Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000)
"We go towards poetic formulations rather than the concrete," Michael Hardt told the Washington Post. "We prefer to appeal to the imagination." Well, it works. Empire is an essay in materialist Liberation Theology--a rhapsody on the power of the poor in history--in which the multitude, through its creativity, is Vogelfrei, or "bird-free." Taking as its motif the moment in Capital when Marx shifts standpoint and "invites us to leave the noisy sphere of exchange and descend into the hidden abode of production," Empire ranges through "unbounded global spaces" and into "the depths of the biopolitical world," where we encounter a medley of competing stories: the history of modern sovereignty from the Renaissance to the present; the expansionist nature of the American constitutional project, from its Jeffersonian, Jacksonian and Wilsonian phases through the New Deal to the long hot summers of the 1960s; the stampede of postmodern theory, in its rush to escape the dialectics of modernity, into the arms of a capitalist marketplace that celebrates difference and multiplicity, fetishism and simulacra, as powerful ideological strategies in the technology of consumption. Each story deserves our attention and further discussion, but two stories in particular stand out: the full-blown critique of the capitalist nation-state as an appropriate sphere for political action, and the supplanting of the industrial working class as the principal agent of social change. Both speak to the core of any Left political project. Both represent a call to arms in a new era of global class struggle.
Sovereign Theories, Just Wars
A week is a long time in postmodern Marxist theory. At the beginning of last September, Hardt and Negri’s Empire was still being swept off the shelves, hailed everywhere as "the most successful work of political theory to come from the Left for a generation." [1]. What a difference a war makes! With September 11, and the subsequent U.S. "War on Terror," the general theoretical framework at the heart of Empire was put through something approaching a trial by fire. At first glance, it appeared that things were not holding up too well. A touching story in the Washington Post found Michael Hardt, immediately after the planes slammed into the World Trade Center, wandering around upper Manhattan in a daze, his hair mussed, his shirt a rumple, at a complete loss, "with a sadness that blocks thinking," as if personifying the vulnerability to catastrophe of his theories.[2].
"Empire," the book claims at the outset, "is materializing before our very eyes...Along with the global market and global circuits of production has emerged a global order, a new logic and structure of rule--in short, a new form of sovereignty. Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world." (p. xi). For Hardt and Negri, this new form of sovereignty is not a metaphor but a concept, a diagnostic tool that has replaced "Imperialism" as the key to understanding the nature and logic of the current phase of capitalism: "[W]ith the processes of globalization, the sovereignty of nation states, while still effective, has progressively declined...The United States does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project." (pp. xi-xiv). But with bombers recently in the skies over southcentral Asia spelling out in daisy cutters the new Bush doctrine--the threat of an overwhelming projection of U.S. military power at any and all points around the globe--hasn’t American sovereignty made rather a roaring comeback?
In the jealous world of the American Left, this apparent setback for the new darling boys of political theory did not go unnoticed. John Bellamy Foster, in a lecture delivered to the Brecht Forum in New York in October (and subsequently reprinted in the Marxist journal Monthly Review), complained that "the concept of imperialism had been all but effaced, even within the left, by the concept of globalization," and, in part, blamed Empire for this "growing fashion...one equally attractive to ruling circles judging by the attention given it by the mass media." The "new global Jeffersonianism" of Empire, Bellamy Foster argued, is a red herring: instead, what we are witnessing is a vindication of the earlier Marxist theory of centre and periphery but in a more dangerous form, what István Mészáros has termed "the potentially deadliest phase of imperialism," with its "expanding circle of barbarism and destruction that such conditions are bound to produce." To objections that the War on Terror is not directed against a nation-state, and might be viewed through the lens of "Empire" as a deterritorialized sanction conducted "in the name of global right," Bellamy Foster countered that "the United States [has] responded not through a process of global constitutionalism, nor in the form of a mere police action, but imperialistically by unilaterally declaring war on international terrorism and setting loose its war machine." "So much for today’s more fashionable views," he concluded, dismissing Empire with a sneer.[3].
This is unfair to Hardt and Negri, and is a misreading of their argument. Nowhere in the book do they suggest that sovereignty as such has declined, or that the functions of the capitalist nation-state (military and otherwise) have ceased to be performed. Quite the opposite. "Throughout the contemporary transformations," they insist, "political controls, state functions, and regulatory mechanisms have continued to rule the realm of economic and social production and exchange." (p. xii). It is the incorporation of all these under a single logic of rule that is new, replacing the formerly competing imperialist powers with "the idea of a single power that overdetermines them all, structures them in a unitary way, and treats them under one common definition of right that is decidedly postcolonial and postimperialist." (p. 9). This emerging global form of sovereignty is what they term "Empire." "One country, two systems," was the slogan of the Chinese leadership during the return of Hong Kong, but, as Michel Beaud insists, "Two hundred countries, one system," is the motto of twenty-first century global capital. [4]. If Empire is not presented here as "the potentially deadliest phase of imperialism," it is hardly a benign force, either: if "the concept of Empire is always dedicated to peace--a perpetual and universal peace outside of history" then "the practice of Empire is continually bathed in blood," with "the necessary force to conduct, when necessary, ‘just wars’ at the borders against the barbarians and internally against the rebellious." (pp. xv-11).
Given the history of recent "interventions" around the world--from Iraq to Kosovo to the seemingly global reach of the War on Terror (which began in Afghanistan but has spread out to touch life in Manila and Bogota, London and Hamburg, Sarajevo, Guantanamo and Mogadishu)--"Empire" looks better than "center and periphery" as an explanation of the forces currently at work and visible in what Noam Chomsky has dubbed "the New Military Humanism." However this may be, the concept of Empire will live to fight another day. This is fortunate because, had it collapsed, much else that is valuable in the book might have been lost or discredited. For to grasp the extent of the changes that have occurred in the locus of sovereignty and in the nature of capitalist production in the passage "from modernity to postmodernity, or really from Imperialism to Empire" (p. xvi) is to run up against the key predicament now facing the international Left: the realization of what Immanuel Wallerstein calls "the historic futility of a political project in which they have invested 150 years of struggle--the project of transformation via the obtaining of state power, state by state." [5].
States, Scales, Struggles
According to Empire, we live today amid a valley of ashes, "the ashes of the fire that consumed the internationalist proletarian subject that was centered on the industrial working class," and while that fire raged it "broke and buried the nation-state and...determined the transition toward Empire." (p. 52). That the international system, based on the nation-state and dating from the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, has been passing through a transformation lately is widely accepted (though there are major disputes about the causes, effects and extent of this change): it is this passage that is at the heart of any contemporary discussion of "globalization." It is, needless to say, a matter of prime concern for the Left. The shifting territorialization of the world has changed the role of the nation-state such that, as Marxist geographer David Harvey argues, it "has lost some (though not all) traditional powers to control the mobility of capital (particularly finance and money capital)...Structural adjustment and fiscal austerity have become the name of the game and the state has to some degree been reduced to the role of finding ways to promote a favorable business climate...a major shift has occurred in the scales at which the world economy can be grasped, organized, and managed." [6].
This is not the "hollowing out" of the nation state peddled by business guru Kenichi Ohmae, Anthony Giddens and others [7]: in this transformation the state has not been passive, merely acted upon by external forces, but rather an active participant, smoothing the way for capital and being itself fully incorporated into capital’s transnational networks and flows. For Mark Gordon, global capital needs the nation-state’s help in "the creation of corporate and financial entities capable of handling tremendous flows of capital...it needs the nation state’s imprimatur of legitimacy for whatever legal regimes are created. Globalization needs legal structure to protect private property, to build infrastructure, to shield corporations from having to pay the costs of negative externalities they impose. And it needs nation states to ensure peace, to provide the threat of political, economic or military sanctions which help ensure the performance of contracts in far-off lands, and to create the structures and underlying agreements and regulations by which the flows of capital, trade, investment, services, and numerous other interactions can occur…" [8]. The malign end-result, as Harvey points out, is a "dramatic asymmetry" in the power of the state: "the nation state remains the absolutely fundamental regulator of labor...precisely controlling and repressing labor movements in all kinds of purposively new ways: cutting back the social wage, fine-tuning migrant flows and so on. The state is tremendously active in the domain of capital-labor relations. But when we turn to relations between capitals, the picture is quite different. There the state has truly lost power to regulate the mechanisms of allocation or competition, as global financial flows have outrun the reach of any strictly national regulation." [9].
This is a strange tale for many on the Left (and, too, for a number of anti-state conservatives) to have to tell. For if a key moment in this passage was the fall of the Berlin Wall and the destruction of the barriers to capital erected by the Soviet Union and its allies--the end of the project of State Socialism--it has also been the death knell for Social Democracy and Liberalism. Of the collapse of Marxism-Leninism as an ideological force in the world, Immanuel Wallerstein concedes that "[t]his is no doubt correct." But that these events "have also been celebrated as the final triumph of liberalism as an ideology...is a total misperception of reality." On the contrary, "these same events marked even more the collapse of liberalism and the definitive entry into the world ‘after liberalism.’" Liberalism, insists Wallerstein, was never a doctrine of the Left: "it was always the quintessential centrist doctrine...Liberals have always claimed that the liberal state--reformist, legalist, and somewhat libertarian--was the only state that could guarantee freedom." More startling is his conclusion: that "the erstwhile project, the strategy of the world Left, failed because it was infused, suffused, with liberal ideology, even in its most purportedly antiliberal, "revolutionary" variants, such as Leninism." [10]. At the heart of this failure, then, this world-historical failure of the Left, is the problem of the relationship between Socialism and the state.
When Marx sat down to write Capital he envisioned a vastly ambitious work in many volumes, the last of which were to deal with the formation of the state and the world market. He never lived to write them, leaving not even notes or an outline behind in his papers (though there are a number of hints scattered throughout his work, with the state characterized as "the executive committee of the bourgeoisie" or the defender of the interests of the capitalist class in general against the excesses of individual capitalists). Since then, of course, we have been treated to any number of conflicting Marxist and Socialist theories of the state, but these were for the most part the province of marginalized thinkers on the fringes of the various movements. More to the point, with the Second and Third Internationals the panoply of different strategies adopted by the parties of the Left either flamed into tragedy or dissolved into mush: as the twentieth-century progressed it saw a decline in any substantive critique and a gradual drift into unthinking acceptance of the state-form. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which might under other circumstances have taken a different course, eventually became a bureaucratic exercise in state planning, a concept which Marx and Engels had never even contemplated, let alone endorsed. Lenin’s fondness for the scientific management principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor is well known [11], but it was Stalin, in his Marxism and the National and Colonial Question, who formulated the theory (which was to bedevil communists for a century) of the nation-state as "immediately revolutionary." [12]. If "nationalist socialism in Europe came to resemble national socialism," then this is "not because ‘the two extremes meet,’ as some liberals like to think, but because the abstract machine of national sovereignty is at the heart of both." (p. 112). As for Social Democracy, from the Erfurt Programme through to the 1970s, the deep conservatism of the reformist Western Socialist parties was made apparent as they became "trapped in the defence of a generalized status quo":
"They defended the growth model of Western capitalism, which provided sought-after consumer goods and the necessary surplus with which to pay for the welfare state; they supported the Atlanticist international order, thus demarcating themselves from authoritarian forms of socialism in the East; they endorsed the liberal-democratic organization of the state, which provided the political conditions for their obtaining a parliamentary victory and/or participation in governmental power; they upheld the prevailing form of the family, with its peculiar division of labour, because it seemed best suited to existing conditions and was not overtly challenged by anyone. Consequently many traditional socialist commitments were in practice abandoned or relegated to an ever-receding long term: the end of capitalism, universal peace, the reform of the state, the abolition of all forms of political and economic inequality between the sexes. Attention was entirely concentrated on the main short-term aims: full employment for all male workers and the provision of welfare services to meet needs not provided through the market." [13].
Attempts to push in another direction--industrial democracy, co-operatives, anything but the overweening state--by radicals hostile to the Left’s wholesale adoption of statism, from Rosa Luxemburg to G.D.H. Cole, were rebuffed. In Britain, the Labour Party rejected out of hand plans for social credit, guild socialism, and other nonstate solutions in favour of the dismal managerialism of Nationalisation--and then only for industries, such as electricity, coal, gas, civil aviation, telecommunications, and railways, which were not particularly profitable at the time (and for which their owners were richly compensated). [14]. Spurred on by the twin crises of Depression and World War, the consolidation of the welfare state around a standard of minimal provision was possible because of the onset of les trente glorieuses, the "Thirty Glorious Years" of the postwar boom, and was in any case partly "a response to the threat conjured up by the Soviet experience, that is, to the increasing power of workers’ movements both at home and abroad." (p. 176).
In America, it did not even prove necessary to have a Socialist party to create a welfare state (albeit a severely truncated one--the U.S. was always a "welfare state laggard," in Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s phrase): what in Europe had taken the might of the organized parties of the Left--Socialist, Social Democratic, and Labour--was in the United States largely the work of "a pseudo-aristocratic politician whose avowed ambition was ‘the salvation of American capitalism.’" [15]. In his magnificent book on Marx, The Great Evasion, William Appleman Williams, one of the intellectual fathers of the New Left on the American campus, showed that under the New Deal America became "a tax state in the fullest sense" and that, while it lasted, as was frequently the case with the welfare state, it was actually subsidized by the poor:
"In thus socializing the accumulation of capital, however, the New Deal did not socialize either the decisions concerning the allocation of that capital or the distribution of wealth in the United States...the national class clearly had vastly more to say about the allocation of those funds than the citizens who paid them; and, since the funds had by definition to be used primarily for sustaining the key productive elements in the established order, the industrial corporation, the giant agricultural units, and other large operators received fantastically greater returns on their investment in taxes than the individual or the small entrepreneur...The retrogressive nature of the resulting system is revealed in many ways...The sum collected from the poor during 1958 was $6.037 billion. The government spent a total of $4.509 billion on all its public assistance programs, its public health operations, its aid to education, and all other welfare programs. That sum includes, furthermore, half the cost of farm supports and half the total spent on housing programs. It is thus apparent that the poorest people are not only paying their own way on welfare, but are providing part of the public assistance for middle- and upper-class citizens...This can be seen even more directly from figures for the top 20 percent of the income earners. They received 45.7 percent of all personal income before taxes in 1959, and still had 43.8 percent of it after taxes. And when the vast sums deducted from gross incomes as business expenses, including entertainment as well as depreciation, are considered, the balance becomes even greater and more obvious..." [16].
This is not to say that the social safety systems created in the United States and Western Europe were worthless, or that they were conceded without a fight. The essential elements of the welfare state--health and unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, old age pensions--along with the relatively high wages afforded the American worker were testament to years of struggle, and to the power of insurgent labour in a period which also witnessed the blossoming of national liberation struggles and feminist, environmental, race and sexual movements. But in the United States in particular the maintenance and extension of the welfare state was only made possible, politically and economically, through the repeated intrusion of war and Cold War and the resulting reorganization of industry and increased military spending, which intervened time and again to lift the whole economy out of stagnation. ("War," as Randolph Bourne insisted back in 1917, "is the health of the State" [17]: the consistent role of military spending as a macroeconomic stimulus rescuing American capitalism from crisis throughout the century is, however, a story for another time). And, as labour historian Paul Buhle argues, American labour’s postwar "strategy of military Keynesianism (the job-creating effects of defense spending) paid virtually all of its benefits in the short run, and to a relatively select proportion of working people. Rather than reproducing union loyalty, the defense-linked rise of Sun Belt industry created large pockets of working class conservatism, just as big-ticket construction of suburbs reinforced racial boundaries and in several different ways greatly diminished prospects of union democracy."[18].
By the 1970s the social democratic equilibrium ("Taylorism in the organization of labor, Fordism in the wage regime, and Keynesianism in the macroeconomic regulation of society," p. 242) was in crisis, with a full-blown counterattack by capital: falling wages, the energy crisis, recession, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, the "financialization" of capital, the Third World debt crunch, cutbacks in social provision, downsizing and global restructuring, deregulation, privatization, and the sorry tale of a quarter-century’s political and ideological swing to the right. The passage to "Empire"--capital’s response to the obstacles to unrestricted rule it had encountered at the national level--had begun.
They are not exactly heavy on the details, but the critique of the state-form (and of the Left’s wholehearted embrace of it) is a key piece of Hardt and Negri’s argument. Negri first began to formulate his theories of the state back in the 1970s, moved in part by opposition to Enrico Berlinguer’s engineering of the compromesso storico --"Historic Compromise"--between the Italian Communist Party and the Christian Democratic rulers of the Italian state. (Prior to its dissolution in the early 1990s, the PCI never did actually enter government, blocked from participation by the deliberate "strategy of tension" developed by the political elite and secret services. The first wave of incidents in the so-called anni di piombo or "Years of Lead"--beginning with the attack on a bank in Milan’s Piazza Fontana in 1969--were actually right-wing in inspiration, carried out by such far-right terror groups as the Revolutionary Popular Movement, the People’s Organic Community and the National Revolutionary Front. The Red Brigades then made their own contribution to Italy’s smoking streets, and it is this climate of bad faith, conspiracy and violence--involving magistrates, politicians, intelligence officers, and most of the key institutions of the state, as well as a handful of Marxist urban guerillas--that led to trumped-up charges against Negri, landing him in Rebibbia prison in Rome. [19]. There is even the suspicion that elements of the Christian Democrat Party allowed prime minister Aldo Moro to be executed rather than negotiating for his release because they were opposed to his deal with the Communists: whatever the truth of this, on the day Moro was kidnapped a government was about to be voted in which would have included the PCI for the first time).
For Hardt and Negri, the nation-states, repressive at home and vicious abroad, "were key agents of capitalist exploitation," and "the multitude was continually drafted to fight their senseless wars." (p. 49). Their emblematic achievements were, "the fields of patriotic battles in the First and Second World Wars, from the killing fields at Verdun to the Nazi furnaces and the swift annihilation of thousands in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the carpet bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia, the massacres from Sétif and Soweto to Sabra and Shatila, and the list goes on and on...Well, if that modernity has come to an end, and if the modern nation-state that served as the ineluctable condition for imperialist domination and innumerable wars is disappearing from the world scene, then good riddance!" (p. 46). Even "subaltern nationalism," the ideology of national liberation struggle, progressive while fighting back against foreign imperialism, took in a Trojan horse in its acceptance of the state-form: "From India to Algeria and Cuba to Vietnam, the state is the poisoned gift of national liberation." (p. 134).
Go on to Part Two
NOTES
All page numbers in the text refer to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
[1]. Malcolm Bull, "You Can’t Build a New Society with a Stanley Knife" London Review of Books, vol. 23, no. 19, 4 October, 2001.
[2]. Lorraine Adams, "A Global Theory Spins On an Altered Axis," The Washington Post, September 29, 2001, p. C1.
[3]. John Bellamy Foster, "Imperialism and Empire," Monthly Review, vol. 53, no. 7, December 2001. István Mészáros’ theory of "the potentially deadliest phase of imperialism" can be found in his recent Socialism or Barbarism: From the ‘American Century’ to the Crossroads, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001).
[4]. Michel Beaud, A History of Capitalism: 1500-2000, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), p. 261.
[5]. Immanuel Wallerstein, After Liberalism, (New York: The New Press, 1995), p. 4.
[6]. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 65.
[7]. See, for example, Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies, (New York: The Free Press, 1995); Anthony Giddens, The Third Way, (London: Polity Press, 1998).
[8]. Mark C. Gordon, "Democracy's New Challenge: Globalization, Governance, and the Future of American Federalism".
[9]. David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography, (New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 14-15.
[10]. Immanuel Wallerstein, After Liberalism, (New York: The New Press, 1995), pp. 1-4.
[11]. See, for example, Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 350.
[12]. "Through Stalin’s translation...nationalism becomes socialist, socialism becomes Russian, and Ivan the Terrible is laid to rest in the tomb beside Lenin." Empire, p. 112; See also Joseph Stalin, Marxism and the National and Colonial Question, (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1936).
[13]. Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century, (New York: the New Press, 1996), p. 197.
[14]. See Frances Hutchinson and Brian Burkitt, The Political Economy of Social Credit and Guild Socialism, (New York: Routledge, 1997); in Cole’s view, the nation state is utterly unsuited to any real democratic community, and "must be destroyed or painlessly extinguished as it has destroyed or extinguished its rivals in the sphere of communal organization." G.D.H. Cole, Guild Socialism Restated, (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1980), p. 32.
[15]. Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class, (New York: Verso, 1999), p. 5.
[16]. William Appleman Williams, The Great Evasion, (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1964), pp. 159-60.
[17]. Randolph S. Bourne, War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays 1915-1919, Carl Resek (ed.), (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), p. 71.
[18]. Paul Buhle, Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor, (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999), p. 2.
[19]. Innumerable news accounts document the central role played by the Italian state in the violence of the Years of Lead. For a sampling, see, for example, Phil Edwards, "The Darkness at the Heart of Italy’s Legal System," The Independent, September 16, 1999, p. 5; and Ed Vulliamy, "Secret Agents, Freemasons, Fascists... and a Top-Level Campaign of Political ‘Destabilisation’: ‘Strategy of Tension’ that Brought Carnage and Cover-Up," The Guardian, December 5, 1990. For more information on Negri’s case a good starting point is the website "Amnesty for Toni Negri".
