenin’s argument: the Kautskyian concept is theoretically
flawed because it ignores the uneven development of
capitalism, and politically opportunist because it denies the
possibility of socialism.
For Hardt and Negri,
Lenin’s analysis of imperialism has been superseded by
history. Vietnam struck the death knell of U.S. imperialism
and its continuation of the European colonial project,
ushering in a new period they dub Empire: a “smooth space”
where “there is no place of power—it is both
everywhere and nowhere. Empire is an ou-topia, or
really a non-place” (190). It is therefore no longer
necessary to reject ultra-imperialism: “Empire has been
materializing before our eyes” (xi). It is my aim in the
following to show by recourse to concrete political analysis
that nothing has changed to make Empire any less utopian than
it was when Kautsky first suggested it in 1914; and that Hardt
and Negri have misconstrued the process of globalization by
naively accepting its definition as “‘a process without a
subject.” They wrongly conclude, therefore, that imperialism
has been overcome. In reality, it has only been perfected
under U.S. hegemony. As Lenin back in 1916 recognized,
“‘American ethics,’ which the European professors and
well-meaning bourgeois so hypocritically deplore, have, in the
age of finance capital, become the ethics of literally every
large city in any country.”12 The rainbow that
Hardt and Negri see is only a mirage obscuring the Stars and
Stripes.
“American capitalism,”
Trotsky stated in his 1924 speech “Perspectives of World
Development,” “is seeking the position of world
domination; it wants to establish an American imperialist
autocracy over our planet.” For Trotsky, the fate of mankind
therefore hinges on the outcome of the international conflict
between revolutionary Bolshevism and American imperialism. In
this context, Europe will be allowed to rise again within
limits set by the United States and will gradually be
transformed into an “American dominion of a new type.” For
England, “only retreats are possible” to avoid
interimperial war with the United States. The internal
political makeup of Europe has also been affected. Americanism
wears the cloaks of social democracy: “European Social
Democracy is becoming, before our very eyes, the political
agency of American capitalism.” Trotsky’s only hope lay in
the revolutionary potential of the American proletariat:
“Americanized Bolshevism will crush and conquer imperialist
Americanism.”13 The reverse has happened. The
20th century has witnessed the containment of revolutionary
Bolshevism, its degeneration into Stalinism, and its eventual
implosion beginning in 1989. For the first time in history,
capital was universalized: “It has totalized itself both
intensively and extensively. It’s global in reach, and it
penetrates to the heart and soul of social life and nature.”14
A new world order was duly declared by George Bush senior,
promising global peace and prosperity while threatening Iraq
with war.15 This double register of peace and war
has come to define the 1990s.
Hardt and Negri read the 1991
Gulf War as a symptom of Empire, of a new order exemplified by
the ethicality and effectiveness of war:
The importance of the Gulf War
derives rather from the fact that it presented the United
States as the only power able to manage international
justice, not as a function of its own national motives
but in the name of global right. (180)
This is exactly the way the
United States presented its intervention in Iraq.
International norms had to be upheld, and the United States
was forced to intervene to rectify global criminal behavior.
To accept and uncritically replicate this hegemonic U.S.
discourse of policing the world, of rights and “just war,”
is to fall into the trap of projecting domestic criminal law
onto the behavior of states. This involves an unprecedented
“transfer of the discourse that serves the domestic legal
system within a liberal democratic state to the realm of world
politics,” leading to a depoliticization of global conflicts
like wars.16 Because the Gulf War couldn’t really
be justified in liberal or democratic terms, a moral discourse
of right and wrong had to be imported into international
relations. International politics, national interests, or even
capital reproduction strategies are substituted by a
humanitarian discourse, which Hardt and Negri endorse. Its
vanguards are the Non-Government Organizations (NGOs), which
prepare for military intervention and “represent directly
global and universal human interests” (313), thus aiming to
meet “the needs of life itself.” “Beyond politics”
(314), morality rules.
But whose morality is it? And
whose humanity was it that was being represented in the Gulf
War? Which “life in all its generality” (313) was being
affirmed? Certainly not those of the Iraqis, as many
immediately recognized. Western humanitarian intervention and
“global right” are in fact premised on the degradation and
dehumanization of the Iraqi people. As Edward Said has argued:
Representation of the conflict
in the West, by the first week of the crisis in August, had
succeeded, first in demonizing Saddam; second, in
personalizing the crisis and eliminating Iraq as a nation, a
people, a culture, a history; and third, in completely
occluding the role of the United States and its allies in
the formation of the crisis.17
Said has also explained that
the Gulf War was part of a long and disastrous history of U.S.
imperialist design in the region, as have many other
anti-imperialist intellectuals like Robin Blackburn and Noam
Chomsky. What should have given Hardt and Negri additional
pause was the fact that this “global right” was being
applied unequally. What sort of international juridical norms
were being followed when they applied only to Iraq’s
occupation of Kuwait but not to Israel’s occupation of the
West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights? If there is such a
thing as a “new supranational right,” why is it policed so
selectively? Hardt and Negri remain untroubled by such
questions. For them, the United States is simply
constitutionally and historically privileged to selflessly act
as a global “peace police” in order to safeguard and
guarantee the public good, a role which it has been asked to
assume by international organizations after the demise of the
Soviet bloc. As Neil Smith argues, Hardt and Negri “swallow
completely the conflation of narrow national self-interest of
US elites with the facade of representing global good.”18
Politically, this makes them complicit with every act of
destruction wreaked in the name of global liberal norms from
the Gulf War to Kosovo:
Those who present the US war
drive as a force for liberal values and a move toward
restoration of justice in the Gulf are complicit in the
carnage and destruction wrought by Desert Storm to buttress
a regional regime of oppression and economic exploitation.19
In reality, the new world
order is substantially different from the one depicted in Empire.
Imperialism has indeed persisted. And American empire is the
real goal of globalization. This has been clearly demonstrated
in Peter Gowan’s The Global Gamble: Washington’s
Faustian Bid for World Dominance. The new world order, he
argues, is in essence about the U.S. drive to dominate the
world economy unchallenged, to “go global” in order “to
entrench the United States as the power that will control the
major economic and political outcomes across the globe in the
twenty-first century.” Globalization and neoliberalism are
U.S. strategies for global dominance, allowing the United
States to shape both “the internal and external environments
of states in directions which will induce them to continue to
accept U.S. political and economic dominance.”20
Seeing globalization as a “process without a subject,” as
Hardt and Negri do in Empire, mystifies the real
dynamics of U.S. global expansion in the 1990s and serves as
an ideological cloak for U.S. imperialism. By confusing U.S.
self-presentation with objective reality, they promote the
crippling illusion that global power is without a dominant
center. Put simply, what is globalization to the rest of the
world is Americanization to the United States:
Globalization thus
deglobalizes US macroeconomic policy...while other economies
and governments experience new kinds of subordination to
international economic processes, from the angle of the US
economy globalization can rather present itself as an
‘Americanization’ of the world economy—a process of
harmonizing the rest of the world to the rhythms and
requirements of the U.S. economy.21
The pressure on the rest of
the world has as a result been immense, forcing states
themselves to become “efficient agencies for capitalist
globalization.”22 But this has not led to the
construction of a global state or Empire. One of the basic
features of U.S. globalization, contra Hardt and Negri, has
been that it uses other states to promote its own interests.
The state is necessary for globalization, and the question
that therefore needs to be addressed is that of how the
contemporary state has been restructured to perform the new
requirements of the drive to “go global” by the United
States. It is important to understand the process through
which other states have internalized U.S. global demands, and
to capture the way the U.S. pressures other states to bend to
its will. This process is not only economic or military, but
juridical as well. As Aijaz Ahmad observes: “national legal
systems are being constantly pressed into altering their own
laws to make them more compatible with—often mere facsimiles
of—American law.” He therefore concludes:
The non-territorial empire
that has its capital in Washington D.C. thus takes over the
actual internal functioning of far-flung nation-states three
times over: under the lure and power of private
transnational capital, under the regulatory regimes of the
supra-national institutions (the IMF and so on), and by
turning the laws of various nations into replicas of
American law.23
Many of these features are
specific to the 1990s, but some have a lineage that goes back
to the early 1970s, if not before. One of U.S. imperialism’s
most dominant features in the postwar period has been its
power to copy its relations of production inside other
imperial metropolises. And this has continued, expanded, and
intensified. Another important feature is that the United
States has never sought to emulate old-style European
imperialism by creating a juridical empire of its own. The
reverse is actually true. Decolonization and formal juridical
and political independence were necessary conditions for the
United States’ own domination and expansion.
The United States has in fact
come to rely on the compliance of other states with its own
military-political projects, and this was one of the most
significant features of the cold war era. Through the
construction of an elaborate hub-and-spokes protectorate
system, the United States was able to dominate its allies and
determine their friends, enemies, states of emergency, foreign
policies, and strategies of accumulation.24 Allies
were dependent on the United States to satisfy their security
needs, and each individual ally’s main strategic
relationship had to be with the United States. Interimperial
rivalries and antagonisms were therefore contained by the
unity provided by U.S. domination. While never seeking to
eliminate its allies as independent centers of capital
accumulation, the United States always sought to determine their
development. So Europe and Japan became strategically and
politically dependent on the United States’ relation with
the Soviet Union, which the United States utilized to secure
its own economic and political supremacy over the world
market. Indeed, as David N. Gibbs has argued, the United
States pursued a “double containment” strategy during the
cold war “to contain Communism and the capitalist allies of
the United States in Europe simultaneously.” The former was
used to legitimize the latter. “With the demise of the
Soviet Bloc, after 1989, the containment of allies has
remained a central U.S. objective.”25 The crisis
of the 1990s can therefore be read as a crisis of legitimacy
for U.S. power: how to maintain and reproduce the cold war
structures of domination and dependency when they were no
longer officially needed. This has been the challenge U.S.
elites have had to grapple with in the 1990s.
In other words, the central
U.S. objective has remained a constant since at least as far
back as the First World War: global domination. As the former
Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage so succinctly
put it in 1990, “There is absolutely no substitute for
decisive, clearheaded American leadership.”26 The
real challenge for the United States in the 1990s had been
finding new ways to legitimize this proposition. The third
world and Eastern Europe have had to bear the brunt of this
process, as interimperialist tensions were projected outwards.
Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, “humanitarian intervention,” “just
war,” NATO expansion, and a host of other forms of
statecraft like globalization and neoliberalism cannot be
understood outside this essential fact. This explains, as
Gowan has argued, the turbulence in transatlantic relations in
the 1990s:
The entire shape of European
politics and economics in the 1990s has been shaped by the
battles amongst the main NATO powers over how to reshape the
political framework in Western Europe after it was shattered
by the Soviet bloc collapse.
The United States has
vehemently refused to renegotiate the basic terms and
conditions of the “strong partnership” between itself and
Europe:
In U.S. official parlance, the
phrase “strong partnership” is code. In diplomatic
language, it means strong U.S. leadership over Euroland.
More bluntly, it means U.S. hegemonic leadership of Western
Europe, the kind of “strong partnership” that used to
exist during the Cold War (and in the Gulf War).27
The United States has, as a
result, continued to resist what can be described as the
European ultra-imperialist project of carving up the rest of
the world equally. As Lenin emphasized early last century,
uneven development and uneven distribution of power undermine
any sense of equality in international relations. This has
been borne out in international politics today. The United
States does not accept what senior British diplomat Robert
Cooper today calls postmodern or cooperative imperialism: “a
framework in which each has a share in the government, in
which no single country dominates and in which the governing
principles are not ethnic but legal.”28 This
project, which includes the International Criminal Court and
other institutions for mutual state interference, sounds very
much like Hardt and Negri’s juridical Empire. And it stands
in sharp contradiction with the United States’ strategy to
attain unchallenged supremacy over the world. The United
States continues to interpret “cooperative empire” as a
direct threat to its own constitution and national interest
since it involves subjecting U.S. domestic law to
international constraints. The European Union has strongly
argued against such a reading. It sees its version of
globalization/imperialism—a network of shared
sovereignty—as a positive development in international
relations. As its External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten
recently said:
On the contrary, the instinct
to return to a narrow definition of the national interest;
to assert the primacy of US concerns, and especially
economic interests, over any outside authority; constitutes
a threat not just to the developing international order, but
to the US itself.29
The United States
categorically refuses to partake in the European Union’s
“neoliberal cosmopolitanism”: “the United States has not
exhibited any discernible tendency either to abandon power
politics or to subordinate itself to supra-national global
authorities.”30 As the 1990s clearly
demonstrated, maintaining a hierarchically structured unipolar
global order has remained the United States’ primary
objective.
It is in this context that
the “war on terrorism” needs to be understood. For Hardt
and Negri, it signifies a rupture in the Empire project. After
September 11, 2001, they have argued, the United States
adopted a unilateral imperialist project, abandoning the
decentered multilateralism of the network: Empire is no more,
downgraded from an actuality into a potentiality, a mere
alternative within global politics.31 This
conception of contemporary international politics is pure
idealism. Empire, like ultra-imperialism, has always been a
theoretical possibility but never a reality—and it never can
be, as the United States has insisted. The “war on
terrorism” has only provided the United States with a means
to legitimize a host of new imperialist measures (including
“regime change” and “preemptive strike”) in order to
increase its global penetration. Combining growing
authoritarianism at home with intensifying intervention
abroad, the United States exploited the September 11 terrorist
attacks to consolidate and extend existing U.S. strategies for
world domination. As the National Security Strategy of the
United States of America, published in September 2002,
indicates, the global economy, free markets, and the national
development of other states are all national security issues
for the United States now. For example, “A return to strong
economic growth in Europe and Japan is vital to U.S. national
security interests.” The sphere of the U.S.’s global
interference is thus constantly being expanded. The domestic
affairs of other nations are increasingly becoming U.S.
affairs as well: “Today, the distinction between domestic
and foreign affairs is diminishing. In a globalized world,
events beyond America’s borders have a greater impact inside
them.”
Militarily, deterrence is no
longer sufficient. A proactive policy of preemption and
prevention is necessary to counter an elusive and fluid foe
like terrorism, giving the United States the right to dictate
any measures it deems necessary for its own protection. It is
rather ironic yet quite apt that the administration chooses to
call such a global strategy of domination and intervention
“American internationalism.” What Trotsky dreaded early in
the last century has come to pass: the globe has finally been
Americanized. Or, as Perry Anderson has put it, America has
been internationalized:
Internationalism in this sense
is no longer coordination of the major capitalist powers
under American dominance against a common enemy, the
negative task of the Cold War, but an affirmative
ideal—the reconstruction of the globe in the American
image, sans phrases.32
Postmodern Desertions
The arrogance of the
“international community” and its rights of intervention
across the globe are not a series of arbitrary events or
disconnected episodes. They compose a system, which needs to
be fought with a coherence not less than its own.33
Desertion is not a
particularly socialist (or even political) value, yet it
occupies a central place in Hardt and Negri’s conception of
change in Empire. To desert, as the Oxford English Dictionary
states, is “to abandon, forsake, relinquish, give up (a
thing); to depart from (a place or position),” It signifies
failure and a violation of an oath or allegiance. Desertion is
wilful abandonment of duty or obligation. There is also a
condition of being deserted, desertedness, which,
interestingly, in a theological register, signifies spiritual
despondency: “A sense of the dereliction of God
(Johnson).”
Empire is premised on the
power of desertion and nomadism. Having in one breath
criticized postcolonial theory for being outmoded, Hardt and
Negri go on to privilege its most recent theoretical trope in
the next: the migrant as bearer of truth, as symbol of a new
world and its liberatory potential. Through migrancy, the
multitude anticipates and invents Empire: “The
deterritorializing power of the multitude is the productive
force that sustains Empire and at the same time the force that
calls for and makes necessary its destruction” (61). At the
same time as being controlled by Empire, the multitude
determines its development: “it is always the initiatives of
organized labor power that determine the figure of capitalist
development” (208). Which turns Marx on his head. In Capital,
proletarian migrancy or nomad labor is a symptom of the power
of capital: “They are the light infantry of capital, thrown
by it, according to its needs, now to this point, now to that.
When they are not on the march, they ‘camp.’”34
Undermining Marx’s emphasis on the rule of capital over
labor, the struggle between capital and labor comes then to be
defined through desertion, exodus, and refusal. Hardt and
Negri substitute political passivity for challenge and
opposition to capital. Class struggle becomes about
disengagement. The politics of refusal becomes, in anarchist
mode, a refusal of politics. It is quite ironic, therefore,
that after presenting Empire as a realm “beyond politics,”
Hardt and Negri end up advocating a reformist sort of
politics—like the right to global citizenship, a social
wage, and the right of reappropriation. But then such a
contradiction between revolutionary rhetoric and reformist
practice is itself a dominant feature of some brands of
anarchism.
For Hardt and Negri,
migration becomes the new vanguard activity—even though they
reject vanguardism as a political form. Evoking the Communist
Manifesto, they state that “A specter haunts the world
and it is the specter of migration. All the powers of the old
world are allied in a merciless operation against it, but the
movement is irresistible” (213). “Migration” is here
substituted for Marx and Engels’s original “Communism.”
The shift is emblematic. A social process is substituted for a
political party/subject. And this has also been the dominant
logic of social movements since the 1970s, as James Heartfield
has observed: “The real meaning of the ‘new social
movements’ is a move away from the idea of an agent of
social transformation altogether. The novel forms of
organization are a break with the idea of collective
agency.”35 The decline and defeat of the working
class as a political force from the late 1970s onwards has
indeed been the primary precondition for the rise of social
movements like “direct action,” environmentalism,
feminism, indigenism, NGOs, and, today, the anticapitalist
movement.
Empire is quite
explicit, therefore, in its rejection of proletarian forms of
political organization. Internationalism is a case in point.
Hardt and Negri are particularly eager to dispel the notion
that internationalism has any role to play in contemporary
politics. “Today we should all clearly recognize,” they
state, “that the time of such proletarian internationalism
is over” (50). Globalization is a response to
internationalism rather than a result of its failure. Again,
workers have “anticipated and prefigured the processes of
the globalization of capital and the formation of Empire”
(51). Global capital emulates international struggles, they
claim. Having prefigured Empire, proletarian internationalism
has become outmoded, its tactics and strategy “completely
irretrievable” (59). As “struggles have become all but
incommunicable” (54), they “do not link horizontally,
but each one leaps vertically, directly to the virtual center
of Empire” (58). In a reversal of the shared antagonisms and
resemblances of proletarian internationalism, difference rules
in struggles today: “Enlightenment is the problem and
postmodernism is the solution” (140). But what sort of
solution is it? Have the problems of inequality, exploitation,
and binary antagonisms generated by capitalism really been
resolved in postmodernity?
Empire seems to have
resolved these problems away by performing a double
evacuation: both of structure and of agency. With the dilution
of an objective power structure comes the liquidation of a
subject of liberation. If Empire is centerless, then so is
counter-Empire. Hardt and Negri’s rejection of
internationalism is therefore premised on the flawed
assumption that the nation-state has disappeared, when, in
fact, it has only been restructured. If state power has not
evaporated in Empire/globalization but only been reconfigured,
then their politics of difference is an evasion of political
action. Which means that the moment of “the missed
opportunities of international socialism” has not become
redundant.36 Neither has the strategy of capturing
state power as the main objective of revolutionary movements.
As Marx and Engels put it in the Manifesto: “Though
not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat
with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The
proletariat of each must, of course, first of all settle
matters with its own bourgeoisie.”37
But who in postmodernity is
to counter and overcome “American internationalism,” and
guarantee that “neoliberal cosmopolitanism”—its equally
imperialist EU competitor—is defeated as well? The real
question is slightly different, as Ralph Miliband observes:
who is structurally capable of transforming global capitalism
and overcoming the logic of its domination? Miliband had no
doubts that it can only be the working class, the subordinated
majority. If the working class does not overcome the rule of
capital, then, quite simply, nobody else will:
[T]he “primacy” of
organized labor in struggle arises from the fact that no
other group, movement or force in capitalist society is
remotely capable of mounting as effective and formidable a
challenge to the existing structures of power and privilege
as it is in the power of organized labor to mount. In no way
is this to say that movements of women, blacks, peace
activists, ecologists, gays, and others are not important,
or cannot have effect, or that they ought to surrender
separate identity. Not at all. It is only to say that the
principal (not the only) “gravedigger” of capitalism
remains the organized working class. Here is the necessary,
indispensable “agency of historical change.” And if, as
one is constantly told is the case, the organized working
class will refuse to do the job, then the job will not be
done.38
Put differently: only the
“particularized universalism” of socialist
internationalism can counter the “universalized
particularism”39 of postmodern American
internationalism. The postmodern left has deserted this
position and, in so doing, has refused to acknowledge the
unprecedented power of global capitalist domination.
Capitalism, it turns out, is not at all as all-powerful as
Marxists thought it was before the days of deconstruction. It
is actually “a paper tiger”40 and has no
essential identity. Between such denial and Hardt and
Negri’s euphoria, capitalism is left unchallenged. Part of
today’s necessary “uncompromising realism” is an
appreciation of the force and truth of Miliband’s statement
above. Only by “refusing any accommodation with the ruling
system, and rejecting every piety and euphemism that would
understate its power”41 can a real appreciation
of the tasks ahead be achieved. Idealism and mystification
will only undermine any re-emerging potential for real
transformation in the future.
Notes
*
All of the parenthetical numbers in the text refer to the
Hardt and Negri book.
1. Mark Leonard, “The left
should love globalization,” New Statesman, May 28,
2001; Emily Eakin, “What is the next big idea? Buzz is
growing for ‘Empire,’” New York Times, July 7,
2001.
2. David Smith, “He
foresees a great future for the workers,” The Sunday
Times, July 15, 2001; David Pryce-Jones, “Evil Empire:
the communist ‘hot, smart book of the moment,’” National
Review, September 17, 2001.
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