Empire & Imperialism
A Critical Reading of Michael HardL and Antonio Negri AnUO A BORON 'THIS MOST 1'�ENCH4""T "NO D[V...
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Empire & Imperialism
A Critical Reading of Michael HardL and Antonio Negri AnUO A BORON 'THIS MOST 1'�ENCH4""T "NO D[VASTATING CRITIQUE 01 Hardr anr1 Ne gr l ' s mlstai<en Clnd conl(JsecinOllons 01 a dcterrtlOllillt/e
tnc con l i ne nt that has llilO lhe most flfstnano expel1ence of the dctual worklflgs 01 Amcllean ImDt.!naiism Boron not anI', contront!> Hard! amJ Ne�fI � ab5\r£lCtlon5 w l !11 'thl� prosaic L.,tHl Amencan eonlQnJporar)
I cal l l )
hul
subleels Iht'li work to d Dfotounrl theorcilcilt amI cmpilitill r.:t,Jlal ton Wllltt'n
wllh N.ccplloncil �el �e and olten bltmg hUlllour. this IS
il
hoo" ;n.1: cleser\les
10 be ",lclCI) read. LEO PANITCH
CoEOltor.
SOClill151 Register. D,sllllgUished Rescilfch
Professor of POhllcal Sc.(!nce. Yorl< Unlvt'ISlt�. CanadiJ
THE SCOPE o r lHIS LUCID .\·�D Co\R[rl:L DISSECTION 01 1\llJt'I� lIel(l !Jel""s
olJOUI !lIe emerging \�ortcJ 010"1 e .1tmth.
.... ell
Q�'I()no tile
IlIl111lmtlil! stud�
thar
IS Its Illlrn._'clltilr. turge!. Boron SIIlPS a.... il�· lil�t!r after la)er of 1ll15Ulider !'.!ilrldlng concefOlOg
. DIll
Imperialism' ilflfj I!S CllfI('rl! \'arlant�
He 1t."'lev.."
lilt' P(!rSISlence of tile dll\e to cuntrol n"lurill ft!SOllrcc!> Ih,' rchanc!:! 01 transnil!.onill fIlm!> on d po\\el ful hOille slate political econo m\ . ana muel, elst'
the dangers of a�olrJlI'g
ThIS li
ill
I
Ifllportanl �rSPt'C;I,\e on oresent rCilh1tes and \',11.11 must be lJone to Cel""
for WflfO OilSI (JCIII(!Vt..'lllenIS on l'flltlflClp.lllon from InJustice. oPP'CSSIOII dl1U degradatIon
NOAM CHOMSk'l' 'BEYOND
HIS mE/I,CH"NT
ENC.\GEM!:NT \,;1111 the argument!'. of !-Iardt cilIa
Negr •. Boron otter" nls o....n 1I1SIghifui ami eloquent anill',5IS of locla\ s 'glollillo,ed
worfd ;,n(1 Ih£' pOSSllll"!'!?S 01
lis
trallsformatlon
T he frUitful
COllllJrrlilltOn ul Ireorelicai flgour dnl1 Cli""�. ('mplriCal ilnall�I'" ollll political passIon 'S Just 1I11� ImlLl 01 thmg we need 011 the left
ElLE'" M£ISKIJ4§ WOOD Authol 01 [llIp.,e vI CalJltiJl
ISBN
9
1 84277 577 4
�1Il��l�l l�IJllIJI1
About this book Harvard achola r Mic:hael Hardt and Italian 1�l'twing intelJ«tuaJ Toni NelJrl's maj or book, Emplrr, quickly became 0 huge bestseller wh�n
it WH pub l lahed in the United States. It W85 widely lauded by or
the NN York TiIJlt:s, not usually known for their think· ing in terms of empi� and Imperialism. But many intellectuals in
gans, such a'
other parts of the world - among them Atillo Boron disturbed
-
�re deepl)'
by the book, reeling that It was analytically misconceived
,
undermiMCI poUlkai resistance to imperialism, and igaomllhe concme experience and inte Umual analysis of the Third World. Alilio Boron argues that Hardt and Negri's concept of im peria l '
ism without an address', however well intentioned their commit ment to buman emancipation and a Muer world, Ignora the
fundamental parametrrs of modern imperialilm. Professor Boron unpicks thrir argumenl5 and confronts them wim me social, «a nomic and political �alides of intensified capi:talm exploitation in today's world. Among Ihe trenchant prunts he makes: The nation Illite, rar trom
being weak�ned, remaiM a crucial
ag.:nt of th� capltallll! core, deploying a la� anenal of eco nomic weaponry to protect and extend its position, and actively promoting globalization in hs own interests. It is only the state in the periphery thaI has �n dramllrlcally wukC'ned lion both 10 transnational corporations and to l-ore supranalional enlitie5like the
s
-
in frla·
ta te s and
US and the EU.
Hardt and Negri are also wrong, he argues. in picturing produc· lion under globalization 115 disregarding nalional frontiers, This does nOI apply to labour. nor to cutting-ed� t«hnology. And their substltulion or a nebulous 'mullitude' for identiftable social forces lind antagonistic social groups merely confuses political reality, as does the'lr curious depktion or Ihe' super rxploiled Third World migrant worker
as II
postmodem hem who
is changing Ihe world.
Boron conclud� that Empirt is • libertarian pessim ist product o f thtl defeat of th� socialist left in the
11)805 and 1990S. Ics authof5
have ablUldoned social theory In favour of a poetic abstraction
which rovers up the reality of a glo balization process whose more cynical apologists do nOI he l lta l e in p �sen llng as a proJ«tion of
American power,
Critical prflUeforthu book '11Ii5 i51 a pGWI!rful polemic, in the best RnH of the word, ap.inst But it I. also mont than tbaL Bt)'ond his lRnchant enpguuen t with lbe arpnnen15 of Marcil and Negri, Boron offen. In acceuibJe prolllC, his own insightful and eloquent IInalyais of today" "globalized" world and the posaibilities of Its transformation. lhe fruitful rombinadan of theoretical ripr and clarity, empiriaal analysis and polldcal passion is jlUt tIw kin d 01 thingW'e need on the lelL' EU.n /rIeiHitU Wood, alllho,ofEmp� a t'uneatly fashionable book.
orCaplw 'Atillo Boron moantl a �re, but neceauy, critidam of the
by Hardt and Negri, who . have aligned themselva with the anempt by IntelllJent rigbcwingel1l to neutral· iu the potential for popular mobJUaadon on the part of mO¥mlentl poslllolU put forward
su pportive of a different Idnd of gJobalhation.'
..
SamJr A min
''nIe IiCOpe oflhis lucid and careful disSft'tion of widely held beliefs
emerging world order extends well beyond lf1tt in ftu ential study that is Ita immediate targft.. Boron strips away layer after layer of mlrrundentanding concerning "old i mperialism and its cumnt variants. He reviews the penlstence of the drive to conllOl natural resoun:cs, the reliance of transnational firms on a powerful home state, the dangers of a\'Oiding political economy, and much else. He brlnp out clearly tbe need for "an adequate s�ial canoeraphyof 1M fteld" where an -emanC'lpatory bame" must be waged If It iii to havt' any hope of success. In a critique of common illusions about about the
"
contemporary aociety. Boron Identifies and strelsn the significance of social ron:cl thaI have eme� and are enp� In the c1usic: ItNggtes that
ronstantly take new forms, but �f1ect much the same
duper institutional factors and conOicling Imerests. 'nib valuable study develops an
Imponanl penpec:tive on present realities and on .,..t ach�m enlJ In emancipa
what must be done to carry forward t ion
from Injustl�, opprasion, and degradation:
NOlI'" C"OIftIkJ
'It is highly appropriate that the IDOl! mnchant and devastating critique oC Hardt and Negri's mlstakrn and oonfuse'CI notions of a deterrltorialized and decenacred Empire sbould have come from one of the most crea� and committed sodali..: intdJcctuals in the
continent that hal had the most 8nt-hand experience of the artUaI workinll of American Impertallam.. Writing in the tradition of-and in the procca doing much to � - 1M Latin American debates on dependency, neo-c:olonlalism and imperial ism oflhe 19']01, Boron not only confronts Hardt and Nqri's abatraL'rions with .� prosaic Latin American contemporary mality', but aubj«ts melt work to a profoun d th�retical and em pirim refutation. Writtrn
\\ith ocepdonal WM and often biting hUmour, this is a book that
especially desenres to be rud by all those ac:tlviIU who, a. Boron aptly notes in the preface to this new English edition, haw been Influenced by Hardt and Negri's 'aevere mlatakea of diagnosis and interpretation, which. il8ccepted by tM group. and orpnlzations that today are tIyinglo defeat imperialism, could become the cause
or new and long-luting defelts.' Uo Ptmitch. C�Editor, SOCiaUst Regisler; Carulda R�turh Chair in ComparrzUw Politiclll Economy and DininpJ.h«J Re.eatrh PrrJ/rllor ofPolirica/ SciMC�, York Uniw,.. sity. Canada
Abouc the author AliIlo A. Boron is Exec:utiw SecrWlry of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (Cl.I\CSO) and Professor of Political Theory at the Unlftnil)' of Buenos Aires. He we. educ:ated In .vpntina and Chile, be f ore doing his doctoral depft at H8J\IlIJ'd in the United S1ate5. He ha. taught at some of the mOld important academic IRltlhl tiona in Argenti na. Bra.il, Chile, Mexico and Pueno Rico. In the Unhed States he has bftn a vilirilll profeBSOl' at the universities of Columbia, Mrr, Notre Dame and UCLA, and in Britain hu ledUred at Wuwlck and Bradford u.rtiwnities. He is the author or editor or
nint'
t>ook. (In a numlwr of IJInguaps), lnefuellng Stall, CapittlUsm
tJnd DDrlocrocy in Latill America (1995). His particular interat i5 the
relationship � IlatH. markets and d� durin, the prOCftS of neo-liberaI rntructuring. 10 2004 he was awarded lhto Cay de las America. Prize for 'Empirr' tlrullmp�rltlIJ.m.
ATILIO A. BORON
Empire and imperialism critical rcading of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri A
lrilnslalnl by Jessica Casiro
led R(){}ks
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Contents
Acknowledgements I vill Prc£acC' I t Prologue to the English-language edition I 6 I
On perspectives, the limits of viliibility and blind spots I �3
2
Tbe constitution oftbe empire
3
I �6
Markets. transnationa1 corporations and national
economies I 42 4
Alternative visions oBhe empire
J
The nation-state and the Issue of sOllereignty I 73
6
111(' unsolved mystery of the multitude I 87
7
I 58
Notes for a sociology of revolutiona", thinking in times
of defeat I gB •
111e persistence of imperialism I 1 11
Epilogue 1111
Bibliography I 115 Index of proper names Geneml index 1136
I
130
Acknowledgements
A number of people have read all or pan of the ma nu
script, making possible the completion of this book. Special thanks are due to Ivana Brighenti, Florencia F.nghel, Jorge Fraga, Sabrina Gonzaln, Bellina In'y, Migud Rossi, Jose Seoane, Emilio Taddei and Andrea
Vlahusic for their encouragement, comml'nl5 and criticism. Jessica Casiro did a superb job of translating the I1Ilher baroque original Spanish into an austere but Mill lively Engtish. Of cou rliC , none oflhem should be blamed for the errors and short<.'Omings of the book, caused entirely by the stubbornness of its author.
Preface
First,
a little bit or histol)'.
(n september 1001, one
of the editors
of New L�ft Rt1I;ew invited me to contribute a chap ter to a col lection of essays to be published by Verso in London. The book was
to contain a series or critical comme ntaries about Emp;n by
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000); their �pon� wouJd be added l a ler) Given that p roponions, it was
my co ntrib ution
clear that it could not
rrached Inordinate
be
included in that
book. Far from being discoura�d, I realized that the work I had already done. considering the importance of the theme, deserved a
fresh start, so, after broadening some analyses, enlarging on a
few commenlS, adding new data and new refiections, the result wall thlB book.
in the previous paragraph is the fesuh of his lOry and circumstances. '[bere �re also more important reasons Ihat inspired me to write my book. First, th� was the need to consider vel)' seriously the work of two scholars of the intellectual calibre of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Their In�lIectual and What is related
politil.'81 trajectories, so broad and proliflc , es�dally in
the case
of the latter, make them deserving of respect an d for tha t reason 1 t'lUlmined
vel)' carefully the assenions they made throughout
Empin, 0 polemic that had such a strong p ublic impact. second, Ihe subject matterofthis b ook is of great importance: the empire,
or, t o use a definition that seems to me more appropriate, the imperialist system
in its current phase.
Th� difficulties in undC'rtaking such a task are many. I sha� the authors' critical view or capitalism and neoliMral globalization, , "1"Iw book a�. aftrr rol\5i�Rblt drily. in 100J without thr final rhllprrr by Hardt and Negri. Seor Balakri.bnan (1003).
"
and applaud th�ir courage in examining such a crucial topic.
.2 !
In Cart, DO matt� how deeply I disagree with Hardt and Negri'.
\I
�
interp�18tions, I must admit that their nvision and update of the subject were necessa ry both because the deficiencies of con ventional analyses of the left with regard to the transformations coxperienc:ed by bnperla1ism over the last �nry-fM: years had beco me impossible to igno� and needed lII'gmt updating, and because the shortcomings of the 'pemh unique' on this matter -
spread urbi rt orb; by the lMF, the World Bank and the ideo
logical agencies of the imperiaJ system
-
to
which the neoliberal
theory of globalization gives expressio n, are even
gRater. For
those like t.he writer of this book, to whom the fundamental mJIsion of both p hilosophy and political theory is to change the world aDd not just to interpret it (to dte the weU-known 'Thesl.a
on Feuerbach' by Marx), a correct theoryconstltutet an invaluable tool with which the popular movements that resist neoliberal globalization can navigate, with a reasoMble amount of accuracy,
through the lrOubled waten of contemporary eapiblJism. One of the main factors inspiring this book Is my sttong beUef th.t Hardt and Negri's reapon� to this chaUenge i, bighly unsatisfactory, and that it could lead to new political defeats. It is mdent that a phen omenon such as toclay's imprrialism -
its structure, its logic of functioning, its consequences and
its conuadlctJona
-
cannot be adequately understood from a
close rea ding of classic texts by Hilferding, Lenin, Bukharin and Rosa Luxemburg. Thit is not because they were wrong, a. the
right
lOYd to claim, but because capitalism is a changing and
dynamic Jystem that, as Marx and EnpJswrote in the Communist MQniJ�stD, 'constantly rrvolutionlzes itst"lr. Therefo�, we cannot
understand early nftnry-Hrlt-antury imperialism by mcling only those authors , but nclth� can we undel'lltalld It without them. The goal Is to mOft forwards in a reformulation that, depaning from the Copernican rn'Olution produced by Man's work. which provides us with an interpretatift due that is essential for explain·
ing capitalist society, will mnlt'rpret with audadty and creativity the clusic:al heritap of studies on imperialism in the Upt of the
transformations of
the prnenL Today's imperialism is not
the same as the one that existed thirty �ars ago; it has changed, and In some ways the chan� has b�n ftry imponanl, but it has not changed into iu opposite, as neollberal mystification suggestl, giving rise 10 a 'global' economy in which
we are
aU
·interdependent'.lt still exisbl, and it stUi oppresses peoples and nations and creates pain. destruction and death. In spite of the changes, il stiD keeps its identity and structure, and it still plays
the same historical ro le in the logic of the global accumuJation of capital. Its mutadons. its volatile and dangerous combinadon of persistence and innovation, require the construction framework
This Is
of a new
t:lutt will allow us to capture its present nature. n ot
the place
to examine
different theories about
I mperialism. Let us say. to sum up, that the fundamental featurn of imperialism, pointed out by the clu.aicall1uthon at the time of the Fint
World War, remain unchangrd In their esscntW.
given that imperiaU.sm is not an ancillary future of contemporary capitalism or a policy implemented by some It'tes, but a new
stage in the dev elopmen t
of this mode
of production whose
fundamental tmlts have persisted to the p�sent day. This new stage is characterized. now even more than In the past, by the
concentration of capital, the owrwhelmlng predominance or monopolies, the incmasingiy important role p�d by financial capital , the expo" of capital and the division of the world into
different 'spheres of InOuence', The acceleration of globalization Ihat took place in the tlnal quarter of the hut century, inslt'ad of weaken ing
or dissolving the imperialist structures of the world
ecoqomy, mapifled the ItnaC'tural asymmetries that define the insenion of the different countries in it. While a handful of deftl· oped capitalist n.tiom increased their capacity to control. at least panially, the productive proc:eaes at a global level, the financial iUlion of the international economy and the growing circulation 3
,
a a"
II
"
'"
i a.
of goods and
services. the great majority of countries witnessed
the growth of their external dependency and the widening of the gap that separated them from the centre. Globalization, in shon, consolidated the submission of
imperialist domi nation and deepened the
peripheral capitalism" which became more and
more incapable of controlling their domestic economic proct'S5eS
even minimally. The continuity of the fundamental parameters of imperialism , nOl
so much of its phenomenology, is ignored
throughout Hardt and N�'s work, and this negation is what they have called 'empire'. What I seek to demonstrate here is that. in the same way that the walls of Jericho did not collapse because of
the sound of Joshua and the priests' trumpets, the reaJity of
empire does not fade awny when confronted by the fan tasies of philosophers. The fact that Hardt and Negri's work appeared at a time when the
periphery's dependency and the imperialist domination have levels previously unknown in history is nolo min o r
grown to
detail. This is why the need to h8� a renovated theoretical toolbox with whieh to understand imperialism and fight against it is more urgent than a
ever. It will be very bard to win this battle without
clear understanding of the nature of the pheno meno n . It
is
precisely because of this need to know that Empin has had 5lK'h an extraordinary so young, the
impact on the large masses of young , and not
people who from Seattle on have mobilized throughout
world to put an end to the systematic genocide that imperial
ism is committing in the countries of the capitalist periphery, to social regression, and to the disenf ran ch isement that is taking place to a similar extent in both the most advanced and the most backward
socirties, to the criminal destruction of the environ
ment, to the degradation of demOC'ratic regimes tyranny of
rntrained by the
markets and the militarism that, following the attacks
on the World Trade Center and the �ntagon, has permeated
the White House and other privil�d places in which decisions affecting the lives of millions of people a� made. 4
Desp i te
the
nobll' intentions nnd intl'lIectual and political honesry of our authors, about which I have no doubt, their book - regarded by man}' as the 'Twenty-first Century's Communist Manifesto' or a'i
a
revived 'Little Red Book' for (he slN,'alled 'globalphobics'
'" contains Sl'rious mistakes In terms of diagnosis and interprr tation which, if accepted by groups and organizations uying to
defeat imperialism, could become the intellectual cau� of new and long-lasting defrats, and not only in the theoretical arena. This is why I have attempted to put forward my critiques and to face the costs and risks entailed in criticizing a book which, for
several reasons, has become an important theoretical reference
for the movements critical of neoliberal globali7.ation. I believe that a sincere debate about the theses developed in Empire can
be a powerful antidote to such worrying pMsibilities. BIIl.'nl>sAirt's. March 2002
Prologue to the English-language
edition
Thii book srcks to debate, bolh from a theoretical 5t4ndpoint and in the light of the lessons provided by historical and con temporary experi ence , the theses that Michael Hardt and Antonio N� drvelop in Emp;rr(lOOO), Wh ile in previous editions I have chosen not to examine some events that were bo th momentous and s pectacula r, suc h as the atrocious 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington - although tbf)' se riously challenged the core of Ha rdt and Negri'S theoretical argument
-
at present such an
altitude is not only impossibl e but also undesirable. [ndt'ed, the Iraq war has had
the
same effect on the analysis proposed
In Emplr� as the collapse of the Twin Towers had on American self-confidence. Much water has Howed under the bridge and much blood has been shed as a consequence of the persistence of imperialist policies since the original pUblication of Empirt QI.d Imptrialism in S pa nish in 1001. It hi necessary. therefore, to render an account of these new realities, If, In writing it , my origi nal idea had been
to crea le a 'living text', to employ Antonio Gramsci's felicitous exp res s ion, the book could hardly remain impervious to the vicis
situcks of. period l ike ours. c ha ractcrized
by In Hnile horror and
terror dealt against defenceless populatio ns - an inftnite war or, as Gore Vidal suggest ed , I perpetual war waged allegedly in pursuit of pe�tual peace - and b)' the unrestrained aggression
against human society and nature pe rp etrated in the name of corporate profits and stock (!xchan� prices. These villainies are
called, with unpa ralleled cynklsm, 'humanitarian wars' fought
[0
bui ld a more secure, peacerul and just worid by characters 8ll
notorious as the Bushes, Aznars, Blairs and Berlu5conis who today
command tM heights of the core capltall .. states. Through me macabre manipulation of worcb and the systematic misinfonna tion incessantly reproduced by the mass media, almost all of which is under the steely control of capital, their technologicaUy ultra-sophisdcated terrorism appears 15 regrettable but unavoid able 'collateral damap' and their wars of pillalf and conquest
become no ble cruadea in fllYOUr of fRedom and dem�racy
.
The objec i or this Prologue, therefore, is to present so me
theories rqarding the characterization of the current p hase of imperialism in the light of the lessons arising flOm the new epoch inaugurated by the events of 9111 and, In partic:uJar, by the Iraq war. Such a revision is essential not only to foil the propaganda
orchesltRted by Washington and projected worldwide In relation to the us military occupadon of that country, but bei:au se as we ,
shaU see in the foUowing pages, even within the ranks of the left an unfortunate confusion prevails with reprd to imperialism and the forms in which it currently manirest5 itselt A confusio n that is made WOIW by the malignant trend among a stuable majority
oC progressive intellectual. to be
'poUtie'eUy correct
'
Of, as the
Spanish playwright Alfonso Sanre said, to be �11 thinking', that
is, to abstain from challenging the dominant sUent premilSt's of our age w h i ch as Marx and Enpls diacowred in their early texts. ,
ore none other than the Ideas of the dominant class.
Given that without an accurate analysis of rulity there cannot
be a co rrect pol itical line Cor combating the s.coulps or imperial Ism, clearing up this matter turns into an issue of the greatest importance. This Prologue seeks to add its humble contribution
to th at undertaking. Tht : harsh IYbuttals' oftht war in Iraq Let us begin by paraphrasing an expression employed by
Norbeno Bobbio, 'the harsh rebuttals of history'. to refeT to the refutation, according to his analyses, of the Marxist theory of the
state'
owing to the changes ellperienced by democratic capital
-
7
of
II
isms during the twentieth century. The military occupation
r
Iraq. declared by Washington with the suppon of its main client
�
l
goftmment.
the Uniled Kingdom. and of its luckily short·li�
Spanish lackey, Jose M. .unar, has in due course generated an extremely harsh refutation of the ambitious
theorizations of
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri thai are the object of this book. The �nu that unfolded in the international arena publication of Empire in 1000
after
the
have incontrovertibly refuted, with
the fottefulness of historical fact, the rash theories they propose in their book. The latter
not
only proved itself incapable
of
ad
equately interpreting the history of imperialism and its current structure, but also of accounting for the defining features of the new phase begun after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the post-war world order.
An examination of some
of
1 Hardt
vicdms' of
the main 'theoretical
recent epoch-making events would include the
following items.
lind Nevi's conception ofth� role ofth� United Nations
and international law. As
the authOR
of Empir�
pointed
out
in
txtelUo
in this book,
grossly exaggerate the Importance of the
United Nations and International law. Lacking the theoretical instruments necessary to allow them to perceive all the nuances and -
complexities
since
of
the structure
of
the imperialist system
such instruments are not to be found in the 'toolbox'
of
French postmodem philosophy, Italian politics and US economic scienl.'t!. the authors' three acknowledged &Ources of - they naively take
for
inspiration
granted the 'democratic' appearance
of
multilaterallsm and of the Unitc-d Natjoru system. They conse quently
confuse the empty formalities of the empire with its con
stitutive
matter. thus mistaking fonn for substance. The contrast
between lhislma� and �aJity is evident even to beginneR in the study of international �lation6. Blinded their
faulty
by
the inadequacies
a veritable prison for thought, Hardt and Negri see
of
theoretical framework, once again transformed into an
unable to
what was evident to evnybody else: the invasion unilaterally 8
decreC!d by Pr�sident
G eo rge W.
B ush
caused the contrad ictio n
between their th�orization and reality to �come as glaring as it
was unsustainabl�. Vi olali ng th� al le ged ord�r �mbodied in the United Nations and intemational law, the United States decickd - as official policy rather than as a position paper circulating surreptitiously in Washington, written by some para no id hawk in t he
Pentagon
-
to ignore any resolution to the contrary that
the Security Council mig h t ado pt,
not
to mention the General
A sse mbly, nnd invade Ira.q. Faithful to Lbat attitude, me
White
House did not hesitate to move to the defence or its supp osedly threatened national security. ignoring both the need to build laborious political agreements as required by the United Nations Chaner and
legislation
the need to submit to the dictalC1i oC intern atio nal
that it had always co ns idered to be a men: tribute
to demagogy and thai needed to be obeyed only i n so
rar as
It
did not affcct Washi ngton 's inlerests. This position was adopted �n despite its high p olitical COlts, such as the ruptun: or the
North Atlanlic conRnsus, the crisis in NATO and the serio us altrrcation with France and Germany, the after-efTects will
or which
M visi ble for a long lime. Afler the aggteuion apin...t Iraq
had been carried out. the Security Council una nimously adopted a resolution in October 1003 call i n g for the democratic and shared reconstruction of that country, bu t this wu merely a post MI lum legi timiza tio n of imperialist aggrHSio n that had de stro)-ed
the tottering remnants of the post-war order. As
Petty Anderson
poignantiy ob served , this unanimoU8 vote to which the Security
Coun"U soLemnly welcomed the puppet government Htablished
by the White House in Iraq as the incarnation of Imqi sovereignty, calling on the patriotic resistance movements agai nst the invasion to cease their activities, �stowed the official blessing ,
whUe
of the united Natioru;' highesl auLhority on t he American takeover of Iraq (Anderson zOO4= 51-Z). This resolution, however, was
wrongiy interpreted by Antonio Negri in
a
recent interview IS
proof of Us ca pit ulation to the United Nations, when it was exactly 9
J
the opposite: the impotent resignation of the UN in the race of the brutal outrage �mmiltcd by washington (Clrdoso 1003). Yet, the
ab su rd ity
difficult - of the Empirr in its to
of
this interpretation - admittedly, always
cu rrent situation
is 1150
repeated throughout
interpretation of the put. This dangerous tendency
confuse rhetoric and reality
led
the
authors, for example, to
cull the "gure or President Woodrow Wilson tn accordance
with the most
conventional ideological
elements of America's
establishm ent creed that present him as an 'idealist', an amialble and
tireless builder
of peace and a man ins pired by the noblest
Kantian idea oC universal community. In their own warda, Wilson
'adopted
an
internationalist
ideology of
peace as an expansion
of the con5titutioDal conception of network power' (p. 174). This vision ignore s, among other things, the acid remarks made by
John Mayn ar d Keynes about the duplicity and bypocrisy that Wilson
exhibited at
the Paris
Peace Conference
after the
First
World War, which led the English economist to conclude that the American president was 'the palest fraud on ea rth ' (Pan itch and GLndin
1004= 1:&). Or
to disregard the
fact,
in no way trivial, that
it was during Wilson's pruidency that Ill8..rines OttUpied the Mex ican port oCVeracruz and imaded Republic, surely to
Nicaragua and
the
Dominican
help the locals gain a Ruer understanding of
Kant', hrpetual P�ace. 1 Th� connption of the sup�dly th'luntoriJJliutl and de
centrrd character of imp�rialism. Another
of the victims of the
Iraq war has been the proposition that d��d the obsolrscenc:e oC territorial - and to
a
of the virtual, symbolic:
pat
extent materi al
- issues in
favour
and immaterial. This volatilization of the
territorial elements of i mperiali sm (and of capitalism) alkgedly results in s�ral inevitable consequences: first, the displacement
ritorial
irrever5iblr
of ancient sove�igntles, based on archaic ter
nation-statt'S, by a 'smooth', supposedly
supranational
space, a place where a new im�riaI sowmgnty would be �id of any
vestiges of links
with national stales and. 10
therefore, of
any territorial or geographical rderen�. Second, the gradual disappearance of. territorially located centre lhat 'organizes' the international structure of domination. Given the former, the classic distinction between centte and periphery, North and South, vanishes into thin air. Instead ofthis, what would aJlegedly characterize the empire would be the primacy of a global logic
of domination overcoming traditional national interests whose bellicose reaffirmation caused innumerable 'imperialist' wars in
the past. Thank God, this period is now ovtrl If one thing was demo nstrated by the aggression unleashed against Inq, and before that in Afgh4nisran, it was the merely illusory character of these conceptions so dear to the authors of
Empirr, which Bush refuted with the rude manners of a Texas cowboy. One of the Orst readings that we caD make of the events in Iraq is that (pace Hardt and Negri) the United States has ful1y assumed its condition as the imperialist superpower, and not only does not attempt to hide that condition, as happened in the past, but even boasts of it. It intervened militarily in Iraq. as it will surely do elsewhere, serving the grossest and pettiest defence of the interests of the conglomerate of gigantic oligopolies that form the dominont clus In the USA, iDternts which, thanks to the alchemy of bourgeois h�mony, have been miraculously trans Formed into the national Interests of the Untted Stateti. It would
be possible now to paraphrase the old motto of General Motors by saying that, In the current imperialist phase, 'What Is good for the US corporations is good too for the Unit� States'. The oilmen who today fe�1 at home in the Oval OffIce pounded, with absurd pretexts, a country to take pos..'iession of the enormous �aJth it harbours in its subsoil. Plainly put, the military occupation of Iraq-is essentially a lrnitorial conque5t for plunder carried out
by
the main actor or the imperialist structure of our time under the
pretext of preventing the deployment of yet unfound weapons of mallis destruction and of �nging the eftn less Hkrly collabora
tion of the Saddam regime with the former US mercenary Osama 11
II ::I
f
1
Bin Laden. "0 conclude: there is nothing 'd�trrritorialized' or immaterial there, Ills the old practice of conquHt and plunder repeatrd for the umpteenth time
by t.he same
old actors wearing
new costumes and showing some technical innovations. Essen tially, it is the samr tim�honoured imperialist 6tOI)'. Nothing, therefore, can be more inaccurate than the image evoked by Hardt and NrgrIln their book in which Washington becomes militarily Im'Olved all over the world in response to II universal clamour for the imposition of international justice and legality. A plethora oHar-right publicists - especially Robert Kagan and Charles Krauthammer - ha� eme� into public view to juslify this reaffirmation of an imperialist unilateralism which cares little or nothing for International justice and 1�lity, join ing forces with other authors such as Samuel
P.
Huntington and
Zbigniew Bnezinski. who some �ars ago had already outlined tM
strategic imperatives of the 'lonely superpower' and the urgent need to take up the challenges posed by its role as 1M focal point
of a vast territorial empire. One of those challenges, certainly not the only one, is the right - actually the duly. by vinue of the 'manifest destiny' that turns the United States Into the all�dly uni�rsal carrier of the freedom Dnd happiness of peoples - to go to
war as
often as necessary to prevent the fragile and highly
unstable 'New World Order' proclaimed
by Gf'Ol'g1! Bush Sr at the
end of the first Gulf War from collapsing like a house of cards. And none of this can be done without considerably reinforcing the state-based national sovereignty of the USA and its effective organs orintemational operations, mainly its armed forces. This is why the United States' militaJy expenditure has grown to almost half the planet's entire milital)' outlay_ More�r. it should be borne in mind that. as Noam Chomsky has rightfully o�rvtd, the new American strategic doctrine announced by the Bush ad ministration in September 1001 entails a plan to rule the world by force dUll has nol btt'n heard since Adolf Hitler made similar announcements in the mid-19.10s. certainly nol a minor detail 11
(Chomsky 1003a). In this way, the idyllic idea poRd by Hardt and Negri - the United StaIn giving up the defence of its national interesL'I and the exercise of imperialist power, and tran.sCecring its sovereignty to a chimerical empire, for the sake of which the White House magnanimously responds to international requests for global justice and law
-
was buried under an avalanche of
'5man bombs' unleashed on Iraqi territory. J A
healthy imperialist detul body.
Another of the lessons of
the Iraq war baa b�n the updating of some of the fealures that characterized the 'old imperialism'. In the authors' version, the emphasis placed on virtual elements established an unbruch able frontier between the 'old imperialism' and the supposedly new empire, the former being understood as that system of inter nalional relations which fiued, approximately, within the canons established in Lenin's analysis and which to a great extent was shared by some classical authoni on the subject such as Bukbarin or Rosa Luxemburg. One such feature was, precisely, the terri torial occupation and the pillaging of the natural resowces of the countries colonized or subjected to imperialist a�5Sjon. From a reading of Empirt there emerges a theoretical conception indifferent to the iuue of access to slIategic resources for the world of production and the sustainabUity of capitalist civiliza tion itself, explained by the strong emphasis the authors place on the (nowadays undoubtedly important) immaterial aspects of the process of creation of value and the transformations of the modem capitalist corporation. Yet, the Iraq war, starting with its tragi·comical groundwork, demonstrated how inaccurate this conception was. We have only to recall President Geo� W. Bush, whh his quirky pathetic smile barely disguised, exhorting Iraqi, not to destroy their oil wells and to refrain from KIting them on fire, to understand the crucial importance of access
to, and control of, strategit: natural h.'sources in the allegedly current world imperialist structure. Oil constitutes, at this time, the central nervous system of internalional capitalism. and its 13
"II
a 0-
ca c CD
!
S' ! A.
i m portance is even greater than that of the world of fi nance. The latter cannot function without t he former: the entire edi fice of what Susan Stra nge has correctly labe l led 'cas i no capitalism' wou ld coll apse within m i n u tes i f oil d isappeared. And the latter, we know, wi ll be exhausted in no more than two or three genera t ions. It would constitute unforgivable naivery to suppose that French d i ss idence in the face of US outrages in Iraq is fou nded on the d e mocratic and an ti-colon ial ist convictions of Jacques C h i rac or on the u nquenchable desi re of the French right to ensure for the I raq i people the full enjoyment of the del ights of a democratic order. What prompted F rench i n t ra nsigence was. on the con trary, somet h i ng far more prosaic: t he permanence of that co untry's oil companies in a territory that con ta ins the world's second-largest oil reserves. Aga i nst what Hardt and Negri induce us to believe in their subl i mated - and hence complacent - view of the e mpi re, one of the possible future scena rios of the i nternational systcm is that of a heightened i n ter-imperial ri va l ry i n which the sacking o f s t rategic resources, such as o i l and water, and the stmggle for a new carve-up of the world could wel l lead to an ou tbu rst of new wars of pillaging, analogous in their logic although different in the i r appearances to those which we have known ove r the cou rse of the twe ntieth ce ntury, in the days when i m peria l i s m enjoyed enviable health and was not dea d , a s they wa n t us to believe is the case today.
4 A nother victim: the view developed in Empire oj the en-one ously labelled t.ransnational corporations. I ndeed, Hardt and N egri endorse - unconsciously, I assume - the vision of the capi talist world assiduously cultivated by the main US and European busi ness and manage ment schools and the theorists of neoli beral 'globa lization'. As is wel l known, in the thi nking of the right the i rresisti ble rise of globalization is
a
natura l phenomenon as un
controllable a s the movement of the s ta rs , and one tha t gives rise to a new world of i n terdependent economies, Economic agents therefore operate on a level fiel d free of the obstacles previously 14
set up by powerfu l nat ion-states. In this space, free competition reigns, and the old asymmetries, with their hateful d i sti nctions between metropolis and colonies, are a th ing of the past. evoked only by left ists nos ta lgic for a world that no longer exists. Accord ing to this i n terpreta tion, not o n ly h as there been a decli ne in the 'national' economies, devoured by the farrago of globalization, but large corporations have entirely sloughed off the last vestiges of t he i r national ascript ion . Now they are all t ransnational and globa l , and what they req u i re to operate e ffi ciently is a worldwide spacc freed from the old ' national' h u rd les and restrictions that migh t h inder their movements. With i n a supposedly a nti-ca pitalist reading this space would be the em pire, precisely as i t is cha racterized i n the work of Hardt a nd N egri. As I shall demonstrate i n the following pages, the reality is light-years away from this vision. There is a n elementary distinc tion (completely ignored i n the work under review) between the t h eatre of opera tions of the compan ies and tJle territorial space in wh ich thei r ownership and cont rol materialize. Even in the case o f modem corporate Leviathans - a sma l l proportion of the total number of companies existing i n the world - whose scale of operations is clea rly pla ne ta ry, ownershi p and con t rol a lways have a national base: compan ies a re legal entities i ncorporated in a specific country and not merely regis tered at the U nited N a tions in N ew York. They have headqua rters i n a given city, obey a specific national l egal fra mework that protects them from potential expropriations, pay taxes on their income and profits i n [he cou n t ry where their headquarters are loca ted, and so o n . T h e New York Times's conservative col umnist Thomas Fried man scorned the Sil icon va lley execut ives who li ke to say:
We are nOt an American company . . . We arc I B M Canada, I B M Australia, I B M China ... Then, t h e next lime IBM China gets in trouble in China, call Jiang Zemin for help. And the next time Congress closes another military base in Asia, call M icrosoft 15
"
a
I c •
11/
:::t
f e IlL
navy [0 secure [he sea l ines in the Pac ific. And the next t ime
Congress wants to close more consulates and embassies, call Amazon_com to order a new passpo rt. (Friedman, 1999)
I n case t h i s argu ment does not look persuasive enough to dis pel the myth o f the 'transnational' nature o f the modern capitalist enterprise, the con duct o f the White House i n Iraq and its bru tal insi stence, with the u ncultured manners of Texas ranchers, that the beneficiaries of the war und ertaken in the name of freedom and d emocracy (a nd of t he need to free the world from the threat of a dangerous monster like Saddam) must be restricted to US corporations (especially but not only Halli burton) d emonstrate the mistakes made in t h e theses developed in Empire. Not only that. It is no longer sim ply an issue of US corporations obtain i ng the lion's share o f t he spoils o f the I raq operation; the very manner in which these privileges were d istributed among com pa nies all l i n ked to the governing US gang rcca l ls the methods employed by the fam i l ies of the New York Mafia to d ivide up control ove r busi ness in the c i ty. What relation is there between this impe rialist ca rve-up and t he i dyllic theorizations found i n
Empire? Absolu tely none. S
Social movements opposed to neoliberal globalization. Lastly,
a few paragraphs a re needed to exa m i ne t he role performed by those movements opposed to neol iberal globalization that the capi ta l ist p ress, and this is no coi ncidence, cal ls 'non-global' or 'anti-globalization'_ The h a rdly i n nocent pu rpose of this semantic choice is more than evident: to t ransform the critics o f neoliberal globalization into a ntediluvi a n monsters who seek to halt t h e march o f h i story and o f technological progress. ' N on-globa l ' activists thus appea r before t h e eyes o f world p u b l i c opinion as a m u l t i farious set o f melancholy seekers after U topia in a world that, as Francis Fu kuya m a and George SOlOS have said . dances to t h e tune of the ma rkets. Th rown together a re soeial ists, communists, ana rchists, ecologists, pacifists, human rights 16
militants, femi n i s ts , aborigi.n al orga n izations and all sorts of sects and tribes, who wilfully ignore the fact that for the first time in h istory the world has been ' u n iversalized' fol l owi ng an America n pattern, and for that reason the end has been decreed for a l l k i n d s o f m i ll enarianis ms and particu larisms. Yel , contrary 10 this biased opinion, the m ovements that resist the markets' tyra nny believe that a n ot her globaliza t i o n is possible (a nd u rgently neces sary), that the curre n t one is the product of the, u ntil recently, u nc o n tes ted pred o m i n a nce of l a rge corp orations_ Th en, th ere is nothi ng natura l about the curren t shape of gl obalizat i on; i t i s the producl of the defeat su ffered by popular, left-wing a n d dem ocratic forces i n the 1 970S and 1980s. Hist ory, far from having ended , is just at its begi n n i ng, and the curre n t situa t i o n can and m ust be reversed. The vigorous emergence of such m ovements contra d icts some central planks i n H ardt and Negri 's book. The ' n on-globals' have earned the huge merit of havi ng lau nched a large pacifist m ovement even before t he begin n i n g of operat i ons in I ra q . Wh ile, as N oam Ch omsky reca lls, pacifism in relation t o the Viet nam Wa r did n ot appear, a n d then t i midly, u n t il m o re t h a n five years after the begi n n i ng of the m i l i t a ry escalation in South Vieln a m , i n the case of lhe recent w a r on I raq t h i s m ovement man aged t o a rticulate massive protests of u npreceden ted vigou r weeks befo re the begi n n i ng of h ostilities. It is calcu l a ted that some 1 5 m i l l i on people demonstrated for peace i n maj or cities through out the w orld. I n B ri t a i n and Spa i n , countries ruled by gove rnments complicit in US i mperia list aggress i o n , s t reet dem onstrations reached a n u n p recedented size. The governments of Blair and A:z.nar p rovided an exe mplary less on on the li mitations of capitalist dem9cracy by ignori ng, with absolute cyn icism, what the dem os, the supp osed s overeign of an allegedly dem ocratic pol itical o rder, demanded \vith its m obilizations and its a n swers to nu merous p u blic opin i on su rveys. As 1 have a rgued elsewhere, i n d e m oc ratic capitalisms what matters is the 'cap i ta l i s m' component 17
a
f i
GI
of the formula; the 'democrat ic' part is merely an accessory to
8'
be respected as long as i t does not a ffec t anything considered
:l
1
fu ndamental (Boron 2002). This imperial pillaging was decided by the 'ru l i ng j u nta' that cu rrently governs the U n ited States. Let us reca l l , with Go re Vida l , t hat Bush is the first U S president to reach the White House t h rough an institutional coup perpetrated by t ha t country's Supreme Court - t here was no need to be bothered by democratic 'formalit ies' (Vidal 2002: 1 58-9). The petty despots d id what ( hey wan ted and continued with the plan drawn up by White House hawks, d espite i ts overwhe l m i ng repu d iation by the public. (n Spa i n , over 90 per cent of those interviewed were aga i nst going to war, despite wh ich the government of the Popular Pa rty con t i n ued with its po licy. The terrorist attack of 11 M arch 2004, and t he shameful l i es of the Aznar government, prompted his resou nd ing electoral defeat. Noam Chom sky is right when he observes that, for Bush, Ru msfeld and their friends, 'Old Europe, the bad E u rope, were the countries where the gove rn m e n ts lOok the same posi tion as the overwhe l m i ng majority of their popula· t ion . New Europe were t he co untries where the governments over' ruled a n even larger proportion o f their popu lation. The criterion was absolutely explicit - you could n't say more d ramat ically ' ) hate a n d despise democracy' (Chomsky 2003 b: 29). All the above is to the poin t because, in Empire, the a uthors celebrate as the real 'hero' of the s truggle aga i nst the empire the anonymous and u p rooted m i gran t , who abandons his or her homeland in the Th i rd World to penetrate t he belly of the beast and , from there a n d along with others who l i ke h i m or he r constitute the famous ' m u l l itude', fights the masters of the un iverse. Wit hout d i m i n ishing the i m portc1nce which t h ese social actors may have, the t ru th is that what has been seen in rece nt years - a nd especially in the demonstrations against the wa r i n early 2003 - i s the vigour o f a social movement t h a t has solid roo ts in the social s truc t u res of metropol i tan capitalism and that attracts n umerous supporters, especia l ly a l though not only La
among t he young, from large social sectors that are su ffering a n accelerated process o f d ecay by virtue of neol iberal globa l iza tion. This is not (0 deny t he pa rticipation of groups of i m m igrants in such mob i l izations, but the fact is that the soc ial com position of these movements suggests that the presence o f the latter i s , more than anything, marginal. In any case, because of its complexity and radical nature, its origi nal i n nova tion as regards the strategic organization of collective subjects, its discursive models, its style of action and, lastly, i ts m i l i tant a n t i -capit.alism, the ' non-global' movement represents one o f the most serious challenges that the empire has to face . Th is l i kewise co nst itutes a new aspect t h a t raises serious doubts abOllt the t heses d rawn up by H a rdt a nd Negri rega rd ing the s u bj ects o f social confrontation and t he u ncertai n sociological physiognomy of t.he ' mu l t i tude'.
To recapitulate We are living at a very special moment in the history of im perialism: the transit ion from one phase ( let us call i t 'classical') to another whose deta i l s are only just beginni ng to be sketched out but whose general ouu ine is a l ready clearly discernible. Nothing co uld be more m istaken than to posit, a s Hardt and Negri do i n their book, the existence o f s uch an implausible entity a s an empire \vithout i m peria l ism - a paralysing pol itical oxymoron. Hence the need to argue aga i n s t their t heses, since, given the cxceptional gravity of the current situation - a capita lism increas ingly reactionary in the social, econom ic, political and cultura l spheres, o ne that crimi nalizes social protest and m i l i tarizcs inter· nationa l pol i t ics - only an accurate d iagnosis of t he stru c t u re and operat ion of the i nternational imperialist system wil l a llow t hose social movements, political parties, labour unions and ,
popula r o rganizations of a l l types that want to overthrow the current situation to face new jou rneys of struggle with any chance of success. An accurate d iagnos is is also needed to identify the empire's enem ies. To consider, as Negri does, that Lula in Brazi l 19
a .r c CD
!
and Kirchner in Argentina represent a species of resolute 'empire
1
of Lu la ' s government i n Brazi l , t u rn i ng a deaf ear to the deepening
f
fighters'; or judging as 'absolu tely positive' the first year a n d a hat( of the neoliberal cou rse of the economic policy imp lemented si nce his accession to the presidency; or assuring his readers t hat the Kirchner government has refused to pay the debt, an aston ishing d iscovery for the Argentinians who every day read in the press the i nord i nate amou nt of dollars be i ng punctual ly paid to foreign creditors - these are certa i n ly not the best ways for intellectuals to help defeat the empire (Dua rte-PIon 2004: 1 ). The i l lusion that we can u nderta ke the st ruggle withou t a p recise knowledge of the terrain in which the major ballies of hu manity will be fough t can only lead to new and overwhelming defeats. Dear Don Quixote is not a good example to be i m i tated in poli tics; confu si ng windmills with powenu l knights with la nces and armour was not the best path towards the real ization of his drea ms. Nor wil l St Francis of Assisi, a nother figure exalted in H a rd t and Negri 's text, serve as
a
model for inspira tion. I n fact,
no emancipatory struggle is possible withou t an adequate social cartography to describe p recisely the t hea tre of ope ra tions, and the social natu re of the enemy and its mecha nisms of domination and explOi tation. The d is tortions that result from a mi sta ke n conception, such as is mainta i ned by Ha rd t and Negri, can be astoniShing. It is sufficient here to quote the latter when he states, among other t hings, that 'the war in I raq was a coup d 'e ta t by the U n i ted S tates against the em pire' (ibid . ). I would l ike to conclude by quoting extensively from a n i n terview gran ted by Negri to [he Argenti ne newspaper Clarl'/I d ur i ng his visit to Bu enos Aires, whose elo quence is u nsurpassable. In it Negri avers that the current Un ited S tates occupation of Iraq does not constitute a case of
colonial a d m i n i s trati o n but rather a classical case of nation ,
building. And therefore it is a transformation in the direction
20
of democracy. This is the pretext of the United States. Ir is a milita r)' occupation that toppled a regime, but afterwards the problem is nation building, in other words an attempt at a tra nsition, not at colonization. I t would be like saying that the fac t of turn i ng from dictatorship to democracy in H ungary or Czechoslovakia is a colonization. There is no attitude of that type in the Un ited States administration. These Americans want to seem nastier than they are. (Ca rdoso 200)) It is conve nient to ask ourselves, in the face of this incredible confusion, i n which a war of pillage and territorial occu pation appears to have been swee tened i n to an altru istic operation of n at ion-bu ilding and the expon of democracy: will i t be poss i ble to advance in the concrete st ruggle against the ' really existing' i m perial ism a rmed with such c rude t heoretical i n s t ru m e n ts as are proposed by these a u t hors and that lead them to such nonsensical conclusions? U l t i mately, to philosoph ize is to make d i sti nctions. A phi losophy incapable of differentiating between a war of conquest a n d the process of nation-building is a bad philosophy. To advocate carefully the features of a new society will be to little avail without a realistic knowledge of the physiognomy of the c u rre n t soc iety that must be overcome. A post-eapi ta l ist a n d post-imperialist world is possi ble. More t h a n that: I wou ld say i t i s essen tia l , because, if i t continues t o operate under the predatory logic of capitalism, mankind is head i ng lOwa rds sel f-d estruction. But before building this new society - more humane, just, free and democratic than the preeed i ng one - it wil l be necessary to em ploy all our energies to overcome the one that today oppresses, ex plojts and dehuman izes us, and that condem n s al most half the world's popu lation to subsist mise rably on less than two dollars a day_ And this t rue emancipa tory epic has, as one of its most imponan t en abling cond itions, the existenee of a real i stic and precise k nowledge of the world we seek to transce nd_ I f instead of
'V
a
I c II
u
this we are the prisoners of the illusions and mystifications that
f
a re so efficiently manufactured and spread by the ideological ap-
:I
1
paratuses of the bou rgeoisie, our hopes of build i ng a be tter world will i neluetably sink. This book seeks to be a modest contribution towards avoiding such a sad and cruel outcome.
Buenos A ires, September 2004
1
On perspectives, the li mits of visibility and blind spots
Something that may surprise the reader of Hardt and Negri is the sea nt a tten tion that Empire pays to the li terature abou t imperial ism_ In contrast with Len i n and Rosa Luxem burg, who made a careful review of the numerous works on the topie, our authors have op ted to ignore a great part of what has been written a bou t the issue. The literature with which they deal is a eombination of North American social science, especially international political economy and international re lations, mixed w i th a strong dose of Fre nch philosophy. This theore tical syn thesis is packaged in a clearly post modern style a n d language, and the fi nal prod uct is a theoretica l mix that, despite the au thors' i n tentions, is u n l i kely to d isturb the serenity of the moneyed lords who year after year gather in Davos. Due to th is, a l most a l l the citations are taken from books or a rticles pu blished within the limits of the French-American academic establishment. The considerable literature concern ing imperia lism and the fu nction ing of the imperial system produced in Lat i n America, I ndia, Africa and other parts of the Third World does not even merit a footnote. Discussions within classical M arxism - Hilferding, Luxembu rg, Len in, Bukhari n a n d Kautsky - about the topic are al located a brief chapter, while the con troversies of the post-war period oe cupy a n even smaller space. Names such as Ernst Mandel, Pau l Bara n , Pa ul Sweezy, Harry M agdoff, James O'Con nor, Andrew Shonfield, Ignacy Sachs, Paul Matlick, Elmar Altvater a n d M aurice ,
Dobb are conspicuous absences in a book that pretends to shed new light on an entirely novel stage of the history of capital. It is not surp risi ng, thus, that this enterprise offers a vision of the empire viewed from above, from its dominant s trata . A partial
II
and u n i lateral vision, t herefore, u nable to perceive the totality of
o
the system and to accou nt for its global manifestations beyond
c
what, presumably, occurs on the North Atlantic shores. Thus, the resu h i ng vision is particula rly narrow, a n d the blind spots are n umerous and i m porta n t , as I w i l l demonstrate t h roughout the pages that follow. In short, Empire offers a vision that wants to be a critical exa m i na t ion going to the root of t h e problem, but given t h e fact that it cannot ema ncipate itsel f from the privi leged place from where it observes the social scene of its time - the opposite of what occurred with Marx who, from London, knew how to detach h i m sel f from that fate - i t is trapped i n the ideological nets o f the dominant classes. How can the n egation of the rol� played by two crucial i n s t i tu t ions that organize, m o n i to r and su pervise the day-to-day operation of the empire - the I n ternational Monetary Fund a n d the World B a n k - barely mentioned i n the almost five h u n d red pages of the book, be u nderstood if not from t he limitations of a North Atlantic perspective? Barely six pages a re reserved for a n a n a lys i s of t ra n s n a t ional corporations, strategic players in t h� world economy, only half of the amount devoted to issues, presuma bly so crucial and urge n t , such as the ' non-place of power'. The eleven pages d evoted to Baruch Spinoza's contribu t ions to political p h i losophy, or the s ixteen d�voted to exploring the mea ndcri ng of Fouca u l t ' s thought and its relevance to u nder sta n d i ng the imperial order, can hardly be considered s ensible for those who see the world not from the i mperial system's vertex but (rom its base. For t h is and many other reasons, Empire is a n i n trigu i n g book that combines some i ncisive i l l u m i nat ions a bout o l d and new problems with monumental m istakes of a pprec iation and i nterpret a tion_ There is no doubt that the authors a re strongly
1
The page references a re taken from Ihe original E nglish-language
cdilion : F:lnpire (Cam bridge , MA: Ha rvard U n iversity P re s s . 100 1 ) . 24
com m i t ted to t h e construction of a good soc iety a n d , specifi ca lly, a com m u n i st society. Th is com m i tment appears many times t h roughout t h e book and d eserves enthusiastic s upport. S u r p r i si ngly, however, the a rgu m e n t of Empire has noth i ng to do with the great t rad ition of h istorical materia l i s m . The audacity exhi bited by the authors whe n , swi m m i ng ag-a i nst t h e t ide of established prej ud ices and the neoli beral commonsense of our li mes, they d eclare their loyalty to comm u nist ideals - 'No, we a re not a na rchists bur com m u nists' (p. 350); ' the irrepressible l ight ness and joy of being com m u ni st' (p. 4 13)
-
collapses like a
house of cards when they need to explain and analyse the i m perial order of today.' At that pOi n t , theoretical a n d political i n d ecisive ness take the place of decla matory concl usiveness. In th is sense, i t is imposs i b le to ignore the contrast with other works about the same topic, such as S a m i r Am i n 's Accumulation on a World Scale
( 1 9 7 4) , Empire of Chaos ( 1992) a n d , the most recent, Capitalism ill
the Age of Globalization ( 1997); or Tile Long Twentieth Century
by Giovan n i Arrigh i (1995); or Year SOl . The Conquest Continues
( 1 993) a nd world Orders, Old and New (1994) by Noam C homsky; o r Production, Power, and World Order by Robert Cox ( 1987); and the works of I m manuel Wal l e rstei n , The Modern world System
( 1 974-88) a n d After Liberalism (1995). And the res u l ts of such a comparison a re extremely u n favoura ble for Hardt and Negri .
2
The constitution of the empire
Empire begi ns with a section devoted to 'the pol i tica l constitution o f the presen t ' , which fol lows a Preface in wh ich the authors i n t rod uce the main thesis of the book: an empire has emerged and i m perialism has ended ( p p . xi-xvii). I n the fi rst part of the book, the analysis of the world order begins in a surprisingly formal istic mode, at least for a Marxist, s i n ce the constit u tion of the empire i s laid out in narrowly j u rid ical terms. Thus, the world order, far from being conceived as the h ierarch ical and asym metrical orga n i zation of states, markets and nations under the general d i rection of a n i nt e rnat ional domi nant b l oc, is m i s represen ted i n Hardt and Negri ' s analysis as a proj ect ion of the U n ited Nations' formal orga nizat ion. This s u rprise is then i n te n s i fied when the i n trigued reader real izes that the conceptual i nstru ments used by Hardt and Negri to examine the world order problem are borrowed fro m such un prom ising toolboxes as the ones used by a group of authors so foreign to hi storical material· ism - and of such little use for a deep analysis of th i s type of issue - such as Hans Kel s e n , N i klas Luhmann, Joh n Rawls and Carl Sch m i tt . Supponed by authorities such as these, it comes as no surprise that the results of this init ial incursion i n t o the subject matter are far from satisfactory. For example, the U n ited Nations' role i n the so-ca l led worl d order is grossly over-esti mated: 'one should also recognize that the notion of right defined by th e UN Charte r a l so points toward a new positive sou rce of j uridical prod uction, effective on a global scale - a new center of normat ive production tha t can play a sovereign j u rid ical role' (p. 4). Hardt and Negri seem to ignore the fac t that th e U n ited Nat ions is not what it appears to be. In fact, because of its b u reau cracy and elitism, th e UN is an o rgan izat ion destined to support
the interests of the great imperialist powers, especially the United States. The effective UN 'juridical production' has little substance or impact when it concerns matters that contradict the interests of the U n i ted States and its allies. The authors over-estimate
the very marginal role played by the United Nations General As sembly, where the votes of Gabon and Sierra Leone are equal to those of the United S tates and the United Kingdom_ Most of the General Assembly's resolutions are reduced to dead letters unless they are actively supponed by the hegemonic power and its panners. The 'humanitarian war' in Kosovo, for example, was carried out in the name of the United Nations but completely bypassed the authority of the Security Council and the General Assembly. Washington decided that a m i l i tary intervent ion was necessary and that is what happened. Years later, George W. Bush Junior invaded and devastated Iraq without the authorization of the Secu rity Council, not to mention the approval of the General Assembly. Naturally, that bears no relationship to the production of a universal law or, as Kelsen trusted, with the emergence of a 'transcendental schema of the validity of right situated above the nation·state' (p. 6). The imperial istic nature of the 'really existing' United Nations, not the one imagined by our authors, is sufficient to prove the weakness of the following affi rmation: 'This is real ly rhe point of depanure for our study of Empire: a new notion of right, or rather, a new inscription of authority and a new design of the production of norms and legal instruments of coercion that guarantee contracts and resolve conflicts' (p. 9 ). Thi s fantastic and childish vision of a supposedly post-colon ial and posl-imperialist international system reaches its clima.'I( when they conclude that 'All interventions of the imperial armies are solici'ld by one or more of the parties involved in an already existing conflict' (p. 1 5); or when they hold that the 'first task of Empire, then, is to enlarge the realm of the consensuses that sup port its own power' (p. 15); or when they assure already astonished readers that the intervention of t he empire is 'legitimated not by 27
o
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right bu t by consensus' in order to ' i n tervene in the name of any type of emergency and superior ethical pri nciples' such a s 'the appeal to the esse n tial values of j ustice' (p. 1 8). I s i t the ' hu man itaria n ' i n tervention in the former Yugoslavia that our a u t hors have i n m i nd ? Indeed, as wi ll soon become clear. This i ncred ible nonsense allows them to conclude that, under the e m pi re , 'the right of the police is legit imated by u niversal values' (ibid.). I t is telling that such a radical thesis i s supported by evidence provided by two bibliogra phic references that all ude to the conventional literature of i nternational relations and whose right-wing bias is eviden t to even the least- i n formed reader. The vol uminous Lat i n American bibl iography about i mperialistic i n tervention produced by a uthors such as Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, Agustin Cueva, RUy Mauro Mari n i , G regorio Seiser, Gerard-Pierre Charles, Ed uardo Galeano, Theoto n io dos Santos, Juan Bosch, Helio Jaguaribe, M a n uel M aldonado Denis, is ignored_! The second chapter of Part 1 is devoted to biopolitica l prod uc tion. It opens with a laudable statement of intent: to overcome the l i m i ta t io ns of the j urid ical fonnaJism with which they began t he i r i n tellectual course, descendi ng, i n t he i r own word s , to the mat erial cond itions that susta i n the legal a nd i ns t i tutional fra mework of t he empi re . The i r obj ect ive is to ' d iscover t he means and forces of the produ(·tion of social reality a long with the subjectivities that animate it' (p. 22). U n fo rtunately, such beautifu l i n tent ions re main m e re declamations, as thc i nvoked materialistic condi t ions 'va n i s h into thin air', to use the wel l-known metaphor by Marx and E ngel s in t h e
Manifesto,
a n d some venerable ideas
from the social sciences are prese nted as i f they were the latest
I When Ihi5 work was practically fi n ished, a n exccllenl book by Saxe Fe rnandl"'I: , Petras, Vcltmcyt'r and Nuilez \\':lli givc n
10
mc bUi I was able to
rake only margi nal advantage of i l s empirical and interpretalive ric h ness
(S3xe'Femandcz et a l . 200 1 ). In any calie, t he reader is reco m m e nded to consult t hat (ext in order
10
expand some of the analyses unden .. ken in t h i s
book. 28
'discovery' by the Parisian rive gauche or New York's Greenwich Village. Fou cault's theorization a bo u t the t ra nsit jon to the sociecy of control, for example, revolves round the supposedly new notion t hat 'Biopower is a form of power that regulates social l i fe from its in terior' , o r that 'Life has now become [ . . .
]
a n object of power'
(pp. 23, 24)· It wo uld not take long to find in the extended western po litical tradition, t h a t begins at least in t he fifth cen t u ry Be i n G reece, ideas surprisingly similar to what today, with the fan fare that supposedly celebrates great scientific accomplishments, is called the 'biopower'. A q uick look at the l i terature wou l d show dozens of citations from a u thors such as Plato, Roussea u , de Tocquevi lle and M arx, to mention only a few of the most obvious, that refer precisely to some of t h e 'great novelties' produced by the social sciences at the end of the twentieth century, Plato's insistence on the psychosocial aspects - summarized in the p h rase 'the individual's character' - that regulated the social a n d pol i t ical l i fe of the Athenian pol is is wel l known , as is t he young Marx's em· phasis on the subject of the 'spiri tualization of the domination' of the bou rgeoisie by the exploited classes. I t was Rousseau who stated the i m portance of the p rocess by which the dominated were induced to be lieve t hat obedience was a moral ducy. Thi s m a d e d isobe d ie nce and rebe l l ion a calise for serious con flict within i nd ivid ual consciences. In short, for H a rd t and Negri, who are dazzled by Foucault's (an author who deserves our res· pect) t heoretical in novations, it could be highly educational to read what \\las written a century and a half ago, for i nstance, by Alexis d e Tocqueville: 'Formerly cyranny used the clumsy weapons of chains and hangme n; nowadays even despotism, t ho ugh i t see "1ed to have noth i ng more to learn , has been pe rfected by civilization: And d e Tocquevi lle continues, saying ancient cyran n ies 'to reach the soul, clumsily struck at the body, and the soul, escaping from such blows, rose gloriously above it'. I n stead, mod ern 'democratic' tyranny 'leaves t he body alone and goes straight 29
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for the soul' (de Tocqueville 1969: 255). Th is step from c h a i n s and hangmen to i n d ividual manipu lation and cont rol of ideology and behaviour h as been christened by Foucault the t ransit ion from the disc i p l i n a ry society to t h e society of con trol. But, as we know, to name something is completely d i ffe rent from d i scovering i t . I n this case, the creature h a d a l ready bee n d iscovered and h ad a name. What Fouca u l t with his renowned a b i l i ty d id was to give i t a new, and very attractive, n a m e , different from the o n e everybody knew. Nevertheless, it cannot be said t hat we are in the presence of a fu nda mental theoretical i n novation. The first part of the book concl udes with a chapter devoted to alternatives withi n the e m p i re . It begi ns with a statemen t as perplexing as it is rad i ca l : 'The m u l t i t u d e called the E m p i re i nto bei ng' ( p . 4 3 ). Con t ra ry to most common i nte rpreta t ions within the left, H ard t and Negri be l i eve t hat the e m p i re is not the crea tion of a world capita l ist coa l i tion under the A merican bourgeois hegemony but the (defensive?) response of capital to the class st ruggles against conte mporary forms of domination and oppres s ion n u rt u red by 'the m u l t i t u d e 's des i re for l i beration' (ibid .). At th is poi n t , H ard t and Negri e n ter a terra i n plagued w i t h cont ra· dictions. They i ns ist that the e m pi re is good si nce i t represents a 'step forward ' in overcom ing colonialism and i m peri a l i s m . They insist on t h i s even a fter assu ring us, w i th the help of H egel, that the fact that the e m pi re 'is good in i tselr does not m e a n that it is good 'for itselr ( p. 4 2). They continue: 'We claim that Empire is better in the same way that M a rx insists that capita l i s m is better than the forms of society and modes of p rod uction that came be fore it' (p. 43). However. a few l ines earlier, the a u t hors say that the empire ' constructs its own relat ionsh ips of power based on explo itation that are in many respects more b ru ta l than those it destroyed' ( i b i d . ). Despite this, the empire is ' better' because, they assert, it enhances the potential for liberation of the m u l ti tude, an assu m ption that has not been confirmed by experience and that, i n Hardt a nd Negri 's case, is surrounded by a dense m e taphysical 30
and, in certa i n ways, religious halo, as I shall show in t h e final pages o f t h i s work. Where that b l issfu l l ibera t i n g poten t i a l is a n d how such possibil ities could be realized i s somet hing the authors expla i n , in a s i m pl istic and u nsatisfactory way, i n the last chapter of t h e i r book . O n the o t h e r h a n d , t o say t h a t the e m p i re is 'better' means that the real capi tal ist world order - and this is precisely the e m p i re - is something d i fferen t from capital i s m . Marx's argu rnent referred to two d i ffe ren t modes of prod uction a n d com pared t h e poss i b i lities and perspectives opened by capitalism to the ones offered by the decay of feudalism. Are the au thors t ryi ng to say t h a t the e m p i re means the overco m i ng of capitalism? Is it that we have tra nscended i t without a nybody not ic i ng such a fabulous h i storical cha nge? Are we now in a new a n d better
society with renewed poss i b i l i t ies for l i bera t ing and e m a n c i pa ting practices? It seems t h a t Hard t and Negri have b u i l t a straw m a n , an i r rational and i m mutable leftist who, in the face of the challenges posed by global iza t ion, i nsists on opposing local res ista nce to a process that is global by na t u re . Local means, in most cases, ' na tional ' , bu t t h is d is tinction is irreleva n t in their analys is. They say that the strategy of local resistance ' misident i fie s a n d t h u s masks the enemy' (p. 45). S i n c e Hardt and Negri wa n t to t a l k pol i t ics seriou sly - and w i t h o u t t h i s being a formal concession to Schm i t t b u t to Clausewitz, Leni n and Mao - who is the enemy t h en? The answe r to this very concrete question could not be more d isappoi nting since we are told that 'The enemy is not a s u bj ect but, rather, is a spec i fic regime of global rel a t ions that we call E m p i re ' (pp. 4 5-6) . N ational s truggles conceal t h e view of the r� al mechanisms of e m p i re , of the existing a l t e m a t ives, and of the l i be rating poten t ials that agitate in its wom b. H ence, the oppressed and exploi ted masses of the world are convened for a final battle aga i n s t a regim e of global relat ions. The beloved Don Quixote appears once aga i n , afte r several cen t u ries, to t i l t at new
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wi nd m i l l s while the sordid m i l l ers, ignoring the multitude's rage , continue with business as usua l , rul i ng the i r countries, exploiting the masses and manipulating the culture. Hardt and N egri view the empire as the historic overcoming of modernity, a period for which they s upply a somewhat d i storted vision. Indeed, modernity left a l egacy of ' fra tricidal wars, devas tating "development, " cruel "civil ization," and previously u n i m agined violence' ( p . 46). T h e scenario that modernity presents i s o n e of t ragedy, signified b y the presence of 'Concentration camps, n uclear weapons, genoci dal wars, slavery, apartheid' (ibid.). And from modern i ty, Hardt and N egri deduce a straight l i ne that leads to the nation-state without mediation. The nation-sta te is noth i ng but t h e ' i nel uctable cond ition for i m pe rialist domination and i n nu merable wars' . And i f now such an aberration 'is d i sappear ing from t h e world scene, then good riddance!' (ibid.). There are several problems wi t h this pec u l ia r i n terpretation of modernity. I n the fi rst place, i t i s a mistake to offer an extremely u n i latera l and biased reading of it. Hardt and Negri are right when they enumerate some of the horrors produced by modernity (or perhaps in modern i ty and not necessarily because of it), but whi l e doing s o they forget some other results of modernity, such as the nowering of individual l i berties; the relative equality establ ished in the economic, pol itical and social terrains, at least in the de veloped capitalisms; u n iversal suffrage and mass democracy; the com i ng of socialism despite the fru stration generated by some of its concrete experiences, such as the Soviet U n ion; secularization and the lay state that emancipated the masses from the tyranny of t radi tion and religion; rationality and the scientific spirit; popular education; econ omic progress; and many other accomplishments. These too are part of modernity's inheritance,and many of t h ese accomplishments were achieved tha n ks to popu lar struggles and i n stren uous oppos i t ion to the bourgeoisie. Second, do Hardt and Negri really believe that before modernity none of the social evil s and h u man a be rrations that p lagued the modern world 32
was already there? Do they by any chance believe t hat the world was inhabited by Rousseau's noble savages? Do they not sit uate t hemse lves in the same position as the critics of Niccoli:> Machi ave l l i who denounced the Florentine theoretician for being the ' i nventor' of political crimes, treason and fraud? Have they not heard about the Punic or Peloponnesian wars, the destruction of Carthage, the sack of Rome and, more recently, the conquest and occupation of the American continent? Do they bel ieve that before modernity there were no genocides, apartheid or slavery? As Marx did wel l to re mind us, we are victims of both the development of capital ism and its lack of development. Once H a rd t and N egri have asserted the substantive a n d historical continu ity between modernity a n d t h e na tion-state, t hey rush to reject the a n tiquated ' proletarian i nternationalism' because i t presupposes an acknowledgement of the nation-state and i ts crucial role as an agent of capital ist exploi tation. G iven the ineluctable decadence of the nation-state's powers and the global nature o f capital ism, this type o f internationalism i s both a nachron istic and techn i ca l ly reactionary. But thi s is not a": toget her with t he 'proletarian i n ternationalism', the idea of the existence of an ' i nternational cycle of struggles' disappears. The new battles, whose paradigmatic examples a re the Tiananmen Sq uare revolt, the Palesti n ian Intifada, the 1992 race riots i n Los Angeles a n d th e South Korean strikes of 1996, a.re specific and motivated by 'immed iate regional concerns i n such a way that they cou ld in no respect be l in ked together as a globally expanding chain of revolt. None of these events inspired a cycle of struggles, because the desires and needs they expressed cou l d n o t b e tra nslated into d i fferent contexts' (p. 54). F�om t h is categorica l assertion, for which i t wou l d req u ire considerable effort to p rovide support ing evidence, ou r a u t hors an nounce a new paradox: ' i n our m uch celebrated age of com mu nication, struggles have become all bu t incommunicable' (p. 54, em phasis i n original). The reasons for this i n co m m u n icabi l i ty
33
remai n shadowy, but we should not lose hopc in the face of the impossibility of horizontal co m m u n ication a mong the rebels because, in real ity, i t is a blessing. Under the logic of the empire, H a rd t and Negri tell their i mpat ient readers, the message of these battles w i l l t ravel vertically on a global scale, auacking the i m perial con stitution i n its n ucleus - o r, what they call with a mean ingful slip, j umping vert ically 'to the virtual center of Empire ' (p. 58). H e re, new and more form idable p roblems besiege their a rgu ment_ In the fi rst pl ace, those that de rive from the very d a nge rous confusion between axiomatic assu mptions and empi rical o bser vations. To say that the popul a r battles a re incommu n icable is an extremely important assert.ion_ Unfortunately, H a rdt and N egri do not offer any evidence to demonstrate whether this is mere supposition or the rcsu lt of a historical or empi rical investigation. Faced with th is s ilence, there a re a bundant reasons for suspecting that this problemalique reflects the less than healthy influence of Niklas Luh ma n n and J ti rgen Habermas over Hardt and Negri. A quick exploration of the nebu lous concepts put forward by
t hese German scholars i s enough to con firm the sca n t utility that their const ructions have when i t comes to anal)'sing popular struggles. Th is, though, does not p revent either of t hem from be ing extremely popu lar among the ranks of t he disoriented Ital ian left. In this sense, the Luh m a n n ia n theses on social i ncomme n s u rab i l i ty and H abermas's proposals conce rn i ng com m u n icative action seem to have gready i nfl uenced H a rdt and Negri , a t l east to a greater extent than t hey a re wil l i ng to recogn ize. But leaving a side this b rief excursus towards the sociology of knowledge, if the i ncommun icabil ity of the struggles preve nts them from i n flaming t he desires and needs of peop l e from other countries, how can we expla i n the speed with which the erroneously named 'anti· globa l ization ' movement spread all over the world? 00 H a rd t and Negri really bel ieve that the events i n Ch iapas, Paris and Seoul were t ru ly i ncommunicable? How can they ignore the fact that the Zapatistas, and especially sub-commander Marcos, became
34
international icons for the neoli beral globalization critics and for the a n ti-capitalist ba ttJes i n five contine nts, i n fl uencing i mpor tant d evelopments i n t hese con flicts waged at local and national levels? Second, Hardt and Negri mainta i n that one o f the m a i n obstacles p reven ting t h e com m u n icability of the battles i s the 'absence of a recogn ition of a common enemy against which the struggles are d i rected ' (p_ 56). We do not know whether o r not th is was the case among the French or South Korean strike rs , but we suspect that they had a cleare r idea than our a uthors regard ing the identity of their antagon ists. Concerning the Zapat.istas' experience, H ard t and Negri's t hesis is completely wrong. From the begi n n i ng of their battle, the Chiapanecos had no doubts and knew perfec tly we ll who thei r enemies were. Aware of this real i ty, t hey organ ized a n extraordinary eve nt i n the d epths o f the Lacandona j u ngle - an i nternatjonal conference aga inst neo l i be ral globa lization , attended by h u n d reds of pa nicipants from arou nd t he world who discussed some of today's most burning problems. The abi l ity of the Zapatistas to convoke a co n ference o f this type refu tes, in practice, anothe r of Hardt and Negri's theses - the one that bemoans the lack of a s u itable com mon and cosmopolitan language i n to which to t ranslate the languages u sed in d iverse nat ional struggles (p. 57). The successive confe r ences that took p lace in the Lacandona j u ngle, togerhe r with the d e monstra tions against neoli bera l globalization and the world social forums held i n Porto Al egre , B raz i l , show that, contra ry to what is said in Empire, there is a common language and a com mon understa n d i ng among the different social forces fighti ng the d ictators h i p of capita l . If,the old battles are no longe r relevant - Marx's o l d mole has d ied, to be replaced by the ' i n fi n ite u n du lations' of the modern snake, accord i ng to Hardt and Negri - the strategy of the anti-capita l ist jou rneys has to change. National co nf1icts a re not co mmunicated ho rizo ntally b u t jump d irectly to the vi rtual 35
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centre of the empire, and the old 'weak l i n ks ' of the impe rialist chain have d isappeared. The a rticulations of the global power that exh ibited a particular vulnerabil ity before the action of insurgen t forces n o longer exist . The refore, 'To ach ieve sign i fi cance, every s truggle must attack at the heart of the E m pire, at i ts strengt h ' ( p . 58). S u rprisingly, after having argued i n t h e book's Preface that the empire ' i s a decentered and deterritorial izing apparatus of rule' (p. xi i), the reader stumbles across the novelty that local a n d nat ional battles must rise at the cen t re of the empire, though our authors rush to explai n that they are not referring to a terri· torial centre bu t to a (supposedly) virtual one. G iven t h a t the empire includes all the components of the social orders, even the deeper ones, and knowing that it has no l i m i ts or front iers, the notions of 'outside' and ' i nside' have lost the i r mea ni ng. Now everyt h i ng is i nside the empire, and its n ucleus, its heart, can be attacked from a nywhere. If we are to believe Hardt and N egri , the Zapat ista uprising in Chia pas, the i nvasion of land by the La ndless Workers' Movement i n Brazil (MST) or the pot·banging protesters and pickets in Argentina a re no d i ffere nt from the 1 1 September attacks i n New York and Wash ington. I s i t i ndeed l i ke t h i s? J udgi ng from the d i fferent types of reactions to all these events, it would seem that t h i s i s nOl the perception held by those at the ' Empire'S heart'. On the other h a nd , what mean i ng should we assign to t h is expression? Are we talking of the cap i t a l i s t nucleus, the centre, t h e i mperialist coalit ion with i ts wide n i ng n e t o f concentric circles revolving round American capitalist power, or what? Who are the concrete subjects at t h e 'Empire's heart'? Where are t hey? What is thei r art iculation with the processes of production and c i rculation of the i nternational capi talist econ· omy? Which institutions normatively and ideologically crystallize t hei r domination? Who are their poli t i cal represen tat ives? Or is it just a set of im material rules and p rocedu res? The book not only does not offer any answers to t hese q uestions, but does not even formu late t he q uest ions.
At this stage, H a rd t a n d Negri's theorization makes its way to a real disaster. By asserti ng that eve ryt h i ng is i nside the e m p i re, thei r theory completely removes from our horizon of visibility the fact that structural h ierarchies a nd asym metries exist pre· cisely there, a n d that such d i fferences do not disappear s imply because someone h as decla red that everything is i n s i d e t h e empire a nd noth i ng is left outside. Studies undertaken by La t i n American schol a rs and writers over decades do agree, beyond the d i ffe re nces, on the fact that the categories of 'centre' and 'pe riphery' e njoy a cerlai n capacity, a t least a t fi rs t , to produce a mo re refined portrait of the i n te rnational system. Everything
seems to i n d icate th a t such a disti nction is more usefu l than ever i n the current circu mstances, because, a mong other thi ngs, t he growing economic margi nal ization of the South has sharply accentuated pre-existing asymmetries. In order to con fi rm this assertion i t is enough to rem i n d ourselves of what the U n i ted Nations Developme n t Programme's (UNDP) a n n ual reports poin t o u t with regard t o h u m a n development: i f a t t h e begin n i ng of the 1960s the ratio between the rich es t 20 per cen t a nd the poorest 20 per cen t of t h e world population was 30 to 1, at the end of t h e twen tieth ce n t u ry this ratio had grown to almost 75 to 1. I t is true tha t Bangladesh and H a i t i are i nside t h e e m pi re, but are they because of t h is i n a pOSi tion compa ra ble to that of the U n ited States, France, Germany or Japa n ? Hardt a n d Negri clai m t hat even though they a rc n o t identica l from the production and c i rculat ion point of view, between 'the U n i ted States a nd B razil, Britain and I ndia [
] are no d iffe rences of n a t u re, only d i ffer·
� • " o ;:,
III
ences of degree' (p. 335).
::r.
This categorical conclusion cancels the last forty years of debates and research t hat took place not only in Lat i n America but also i n the rest of the Third World, and it brings us back to the American theories in vogue in the 19 50S and at the begi n n i ng of the 1960s, when a uthors such as Wa lter W. Rostow, Bert Hosel itz and m a ny ot hers elaborated their ahistorical models 37
C
::r.
g
of econom ic development_ Accord ing to these const ruc tions, i n both ni neteenth-century Europe and the U nited Sta tes and in the h i storical p rocesses t h a t took place i n the middle of the twentieth century in Latin America, Asia and Africa, economic growth fol lowed a l i near a n d evolu t io n i s t path, begi n ning i n underdevelopment a n d concluding i n development_ This type of reasoning was based on two false assumptions: first, that societies located a t either extreme of the continuum share the same n a tu re a n d that they are essentially the same. Their d i fferences, when existent, were only in tenns o f d egree, as H ardt and Negri would later say, a n assenion that was , and still is, completely false. The second assu m ption: the organization of i nternational markets has no st ructural asymmetries that coul d affect the chances of deve lopment fo r nations in the periphery. For t hose au t h o rs mentioned above, tenns such as ' d ependency' o r ' i mperi a l i s m ' were n o t useful when d escri b i ng the rea l i ties of t h e system a n d they were more than anything e l s e a t ribute t o political - a n d hence not scientific - a pproac h es, with w h i c h a n understa n d i ng of economic develop ment was sought. The so-called 'obstacles' for development lacked structural foundations. Instead they were the product of clumsy polit ical deci s ions, u nfortunate and poorly informed choices made by the ru le rs, or easily removable inertial factors. In Hardt and Negri's terms, a l l the cou nt ries were 'insidc' t h e s}'stem. I n this imagi n a ry return to the pas t , it i s i mponant to remem ber the fol l owing: at the begi nning o f the 1970s, the Lat in Amer ican debate about dependency, i mperia lism and neo-coloni a l i s m had reached its a pogee, and its resonance deafened t h e Academy and American political circles. Its impact was of such magni tudc that Henry Kissinger, then c h ief of the National Seeurity Cou ncil and on his way to beco m i ng Seeretary of State under R ichard N ixon, consid e red i t necessary to i n tervene on more t h a n one occasion in the d i scussions a n d debates caused by the Latin Americans. Hardt and Negri ' s t h esis about the non-
d i fferemiation of the nations wi t h i n t h e empire calls to m i nd the cynical comments made by Kissinger about t h i s topic. Expressing his rej ection of the idea of Third World econom ic dependency a n d ques tion ing the extension and i m portance of the structural asymmetries in the world economy, Kissinger observed: ' today we a re a l l dependent. We live in an i n terdepe n de n t worl d . The U n ited States depend on the H o n d u ran bananas as much as Honduras depends on the American computers . ' 2 As can be easily concluded, some of the sta tements expressed wi t h such fi n al i ty i n
Empire
-
for in stance, that there are no more d i ffe rences between
the cen t re and the periphery of the system, that there is no longer an 'outs ide' , that the players m e rely d i ffer in degree, etc. - are far from new. These affi rmations began to c i rcu latc t h rough the words of theoreticia ns clea rly affiliated to the right, who opposed a theory o f ' i n terdependence' and i m perialism, and who refused to accept that the i nternational economy was characterized by t he radical asym metry that separated the nations in the centre of t he system from those a t the peri phery. H a rd t a n d Negri conclude t h i s section of the book by i n t ro d u c i n g the two-headed eagle , the e m bl e m of the old Austro H u ngarian E m p i re , as a conveni e n t sym bol for the c u rren t e m p i re. However, i t i s necessary t o i ntroduce a little reworking of this image si nce the two head s woul d have to look i nwards, as if they were abou t to a ttack each other. The first head of t.he i m perial eagle represents the j u rid ical structure - not the eco nomic foun d a tions - of the e m p i re. As we have s a i d , there is very little pol it ical economy in t h i s book and the absence of the most elementary men t ion of the economic s t ru cture of the empire i n wha t i s outli ned a s its emblematic i mage reveals the strange paths t h rough which ou r a u thors have ven t u red and on which they have
2. Henry Kissi nger is considered by the nove-list and playwright Gore Vidal to be 'the most conspicuous c ri m i na l o r war loose around the- world'
(c(, Saxe·Femandt"l et 3 1 . 200 1 : 25).
39
o
�
completely lost t h e i r way. That is why the eagle's second head, sta ri ng at the one that represe nts the e m p i re's juridical order, symbolizes 'the p l u ral m u l t i tude of p roductive, c reative subjectiv i ties o f global ization' (p. 60). This m ultitude is the true abs ol u t ely posit ive force that pushes the d om i n a t i ng power toward a n abstract and e m p ty u n i fication, to which it appears as the d istinct alte rnarive. From this perspective, when the const i · tuted power o f E m p i re appears merely a s privation of bei n g and production, a s a s i m p l e abstract and empty t race of the const itu e n t power of the m u l t i tude, then we will be able 10 recogn i ze the real stand point of our analysis. (pp. 62-3)
In short: those interested i n exploring the alternatives to the e m p i re will fi n d very l ittle help in t his section of the book. What they will find is a death certificate for t he archaic ' p roletarian i n ternational ism ' (without a ny mention of the new in ternational ism that e ru p ted strongly from Seattle);J a petj tion of p rinci ples in the sense that the popular st.ruggles are i ncommunicable and
laek a eom mon language; an e m barrassing silence regard i ng the rela tionship with a concrete enemy whom the o m nipotent mul titude faces or, i n the best case, a n i m m ob i l i z i ng vagueness ('a regi me of global relationsh ips'); t h e d isappearance of the 'weaker l i n ks' and the d isti nction between centre and periphery; a n d that the o l d dist inction between s trategy a n d tactics has disap peared because now there is only one way of ba u ling against the empire and it is strategic a n d tactical at the same t i m e . This way is the rising of a constituent coun ter·power that emerges from i t s wom b , some t h i ng hard to u nderstand in light of Hardt a n d
Negri's rejection of dialectics. The only lesson t h a t c a n be learn t is
3. For more on t his, I suggesl looking at thc compilation prepared by the Observatorio Social de I\ m eric- a Lalina of CLACSO in an issue devoted
10
ule
'new intern:llionalism' with lexts by Noam Chomsky. Ana F.st11er Ceceiia, Christophe Agu ilon, Rafael Freire, Walde n Be l lo , Jaime ElOlay and Francisco Pi n eda (OSAL, 6, January 2002).
that we must trust that the multitude wi ll fi nally assume t he tasks assigned them by Hardt and Negri. How and when t h i s wi l l occur cannot be found in the book's contents. There is no d i scussion about the ways of fighting; the o rganizational models (assu m i ng, as the aut hors do, that the parties and labour u nions a re illustri ous corpses)j the mobil ization strategies and the con fro ntational tacticsj the a rticulation among the economic, pol itica l a nd ideo10gicaJ confl icts and oppositionsj the long-te rm objectives and revolutionary agendaj the political instru ments used to put an end to the iniquities o f global capital ism; i nternational a lliances; the m i l itary aspects of subversion promoted by the multitudc; and m any other topics of similar t ra n scenden ce. Neit her i s there any attempt to relate the current postmodern d iscuss ion abou t the subversive i mpulse of the multitudes to previous debates about the labour movement and a nti-capitalist forces in general, as if the pbase in which we a re now had not e merged from the u n folding of past social struggles but had erupted, i nstead. from the phi losophers' heads. What we do find i n this part of the book is a vague exhorta tion to trust in the transformational potential of the multi t ude. who. in
a myste rious and u npred ictable way, wil l some day overcome
all resistance and blocks, and subdue its enemies to
To do
what? To build what type of society? Its i ntellectual m e n tors still do not say.
41
3
Markets, transnational corporations a nd national economies
A Recurrent Confusion H a rd a n d Negri's naive acceptance of a cru c i a l aspect of world market ideology clearly i l lu strates the consequences of their rad i c a l i ncomprehension of contempo rary capitalism_ I nexpl icably stubborn in maintain ing the not very in nocent m yth that nation states are c lose to d isappearing completely, the a u thors make their own, as if it were a t ruth revealed by a prophet, the opinion of the fo rmer US Secretary of Labor, Robert Rei c h , who wrote: as almost every fa('tor of production - money, technOlogy, factories, and equipme nt - moves effortlessly across borders, the very idea of a [national) economy is becoming meaningless, In the fut ure ' t h e re w i l l be no national products or technologies, no nat ional corporations, no national industries, The re will no longer be nat ional economies, a t least as
we
have come to
un derstand that concept.' (p, 1 5 1) It is hard to bel ieve [hat an i nte l l ectual of Toni N egri 's cal i bre, who i n the past has shown a s t rong i n terest i n t h e study of econom ics, cou l d c i te an opinion such as the one above, First of a l l , Reich s h rewdly speaks of ' a l m ost every factor of p roduction', a n e lega nt way of avoiding the e m ba rrassing fact that there is a nother crucial factor of production, the l a bour force, which does not ' m ove effortlessly across borders' This belief i n the free mo _
b i l i ty of productive fac tors is to be fou nd at the hean of corporate American ideOlOgy, determi ned as it is to e m be l l i sh the assumed virtues of the free market at the same time as i t condemns a ny type of state i nt e rve n t ion that does not favou r monopolies or ol igopol ies or that i n t roduces at least a m i n i m u m level of popular
or democratic control over economic processes. From their s trat ospheric platfonn, Hardt and Negri seem to ignore the fact that Reich was the Secretary of Labor in a government that presided over one of the most dramatic periods of wealth and income concentration in the history of the United States, It was a time when waged labou r saw some of the most important pieces of labour legislation dismantled and when precarious nes s reached u nprecedented levels not only in the rural districts of Alabama and California but also in the U pper West Side of Manhatta n , where hundreds of elegant stores recrui ted iIIeg-d l i m m igrants to assist their clients, paying them salaries well below the legal m i n i m u m . Perhaps the authors refused to acknowledge that none of these workers would have crossed American borders without cons iderable effort. The h istory o f these m igrants is one of vio lence and death, pain and m isery, su ffering and h u m i l i a tion, And it is a history in wh ich the crucial player is the nation-state that H a rdt and Negri describe as 'decl in ing', Before writ ing about such issues, it would have been appropriate had the authors inter viewed a n u ndocu mented worker from M exico, EI Salvador or Haiti to ask him what the expression ' [a migra' means, a term used to refer to the U nited States' i m m igration police, the very mention of which terrifies the i m m igrants. Or maybe the authors could have asked how much the worker had to pay to enter the U nited Sta tes i llegally, how many of his friends died i n the a ttempt a n d what the word 'coyote' means o n t h e Cal i forn ian border. Have they not heard about the unsuccessful m igra nts who died in the desert under a baking sun (bu t comfo rted by Reic'h's words)? Can they ignore the fact that every year the Mexican-American fron tier takes more human lives than the infamous Be rlin Wa l l th roughout its entire existence? It would also b e appropriate to ask similar questions of il legal i m m igra n ts in France and the rest of Europe. A q u ick look at U N OP or the In ternational Labor Organ ization (ILO) repons wou ld have saved them from making major m i stakes such as as the one mentioned a bove.
43
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It is not thei r only m istake. Our authors seem to believe that money, technology, factories a n d equipment a re a lso s u bj ec t to u n l i m i ted mobi l ity. Money is, no d o u b t , the most mobile o f t h e four, b u t even s o i t i s t i e d to certain restrictions, albeit not extremely strict ones. But what about technology and the rest ? D o t hey rea l ly bel ieve that technology a n d t h e other factors o f production ci rculate a s freely across borders as Reich proclaims? Which technology a nyway? Do they mean last generation techno logy? This is someth i ng that even a primary school child al ready knows. Obviously, technology and i t s p roducts circulate, but the ones thaI move more freely are su rely not the latest or the best. Th i rd World countries know that they can have access without problems to obsolete or semi-obsoletc technologies, relics already abandoned by the nations at the forefron t of the planet's tec h no logical developme n t . I f t h e best techno logies c i rculate freely as corporate-speak assures us, why is it that we wi tness so many cases of industrial espi onage in a l l the developed coun t ries? How can we explai n i ndustrial p i racy, i llega l copying and im itations of a l l types of tech nologi<.'s and products·? That Hardt and Negri accept some of the cen t ra l ass u m ptions of the ideologues of globa l ization i s a matter of extreme concern. Their belief in the disappearance of nat ional products, com panies a n d indust ries is absolu tely indefensi ble i n the l ight of d a i ly evi dence that shows the vital ity, especially in developed cou n t ries, of customs taxes, non-tariff barriers and spccial su bsidies through which governments seek to favour their national products, com panies and economic act ivi ties. The au thors l ive in countries where protect ionism has an extraord i n a ry stre ngth and can be ignored only by those who i nsist on denying its existence s i mply because it has no place in their theory. The American govern ment protects its i nh a b i ta n ts from foreign compe t i t i o n from Mexican strawberries, Brazi l ia n cars, Argent i n e seam less steel pipes, Salvadorian texti les, Chi lean grapes and Uruguayan meat , while on t h e other side o f the Atlantic, t h e European citizens are 44
safely prolected by 'Fortress Europe' which, while hypocritical ly proclaiming the virtues of free trade, seals its doors aga i nst the ' Ih real' posed by the vibrant economies of Africa, Lat i n America a nd Asia. Regardi ng the declared d isappearance of national companies, a simple test wou l d be enough to demonstrate t h is mislake. For ex.ample, Hardt and N egri should tl)' to convince a friendly gov ernmenl 10 expropriale a local branch of a 'global' finn (an d , therefore, supposedly u natlached t o a n y national base) s u c h a s M icrosoft, McDonald's o r Ford ; or, i f they p refer, I hey could t l)' t o do Ihis w i l h Deulsche Bank, Siemens, Shell o r U n i lever. The n we would have only to wait a nd see who would step forward to demand that t he decision be revoked . I f the compan ies were t ru ly gl oba l , it would be the job of Kofi An nan, or of the general d i rector of the World Trade Orga nization (WfO), to appear i n fron t of the government i nvolved i n order 10 put pressure o n it i n the name of global markets a nd the world economy. However, it is more l ikely that, instead of those characters, an am bassador from the U n ited States, Germany or the U ni led Kingdom wou l d lum u p t o d e m a n d , w i l h their usual rudeness and i nsolence, the i m mediale reversal of the decision u n der the threal of pun i s h i ng the country wil h all types of sanctions and penal ties. If this hypo· thetical example seems too com pl icated , H a rdt and Negri should ask themselves, for example, who was Ihe Boe i ng representative in t he tough negotiations with Europea n Un ion officials for t h e commercial competition with A i rbus. Do they bel i eve t h a t the interests of the former were defended by a C EO from Bangladesh who had received his M BA from the U n iversi ty of C h icago or i nstead by top American government officials with the help of Iheir a � bassador i n B ru ssels and aCling logelher with the While House? In Ihe real world, a n d not i n the nebu lous republic i m· agined by philosophers, the latter is what really occurs. Th i s i s someth ing Ihat any student o f economics learns only two weeks into classes.
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Can Hardt and Negri ignore the fact t h a t the 200 mega-corporal ions that preva i l in the world markets register a comb i ned total of sales that is greater than the G N P of a l l the cou ntries i n the world combined except for the nine l argest? Their total annual i ncome reaches the $7, 1 00 tri l l ion threshold and they are as big as the com bi ned wealth of 80 pe r cent o f the world population, whose income barely reaches S3,900 t ri l l ion. Despite this, these Leviathans of the worl d economy employ less than one-third of 1 per cent of the world popu lation (Barlow 1 998). The neoli b
eral globa l ization ideologists' rhetoric is not enough to disguise the fact that 96 per cen t of those 200 global and transnational com panies have their headqua rters i n only eight countries, are legally registered as i ncorporated com panies of eight coun tries; and their board of d i rectors s i t i n eigh t cou ntries of metropol iran capitalism. Less than 2 per cent o f their board of d i rectors' members are non-nationals, while more than 8 5 per cent of a l l their technological developmen ts have originated wit h i n t h e i r 'nat ional frontiers'. Their reach is globa l , but their property and their owners have a clear national base_ Their earni ngs now from a l l over the world to their headquarters and the loans necessary to finance their operations are conveniently obtained by their headquarters i n the national banks at in terest rates i mpossible to find in peripheral capita l i sms, than ks to which they can easily displace their competi tors (Boron et al 1 999: 233; Boron 20oob: 1 1 7-23).
Noam C homsky, for instance, c ites a study by Winfried Ruig· rock and Rob Van Tu lder on the top 100 corpora t ions o f the 1 993 Fortune l i st accord ing to wh ich 'virtually all o f the world ' s
largest corpora tions have experienced a decisive support from govern me nt policies and trade barriers to make t he m viable.' I n addition, these authors also noted that at least 20 compa nies would not have su rvived by themselves have t heir governments not 'intervened by e i ther socia lising losses or by simple ta keovers when the companies were in t rou ble' (Chomsky 1 998, Kapste in
1 9 9 1 /92, Ru igrock and Van Tulder 1995). I n short, despi te what the a u thors of Empire assert, nation-states still are crucial players in the world economy, and national econo m i es sti l l exist.
The postmodern logic ofglobal capital In l i ne with t h e a rgument developed in the previous section, Hardt and Negri state that a profound change i n the logic with which global capital operates has taken place with the constitu tion of the e m pi re . The predom i nant logic these days is that of post modernism, with its e mphasis on e xa l t i ng the i n stantaneous, the a lways cha nging profiles o f desires, the cult of individual e lection , the ' pe rpetual shopping and t h e consu mption of com m od i t ies a n d commodi fied i mages [ ity
[
]
..
_ ] d i fference a n d m u lti plic
fet ishism a n d simulacra, i ts contjnued fascinat ion with
the new and with fash i o n ' (p. 1 52). A l l t hese lead ou r aut hors to conclude that m a rket i ng strategies fol l ow a postmodem logic, s i nce marketing is a corporate p ractice i ntended to maxi mize sales from t h e com mercial recogni tion a n d exploitation of d i ffe r ences. As populations become i n c reasi ngly hybri d , the possibility for creating new ' ta rget markets' is e n hanced. The consequ ence is that m arketing u n folds an endless array of comm e rcial strat egies: 'one for gay Latino males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, another for C h i nese-American teenage girls, and so forth ' (po 152). Aware that, by pre tending to i nfer the global logic of capita l from marketing strategies, they a r e on a sl ip pery slope, Hardt a n d Negri t a k e a s t e p forwards t o assure us that the s a m e post modern logic also prevails at the heart of t he c a pital i st economy: t h e sphere of p rod uction. For th is, they recal l some rece n t develop ments in the m a nagement field, where it is stated t hat corporal
tions m u s t be ' mobile, flexible, and able to deal wit h d i fference' (p. 1 53). As cou l d have been foreseen, the naive acceptance of these assu med advances of ' m a n agemen t science' - i n t r u t h , stra tegies t o strengthen t h e extraction of s u rplus v a l u e - led Hardt
47
and Negri to a completely ideal ized vision of contemporary global corporations. These appear as 'much more diverse and fl u i d cui' t u ra l ly tha n the parochial modern corpora t io n s of previous years ' . A con sequ ence of th is greater diversi ty and fl u i d i ty is eviden t in the fact that, according to the authors, 'the old modernist forml> of racist and sexist theory are the expl icit enemies of t h i s new corporate c u l tu re' (p. 1 53). Because of this, global companies are anxious to include: d i ffe rence within their realm a n d t h u s aim to maximize crea· tivi[)" free play, a n d d iversity in the corporate wo rkpl ace. People of all d i fferent races, sexes, a n d
sex u al
orientat ions should
potentially be inclu ded in the corpora t io n ; the d ai ly routine of the work place should be rej u ve n a t c d with uncxpe("led changes and an
a t m os phe re
of fu n. Break down the old boundaries and
let o n e hund red f)owers bloom! (p. 1 53) After rcading these l ines, we cannot avoid asking to what extent corporations a re home 10 the relat ionships of prod uction; are the salaried exploited or, i n contrast, are they real earthly para d i ses? I t does not seem to req uire a management expen to conclude that the rosy description given by the a ut hors bears l i ttle relationship to rea l i ty, si nce sexism, racism and homophobia are practices that still enjoy enviable health in the postmodern global corporation. Maybe this i m proved corporate atmosphere has someth ing to do with the fact tha t, as reported i n the New England}oumal of Medi·
cine, d u ring the apogee of America n prosperity, 'African·American men in Harlem had less probabil i ties of reaching t he age of 65 than men i n Bangl adesh' (Chomsky 1 99 3 : 278). Hard t and Negri consta n tly fal l against the subtle ropes of corporate l iterat u re and the free market ideologists. I f we were to accept t h e i r points of view - actually t h e points of view o f the b usi ness school gurus - the whole debate arou nd the despotism of cap i ta l within the cor· poration loses its meani ng, as it does every time more demands i n favour of the democratization of fi rms are made by theoreti·
cians of Robert A. Dah l 's statu re ( Dahl 1995: 134-5). Apparently, t he structura l tyran ny of capital va n ishes when wage-labourers go to work not to earn a living but to entertain t h e m selves in a n agreea ble c l i ma te t hat a llows them to express their des i res without restriction. Th i s portra i t hardly squares wit h the stories reponed even by the most capi tal-involved sectors of t he press about the extension of the work day in the global corpora t i on, the devastating i mpact of labo u r flexi b i lity, the degradation of work and of thc workplace, the growing frequency with which people are laid off, the precariousness of employmem, the trend toward s an aggressive concemration of salaries wi th i n the com pany, not t o mention horror stories such a s the exploitation of chi ldren by many global corporations. It seems u nnecessary to insist, before t hese two authors who idemify themselves as com m u nists and scholars of Marx, on the fact that the logic of capita l , be it global or national, has little to do with the i mage projectcd by busi ness school t h eoret icians or eclectic postmodern philosophers. Capital m oves t h rough an i ncxorable logic of profit-generation, whatcver the social or environmental costs may be. I n order to maxim ize profits a n d i ncrease security i n the long tenn, capital travels a l l ovc r the world and is capable of establishing i tself anywhere. The pOlitical condi t ions are a matter of maj or i m porta nce, especially i f there is a need to maintain an obedient and well-behaved labour force. Cor porate blac kmail is also e�t remely releva nt, given that the global firms, with ' t heir' government's su pport, seek to ga in benefits from the ext raord i n a ry concessions made by the h ungry states of the impoverished periphery. These concess ions range from generous tax exemptions of all kinds to the i m plementa tion of labou� legislation comrary to workers' imerests, or of the type that d iscourages or weakens the activism of labou r u n ions capa ble of d i s turbing the nomlal atmosphere of business. I n the developed world , i nstea d , i t is more d ifficult to d ismantle workers' advances and ach ievements, a n d the pro-labou r legiSlation sanctioned i n 49
the gol den period of the Keynesian stllte, but this is compensated for by the greater size of the markets in societies where social progress has created a pa ttern of mass consumption not usua l ly available i n the peripheral cou n t ries.
Transnational corporations and the nation-stale Cha pter 3.5 of Hard t and Negri's book is devoted to the m ixed constitution of the empire. It opens, however, with
a
s u rprising
epigraph that demonstrates the u n us ua l pe netration of bou rgeois prej udices even i n to the m inds of two in tellectuals as l ucid and cult ured as Hardt and Negri. The epigraph is a statement made not by
a
great philosopher or a distingu i shed economist, nor by
a renowned statesman or a popular leader. I t is, i nstead, a few words pronounced by B i l l Gates: 'One of the wonderfu l th ings abou t the i n formation highway is that virtual equity is fa r easier to ach ieve tha n real-world equity
We are all created equal in
the vi rtual world' lp. 304). Two brief co m me n ts . Fi rst, it is hard to u nderstand t h e reason why a chapter devoted to exa m i n i ng the problems of the m ixed constitution of the e m pire begi n s with a banal quote from B i l l Gates about the su pposed eq u i ty of the information h ighway. Maybe it is because q uoting Gates has become fashionable a mong some European and American progressive i ntel lectuals. Th e reader, even one who is well d isposed, cannot but feel i rritation before this t ri bute pa id to the richest man i n the world , someone who i s the most gen uine personification of a world order that, supposedly, Hardt and Negri fen'en t ly desi re to cha nge. Second, and even more imponant, Ga tes is wrong, deeply wrong. Not a l l of us have been created e q ual in the i n formation world a nd the fa ntastic virtual u niverse. Surely, Gates has never been in con tact with even one of the three bill ion people in the world who have never made or received a phone call. Gates and Hardt and Negri should remember that i n ve ry poor countries, such as Afgha n istan for insta nce, o n ly five ou t of a thousand 50
people have access to a te lephone. This horrifying figu re is far from being exclusive to Afghani stan . I n many a reas i n southe rn Asia, in sub-Saharan Africa, and i n some u nd e rdeveloped coun t ries i n Lati n Ame rica and the Caribbea n , the figures are not much better (Wresch 1996). For most o f the worl d's popu lation, Gates's com ments are a j oke, i f not � n insult to rheir miserable and i n h u mane l ivi ng cond itions. Leaving aside this u n fortu nate begi n n i ng, the chapter intro duces a d ivision of ca pitalist development i n to t h ree stages. The first extends throughout the eighteenth a nd n i neteenth cent u ries. It is a period o f competitive capital ism, characterized accord ing to Hardt and Negri by ' re latively l i t tle need of state i n tervention at home and abroad' (p. 305). for the a uthors, the protection ist policies of the UK, the USA, France, Belgi u m , Holland and Germany, and t he pol icies of colonial expa nsion promoted and i mplemented by the respective national governmen ts , do not qualify as 'state intervention ' . I n the same manner, the legisla tion passed, with differen t degrees of t horoughness i n all these countries over a long period and desti ned to repress the workers, would also nOt qualify as examples of state i n tervention in eco n omic and social l i fe. It should be taken i nto consideration that such legislation incl udes the Anti-Combination Acts of Engla nd, the Le Chappellier law i n France, the a nti·socia l ist legislation of Chancellor Bisma rck in Germany, who condem ned t housands of workers to exile, and the legal norms that made possible the b rutal repression of workers i n t he U n ited States, symbolized by the massacre of Haymarket Square, Ch icago, o n 1 May 1 886. G ramsci formulated some very precise observations about the 'Southern Question' i n which he demonstrated that the com plex system of a l l iances that made Italian u n i ficatjon possible overlay , a set of soph isticated econom ic po l icies that in fact supported the dominant coa lition. It was G ra msci who poi nted o u t the 'theoretical mistake' of the l i bera l doctrines that celebrated the supposed Iy hands-off an itude, the passivity of the state in relation 51
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to the capitalist acc umula t ion process. I n h i s Quadern;, Gramsci wrote: 'The iaisse'ljaire is also a mode of state regu lation, i n t ro duced a nd maintained by legislative and con s tra i n i ng means. I t is a d e l iberate pol icy, aware of i t s own obj ect ives, and not t h e spon taneous a n d automatic expres s io n of the econo mic events. Consequently, the laissezjaire l i be ralism is a political progra m ' (Gramsci 1 9 7 1 : 160). The reason for t h is gross error must be fou n d in the inability of l i beral writers to recognize the fact that the distinction between the political society a n d the civil society, between economics a n d pOli tics, ' i s made and presented a s if it we re an organ ic d i s t i nc tion , when it is me rely a methodological d istinct ion' (ibid.). The 'passivity' of the state when the fox en ters the henhouse cannot be conceived as the inaction proper to a neutral player. This be haviou r is called com pl icity or, in some cases, conspiracy. These brief exa mples are enough to prove that conve n tional knowledge is not capable of prov i d i ng adequate guidelines to explain some of the central features of t he fi rst period iden t i fied by Hard t a n d Negri. Certainly, t he passivity of the state was not one o f t h e m . I t i s t ru e � h a t , i n comparison w i t h w h a t happened in t h e period following the great depression, the levels of state i ntervention were lower. But this does not mean that there was no i n tervention, or that the need for it was weaker. On the contrary, there was a great need for state in tervention and the d i fferent bou rgeois govern ments responded adequ ately to t h i s need. Naturally, after the F i rst World War and the 1929 crisis, t hese needs increased to an extraordi n a ry degree, but t h a t should not lead us to bel i eve that before these dates the state d i d not play a primary role i n the process of capitalist accu mulat ion . The most serious problem with Hard t and Negri's interpreta tion e merges when they get to the ' t h i rd stage' i n the h istory of the marriage berween t he state and capital. In their own word s: 'Today a t h i rd phase o f this relationship has ful ly mature d , i n which l a rge tran snational corporations have effectively surpassed 52
the j u risdiction a n d authority of nation-states. It would seem, then, that this centu ries-long d i a lectic has come to an end: the state has been defeated and corporations now rule the ea rth!' (p. 306, em phasis i n original). This statement is not only wrong but also exposes the authors to new rebu ffs. Worried about having gone too far wi th their anti -state en thusiasm, they warn u s that it i s necessary ' to take a much more nua nced look at how the rela tionsh i p between state a n d capital has changed' (p. 307). It is at the very least perplexing that, after having written this sentence, the authors d i d not proceed with the same conviction to erase the previous se ntence. This con fi nns the suspicion tha t the fi rst one represents adequately enough what they think about the subject. For them, one of the cru cial features of the c urrent period is the displace ment of state fu nctions and pol itical tasks i n to other social l i fe levels and domains. Reversing the hi storical process by wh ich the nation -state 'expropriated' the political and administrative fu nc tions retained un ti l then by the aristocracy and local magnates, such tasks and fu nctions have been re-appropriated by somebody else in this th ird stage in the history of capital. B u t by whom'? We do not know, because i n Hardt and Negri's a rgument there is a meani ngful si lence at this poi nt. Hardt and Negri begin assuring us i n an a'\iomatic way that the concept of national sovereignty is losing its effective ness, withou t bothering to provide some type of em piri cal reference to support this thesis. The same happens with the fam ous thesis about 'the autonomy of the pol itica l ' . If evidence for the first thesis is com pletely absen t, all that can be said i s that it is a commonplace of con tem porary bou rgeois ideol ogy; concern i ng the second thesis, Ha rd t and Negri are completely wrong. To support their interpreta tion , they m a i n ta in : 'Today a notion of pol i t ics as an i ndependent sphere of the detennina tion of consensus a n d a sphere of mediation among con fl icting social forces has vc ry little room to exist' (p. 307). Question : when and where was pol i t ics r hal 'i ndepe ndent sphere' or that simple 53
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'sphere of mediation'? To this i t could be answered that what is in crisis is not so much politics - which might well be in crisis, bUI for other reasons - but a Schmittian conception of pol itics, which progressive European a nd Ameri can in tel lectuals cul tivated wi th an obsessive passion for many years. As a resu lt of that addiction, the confusing doctri nal constructions of Nazi theore tician Ca rl Sch mitt - not only an academic bUI also a lead ing ju dge in the Third Reich - we re interpreted as a great cont ri bution to poli ti cal t heory capable of prOvid i ng an escape rou te fo r the oft-proclai med 'crisis of Marxism'. But, conU'ary to Schmitt's teachings, poli tics i n capi taJ ist societies was never an au tonomous sphere. This d iscus sion is so wel l known, generating rivers of ink in the 1960s and 1980s, that there is no need to sum marize it now. For the p u rpose of this book, a brief reference to a cou ple of works that approach this problem i n a d i rect manner (Meiski ns Wood 1 995: 1 9-48; Boron 1997: 95-137) will suffice. In any case, our authors are closer to the truth when they write, a few lines later: 'Pol itics does not d i sappear; what d isappears is any notion of the a utonomy of the pol it ical ' (p. 307). Once again, the problem here is less wit h politics - which h a s undoubtedly changed - t h a n with the absurd notion of the auto nomy of politics and of the pol itical, nu rtured for decades by angry ant i-M arxist academ ics and intellectuals, who desire to maintain, against all t he evidence, a fragmentary vision of t he social, typical of what Gyorg Lukacs characterized as bou rgeois thought (Lu kacs 1971). In Hardt and Negri 's interpretat ion, t he decl ine experienced by the autonomy of pol itics gave place to an ultra-economicist co nception of the consensus, 'determined more sign ifica n t ly by economic factors, such as the equilibria of thc t rade balances and specu lation on the value of cu rrencies' (p . :107). I n this way, the Gramscian theorization t hat saw the consensus as the capacity of the dom i n a n t alliance to guara ntce an intel lectual and moral d i reetion that would establish it as the avan t-ga rde of the devel opment of n at ional e nergies, is entirely left out of the aut hors' 54
analysis of the state i n its curre n t stage. I nstead, the consensus a ppears as the mecha n ieal reflection of the economic news, a set of mercantile calculation with no room left fo r political med iations lost i n the darkness o f t ime. Its reductionism a n d econom icism com pletely distort the com plexity o f the conse n s u s cons truction p rocess i n con temporary capitalism, a n d , i n a d d i t i o n , they do n o t fail t o pass t h e test that demonstra tes how o n i n n u me rable occasions sign i ficant pol itical turbulence occ u rred at moments i n which the economic variables were moving i n the ' right d i rection', as European a n d America n h istory o f the 1 960s demonstrates. Besides, times of deep economic crisis d i d no t necessarily t ranslate i nto t h e swift collapse of pre-exist i n g pol itical consensuses. Popu lar passivity and acquiescence we re noticea ble, for example, in the o m i nous decade of t h e 19 30S in France and Brita i n , someth i ng very d i ffere nt from what was oecurri ng in neighbouring Germa ny. In consequence, it is u n d en iable that, given that politics is not a sphere a u tonomous from social l i fe, the rc is a n int.i mate con nection berwee n econom ic factors a nd political, social, cultural a n d i nternational factors that, at a certa i n moment , crysta ll izes in the construction of a long-lasting pol i tical consensus. That is why a ny reduc t i o n i st conceptual scheme, either economicist or politicist, is i ncapa b l e of exp l a i n i ng real i ty. The co nclusion of the authors' analysis is extraord i n a ri ly im port a n t and can be su mmarized in this way: the decline of t h e political as an au tonomous sphere 'signals t h e decline, too, of a ny independent space where revolution cou ld emerge in t he n a tional pOl it ical regime, or where social space cou ld be t ransformed u sing the instru m e n ts of the state' (pp. 307-8). The trad i tional ideas o f b u i l d i ng a coun t e r-power or of opposing a national resistI
a nce aga inst the state have been losing more and more releva nce i n the curre n t c i rcumstances. The main fu nctions of the state have m igra ted to other sphe res a n d domains of the social l i fe, especially towards the 'mechanisms of command on the global 55
level of the transnational corporations' (p. 308). The resu l t of this process was somet h i ng l ike the destruction or suicide o f the national democratic capitaJist state, whose sovereignty frag mente d and dispersed among a vast collection of new agencies, groups and organizations such as 'banks, i nternational organisms of planning, and so forth [
] which all i ncreasingly refe r for
legitimacy to the transnational l evel of power' (p. 308). [n relation to the possibili ties opened before th i s nansfo rmation, t he verdict of ou r aut hors is rad ical a nd unappea l ing: 'the decl ine of the nat ion-state is not simply the resu l t o f an ideological pos i t ion that m ight be reversed by a n act of polit ical wil l : i t is a structu ra l and i rrevers i b l e process' (p. 3 36). The d ispersed fragme n ts of the state's old sove reignty and its i nherent capacity lO inspire obedience to its mandates, have been recovered and reconverted ' by a whole series of global j u ri d ico-economic bod ies, such as GATT, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and thc I MF' (ibid.). G iven that the global ization of the production and c i rculation of goods caused a progressive loss of e fficacy and effectiveness in national pol i tical and j uridical structu res which were powerless to con t rol players, p rocesses and mechanisms that greatly exceeded their possi bilities and that d isplayed their games on a foreign board, there is no sense in t rying to resurrect rhe dead nation-state. Aijaz Ah mad ( 2004: 5 1 ) provided a tim ely rem inder that it was none other than Madeleine Al brigh t who, as Secretary of State d u ring the Clinton a d m i n i stration, expou nded s i milar theses by sayi ng that both 'nat ionality' and 'sovereignty' belonged to an 'out dated repenoire of polit ical theory' u nable to accou nt for the ' new structu res of globalization and impera tives of " h umanitarian i n te rven tion·. .. The authors assure us that not h i ng cou l d be more negative for fu ture emanci palOT}' struggles than to fal l victim to nostalgia for a n old golden era. Still, if it were possible to resu rrect the nation-state, there i s a n even more important reason t o give u p this en terprise: th i s institu tion 'carries w i t h i t a whole series of repressive structu res
and ideologies
[
]
and a ny strategy that relies on it should be
rejected on t hat basis' (p. 336). Let us su ppose for a moment that we cons ider this argumenl val i d . In that case we should resign ourselves to contemplat i ng not only the ineluctable decadence o f the nation-stale but a lso the fall of the democra t ic order, a result of cen tu ries of popular struggles t h a t inevitably rest on the state s t ructure. Hard t and Negri do not delve very deeply i n to this subject of vital im portance. M aybe they do not do so becau se t hey assu me, m istakenly, that i t i s possible to ' democratize' t he markets or a civil society structu ra l ly divided i n to classes. This is not possible, as I have explained carefu l ly elsewhere (Boron 20oob: 7 3-132). Therefore, which is the way Out?
57
4
Alternative visions
of the empire
The ethical empire. or the postmodem mystification of the 'really existing' empire At this stage of their journey, Hardt a n d Negri have clearly gone beyond (he point of no ret urn, a nd their a n a lysis o f (he 'rea l ly ex.isti ng' e m pi re has given place to a poetic and meta p hysical construction that, on the one hand, maintains a distan t similari ty to rea l i ty, a n d , on the other h a n d , given precisely those characteristics, offers sca nt hel p to t he social forces i n terested in transform ing t he national and i n ternational s t ructures of world capital ism. As Charles Ti l ly (2003: 26) put it rather bluntly, t he authors 'orbit so far fro m t h e concrete rea l i ties of conte mporary cha nge t h a t their readers see l ittle but clouds. hazy seas a n d nothingness beyo n d ' . The general d iagnosis i s wrong due to fatal problems of analysis and intcrpretation tha t plague their t heoretical scheme. To this I cou ld add a series of extremely unfonunate observations a nd comment aries that a patient reader could find without grea t effort. But if t he reader were to refute them, he would be obl iged to write a work of extraordinary mag nitude. Since t hat is not my inten tion, I wi ll con t i nue with my anaJysis cen t red o n the weaknesses of the general interpretative t heoretical scheme. To begi n, allow me to reaffirm a ve ry elementary but extremely i m porta n t poi n t of depa rture: it is i m possible to do good political a nd social philosophy without a solid economic analysis. As I have shown elsewhere, that was exactly the path chosen by the young Marx as a pol i tical philosoph er, once he precociously understood the l i m it s of a social and pOlitical re(Jection that was not firmly anchored in a rigorous knowledge of civil society (Boron 2000a). The science thal unveiled the anatomy of civil society and the
most i nt i m ate secrets of the new econo m ic orga nization created by capitalism was politicaJ economy. This was the reason why the fou n de r of h istorical materialism devoted h i s e nergies to the new discipline, not to go from one to t he other but to anchor his reOections on cri t i q ues of the existing social orde r and his a n t icipation of a fu ture society i n the bedrock of a deep economic a nalysis. Tbis a nchorage in a good political economy, a 'regal way' to reach a t horough knowledge of capit alist society, is precisely what is m issing in Empire. [n fact, the book has very little of econom ics, and what it has is, in most cases, the convenlional version of the economic a na lysis taught in American or Europea n busi ness schools or the one boosted by the publicists of neo l i bera l globalization, com bined with some isolated fragm e n t s o f M a rx i s t political economy. In shon: b a d economics i s used to a n a lyse a topiC such as the i mperiaJist system that requires a rigorous t reatment of the matter appeali n g to the best of what pol itical economy could offer. As M ichael Rustin persuas ively argues, Hardt a n d Negri'S 'description of the major t re n d s of de velopment of both the capi ta l ist economy, and of its major fonn s of governance, is plainly in accord with much curre n t a n aJysis of gla blization' (Rus t i n 2003: 8). Conseq uen t ly, readers will find themselves with a book that at tempts to analyse the i nternational order, supposedly a n empire , a n d in which o n ly a couple o f times will they stu m ble across i n stitutions such as the I M F, the World Bank, the WTO a nd o ther agencies of the current world order, call it empire or i mperia lism. For example, t h e word 'neoliberalism', wh ich refers precisely to [he ideology and the econom ic-pol itical form u l a prevailing dur i n g the last q uarter of the twentieth ce n t u ry whe n the curren t econo Pl ic order was rebuilt fro m head t o we, merely appears throughout the book, in the sa me way as the Multila t era l Agree ment on I nvestments (MAl) a n d the Washi ngton Consensus. The i mpression that the reader gets as he co n t i n ues to read the book is of fi n di ng h i mself before two acade mics who a re very well 59
� :
i ntentioned but who are completely removed from the m u d and blood t hat constitute the daily l i fe or capital ist societies, especi ally i n the periphery, a nd who have launched themselves to sail across the oceans of the empire anned with defective maps and i n ferior instru ments of navigation_ Thus, bewildered as Qu ixote, they take appearances as rea l i t ies. Therefore, when t hey descri be the pyra m i d o r t h e e m pire's global const itution, Hard t a n d N egri assure us that: 'At the narrow p i nnacle of the pyram i d there is one superpower, the U nited States, that holds hegemony over the global use of force - a superpower that can act alone but prefers to act in col laborat io n with others under the u m brella or the United Nations' (p. 309). It is very hard to u n derstand such a naive comment, in which the sophistication expected o r scien tific a n alysis is completely lacking. To begin with, the reduction of the concept of hegemony to the use o r rorce is inadmissible. H egemony is much more than that. Regard i ng the themes of empire and i m periali s m , Robert Cox once wrote t h a t hegemony cou l d b e represented a s 'an adjustment among t h e material power, the ideology and the i nstitutions' (Cox 1 986: 225). To reduce the i ssue of hegemony to its m il itary aspects only, whose i mportance goes beyond all doubt, is a major m istake. American hegemony is m uch more complex than that. On the other hand, we are told that t he U n i ted States ' prerers' - surely because of its good will, i ts acknowledged generosity on international matters and its st rict adherence to the principles of the J udeO-C h ristian tradition - to act in collabora tion with oth ers. One cannot hel p but wonder i r the twen ty-some t hing pages that Empire devotes to a reflection u pon Mach iavel li's t houghts were written by the same a u thors that then p resent a n i n terpretation of the United States' i n ternational behaviou r so antithetical t o the teach i ngs o f the Flore nt ine theorist a s t he one J have q uoted . The ' prererence' of the U nited States - of course I am talking ofthe American government and its dominant classes, and not about the nation or the people o r that country 60
- for collaborative action is m e rely a mask beh ind which the imperialist policies are adequately d i sgu ised so tha t they ca n be sold to i nnocen t spirits. Through t h i s operation, whose efficacy is demonstrated once aga i n i n their book, the policies of i mperial expansion and domi nation appear as i f they were real sacrifices in the name of humanity's com mon good . It is reasonable to suppose that the American government's top officials and their numerous ideologists and publicists cou ld say something like this, someth i ng that nol even t he most subm issive and servile allies of Washi ngton would take seriously. It is entirely u n rea sonable for two radical critics of the system to believe these deceits. Th i s i s not the first time that such a serious m istake ap pears in the book. Al ready in Chapter 2.5 t hey had written: I n the wan i ng years and wake of the cold war, the re sponsib i l i ty of ex e rc is i n g an international police power ' fel l ' squarely o n t h e shoulders of the U n ited S ta tes. The G u l f War was t h e first t ime the U n ited States could e xerc ise this power in its full form.
Really, the war was an operation of repression ohe ry l iule interest from the point of view of the objectives, t he regi ona l in
teresls, and the political ideologies involved. We have seen many such wars conducted d i re c t ly by the United States and i t s allies. I raq was accused of having broken i n t e rn a ti on a l law, and it thus
had t o be judged and pu n is h ed . The i mportance of the Gulf War derives rather from the fact that it presented the U nited States
not as a function of its own national motives but ill lhe /lame ofglobal as t h e only power able to manage international justice,
right. (p. 1 80, emphasis i n original) In. co nclusion, and con t rary to what the a ncest ra.1 prej udices nurtured by the i ncessa nt a n ti-American preaching of the left i ndicate, what we learn after reading Empire is that poor Uncle Sam had to assume, despite his reluctance and agai nst h is wil l , t h e responsib i l ity of exercising t h e role o f world police man after 61
..
decades of u n fru it ful negotiations trying to be exem pted from
.f
such a distressing obligation. Therefore, the power ' fe l l i nto' his
:::I
hands while all the diplomacy of the State Depanment was busy in the reconstruction , on gen uine democra t i c grounds, of the U nited Nations system. Meanwh ile, top waS h i ngton officials travelled around the world trying to l aunch another round of North-Sou th negotiations focused on reducing t he irrit a t i ng i nequal it i es o f the i n t ernational dis tri bu t i on of wea l t h a n d t o strengthen the languish ing governme nts of t h e periphery by teaching t hem how to resist the exactions by which t hey are subdued by the giga n t i c tra nsnational corporat ions. Those two radical scholars, l o s t i n the darkness of theoretical confusion, find someone to give [hem a hand who, in the light of t h e day, t hey discover is Thomas Fried man, the very conservat ive edi tori a l writer of the New York Times and spokesm a n for the opinions of the American establishment. According to Fried m a n , the i n t e rve ntion of the U n i ted Sta tes in Kosovo was legitimate (as was the one in the Gul f for other reasons) because it put an end to the e t h n i c cleansi ng practised in that region and, therefore, it was 'made in the name of global righ ts', to u�e an expression dear to H a rdt and Negri. The tru th is that, as Noam Chomsky has demonstra ted, t he ethnic cleansing of the sin ister regi m e of M ilosevic was not the cause but the consequence of the America n bom bings (Cbomsky :200 1 : 81). Let us return to the Gulf War, deplorably c haracterized by t he a u thors as a 'repressive operation of scarce i n terest' a nd l i ttle importance. first of a l l , it is convenient to remember that t h is operation was not precisely a wa r but, as C h omsky i nforms us, a slaughter: 'the term "wa r" hardly applies to a confronta tion i n w h i c h one pa rt ma ssacres the other from an u n reachable d istance, while the civil society i s destroye d ' (Chomsky 1 994 : 8). The authors a re not worried abou t this type of disquiSition. Tbeir vision of the coming of the e m pire with its plethora of libera t i ng a n d ema ncipating possi bil i ties ma kes t h e i r eyes look u p so, for that reaso n , t hey are unaware of the horrors a nd miseries that cu r-
62
ren t i m perialist pol icics produce in h i s tory's mud. If the C hrist ian theologians of the M iddle Ages had their eyes completely t urned to the con templation of God and for that reason did not real ize that hell was surrounding t h e m , the authors are so dazzled by the l u m i nous perspectives t hat open with the coming of the empire that the butchery inaugurated by this new historical era does not move them to write a single line of lamentation or compas sion. Masters of the art of 'deconstruct ion ', they are shown to be com pletely i n capablc of applying t h i s resource to the analysis of a war that was i n real ity a massacre. They also fa i l to recognize, let us not say denou nce, t h e enormous nu mber of civil i an victims of the bombi ng, the 'collateral damage' and the criminal e m bargo that followed the war. Only cou n t i ng the chil d ren, the n umber surpasses 1 50,000 victi ms. They also remain silent about t he fact thaI, despite his defeat, Saddam remained i n power, but with the consent of the world's boss to repress a t will the popu lar upri si ngs of the K u rds and the S h ia m i nority (ibid.). Finally, how realistic can an analysis be t hat considers the Gulf War, located i n a zone conta i n i ng the world's most important oil reserves, a matter of marginal i m portance for the U n i ted States? Should we t h i n k then that washi ngton launched its m i l i t a ry operations moved by the i m perious necessity t o ensure the pre dominance of 'global righ ts' and not with the goal of reaffirm i ng its i nd ispu ta ble primacy in a s t rategic region of the globe? Was President Bush's decision to raze Afghanistan while trying in vain to discover the whereabouts of one of its old partners, Osama Hin Laden, motivated by the need to m a ke poss i ble this demand for u niversal jus tice? How to describe such foolish ness? This vis ion of the e mpire's concrete functioning, a nd of some u n p l e",sa nt events such as the Gulf War, is i n l i n e with other extremely pole mic definit ions made by the authors. For example, that 'the world police forces of the United States act not with an i m perialistic bu t a n i m perial inte rest'. The grou n d i ng for this affi rmation is pretty simple and refers to other passages of the
� :.
book: given that i mperia lism has disappeared, swallowed by the commotion that dest royed the old nation-states, an intervent ion by t he ' hegemon' makes sense only as a contri bution to the stabil ity of the empire. The pillage characteristic of the imperialistic era has been replaced by global rights and i nternational justice. Another issue outlined by Hard t and Negri renects with greater clari ty the serious problems that a ffect their vision of the really existing i nternational system which before their eyes becomes a type of ethical empire. Thus, referring to the ascendancy that t he Un ited States achieved i n the post-war world , the authors mai n ta i n that: With the en d of the cold war, the United States was called to serve t he role of guaranteeing and adding juridical efficacy to this eomplex p rocess of the formation of a new supranational right. Just
as in the first century of the Christian era the Roman
senators asked Augustus to assume i m perial powers of the ad· ministration for the public good , so too today the i n t ernat i o na l monetary o rgani zat i o ns ( t he United Nations, the international organizations, and even the humanitarian organizations) as k the U n i ted (p.
States to assume the central role in a new wo r l d order.
18J)
The equ ivoca l contents o f this passage o f Hard t a n d Negri's work are vel)' serious. First, they con sider analogous two situa· tions that a re completely d i ffer�nt: the one of th e Roman Empire in t h e first ce ntul)' and t he curren t one, when the world has changed a l i ttle
if not as much as we would l i ke. And the old
order that preva iled around the Mediterra nean basin based on slaveI)' does not seem to have many a ffin ities with the current i m perial ist system that today covers the enti re planet and which includes formally free populations. Second, however, i s the fact that Roman senators demanding that Augustus assume i mperial powers is one thing and the people subdued by t he Roman yoke asking lor this is another, very different, thing. Cena i n ly, there
is a consi dera ble majority of American senators who repeatedly lobby the White House on the need for acting as an a rticu lating and orga nizing axis for the benefit of the com panies and national i n terests of the U nited States, as we will see in the following chapters. Another, very d i fferent thi ng is that people, nations and states subjected to US im perialism wou ld demand such a thing. At this poi nt, Hard t and Negri 's analysis becomes muddled with American esta blishment thought because it refers to questions supposedly asked of Wash ington by the U n ited Nations. When did the General Assembly request such a thing? , because this is not a matter that can be solved by an organ as little representa tive and a nti-democratic as the Security Council; and even less by the ' i n ternational monetary org-a niUltions'. In this case, are they referring to the I M F, the World Bank, the WTO or the IDB as 'represe ntatives' of the people's rights? What are they talking abou t? In any case, and even when they had reclaimed it, we k now very well that such institutions are, in fact, 'informal depa nmen ts' of the American government and completely lack any u n iversal legitimacy to take up an initiative such as the one men tioned. And what can be said about the humanitarian organizatio ns? As fa r as I know, neither Amnesty or the Red Cross, neither Greenpeace or the Service of Peace and J ustice, or indeed any other known orga n ization has ever formulated the petition stated in the book. Maybe Hardt a n d Negri are thinking about the main role ta ken by the U n i ted States in the promotjon of a new supranational j u ridical framework, which, for reasons that will soon be u nder stood, has been cond ucted in secrecy by the governments i nvolved in this enterprise. Indeed, for many years, Washingto n has been syste matically working on the establishment of the Multi lateral Agrerment on Investments ( MAl) and has it as a priority on its political agenda. To move forwards wi th this proposal, the White House counts on the a lways uncond itional collaboration of i ts favourite client-state, the U n i ted Kingdom, and that of the over whel m i n g majority of the governments in the OECD. Among
5 .2
the rules that the USA has been t rying to i m pose to conso l i date u n iversal justice and rights - surely i n s pi red by the same l i ter· ature as the au thors - a re two epoch·making con t ri butions to legal science. The first i s a doctrinarian i n novation, thanks to which for the fi rs t time in history compa n ies and states become j uridical ' persons' enjo}'i ng exactly the same legal status. States are no l onger representatives of the popular sovereignty and the nation and have become s i m ple economic agents without a ny type of prerogative in the courts. It is not necessary to be a great legal scholar to be a ble to qualify thi s 'j u ridical advancement', zealously sought by Wash ington, as a phenomenal retrogression that neglects the progress made by modern law over the last t h ree hundred years. The second contri b u t io n : having taken i n to account the extraord i n a ry concern of the American govern ment fo r u niversal law, t he MAl p roposes the abo l i t ion of the reciprocity principle between the two p a rties sign i ng a contract. If the MAl were approve d , something that so far has not been possible thanks to tenacious opposition from humani tarian organ izations and diverse soc ial movements, one of the parties to t he cont ract woul d have rights and the other one only obl igations. G iven t he characteristics of the 'really ex.i sting' empire, it is not hard to find out who would have what: co mpanies would have the right to take states to th e courts of j ustice, but the states wou l d be debarred from doing so with investors that d id not comply with their obligat ions. Of course, given the well·known concern of the American gove rnment to guarantee un iversal democracy, it i s permitted for a state to file a law suit against a nother state, with which t h ings become more even. Thus, i f the governments of Guatemala or Ecuador had a problem with Un ited Fruit or Chiquita Banana, they wou l d not be a ble to file a suit aga i n st those compan i e s , but they would be free a n d would have a ll the guarantees in the world to do i t against the government of the Un ited States, given that, despite what H a rdt and Negri thi nk,
66
those companies are American and are registered in that country. Now we can understand the reasons why t he negotiations that ended i n a d raft MAl were conducted i n a bsolute secrecy and beyo nd any rype of democratic and popular control (Boron 2OO 1a: 3 1 -62j Chomsky 2ooo a : 259-60; Lander 1 998). Given such a huge distortion of the empire's realities, it is not surp ri s i ng that the authors conclude: In all the regional confl icts of the late twent ieth century, from Haiti to t he Persian Gulf and Somalia 10 Bosn ia, the United States is called to intervene militarily - and these calls are real and substantial, not merely publicity stunts to quell U.S. public dissent. Even if i t were reluctant, the U.S. m i l itary would have to answer the call in the name of peace a nd order. (p. 1 8 1 ) N o comment.
The empire as it is, portrayed by its organic intellectuals Hence, it seems to be sufficiently p roved that Hard t and Negri's analys i s of the contempora ry world order i s wrong. based on a seriously distorted read ing of the current transformations that are taking place in state formations and i n the world markets of contemporary capitalism. This i s not to deny that, occaSionally, here a nd there, the reader can find a few sharp reflections and observations related to some timely issues, but t he general picture that flows fro m their a nalysis is t heoretically wrong and politically self·defeati ng. A good exercise that cou ld help Hardt and Negri to descend from the structura l i st nebula in which they seem to have sus pended their reasoning - 'a new global form of sovereignty' (p. xii), 'a sp�cific regime of global relat ions' (pp. 45-6) - would be to read the work of some of the main organic i ntellectuals of the empire. Leo Pan i tch has ca l led attention to a mea n ingful paradox: while the term ' i m pe rial ism' has fallen i nto d isuse, the realities of im perialism are more vivid and i m p ressive t h a n ever. Th i s paradox is
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much more accule in Latin America, where not only the tern,
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'imperialism' but also the word 'dependency' have been ell.-p elled
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from academ ic language and public discourse, precisely at a time when the subjection of Latin American countries to transnational economic forces has reached u nprecedented levels. The reasons for this are many: among them the ideological and political defeat of the left and its consequences stand out. The adoption of the language of the victors and the inability to resist their blackmail, especially among those obsessed with preserving their careers and gaining 'public acknowledgement', reinforces this subjec· tion. This phenomenon can be verified not only in L-a tin America but also in Europe and the United States. In Europe, it is mainly evident in those countries i n which communist parties were very strong and the presence of the political left vigorous, such as in Italy, France and Spain. This is why Panitch suggests that if the left wants to face real ity, maybe 'it should look to the right to obtain a clear vision of the direction in which it should march' (Panitch 2000: 18-20). Why? Because while many on the left are i nclined
to forget the existence of class struggles and imperialism (fearful of being denounced by the prevailing neoliberal and post modern consensus as self·indulgent and absurd dinosaurs escaped from the Jurassic Park of socialism), the mandari ns of the empire, busy as they are giving advice to the dominant classes who are faced daily by class antagonists and emancipatory struggles, have no time to waste on fantasies or poetry. The pract.ical necessities of imperial administration do not allow t hem to become distracted by metaphysical lueubrations. This is one of the reasons why Zbigniew Brzezinski is so clear i n his diagnosis, and instead of talking about a phantasmagorie empire, such as the one depicted by Hardt and Negri, he goes directJy to the point and celeh rates withom shame the irresistible ascension, in his own judgement, of the United States to the condition of 'only global superpower'. Focused on assuring the long·term stability of the impe rial ist phase opened after the fal l of the Soviet Union, Bn.ezinski identi68
fies three mai n guiding principles of the American geopol itical strategy: first, to impede the collusion among, and to preserve the dependence of, the most powerful vassals on issues of security (Western Europe and Japan); second, to maintain the submission and obedience of the tributary nations, such as Latin America and the Third World in general; and third, to preve nt the unification, the overflow and eventual attack of the 'barbarians', a denomina tion that embraces countries from China to Russia, including the Islamic nations of Central Asia and the Middle East (Brzezinski 1998: 40). Crystal clear.
The former US National Secu rity Cou ncil chairman·s observa tions offer a clear vision without beating about the bush, distant from the vague rhetoric employed by Hardt and Negri and, pre cisely because of this, extremely i nstructive of what these authors call empire and Panitch calls 'new imperialism'. In 1989, long before Brzezinski expressed these ideas, Susan Strange, not ex actly a Marxist scholar, wrote an article. Had it been read by our authors, it would have saved them time and prevented them from making extremely serious mistakes. Strange said: What is emerging is, therefore, a non-territorial empire with its imperial capital in Washington DC. If the imperial capitals used to anract courtesanS of foreign provinces, Washington instead attracts 'lobbies' and agents of the international companies, representatives of minority groups dispersed throughout the empire and pressure groups organized at a global scale. [ ... J As in Rome, citizenship is not limited to a superior ra,·e and the empire contains a mix of citizens with the same legal and political rights, semi·citizens and non-citizens, such as the slave in Rome. [ . . . ] The semi-citizens of the empire are population , many and they a re spread out. [
...
] They include many people
employed by big transnational finns that operate in the trans national stmcture of production that assists, as they all well know, the global market. This includes the people employed 69
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in transnational banking and, very often, the members of the
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'national' armed forces, especial ly those that are trained, armed
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by, and dependent on the United States a rmed forces. It also in cludes many scholars in medicine, the natural sciences and the social sciences, as in business management and economy, who view the American professional associations and universities as t hose peers before whose eyes they want to shine and excel . It also includes t he people in the press and the mass media, for whom the American technology and the examples offered by the United States have shown the way, changing the established inst i tu tion s and organizations. (Strange
1989: 167)
I t i s u nquestionable t h at , despite her rejection of M a rx ism, Strange's d iagnosis of the inrerna tional st.ructure and the organ ization of t h e e m p i re has more i n common w i th historical materialism than the One that a ri ses from Hardt and Negri's work. This is not the fi rs t li me t h a t a rigorous and objective liberal, t h a n ks to the realism that informs her a n a lysis, provides a vision that is closer to Marxist a n a lysis t h a n that p rovided by a u t hors tacitly or outspoken ly identified with tha t theoretical tradition. I n addition to t he vibrant perspective t h a t Brzezinski a n d Strange have offered us, we have a crude diagnosis made by one of t h e most d i s t i ngu ished t h eoreticians o f American neo-conservatism, Sa muel P. Huntingt o n ; h e also h as n o doubts about the i mperial· ist ch aracter of the curren t world order. H u n tington'S concern i s w i t h t h e weakness a n d vul nerability of t h e USA a n d its cond ition as the 'lonely s h e ri ff' . This condition has obliged Washi ngton to exen a vicious i n ternational power, one of the consequences of wh ich could be the form a tion of a very broad anti-American coal i tion including not o n ly Russia and C h i na but also, though in d i ffering degrees, the Eu ropean states, which cou l d p u t the current world order i n cri s is . To refute the scepticS a n d refresh the memory of those who have forgotten what the imperial ist relationships a re , i t is convenient to reproduce in extenso the long
70
string of i nitiatives that, according 10 H u nt i ngto n , were d riven by Washington in recent years: To press other countries to adopt American values and practices on issues such as human right s and democ racy; to prevent that t h i rd countries acqu i re mil i tary capacities susceptible of i nterfering with the American military superiority; to have the American legislation applied i n other societies; to qualify t h i rd cou n tries with regards to their adhesion to American standards on human rights, drugs, terrorism, nuclear and missile proli fera tion and, now, religious freedom; to apply sanctions against the countries that do not conform to the American sta ndards on these issues; to promote the corporate American i n terests under the slogans of free t rade and open markets and to shape the politics of the I M F and the World Bank to serve those same i nterests; [ .
..
] to force other countries to adopt social and
economic policies that bene fi t the American economic in terests, to promote the sale of American weapons and preven t t hat other countries do the same [ . ] to categorize certain cou ntries as .
.
'pariah states' or cri m i nal Slates and exclude them from the global institutions because they refuse to prostrate themselves before the American wishes. (Huntington 1 999: 48) Let us be clear, t h i s is not i n ce nd i a ry criticism by an e nemy of A merican imperia l i s m , rather it is
a
sober acco u n t written by
o n e of its most l u c i d organic i n t e l lectuals, concerned about the self-destructive trends t h a t have a risen fro m America's exercise o f its hegemony i n a u n i polar world. Given the images t h a t a rise from t h e work of the t h ree authors whose ideas we have p res ented, t he someti mes poetic and at other times m etaphysical d is cour.;e of H a rd t and Negri vanishes because of its own l ightness and its rad ical d iscon nection with what H u n ti ngton a p p ropriately cal l s the respons i b i l i l.ies of the ' lonely superpower', What emerges from Hardt a n d N egri's a nalysis is that the ass u m e d ' n ew form o f global sovereignty' exercised by t h e world ' E m pire', which woul d 71
!i .e
impose a new global logic of domination, is not a world empire but 'American logic of domination'. There is no doubt that there are supranat ional and transnational organizations, just as there is no doubt t hat beh ind them lies the American national i n terest. It is obvious that the American national i nterest does not exist in the abstract, nor is it i n the i nterests of the American people or the nation . It is in t he interests of the big corporate conglomerates which control as they please the government of the U nited States, Congress, t he judicial powers, the mass media, the major u niver· sities and centres of study and t he framework that allows them to retain a form idable hegemony over civil society. Inst i tu tions t hat are su pposedly 'intergovernmental' or i nternational, such as the I M F, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization , are at t he service of corporate America n i nterests. The intervent ions of t he USA i n other regions of the world have different motivations, but did t hey take place. as Hardt and Negri cla im. to establ ish international law? I n this sense, Brzezinski could not have been more categorical when he said t.hat the so-called s uprana t ional institu t ions are, i n fact, pa rt of the imperial system, someth i ng that is particularly t rue in the case of the international fi na ncial i nstitutions ( Brzezi nski 1998: 28-9).
5
The nation-state and the issue of sovereignty
As we have seen in previous chapters, according to Hardt and Negri, the const itution of the empire overlays t h e decadence and final, supposedly inexorable, collapse of the nation-state_ Accord i n g to our authors, the sovereignty t hat nation-states retained in the past has been transferred to a new global st ruct ure of domi nation i n which decadent state formations play an i ncreasingly marginal role. There are, we a re assured, no imperialist players or a territorial centre of powerj nor do there exist established barriers or limits or fixed identities or c rystallized hierarchies. The transition from the age of i m perialism, based on a collec t ion of bell icose states i n permanent conflict among t hemselves, to the age of the e m p i re, is signalled by the irreve rsible decl ine of the institu tional and legal fou n dations of the old order, the nation-state. It is because of this t hat Hard t and Negri plainly reject the idea that the U nited States is 'the ultimate authority that rules over t h e processes of globalization and the new world order' (p_ xiii). Both t hose who see the U nited State9 as a lonely and om nipotent superpower, a fervent defender of freedom, and those who denou nce that country as a n imperialist oppressor, are wrong, Hardt and Negri say, because both parties assume that the old nation-state's sovereignty is still in force and do not reali:te that i t is a rel ic of the past. Unaware of t h is mutation they also fail to u nderstand that i mperialism is over (ibid .)_ LFt us exa m i ne some of the problems that this in terpreta t ion poses_ In the first place, let us say that to assu me that t here can exist something l ike an authori ty able to govern 'all the processes of globalization and t h e new world order' is not an i nnocent mis take. Why? Because given such a requirement t h e only sensible
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answer is to deny the existence of such an authority. To say that a certain structure of power can control all thc processes that occur in its jurisdiction is absurd. Not even the most elementary forms of organization of social power, such as the ones reported by anthropologists studying 'primitive hordes', were capable of fulfilling such a requirement. Fortunately, the omnipotence o f t h e powerfu l does n o t exist. There are always loopholes and, invariably, there wil l be things that the power cannot control. Even in the most extreme cases of despotic concentrations of power - Nazi Germany or some of the most oppressive and feroci ous Latin American dictatorships such as Videla's in Argentina, Pinochet's in Chile, Trujillo's in the Dominican Republic and Somoza's in Nicaragua - the authorities at the time demonstrated an incapacity to control 'all the processes' unfolding in their countries. To say that there
is
no imperialism because t here is
no one who can take control at a world level
a world whose
complexity transcends the limits of our imagination - constitutes a dismissive statement. It is a question of finding out i f i n the new world order, so celebrated by George Bush Senior after the Gulf War, there are some players who hold an extraordinarily elevated share of power and whose interests prevail systematically. It is a question of examining whether the design of this new world reflects, somehow, the asymmetric d ist ribution of power that existed in the old world, and how it works. Of course, to talk about an 'extraordinarily elevated' share of power is to admit that there are others who have some power, and i f we speak of systematiC predominance it is also accepted that there may
be
some devia
tions that, from time to time, will produce unexpected results. Th is being said, let us continue with a second problem. Hardt and Negri'S analysis ofthe issue of sovereignty is wrong. as is their interpretation of the changes experienced by social structu res in recent tjmes. Regarding the issue of sovereignty, they seem not to have noticed that in the imperialist structure there is a yardstick of evaluation, or, as Jeane Kirkpatrick, the US Ambassador to the 74
U n i ted Nat ions d u ring Ronald Reaga n 's first term , sai d , there is a double standard with which Washi ngton judges foreign gove rn ments and their actions. One standard is used to evaluate the sovereignty of the friends and allies of the U nited States; a nother, very d i fferent, is used to judge the sovereignty of neutral cou n tries and its enemies. The national sovereignty of the former m ust be p reserved and strengthened, the laner's should be weakened and violated without scruples or false regrets. Prisoners of their own specu lations, Hardt a nd Negri cannot perceive this d isturbing duality, believing thus that there is a 'global logic' beyond and above the national i nterest of t he superpower and u ndeniable 'centre' of the empire, the United States. For au thors so i n terested in constitu tional and j u ri dical matters, as is the case of Hardt
and Negri, the deplorable performa nce of Washington regarding the acknowledgement of i n ternational treaties a nd agreements provides a timely douche of sobriety. As is well known, the U n i ted States has repudiated any i nternational ju rid ical i nstrument that i m plies even a m i n i mal reduction of i ts sovereignty. Recently, Washington has delibera tely delayed agreeing to the constitu tion of an I n ternational Criminal Court sited i n Rome - with special competence to ju dge war crimes, c ri mes agai nst humanity and genocide - because this would mean a t ransference of sovereignty to an i n te rnational organ whose control could escape from their hands. The U n ited States actively panicipated i n all the previous delibera tions abou t se tti ng u p the cou rt, it discussed criteria, it vetoed norms and co-authored various drafts of the const itution. Bu t when the time came to approve the constitu tion of the cou n i n Rome, it decided to wa lk away. This should come as no surprise to students of imperialism, thoug-h it seems to have con fused the authors of Empire. Appar ently, they have ignored the fact that the Uni ted States has one of the worst world records regard i ng the rat ification of i nternational conventions and agreements, precisely because WaShington con siders tha t these would be detrime ntal to American national 75
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sovereignty and its interests as a superpower. Recently, the USA refused to sign the Kyoto Agreement to preserve the environment, using the argument that i t would hann the profits of American compa n ies. In the case of the Ince rnational Convention on the Rights of the Child, only two countries i n the whole world
re
fused to sign the protocol: Somalia and the U nited States_ But as poi nted out by Noam Chomsky, actually the U n i ted States 'have not ra tified a single convention, because even in the very few cases i n which they did so, the American government managed to introduce a reserve cla use that says the fol lowing: "not appl icable to the U n i ted States without the consensus of the U n i ted States"' (Chomsky 200 1 : 63). In the neo-conse l"Jative ze nith of the 1 960s, the U n i ted S ta tes refused (and in some cases is sti l l refusing) to pay i ts fees to some of the main agencies of the U nited Nations, accusing them of having defied American sovereignty. Why pay membership fees to an institution that Washington ca nnot control a t will? A simi lar attitud e is obsel"Jed in relation to another US creation, the wro, and its preced ing agreement, the GATT. The European U nion aCCll sed the American government of damaging European companies because the embargo against Cuba violated the com mercial ru les previollsly agt"eed. Besides, the E u ropean U n io n s a i d , the e m bargo w a s i m mora l , i t had been unanimously con demned and children and the elderly were i ts main victims_ The embargo's u n favourable i m pact on heal th and nutrition policies as wel l as other similar co nsiderations were also h ighl ighte d . The response from Washi ngton was that these were not commercial or hu manitarian issues but, i nstea d , they we re matters rel ated to American national security a n d , therefore, t hey wou ld not be t ra nsferred to a ny other i n ternational agency or institution but would be exclusively managed by the d i fferent branches of the American government without allowing any, even m i nimal, foreign i mel"Jention (ibid.: 64-6). A final exa m ple will be useful to conclude this d iscu ssion. 76
D uring the offensive of the N icaraguan Contras - i l l egal ly armed, t rained. financed and organized by t he United States - the govern· ment of Managua fi led a demand i n 1985 to the I n ternational Court of J ustice accusing t he A merican government of wa r crimes against the Nicaraguan civil population. The response from Wash i ngton was to d is regard the cou rt ' s j u risd iction. The p rocess con t i nued anyway, and the final sentence of the court ordered Washington to stop i ts m i l i tary opera tions, retire the merce nary forces stationed in N icaragua and pay substa ntial reparations [0 compensate for the damage inflicted on the civil society. The
government of the U n i ted States simply disrega rded the sente nce, continued the war, whose results are well known, and not even when it managed to i nstal a new 'friendly' government in Nicar· agua d id it dare to sit down to talk about the reparations of war, let alone payi ng them. The same occurred with Vietnam. These are good examples of what Hardt and Negri unde rsta nd as the i mperial creation of 'global rights' and t he empire of un iversal ju stice (ibid.: 69-70). It seems clear t h a t the authors have not ma naged to appreciate the co ntinuous relevance of national sovereignty, t he national i nterest and national powe r in all its magn i tude, all of wh ich i ncurably weakens t h e central hypothesis of their argument that i nsists t here is a global and a bstract logic that presides over t he functioning of the empi re . Rega rd i ng what occurred with t he capitalist state in its cu rrent phase, i t seems that the m istakes cited before become even more serious. First of all, there is an i m portant i n itial problem that is not margi nal at all, with res· pect to the proclaimed final and irreversible decadence of the state: all the avai lable quantitative information with regard to pu bljc expenditure and the size of the state apparatus moves i n t he opposite d i rection of t h e o n e i magi ned by Hardt a n d N egri. If somet h i ng has occurred in metropolitan capitalisms in the last twen ty years, it has been precisely the noticeable i ncrease of the sizc of the state, measured as the proportion of p u blic 77
expenditu res to GOP. The i n format ion p rovidcd by a l l types of sou rces, from national governments to the U n i ted Nations De ve lopmen t. Program me (UNOP). and from the World Ban k to the I M F and the OECO, speak with a single voice: all the states of the metropolitan capital isms were strengthened i n the last twe nty years, despite the fact that many of the governments in those states have been veritable champions of the a n t i-state rhetoric t hat was lau nched with fury at the begi nning of the 1 980s. What happened after the c risis of Keynesian capitalism i n the middle of the 1 970S was a relative decrease i n the growth rate of public expend i tu re. Fiscal budgets cont i n ued to grow u n i nterru ptedly. althou gh at more modest l evels than before. Th at is why a special report on t h i s topic in the con se rvative British magazi ne The Economist ( 1 99 7 ) is e n titled ' Big Gove rnment is Still in Charge'.
The writer of this article cannot hide his d i sappointment at t he slates' tenacious resistance to becoming smaHer as manda ted by the neolibera l catechism. (Hardt and Negri seem not to have examined this work because t he last section of Chapter 3-6 i n t heir book i s ent itled ' B ig Gove rnmen t i s Over!', a h ead ing that clearly reflects the ext e n t of their misunderstanding of a theme so crucial to their theoretical argument.) I n any case, after a ca refu l analysi s of recent d a t a on public expenditure i n fourteen i n d us trialized cou nt ries of the OECO, The Economist concludes t hat, despite the neoliberal reforms i n i tiated after the proclaimed new goals of fiscal austerity and public expenditure reduction between 1 9 80 and 1 996, public expenditure in the selected cou ntries grew from 43-3 per ce nt of the GOP to 4 7 . 1 pe r cen t, while in cou n tries such as Sweden th i s figure passes the 50 per cen t t h reshold: 'in the last forty years the growth of public expend iture i n the d eveloped economies has been persistent, universal and coun ter productive ', and the objective so strongly p roclai med of beco ming a 'small govern men t ' apparently has been more a weapon of electoral rhero ric than a true objective of economic policy. Not even the strongest defende rs of the famous 'state reform' and
the shrinking of public expenditure, such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, managed to achieve any significa n t p rogress in this terra i n . Th us, if th i s strengthening of state orga n izations is verified i n the hea rt of developed capitalis ms, t h e h is tory of the periphery is com pletely d i fferen t . In the i n ternational reorganization of the i m perialist system under the ideological shield of neol iberal ism, states were radically weakened and the economies of (he periphery were su bdued to become more and more ope n , and almost with ou t any state med iation, (0 the i n flux of the great transnational companies and to the policies of the developed coun tries, mai nly the U nited States. This process was in no way a natu ral one, but ins tead was the result of initiatives adopted at the cen t re of the empire : the governme n t of the U n ited Sta tes, in its role as ruler, accompanied by its loya l guard dogs (the
IMF, the World Bank, the wro, e tc.) and su pported by the active compl icity of the cou n t rie s of the G- 7. This coalition forced ( i n many cases bru ta l ly) t h e i ndebted cou ntries of t h e Third World to apply the policies k nown as the 'Washi ngton Consensus' a n d to tra nsform t heir economies in accordance with the interests of the dom inant coalition and, espec ia l ly, of the primus inter pares, the U nited States. These pol icies favou red the practically u n l i mited penetration of American and European corporate i n terests into the domestic markets of the southern nations. For that to take place, it was necessary to d ismantle the public sector in those cou n t ries, produce a real deconstruction of the state and, with the a i m of generating surplus for the payment of these cou n t ries' foreign debt, to reduce public expenditure to the m i nimum, sacri ficing i n this way vital and impossible-to-postpone expenditure on h �a l th , housing and educat ion . State-owned com panies were first fi nancially drained and then sold at ridiculous prices to the big corporations of the central count ries, thereby creating a space
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i ndustria lized cou ntries.) Another policy imposed on these countries was the u n ilateral open ing up of the economy, faci l i tating an i nvasion of imported goods produced in other countries wh i le the u nemployment rates i ncreased exponentially. It is pertinent to state that while the pe riphery was forced to open u p commer cially, p rotectionism in the N orth became more sophisticated. The d eregulation of markets, especially the fi nancial one, was another of the objectives of the 'capita list revolution' in t he 1 980s. All together, t hese policies had the result of d ramatically weaken ing the states of the peri phery, while fu I fil ling the capitalist dream of having markets operating without state regulation, as a result of which the strongest corporate conglomerates actually took charge of 'regu lati ng' the market, obviously in their own i nterests. As I said before, these policies were not fortuitous or accidental, given that the d ismantling of t.he states increased s ignificantly the ability of i mperialism and foreign companies and nations to control not only the economic life but a lso t he pol i t ical life of the cou nt ries of the periphery. Of course, we find nothing of this in Empire. What we do find, instead, are reiterative passages clai m i ng that i mperialist relat.ionships have ended, despite the fact that the visi bility they have acq u i red in recent decades is so striking that even the least rad ical sectors of our societies have no trouble in recognizing them. A concrete example of the conseque nces of this acute weaken i ng of the state in the capitalisms of the periphery has been stressed by Hond u ran h i storian Ramon Oqueli. Referring to his cou ntry i n the m id-1 980s, wit.h its well-established democrat ic regi me, Oq ueJi observed: The importance of the presiden t ial elections, wi th or without fraud, is relative. The decisions that affect Honduras are first made in Washington; then in t.he American mil itary command in Panama ( the Sout hern Command); afterwards in the American base command of Palmerola, Honduras; immediately 80
after in the American Embassy in Tegucigalpa; in the fifth place comes the commander-i n-chief of the Honduran armed forces; and the president of the Republic only appears in sixth place. We vote, then, for a Sixth-category official in tenns of decision capacity. The president's functions are limited to managing m isery and obtaining American loans_ (Cueva 1 986: 50) Replace Honduras with almost any other Lati n America n cou n t l)' a n d
a similar picture wi l l emerge. Obviously, t h e predominant
milita ry situation i n t hose years assigned the a rmed forces a very special role_ For the cou n tries t h a t do not face a seriou s military crisis, that central role today fa lls i nto the hands of the Treasury and the I M F, and the president can, in such a case, move up the decision ladder to the th i rd or fou rt h rung, but no further than that. Regarding t he president's main functions - managi ng m i sery and obta i n i ng American loans - th i ngs have not change d . The Argenti n e case is a s h i n i ng example of a l l t h i s . Continu i ng with t h e probJemalique o f the state, our authors do not seem able to d istinguish between s tate forms and func tions a nd the tasks of states. There is no doubt that the form of the capitalist state has changed in the last quarter of a cen tury. Si nce the state is not a meta physical entity bu t a historical c reature, continually formed a nd reform ed by class struggles, its forms can hardly be i nterpreted as immanent essences float ing above the h istorical p rocess. Consequently, the forms of the democratic state i n the developed capitalist countries have changed. How? There has been real democratic degeneration: a progressive loss of power forme rly i n the hands of congresses a nd parliaments; the growing u naccountability of governments, whicl;l goes hand-in-hand with the i ncreasing concentra tion of power i n t he hands of executives; the proliferation of secret areas of decision-making (see, for example, the aborted negotiations of the MAl , the accelerated approval of the NAITA, the current negotiations behind closed doors to create the Free Trade Area of 8t
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the Americas); decli ning levels of governmental response to rhe claims and demands of civil society; a drastic reduction of com petit ion among pOlitical parties because of increasing simi larities between the majori[)' pol it ical parties, following the bipart isan American model; the tyranny of the markets - in fact, of the oligopolies that control them - that vote every day and capture the permanent artention of the governments while the public votes every two or three years; related to the aforemcntioned, logical trends towards pOlitical apathy and individualist ret raction; the growing predomi nance of the big oligopol ies in the mass media and the cultural in dustry; and, lastly, an increasing transference of the right to make decisions from popular sovereign[), to the admin istrative and political agencies of the empire, a process that exists both in the empire's 'exterior provinces' and in its centre. In the Latin American case this means that popular sovereign [)' has been deprived of almost all its attributes, and that no strat egic decision on economic or social mat ters is adopted in these cou ntries without previous consultation with, and the approval of, the relevant agency in Washington. As we can sec, a situation like this cannot but contradict the essence of the democratic order, and popular sovereign[)' is reduced to a mere dead letter. Boaventura de Sousa Santos has examined the changes experi enced by states under neoliberal globalization and his analysis confirms that ' there is by no means an overall crisis of the state, let alone a terminal crisis of the state, such as suggested by the mOSI extreme theses of globalizatjon scholars' (de Sousa Santos 1999: 64). The Hobbesian repressive fu nctions of the slate e njoy
thei r vigour both in the periphery and i n the centre of the sysrem. I n the former, because the implementation of strongly repressive policies has become necessary to prop up an increaSingly unjust and unequal capitalist organization, where the numbers of the exploited and the excluded increase incessantly. In the centre, on the other hand, because this occurs especially i n the U nited States, a Significant proportion of their social problems is dealt 82
with by channell i ng people towards the prison syste m, though this situation also occurs, but less acutely, in other countries. I t is estimated t h a t today the total n u m ber o f p ri soners i n A merica a moun t s to a figure only surpassed by the populations of the three major cities of that country, New York, Chicago and Los A ngeles, and that the ove rw h e l m i n g majority of the convicts are black or Latino_ As de Sousa Sa ntos correctly notes, i n the social apartheid of contem porary capitalism t h e state conti nues to pe rform a crucial role: it is the Hobbesian Leviathan in the gheuos a n d the margi nal neigh bou rhoods while it guarantees t he benefits of the social Lockean contract for those who inhabit the opulent suburbs. Consequently, this state supposedly on the way to becoming extinct, according to the obfuscated vision of Hardt and Negri, continues on its way as a divided s tate, almost schizophre nic: for the poor and the excluded, a fascist state; fo r the rich, a democratic state. But the vitality of the nation-state is not measured o n ly in t hese temls; it can also be proved by the role it plays i n several other fields, such as supranational un ification, the l iberalization of t he economy, the commercial open ing u p, the deregulation of the fi nancial system and the elaboration of an i n stitu tional-j u rid ical fra mework adequate for the protection of private companies and the new economic model inspired by the 'Washi ngton Consensus' . 'What is i n c risis i s the function of pro moting non-merca ntile exchanges among citizens,' concludes de Sousa San tos (ibid_: 64). As Ellen Meiskins Wood ( 2000: 1 1 6) d e monstrates, the nation s t a te con t inues to be the main agent o f globa lization. I n the global m a rkets, the need that capital has for the state is even more pronounced than before. A recen t analysis shows that i n t h e processes o f economic restructuri ng, the national states of metropOl i ta n capitalisms, fa r from being the 'victims' of global ization, were its m a i n promoters. The i nternational expansion of the fi na ncial, industrial and commercial capital of the U n i ted States, the European countries, Ja pan , South Korea, S i ngapore
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a n d Taiwan 'was not a macroeconomic phenome non born inside the compan ies' but, instead, was the product of a political strategy d i rected at i mprovi ng the relative position of those cou nt ries i n the changing i nternational econom ic scene. In this strategy, ac tors such as the US Treasu ry, the M ITI of J apa n, t h e E u ropean Commission and a group of na tional state agencies played a central role (We iss 1997: 23). This is why Pe ter Drucker, one of the most prestigious US gurus, calls our a ttention to the amaz· i ng persistence of states despite the great changes t hat occu rred i n the world economy and he concludes that they will, for sure, survive the globalization of the economy and the i nformation technology revolution ( Drucker 1 997: 1 60). It seems appropriate to quote what one of the major advocates of US imperialism has written on these issues, ratifying the key role played by the capitalist states, and very especially the Ameri can state, in globaJization. 'As the country that benefits most from global economic i ntegration, we have the responsi bility of making sure that this new system is sustaina ble [
...
] Sustaining globaliza·
t ion is our overarching national i n terest,' says Thomas Fried man. And the implications of the fact that 'globa l ization·is·US' the New
York Times columnist does not fa il to notice that 'because we are the biggest beneficiaries and d rivers of global ization, we are unwitti ngly putting enormous pressure on the rest of the world' ( Fried man 1 999). To sum up: the global markets strengthen competi tion be· tween the giant corporations that dominate the global economy. S i nce these companies are transna tional i n t heir reach and the range of their operations while still possessing a national base, in order to succeed i n this relentless battle they requ ire the sup· port of 'their governments' to keep their commercial rivals i n line. Aware o f t h i s , the national states offe r ' thei r companies' a menu of alternatives which i nclude the following: the concession of d i rect subsidies for na tional companies; the giga n tic rescue opera t i ons of banks and com pa n ies, paid i n many cases through
taxes applied to workers and consumers; the i m position of fiscal austerity policies and structural adjustment programmes d i rected towa rds guaranteeing greater profit rates for the companies; t he devaluation or a ppreciation of t he local cu rrency, in order to favour some fractions of capital while placing the bu rden of the crisis on other sectors and soc i a l groups; the deregulation of markets; the i mplementatio n o f 'labour reform s' i ntended to accen tuate the subm ission of workers, weake n ing both the ir capacity to negot iate their wages and their labour u n ions; the enforce ment of the inte rnational i m mob i l i ty of workers while faci l i tating the i nternational mobility of capital; the guarantee of 'law and order' in societies that experience regressive social processes of wealth and i ncome re-concen tration and mass ive processes of pauperization; t he c reat ion o f a legal framework cap able of ratifying favou rable terms and opportunities that compa nies have enjoyed in the current phase; and the establishment of a legislation that 'legalizes', in the cou ntries of the periphery, the im perialist suction of surplus-va l ue and that al lows for the great profits of the t ransnational compa n ie s to be freely remitted to their headquarters . These a re some of the tasks that the national states perform and tha t the 'global logic of the Empire', so exalted in Hardt and Negri'S analysis, can guaran tee only t hrough the still ind ispensable med iation of the nation-state (Meiskins Wood
2000: 1 1 6- 1 7). That the most prominent and i nfl uential members of the capitaJist class a re actively working to d estroy such a useful and formidable instrument as the nation-state can be understood only by assuming that the capi talist class is made up of id iots (I m ust state right away, to clear up possible doubts, that the ca pitalist sta te is not only a n i nstrument of the bourgeoisie but also m � ny other things, which do not prevent i t from also being an i ndispensable i nstrument in the process of capital accumula tion).· In l ight o f this, Ellen Mei skins Wood concludes:
1
I have examined [ his issue i n detail i n Boron ( 1995). 85
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Of course, it is possible for the state to chan ge its form, and for the t raditional nation-state to give room, on the one hand, to most strictly local states and, on the other hand, to wider reg ional political authorities. But regardless of its shape, the state will still be crucial, and i t is likely that for a long time even the old nation-state will continue to play its dominant role. ( Meiski n s wood
2000: 1 1 7 )
6
The unsolved mystery of the multitude
Obsessive denial of the realities of the nation-state lead s Hardt and Negri to a political dead-end. Let uS review, therefore, a pas sage from Empire that ' analysed from another perspec tive in Chapter 5. In t ha t chapter I said that, together w i th the term inal crisis of the state, Hardt and Negri a lso observed 'the decline
]
of any i ndependent space where revolut ion cou ld emerge
i n the national political regi me, or where social space cou ld be t ransformed using the instrumen ts of t he s tate' (pp. 307-8). Consequently, withou t the oxygen provided by that space, the name of revolu tion i s extingui shed. I f th is is t rue, how can one break t he iro n cage of the em pire? The a nswer offered by the authors is s ilence. The word ' revolution' is mentioned only five or six ti mes in the thick volume u nder a nalysis, and the subject occu pies a lot less s pace than th e ten pages assigned to the study of population mobility or the eleven pages devoted to a discussion of republ ican ism. How ca n such noisy silence be u nderstood? The vague refe rences to 'the m u lt i t u de' in the fi nal chapter of Empire do not offer any clues as to how t h is oppressive world order - much more oppressive than the preceding one, it should be remembered - may some day be transcended. The problem is not o n ly that the references to the multitude are vague. M ichael Hard t ack nowledged in a recent i nterview t hat, 'in our book the concept of m u l t i tude works as a poetic concept rather tha n as a factual one' (Cangi 2002: 3). Hard t is right about that , because , such a notion i s, sociologi cally speaking, em pty, t hough it is necessary to recognize that i t h as a considerable poetic force wh ich makes it extremely attractive. We are told t h a t the m u lt i tude i s the totality o f the creative and productive subject ivities
that 'express, nourish, a n d develop positively t heir own constitu ent projects' and t h a t they 'work toward the l iberation of living labor, creating constel lations o f powerful singularities' (p. 61). Thus, with a stroke of the pen, social classes disappear from the scene a nd the d istinction between exp loite rs and exploited and between the weak a n d the powerfu l evaporates. What is left after this shadowy operation is an a m o rp hous mass of h ighly creative s i ngu l a rities t h a t , i f existe n t , would put t he t hesis of the a lienat i ng character of labour and da i ly l i fe i n capitalist societies i n serious t rouble. If we appl ied Hardt and Negri's work to the p rosaic rea lity of contem porary Lat i n America, we should ask o u rselves if the para m i l i ta ries a n d death squads that razed C h iapas and a good part of Centra l A merica , sowing ter ror a n d death, are i nc l u ded in the m u l t i t ude; or the landowners who orga n ize and fi nance a great pa rt o f the private repreSSion exened in those countries aga i nst peasa n ts and aborigi n a l com mu n ities; or the financial speculators and t he bou rgeoisie who s upponed m i l itary regimes i n the past and who today undermine the l a ngui s h i ng democracies. Does t h is category i n c l ude those who, i n the name of capital, control the cul tural ind ustry of Lat i n America at t h e i r pleasure? D o h um i l iated and exploited peasan ts, blacks, I nd ians, cholos and mestizos form pa n of the m u l t itude too? A nd what a bout the urban 'proletaria t ' s u n k i n excl usion a nd m isery, the workers and the u ne mployed, the single mothers and overexploi ted women, the sexual minorities, the ch ildren o f the streets, the paupe rized elde rly, public employees and the i m poverished m id d le classes? If t hey are not i n t h is ca tegory, where can this vast conglomerate be placed socially? And if they indeed share their place in the m u l t itude with the social agents of exploita tion and repression, wh at sense is there in using such a category? What is i t t hat i t describes, to say nothing of what i t could exp l a i n ? Empire does not offe r any such expla nations. I t is, as Hard t said i n the i n terview mentioned above, a poetic concept. But poetry is not always useful for explain i ng reality, or
88
for cha nging i t . Some t i mes, good poetry m a kes bad sociology, and this seems to be the case here. Leaving aside these disagreeable observations, the progra mme proposed for the m u l ti tude is explai ned in t h e fi na l chapter of t h e book. The combi nation of t h e basic precepts o f the neoliberal theory of globa lization and a sociologically amorphou s concept such as that o f the 'm uhitude' results in a cautiously reform· ist poli tical p rogram m e a n d , to make things worse, not a very realistic one. An 'abs t ract i n ternationalism' permeates it and t h i s resu l ts i n what t he a uthors c a l l t h c ' fi rst element o f a poli tica l program for the global m u l t i t ude, a first political demand: global citizenship ' (p. 400, emphasis in original). I ca n not d isagree with t h i s claim, an old aspi rat ion a l ready proposed by Kant a n d that Marx a nd Engels recovered a nd redefined w i t h i n the framework of the i nternationalism proclaimed with so m uch vigour in the Manifesto. B u t C i t izensh i p has a lways i nvolved a set of rights and prerogatives as well as req u iring t h e creation of adequate chan· nels of political participation that, to be effect ive and not i l l u sory, must be realized wit h i n a legal and i nstitutional framework such as, in recent h istory, was provided by the nation·state. Whoever speaks of citizenship, speaks of power, relationshi ps of force, a nd t h e state as the basic framework within which a j u ridical order i s elaborated a n d su pponed. S i nce, accordi ng to Hard t a n d Negri, t he state faces an irreversible decl ine, with i n what fra mework is the emancipa t i ng and panicipa t ive poten tial of the citizenshi p to be realized? 'Abstract internationalism' believes that the solution for most of o u r problems l ies i n the empowerment of civil society and the construction of a global and cosmopol itan ci tizenship. The problem is t h a t , in its a rroga nt a bs t raction, t h i s i nterna· tionalism rel ies on 'an abstract and little real istic notion of an ,
i nternational civil society or global citizenship' and on t h e i l l usion that the world can be cha nged if t he representation of the l e ft a nd the popular movements - let us say for a moment, the m u l t i t ude - are s t rengthened wit h i n the la rge transnational organ izations
89
such as the I M F (Meiskins wood 2000: u8). Though the argu· ment developed in Empire is not ve ry c lear about this, it seems, however, to be in l i ne with a certain type of reason ing that in recent years has aeq uired great popularity thanks to the efforts of a wide range of intell ectuals and ·experts' connected to the World Ban k and other international financial i nstilutions. The proposals out l ine, especially i n the framework of national societies, t he begi n n i ng of a process of 'devolution' to civil soeiety functions that had been improperly appropriated by the state. Obviously. these pol icies a re · the other side of the coi n ' of the privatizations a nd the dismantling of the public sector that the i n terna tional financial i nstitu t ions have promoted over the last twenty years. Such changes seek to provide a solution to the crisis triggered by the state's desertion of its responsibil ities in the provision of public welfare - providing social assistance, ed ucation, heal thcare and so on - transferring to civil society the task of dea l i ng with these issues whiJe incidenta l ly preserving a balanced fiscal budget and, eventually, guara nteeing the existence of a surplus in the fiscal aceounts i n order to fu nd the foreign debt. I f this pol icy of empowerment of civil society is u nreal istic a t the national level, its transference to the international level deepens the cracks ap parent in its own foundations. The so-cal led global civil society, far from bei ng li berated from class l i mi tations that ma ke i m pos si ble the fu l l expansion of ci tizens' rights in national societ ies, suffers from these same l imitations even more acutely, riddled as it is by a bysmal economic and soc ial inequalities and by the oppressivc features inscribed in its structures, norms and ru les of operation. If democracy and c i ti zenship have proved to be such elusive and praetica l ly u ngraspable objectives in the capitalisms of the periphery, why shou ld we expect them to be obtainable in the even less u n favou rable terra i n of the i nternat ional system? The price that Hardt and Negri pay for ignoring this i s the extreme naivety of their proposal, closer to a religious exhor tation than to a rea l istic socia l-democra tic demand . According
90
[0 i t , capi talists should acknowledge that capital is c reated by rhe workers a n d , therefore, accept 'in postmode rn i ty [
] the
fu ndamental modem const i t u tional principle that links right and labor, a n d thus rewards with citizenship t h e worker who creates capital' (p. 400). The mult itude's emaneiparion, conseq uently, seems to ru n along t he following course: ' I f in a first moment the m u lt itude demands t h a I each state recogn ize j u ri diea l ly the m igrations that a re necessary to capita l , in a second moment i t m u s t d e m a n d control over t h e movements themselves' ( p . 400). Conseq uently, our a uthors conclude:
'The general right to control
its own movement is tile multitude 's ultimate demand for global citizenship' (p. 400, emphasis
in original). It is of no use to search
the book for a d i scussion of the reasons why large n umbers o f our people have to e m igrate, desperately seeking to be exploited i n the metropolitan c a pitalisms, s i n ce the des t ru ction - sometimes the silent genocide - practised in the periphery a nd the deterioration of every form of civil ized life under the rise of neoliberalism a re completely a bsent from the pages of
Empire.
Sim ila rly useless
would be the search for a serious d iscussion about the reach and l i mi t a tions t h a t migntion and a nomad ic way of l i fe would have in a (revolut ionary?) project t h a t wou ld al low the m u l t i tudes to take control of t h e i r lives; putting an end to the slave ry of waged labour and of nom i ma l ly 'free' subjects throughout the world. Because of t h is, the equation between migrat ion/nomad i s m and li berat ion/revo l u tion acqu i res i l l u sory characteristics. The second component of t h e supposedly emancipa t i ng pro gra mme of the m u ltitude in its e ffon to defeat the empire is t he right to a soc ial wage and a guara nteed m i n i m u m income for everybody. This demand goes one step beyond t h e fa mily wage, puttipg an end to the unpaid labour of workers' wives a nd fam i ly m em bers. The distinct ion betwecn productive and reprod uctive la bour fades in t he biopo l i t ical context of t h e empire, si nce it is the m ul titude in i t s totaliry that produces and reproduces the social l ife. Th us, 'The demand for a social wage extends to t h e 91
entire population the demand that a l l activity necessary for the prod uction of capital be recognized with an eq ual compensation such that a social wage i s real ly a guaranteed income' (p. 403). Once aga i n , fine intentions with which everybody can agree. But it i s pert inent to formulate some questions: fi rst, i s not t h is second component of the ema nCipating programme extremely similar to the 'citizens' wage' that, with some restrictions i t is true, has been conceded i n some of the m ost adva nced industri a l ized democracies of the North? Is i t so d i fferen t from the moderate social-democrat reformism in place i n some of the Sca ndi navian count ries, especially Sweden? It does n ot seem so. I nstead, i t appears t h a t th is would b e the deepening of a tre nd going back a lmost half a century wi thout, at least a s seen fTom here, having checkmated the capitalists or neutral ized the exploitative charac ter of the bourgeois relationShips of p roduction. Authors such as Samuel Bowles and Herbert G i ntis, for example, thoroughly ex a m ined different i ntemational experiences with what they called 'the citizens' wage' without being able to i n fer from their a na lysis a conclusion that al lows us to support the thesis that in states i n which such a wage h a s been established - wit h greater o r lesser rad i ca l i sm - the m ultitude has been emancipated ( Bowles and Gintis 1 982, 1 986). Second: how would the capitalist class respond to the i mplementat ion of a measure sllch as the a foremen tioned, which, desp ite its l i m i ta t ions, has an enormous distributive cost? Wou ld they accept it without fe rocious resistance? This leads, obviously, to a discussion that postmodern thinkers abhor but which i m poses itself with the same u navoidable power as the un iversal law ofgravity. We are talking, with Machiave l l i , about the problematic of power and how i t i s obta ine d , exerted a nd lost. The third political demand of the m u l t i tude is the right to reappropriation. I t i s a right that conta i ns diverse d i mensions, from language, commun ication and knowledge to machi nes, and from biopolitics to the conscience. This last component is partieu la rly problematic because i t 'dea ls d i rectly with the con92
stituent powe r of the multi tude - or really with the prod uct of the creative i m agination of the mu ltitude that con figures i ts own constitution' (p. 406). On this point, which covers as we know a cruc ial topic i n Negri 's t hought, such as the co nstituent power, the authors i ncessa ntly t ravel between t he constitution of (he m ul t i tude as a social actor - and here a wide space opens i n which to discuss to what exten t this process can be i n terpreted a s the only resul t of its 'creative i magination' - and the consti tution of the U nited States as it appears, in a particu larly ideal ized fash ion and , for a moment, naively interp reted , by the au thors. This becomes evident when, for example, they say: 'the postmodern multitude takes away from the US Constitution what allowed it to become, above and against a l l other constitutions, a n i mperial const itution : its notion of a bound less frontier of freedom a nd its defini tion of a n open spatiality a n d temporality celebrated i n a const i tuent power' (p. 406). There are a few l i ttle problems with this inte rpretation. First, the belief that the so-ca lled postmodern mu ltitude knows the American constitution or someth i ng l i ke it, its deba tes and its lessons; in the best of all possible worlds th is is still a remote pos sibility. If u nder the label of ' m u l titude' Ha rdt and N egri i nclude the more tha n two billion people who barely su rvive on one or two dollars a day and without access to potable water, sewerage systems, electricity and telephones, without food or housing, i t i s somewhat h a rd to understand how they manage to i mbibe the marvello us ema ncipating teachi ngs of the US constitution . If, on the cont ra ry, t he authors are referring to the graduate students of Duke or Pa ris, then the chances improve, though not greatly. But these are minor d eta i ls. The serious issue is their idealization of the America n const itution . Noam Chomsky has a rgued repeat· I
edly that this d ocument, so a d m i red by the aut hors of Empire, was conceived 'to keep the ra bble in l i ne ' a nd to preven t them from, even by accident o r by mistake, having the idea (let a lone the p ractical poss i b i l i ty) that they m ight wa n t to rule the destiny
93
of the U nited States or even govern themselves. The American const itution is decisively and consciously a nt i·democratic and anti-popular, in accordance with what its most i m portant original a rchitects repeatedly declared. For James Madison, the main task of the constitution was that of 'assuring the supremacy of the pe rmanent in terests of the cou n t ry, that are no others than the property rights'. This opinion from one of its wri ters probably went un noticed by Hardt a n d Negri, but i ts force obl iges us seri ously to redefine the role that they assign to the US constitu tion, especially when we consider that Madison's words were pronounced in a country that at the time had a great part of its territory organ ized as a slave economy, a nd tha t the idea of the incipient constitution becoming a beacon for the emancipation of the multitude of the day, mainly slaves, apparen tly d id not enter his thoughts_ M oreover, to avoid attacks on the righ ts of property, Ma dison shrewdly designed a pol itical system that d iscouraged popu lar pa rticipation (something that persists today, with a very low t um-out for e lections wh ich, on top of eve l)1 h i ng else, are held on working days), and fragme nted the process of decision making, while he reaffirmed the i nstitutional balances tha t would guarantee that power would re main fi rm ly i n the hands of those who controlled the wealth of the cou ntry. As C homsky obsclVes, these opinions of Madison in t he cons titu t ional debate of Phila· delphia are less well known than those expressed in the famous Federalist Papers, but they m ay be more revealing of the t rue
spi rit of the constitution than the formal decla rations voiced to the general public. It is no coincidence that, as the brilliant M IT lingu ist remarks, i n a cou n t ry where the publish i ng i ndustry is so dynamic, t he most recent edi tion of those debates dates from 1 838. The American people was not supposed to know about
the ideas t hese gen tlemen di scussed in the convention ( Boron 20oob: 2 28). In short, the constitu tion of the U n i ted States cou ld
hardly be an i nvitation 10 travel through 'the i n fi n i te front iers of freedom', as the authors nai\'eiy proclaim, since still today, 94
and despite successive reforms (one of which prohi bi ted the con sum ption of a lco holic beverages), it prevents t.he American multi tude from d i rectly electing their president. Thanks to the norms and procedures established in t h i s much-adm i red co nstitu t i on , during t h e last presidential elect ion t he candidate who came sec ond in terms of the n u m ber of votes cast by the citizenship cou l d lega l ly become president. Apparently, the authors h a d n o t noticed the da ngers lurking with i n the co nstitutional text . Malcolm B u l l
( 2003: 85) is surely right when he assens t h a t : 'Although h a i led by Slavoj Zizck as "the Commun ist Manifesto for our t i m e " ,
Empire
is more Jeffersonian than MaIXist.' I would add that the book i s
much more Jeffersonian
than Marxist.
Another serious problem emerging from the issue of the rights of approp riat ion is the fol lowing: Hardt and Negri stand o n solid ground when they write: 'Th e righ t to reappropriation i s fi rs t of a l l the right to the reappropriation of the means of production' (p. 406). The old social ists and com m u n i sts, they say, demanded that the proletariat should have free access to the mach ines and materials needed in the production process. But s i nce one of the d is t i nctive signs of post modern i ty i s the com i ng of what Hardt and Negri ca l l 'the i m material and biopolitical produc tion', the concrete contents of the old left and the labour u n i ons' demands have been tra nsformed . Now the m u l ti t ude not only uses machines for production but, accord i ng to the authors, i t 'also becomes i ncreasingly machinic itself, a s the means o f pro duction are in creasi ngly inregrated into the m inds and bod ies of the multitude' (p. 406). The consequence of t h i s mutat ion is that a ge nuine reappropri ation req uires free access and control over not only machines and equ ipment but also over ' knowledge, in forrQation, com mu n ications, and a ffects - because these are some of the pri m a ry means of biopo l i t ical product ion' (p- 407). Now, let us analyse two not very t rivial inconven iencies that emerge from th e precedi ng argument. Fi rst, how do th e knowledge, the information, the commun ication and the a ffects relate to the 95
.!!
VI
'classic' material means of product ion and the materials tha t a re still requ i red to produce most of the goods necessary to sustain life on t h i s planet? Or are we i n the presence of autonomized segm ents of the postmodem b iopol itical production? Are those segments or i nstruments avai la ble fo r anyone? Are the know l edge, the i n formation and the com m u n ication capable of circu lating freely through all classes, social strata and groups of the em pire'? How can the growing monopolistic features acq u i red by the i n format ion and mass commu nication i ndu st ries all over t h e world b e explained? And regard ing knowledge, w h a t c a n b e said about patents and the crucial i ssue of i n tellectual property rights, a new method of pi llage in the hands of the main transnational companies of the indu strialized countries that are looting entire conti nents with the active su pport of their gove rnments? Second, do we have to assume that the owners and/or those who control these new and very complex and expensive means of prod uction will peacefu l ly and gently yield their property and i ts control , t hrowing ove rboard the basis of their wealth and poli tical dom ination itsel f? Why wou l d they act i n such a way, unprecedented in the m i l lenary history of class struggl es? Wou ld they be led to do th is because the i r hearts woul d become ten der before the s h i n i ng vision of the self-constitu ted mu ltitude marching jubilantly towards i ts l i beration? I f this is not the case, wh ich reco mmendation wou l d our authors make regarding the u navoidable i n tensificat ion of class st ruggles and the poli t ical repression tha t wou ld surely fol low as a response to the emanci pating i n i tiatives of the multi tude? The fo urth d i mension of the poli tical programme of the m u l ti tude is the orga n i zation of the multitude as a pol i tical subject, as posse.
The au thors i ntroduce h e re the Latin word posse to refer to
power as a verb, a n activity. Th us, posse 'is what a body and what a m i nd ca n do' (p. 408). In the postmodern society, the constitu ent power of labo u r can be expressed as the ega l itarian righ t of citizensh ip in the world or as the righ t to commun icate, construct 96
languages and con trol the com m u n ication networks; a nd also as a political power, which is to say, 'as the constitution of a society i n w h i c h the basis of power is defined by t h e expression of the needs of a l l ' (p. 4 10). Due to the latter, Hardt and Negri conclude wit h a s u rp risi ngly triumphant tone, 'The capacity t o constru ct places, temporalit ies, migra tions, and new bodies a l ready affirms its hegemony t h rough the actions of the multitu d e aga i n st Empire' ( p . 4 1 1). They wa rn, though, that a small d i fficu lty still persists: 'The only eve n t that we are still awaiting is the construction, or rather the i nsu rgence, of a powerful organization' (p. 4 1 1). Sens i bly t hey recognize that t h ey have no model to offer regard i ng this organiza tion, but they are confident t h a t ' t h e m u l t i tude t h rough i ts practical experimentation wi ll offer th e models and determi ne when a n d how t h e possible becomes real ' (p. 4 11). Some clues, however, were provided in an earlier chapter where we read that 'The real heroes of the liberation of t h e Third world today may really have been the em igrants and the flows of population that have dest royed old and new bou ndaries. I ndeed, the postcolonial h ero is the one who con tinually t ra nsgresses territorial a n d racial bou ndaries, who destroys part icu l a ri sms and points toward a common civilization' (pp. 362-3). Th is is an enigmatic statement because it obl i q uely i nd uces u s to t hink, fi rst, that t he Third World h as already ach ieved its liberation; seco n d , that t h e m u l · titudes of the Third world have also succeeded i n t h e i r attempt to l iberate themselves (an amazing revelation for four- fi ft h s of the world popu lation); th ird, tha t the hero of such a great deed is the migra nt who abandons his native land to e nter Europe or the Uni ted S tates, in most cases illegally, in search of a better l i fe . The a lchemy of theory h a s converted e m igra t ion t o revol u tion.
97
7
Notes for a sociology of revolutionary thinking i n times of defeat
Empire concludes with a political programme for the multitude, whose most i m portant fea t u res h ave bee n outlined i n the previ ous chapter. Once aga i n , the fragi l i ty of the a nalysis m anages to debunk both t h e i r very good i nten tions and their noble goals. The appendix at the end of the last chapter is extraord i narily eloquent, since it d iscusses the issue of political act.ivism a n d fin ishes wit h a h a l l uci nat ory reference to St Fra n c i s . This brief eXClirsus begi ns very nicely, wi t h the a ssert i o n that today's pol itical act ivist is in no way s i m i l a r to the 'sad, ascetic agc n t of the Third I n terna t ional whose soul was deeply penneated by Soviet state reason' (p. 4 1 1 ). On the contrary, today's activi s t is i n spired by the i m agc of the 'com m u n i st and li bera tory co m bat a n ts of the twentie th-ce n tury revol utions' (p. 4 1 2), a mong whom we must include those i n t eUectuals who were persecuted a nd exiled during t h e fascist e ra , the rep u bl icans of the S pa n i s h civil war, t h e mem bers of the a n t i - fascist res ista n ce, a nd those who fough t for freedom i n the a n t i-colo n ia l ist and a n t i- i mperia l i s t wars. T h e mission of t h e poli tical activist has always bee n , and today more t h a n ever, to orga n ize and act, and n ot to represen t . I t is precisely t h e i r co nstitu tive act ivity a n d n o t t h e i r represen tat ive act ivity t h a t characte rizes t hem. ' M i l i ta n cy today is a positive, constmctive, and i n novative a (; livi�' (
] M i l itants re sist imp erial
command in a creative way' ( p . 4 1 3). The c u l m i n a t i o n of this l i ne o f reasoni ng, nevertheless, d oes n o t lead the reader to Che Guevara o r Fidel Cast ro, nor to Nelson Ma ndela . Ho C h i M i n h , M a o Zedong o r Den Bel la, b u t t o S [ Fra ncis o f Assisi . Accord i ng to H ardt and Negr i , St Fra ncis denounced the poverty that was stri k i ng the multitude of his timc, and h e adopted it as one of the
rules of the begging o rd e r thai he would later fou nd , d i scovering in poverty the ontological power of a nt.'w society. The commu n ist militant does the same, ident ifying in the common cond ition of the muitilllde its enormous wealth. Francis in opposition to nascent capitalism refused evet}' type of instru mental discipline. and i n opposition t o the mortification of t h e flesh ( i n poverty a n d in the constituted o rder) he posed a joyous l i fe, includ i ng all of being and nature, the animals. sister moon, brother sun, the birds of the field, the poor and exploited humans. together aga inst the will of power and corruption . (p. 4 1 3 ) I n t he post modern world . H ardt and Negri co n t i n ue. 'we fi n d o urselves i n Fra ncis's s i t u a t i o n , p os i ng aga i n st t he m i s e ry o f power t h e joy of bei ng' (ibid.). T h e outcome of t h i s m isplaced, and dangerous, analogy can o n ly be a very pecu l i a r u ndersta nding o f t he meaning o f revolution in o u r time, 'a revo l u t i o n t hat no power wi l l conrrol - because biopower and c o m m u n i sm , coopera tion and revol u t i o n remai n together, in love, s i m p l i city, a nd a lso i nnocence. This is the i rrepressi b l e l igh tness and joy of being c o m m u n ist' (ibid.). So wha t is i t that H ardt a n d Negri suggest? That the multitude w i t h i n the e m pi re, i nsp i red by the example set by 5t Francis, should play gen t l e melodies on the i r viol i n s to pacify the Levia · t h a n s of neoli bera l globa lization, j u s t as St fra ncis d i d w i t h the wild a n i m als i n t he woods? O r t h a t the i n noce n t songs to l i fe s u ng by the p roduct ive m u lt itude will convi n ce the masters of t he world of their u nwort h i ness a n d gu ilt, a n d henee they will give u p t h e i r p rerogat ives, wea l t h a n d p rivilege? For t h e sake of h u m.a n i ty, we can o n ly hope that these new postmodern com m u ni st activists will be somewha t m o re successful i n d e fea t i ng capitalism t h a n t h e fra nciscan order, a n d t h a t t he outcome of t h e i r activism will be more productive both in terms of the eradi cation o f pove rty a n d of the ema ncipation of m a n k ind than that 99
c
j
obtai n ed long ago by the prayers a nd sacrifices of 5t Francis. A carefu l reading of Empire allows us to conclude that the au thors' goal of displaying a sophist i cated analysis of the world order ends in fai l u re. H ow can we explain the b l i nd ness of these [\Yo co m m u n i s t academ ics to the i n herently i mperialist nature of the intemationaJ system? Throughout th is book, I have mentioned some factors that I feel need to be taken i nto account i n order to explain the authors' fa il ure to achieve t he i r goal: the extremely fo rmalist and legalistic point of departure; the weak· n ess of the instru ments used to analyse polit ical economy; t he lack of ve ry basic economic data; t he naive acceptance of several neoliberal and postmodern axioms; the con fusing heritage of struct u ralism and its visceral rejection of the subj ect; and, last but not least, the unset tling effects o f a radically mista ke n theory of the state. Given the formidable i n tellectual calibre of H ardt and Negri, especi a l ly in the case of the Italian academic wi th his strong experience i n the fields of Marxist social and political philosophy, how can we explain such d isappointing results? In an o utstand i ng piece of work, Terry Eagleton provides some hints that m ight help us solve the puzzle. In order to faci l i tate comprehension of his a rgument. Eagleton invites u s to i magine the i mpact that an overwhelming defeat wo uld have on a radical d issident move' ment. assum ing that t h i s defeat seems to erase from the public agenda the topics a n d proposals of the movement not only for the l i fetime o f its members but probably for ever. As time goes by, the movement's central theses become more cha racterized by their i rrelevance than by their falseness. The movement's op' ponents no longer bother to debate or refute the m , but i nstead they contemplate these t heses with a stra nge combination of indifferen t cu riosity, 'of the same type that one can have towards t he cosmology of Ptolemy or the scholastics of Thomas Aq u i nas' (Eagleton 1 997: 17)· What a re the pract ica l alternatives that these antagonists face,
100
given t h e a foremen tioned political a n d ideological catastrophe, i n which a world of seemi ngly u nmoving and obj ective certain ties, of determ i n a n t structures, o f 'laws of motion' a n d efficient causes, has suddenly van ished l i ke morn i ng fog, giving place to a colourful galaxy o f social fragments, hazardous con t ingencies and brief circumsta nces whose endless com bi nations have led to t he bankru ptcy not only of Marxism but a l so of the whole theoretical heritage of the E n l ightenment? Eagleton asserts t hat, for a 'post modern sensibility', the central M a rxist ideas a re more often ignored than fough t agai nst: it is no longer about their wro ngness, b u t i nstead, i t is a bout t he i r i rreleva nce. The Berl i n Wall has already fallen; the Soviet Union has su ffe red a gigantic i m plosion, and for many today it is a blu rred memory; capital ism, markets and liberal democracy seem to wi n everywhere, accord i ng to Francis Fukuyamaj the old work i ng class has been a tomized by post-fordism ; t he nation-states seem to be undergoing a messy withd rawal, kneeling l i ke serfs i n front of the strength of global markets; the Warsaw Pact has been d issolved in embarrassm ent j social democracies s h amelessly embrace neoliberalism; C h i na opens up to fo reign capital a n d becomes part of the wro; and the forme r 'socia list camp' disappears from the i nternational arena. What should we do? Eagleton proposes some i n teres t i ng alternatives that i l l u m i · nate not o n ly the rou tes probably walked by the au thors, but
,. .. o
also the i t i neraries covered by many o f those who, i n the La tin
o·
American context of the 1960s and 1970s, extolled the im m i ne nce of the revolution and awaited wi th their arms ready the arrival of t he 'decisive day'. We can fi n d , on the one hand, t hose who either cynica l ly or sincerely moved to t h e right. On the other hand there a re those who stayed o n t he left, but who did so wi th resignation a nd nostalgi a , given t h e i nexorable d issolution of their identity. There are still others who have closed their eyes i n delusional triumphalism, recognizing in the weakest traces of a street demonstration or a strike clear signs of t h e i m m i n e n t 101
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outbreak of revolution. Finally, there a re those who keep their radical i m pu lse al ive, but who have had to red i rect it to regions other tha n the pol itica l a rena ( i bid.). Hard t and N egri lind themselves, we cou l d argue, wi t h i n the complex field that defines t h i s fou rth a lternative. They have n ot moved to the righ t, as Regis Debray or ( i n Latin America) M ario Vargas L10sa have done. Nor have they re ma ined in the deep and pai n fu l perception of the defeat of a set of ideas in wh ich they s t i l l be l ieve, nor have they b l i nd folded t hemselves by pretending that nothing has occu rred and search the planet for signs that forecas t t h e retu rn of the revo l u tion. Their a ttitude has been healthier: open ing, sea rch ing, reconst ruction . N eedless to say, a process of t his type carries with it the inevitable risk of invol untar· i1y accepting a prem ise that, i n the long run, can frustrate the renovating project: the idea 'that the system is, at least for the time being, u n beatable' (ibid .). From here, a series o f theoretical and practical conseq uen ccs e merge that, as r will explai n below, a re neatly reflected in t h e postmodem agenda. On the one hand , an almost obsessive i n rerest i n the exami na tion of the social forms that grow in the margins or in the i n terst ices of the syste m ; on the other hand, the search for those social forces that at least for now could commit some sort of t ransgression against the system, or coul d promote some type o f l i m ited and ephemeral subversion against it. The celebration of the marginal and the ephemera l , the prejud ice that 'minori ty' i s a synonym for l i be ration (bl urring the role pl ayed by a vel)' special m inority, namely the bourgeoi sie), wh i le the mass ive a nd cen t ra l , the non-margi na l , i s demonized , has become pa rt of t h is new poli t ical and cultural e t hos. I f the system appears to be not only i nexpugn i b le but a lso oppressive, the abandonment of a ' modern' t heorization such as the Ma rxist one leaves no escape other than its purely imaginary neg-a tion. I n this way ' the oth e r' , the d i fferent, ari ses as the supposed an· tagon ist of the existing order, And it is precisely its 'otherness' t h a t guaran tees the ra d ical ism of i ts a n tagon ism, when it lurn� 102
it i n to someth ing i m possible to a s s i milate a n d therefore i n to t.he o n ly ( i l lusory) al te rn ative to the system. The ou tcome of a product ion that is consistent with its poi nt of d e pa rt u re, the i nvinci b i l ity of the syste m , is what Eagleton ca lls ' l i be rta r i a n pessim i s m ' ( i b i d . : 1 9). Pess i m ism, because the system prese nts itself as o m n ipotent and ove rbeari ng; l i bertari a n , because i t al lows u S t o dream about m u l t iple s u bversions a nd the overcom i ng of the system, withou t i m plying the ide n t i fication of flesh and blood agents ca pable of turning those drea m s i n to reality. The system is everywhere a n d it cancels the d i s t i nction between 'inside' a n d ·outside': wha tever is i n side is part of its machi n e ry a n d is there fo re an accom p l ice; whatever is o u tside is u n a b le to d e feat it. This is the main source of the rad ical pessimism tha t permeates this line of thought, regard less of i ts proc l a i med revolutionary i ntentjons. Eagleton ' s work is extraord i n a ri ly suggestive a n d - written a t the same ti me that Hardt and Negri were working on the writing of Empire
-
i t a n t ic ipates with outsta n d ing sharpness some of the
general fea t ures prese n t i n that theorization. Like t he system, the e mpire is o m n i present, a n d although the authors by no means as sert that the empire is invincible, the tonc used i n the i r argu ment c u l m i nates with a pessim istic re mark t h a t st.rongly resem b les capi t u la t io n . Throughout the book , t.he conserva tive forces of order are i n fi n itely m ore powerful and e ffective than t hose al legedly called upon to destroy the empire. Aga i nst the powers of the bom b , t he money, langu a ge a n d i mages, there a rises a Th ird World 'hero' wh o i nstead of em bracing rcvolution selects e m igra t ion . Moreover, l he e m p i re recognizes no 'outside' and ' inside'; we a re a l l ' inside' and, even though t h is is not expl icitly menSioned, we a re a l l s u bjected to its a rbitrary modes a n d its oppression. The one thing that can brea k i t down is the u n foresee a ble act jon of the ideal ized 'other', the m ul t i tude, marked as it is by an in fi n i t e com b i n a t ion of i n exha usti ble singu l a ri ties. The classes and the people, categories of i nclusion at a time when 1 03
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there were still 'n ational' capital ism a n d nation-states, become volatile in the work of Hard t a n d Negri and they leave space for the hopeful negativity of the multitude. And some featu res that the authors identify as carrying a radical answer to the system - ' d i f· fe rence', 'hybridation', heterogeneity a nd inexhausti ble mobility - are, as specified once again by Eagleton, 'native to the capitalist mode of production and therefore t hey are i n n o way inherently rad ical phenomena' (ibid.: 2 1 ). In a ny case, this syndrome is far from being u n i que i n the history of Marxism and revolutionaty thought. Perry Anderson detected this with his habitual shrewdness in a releva nt piece of scholars hip published at a very special poi n t in t i me, 1 976, when Keynesian capitalism a n d the social-democratic strategy (fol lowed by both socialist and co m m u n ist parties, especia l ly in Italy, France a n d Spain) were dec l i n i ng a n d when the first s igns of the neolibera.l coun ter-revolu tion were starting to show. I a m referri ng, of course, to Considerations on Western Marxism, a book that was conceived to examine a d i fferent h istorical process, that of the 1920S and early 1 930s, a period that was a lso deeply characterized by defeat. H owever, it is not my purpose here to try to reconstruct an imaginary dia logne between Eagleton a n d Anderson, though I believe it would b e very enlighteni ng. given the chal lenge that u nderstand i ng the theoretical mess presemed in Empire e n ta i ls. Defeat d u ri ng t he 1920S, defeat once again during the 1980s; a l i ne of thought characteristic of that wh ich H a n nah Arendt would portray with extraord inary s u btlety i n her revision of the hard times u ndergone by the brigh t men and women who lived during the t i mes that Bertolt Brecht called t he 'da rk ages'. A look at the l ives of Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benj a m i n or Bertoli Brecht h imself, just to mention some of t hose who ded icated their l ives to socialist ideals, reveals some extremely i n teresting teachings_ For exa mple, the fact that u n t i l the moment at which the ca tastrophe took place, the truth was h idden beh ind a thick 104
fog of d iscourses, double d iscou rses a n d various mechanisms that effectively concealed the ugly facts and d issipated the most reasonable doubts. Such concea lment was possible thanks to the work of both public servants and good·hearted i ntellectuals. Then , all of a sudden , tragedy emerged (Arendt 1 968: viiil. Isn't it possible, then, that Hard t and Negri have become victims of [he way in which i n tellectual product ion is undertaken by those who live during dark ages? There is no way for us to know. [n a ny event, Eagleton has pro\'ided us with some clues that will help u s understand t h e difficulties faced by left·wing intellectuals t rying to explain the most abom inable aspects of our time. Anderson adds some other clues that mesh very smoothly with those sug· gested by Eagleton. Th i s Marxism of defeat ' has paradoxically reversed the trajectory of Marx's own i n tellectual development' (Anderson 1 976: 52). If the founder of historical materialism turned from philosophy to politics and from poli t ics to pol itical economy, the 'Western Marxist' t radition reversed this path and quickly searched for a place to h ide - both from revolutionary defeat at the hands of fascism and from the frustration a riSing from i ts 'triumph' and consolidation i n the USSR - i n the most abstruse areas of philosophy. The path of the young Marx from philosophy to pol i t ics was based on the conviction t h a t 'the radical character of social criticism requires for us to go to a deeper level of analysis than tha t of the abs tract man, and that in order to u nderstand the man i n context we need to delve into the anatomy of the civil society' (Boron 2oooa: 302). In walking bac kwards in Marx's steps i nstead of goi ng forwards, phi losophi' cal and epistemological thought have once agai n been put at the centre of the scene, overshadowing the pol itical, economic and historical worries of the founder. Th i s reorientation towards the ,
ph ilosoph ical and the metaphysical, clearly reflected i n Empire, goes hand·in·hand wilh a second fea ture recognized by Anderson as one of the d istinctive marks of West em Marxism in the period between the two world wars (Anderson 1976: 5). As he explains, 105
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this brand of Marxism was characteri2ed by its esoteric language and its inaccessi bility to a nyone not already immersed i n the field: 'The excess above and beyond the necessary verbal com plexity was a sign of its d ivorce from any popular pract ice: This conceptual pro l i ferat ion becomes ma n i fest i n some sym ptoms that are also apparent in Hard t and Negri 's work: the language is unnecessarily d ifficult; the syn tax is, at times, impe netrable, and there is a needless lise of neologisms that only contribu tes to a more hermetic work. Finally, t here is one last element t.hat chara(·teri2es this theoretical regress ion : 'Due to the lack of mag netism that the existence of a class-based social movement can provide, t he Marxist tradition has leaned more and more towards the contemporary bourgeois culture: And, Anderson suggests, 'the original relationship berween M arxist t heory and proletari an practice was swiftly but fi rmly su bsti t u ted by a new relationship between Marxist theory and bourgeois t heory' (ibid_: 55). The t ruthfulness of this assertion can be confirmed rat her easi ly, j ust by ta ki ng a look at the list of aut hors discussed by Hardt and Negri. very few of whom have had a ny sort of pa rt icipat ion in a ny of the big fights led by the classes a nd the popular sectors of society in t he last twenty years. In an i nterview that took place recently, M ichael H ard t offe red some i nteresting clues rega rding the reasons for the astonishing theoretieal involution that beeomes apparent throughout Empire. During the interview, he observed that, i n Marx's t i me, revol ution ary t hought recognized three main sources of i nspiration: Ger man phi losophy, British political economy and French pol itics: ' Nowadays [ ... ) the orientations have changed and revol utionary t hought is guided by French phi losophy, North Ameriean eco nom ic science, and I talian polities' (Hard t 2001)_ Hardt is right, as long as he is referring to the orientation that guided h is own work and not to the sources that inspire revolutionary t hought. I n fact. both French philosophy and the economie theories that are t aught in most busi ness schools t.hroughout the U n ited States 106
play a p redomi na n t role i n Empire. Of course, not h i ng al lows us to assume that these new theoretical avenues wil l either represent a step fo rwards in terms o f i m proving and developing a theo ry of capital i s m 's i m peri a l i st stage, or, even less, that they wi ll cont ri bute to the elaboration of a 'guide for action' that will i l l u m i nate for us the path that the social forces of transformation and change should fol low. ConlTiuy to Hegelian dialectics, with its empha· s i s o n the h i storic and transi tory character of all i nstitutions and socia l practices, and the con tradictory cha racter of social existence, contemporary protest seeks to u pdate i ts theoretical a rsenal i n such u n reliable sources a s structuralism and post· s t ructu ralism, semiology. laca nian psychoa nalysis, and a whole series o f philosophical currents characterized by their adherence to post modernism. O n the other hand, it is i m possible to view the crowd i ng·out of political economy a nd i ts replace ment by North Am e rican economic science - whose narrowness, pseudo· mathematic formalism and superficia l i ty are tod ay u n iversally recogn ized - as a step forwards towards a better understanding of the econom ic rea l i t i es of our t i me. To suggest that the d isplace ment of figures of the stature of Ada m Smith or David Ricardo by pygmies such as Mi lton Fried man or Rud iger Dorn busch can be a n e ncouraging sign in the consrruetion of a leftist l i ne of thought is, to say the least, a m on umental m istake. Lastly, to say that the Italian pol iti cal system, onee home to t he largest com m u nist party in the western hemi sphere a nd nowadays governed by a repulsive creature, Silvio Berl usconi, is a renewed source of i n s p i ration that can be compared to n i netee n th-centu ry France, "",ith its great popular u prisi ngs and the wonderful experience of the Paris Commune, the fi rst government of the working class i n world h istory, demonstrates dearly the extent o f t his mistake, that could have d isast rous consequences for both praetieal pol i tics as well as in the dom a i n of t heory. Still taking into acco unt the aforemen tioned considera t ions, ] can not refrain from asking how i t was possible for Antonio
107
Negri , who has written some of the most i m ponant books and ankles within the Marxist tradition over the last qua rter of a centu ry, to write a book i n which it appears as if he has forgotten everyth i ng that he had previously though t. There is no doubt that Negri has been one of the most i mportant M arxist theorists. I Born in Padua, ltaly, in 1 933, he graduated in Phi losophy from his natal city's u niversity, and i n the 1 960s was appoi nted Professor of Theory of the State in the Polit ical Science department in Padua. At the same time, his practical i nvolvement in I tal ian pol i tical l ife tu rned him i nto one of the leaders of the Potere Opcraio and one of the most outsta n di ng figures of the Italian left, very critical of the po li tical and theore tical line fostered by t he Italian Commu nist Party, PCI. In 1979 Negri was arrested and sent to prison a fter a faulty legal process. He was accused of being t he intellectual mentor of the terrorist anions of the Red Brigades, i ncluding the assassination of Italian Prime M i n ister Aldo Moro. In 1 983 the Italian Rad ical Party, a moderate combi nation of l i be ralism and social democracy, sponsored h is candidacy to parliament, i n order t o pressu re the Italian government into reviSing t he legal sentence. After being elected member of parliament by popular vote, parliamentary i m m u n ity allowed him to get out of prison. Shortly a fter, the m l i ng pany wit h a majority in parliament - with the i n fa mous complicity of PCI MPs, i n a scandalous political act - revoked his i m m u n i ty, a n d , as many other anti-fascists had done before, Negri depa rted for exile i n France. The a lready entirely corrupt Italian judicial system d eclared Negri a rebel and he was condem ned to t h i rty years in prison, accused of 'armed insurrection aga i nst the state' with an additional sentence of four a nd a half years because of h i s 'moral responsibi lity' for violent confrontations between the police, students and workers that took place in Milan between 1973 and 1 977.
I A 5ublle analysis or Negri·s i n telleclual and political l rajeelOl)' is to be ruund in Callin icos (ZOO)).
108
I m p risonmen t d i d not preve nt Negri from writing; a mong texts written in prison, La Anomalia Sa/vaje, published in 1 9 8 1 , is worth mentioning. By this time he had a l ready published some of his main contributions to Marxist t heory: Opera; e Stato. Fra Rivolu· zione d'ollobre e New Deal ( 1 97 2), Crisi dello stato'piallo (19 74), Proletari e Stato ( 1 9 76), L a Forma Stato. Per la Critica deU'Economia Politica della Constituzione ( 1977), Marx oltre Marx ( 1 979), and a
se minal article a bou t capitalist restructuring after the great de· pression, ' Keynes and t he Capital ist theory of the State', origi nally published in Italy and later transla ted into several languages and reprinted in Labor ofDionysus, a book that Negri wrote years later wi th M ichael Hardt. Negri remained in France for fou rteen years, between 1983 and 1 997. Fran�ois M i t terra n d ' s gove rn men t's protection was decisive i n terms of dissuad ing the I talian secret service from its origi nal intention of kidnapping Negri. During his years in France, Negri taught at the famous E cole Norma le Superieure and at the U n iversity of Paris VI I I a n d , together with other distinguished 1-'Tench colleagues, he fou nded a new theoret· ical magazine: FI/Cur Anterieur. It is obvious t hat du ring h is stay in France Negri shelved his i nterest in Germ a n philosophy a nd acq u i red a great fa m i liarity with French philosoph ical deba tes marked by the presence of i ntellectuals such as Louis Althusser, Alain Badiou, E t ienne Bal iba r, jean lIaudri llard , Gilles Deleuze, j acques Derrida, M ichel Foucault, Felix Guaua ri, jacq ues Lacan , j ean'Fra n�oise Lyotard , jacques Ranciere and many others. His stay i n France was a period of in tense t heoret ical production and profound i ntellect ual, a nd to some extent polit ica l , reorientation. Among rhe most imponant books published d u ring t hat period it is won h mentioni ng L es nouveaux espaces de liberlfi, in col· labo �ation with Fel i x Guattari ( 1<)8s); Fabbriche del soggetto ( 1 987); 1'he Politics of Subversion ( 1 989); II potere constituente ( 1 992); a nd Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the Statclonn, co·authored with
M ichael Hard t ( 1 994). In 1 99 7 , after t he scandalous collapse of the Italian slate institutions and the crises of Christian Democracy
1 09
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and the I talian Social ist Party, Negri returned to I ta ly where his previous sentence had bee n revoked . He spent a short period in the Reb ibbia prison and. afterwards, was perm itted to serve a new, shorter a nd more benign sentence that entails living at home in Trastevere during the d ay a n d spending the nights in prison. I t is i n t h i s context t h a t Negri co-au thored Empire. with M ic hael H a rdt
8
The persistence of imperialism
'The United States seem t o bc destined by Providence t o plague the Americas with misery i n the name of freedom' Simon Bolivar
The rad ical goa l repeatedly deela red th roughou t Empire - to con t ri b u t e to the c reation of a 'ge nera l theoretical struct u re and for that stru c t u re to cons t i t u te a set of conceptual tools al lowing u s to theorize and a c t i n the E m p i re a n d aga i n st i t' - falls t o e a rt h a s a res u l t of the i nc u rable wea k ness of the a n a lysis. U n fortun ately, the tool box i s l acking some of the most basic i n struments for t h eorizi ng a bo u t the e m pire a n d , more seriously, for fight ing aga i n st i t . Th is fi n a l critique could be su m marized by saying tha t t he book's most crucial fau l t is its serious d iagnostic m is takes. There is no con nection between a t heoretical backgrou n d that is u narguably conservative i n n a t u re
-
o r whose n a t u re is a t
best confu s i ng - a n d which d e rives m a i n ly from eonven tional neol i beral k n owledge that extols globalization and ' n a tu ra lizes' capitalism on one h a n d , and the b l u rry vision of a new society and a new i n ternational order to be b u i l t over radica lly d i fferen t premisses o n the other. I f t he d iagnosis is i naccu ra te, t h e new social a n d political constru c t ion is doomed to failure. The fragi lity of the ana lysis is a p pa rent as ea rly as the Preface of the book. The authority c ited in order to define the fundamenta l concept that
gi ves
the book its n a m e is not Len i n or Bukha ri n or Luxe m b u rg
or, more recently, Sa m i r Am i n , A nd re G u n de r Fra n k , I m m a nuel Wa llerste i n , E ric Hobsbawm, Samuel Eisenstadt, Pa blo Gonza l ez Casa nova, Agu st i n C ueva, Alonso Agu i la r, H e l i o Jagua ribe, J o h n Saxe-Ferna ndez, J ames Petras or a ny of the m a ny other scholars who have contribute d to our u nd e rsta n d i ng of the topic. No. I n stead, the a u thors mention M a u rice Duverger, a French poli-
.l:
at iii
t ical scien t ist comforta bly installed in the most conventional currents within the discipline and an academic who has never been associated with any of the cri tical schools of though t. These l i mitations are even more conspicuous when it becomes clear how easily the au thors prese n t as their own the conve n tional definitions used hy business school p rofessors who conceive globalization as an ' i rresistible and i rreversi ble' p rocess before wh ich the democratic states should kneel. We can recogn ize i n this formu lation t he old trap o f t h e bourgeOis ideologists for whom capital ism is not h i ng but the ' natura l ' manifestation of ou r human acq u isi tive and egoistic i m pu lses, and every system other than capitalism is viewed as 'artificial ' or as the i m prudent product of political will . Hardt and Negri appear to have paid no attent ion to the sensible com ments made by a genuine American li beral not too long ago: John K. Galbraith, who sharply argued that 'global iza tion is not a serious concept. Us, Americans, have invented it in order to h id e our pol icies of econom ic penetration in the rest of t.he world ' (Ga lbraith 1997: 2). This a rgument comes very close to admitt i ng that capita lism's i rresisti bility and i rrevers' ibil ity leave no alternative options, an argument deeply engrai ned in the heart of neoliberal thought. Ellen Meiski ns Wood (2003: 63) is right when she observes that if ' t here is no material point at which the power of capital can be challenged , and wi th all forms of pol i tical action effectively d i sabled, the ru le of capital is com plete a nd eternal '. The clamorous i nconsistency between the au t hors' analysis and their pol itical goa ls is also revealed when the reader asks to what extent the system's 'global logic' is overlaid by contra' dictions that could eventually lead t o its col la pse and t o the preparation of the material and cultural bases n eeded to build an alternative system. This is partinllarly serious when we realize t hat the aut hors seem n ot to be aware of the fu ndamental con ti nuity that exi sts between the supposedly 'new' emp i re's global logic, its fu ndamental actors, its institutions, norms, rules and 11 2
procedures, and the logic that exis ted i n thc al legedly dead phase of i mperialism. Hard t and Negri seem not to have realized that the st rategic actors are the same, the large transnational compan ies but with a national base, on one hand, and the governm en ts of industrial ized cou ntries, on the other hand; that the decisive insti· tutions are still those that characterized the i mperialist phase they cla im is now fi nished, such as the I M F, the World Bank, the WTO, and other simila r organizations; and t hat t he rules of the game of the internat ional system are still the ones dictated mainly by the United States and global neoliberalism , and that were im posed by force d u ri ng the climax of the neolibe ral cou n ter-revolution through the 1980s and the begi n n ing of the 1 990S. Given their de· sign , pu rpose and fu nctions, these rules do nothing hut continuo ously reproduce and perpetuate the old i mperialist structu re i n a new guise. We would be much closer to the truth if, paraphrasing Lenin, we say that the empire is the 'superior stage' of imperial ism and nothi ng else. Its fu nctioning logic is the same, a nd so are the ideology that justifies its existence, the actors that make its dyna mics, and the unfair results that reveal the persistence of relations of oppression a nd exploitation. I n Marx's analyses, the con t radictions in the development of bou rgeois society wou ld lead it to its own destruction. Th e logic of social devel opment was presided over by class struggles and contradict ions between the forces of production a nd the social relations of prod uction, The problem with H ardt and Negri's a nalyses is that the new global logic of rule that al legedly prevails in the empire as i magi ned by the aut hors lacks any struct u ral or inherent con t radictions.' The only cont radiction that is p resent is that of the potential t h reat posed by the multitude if it ever a ban doned t he lethargy I
For a penetrating analysis of the shoncomi ngs of the '('(assie thcorics
of i m perial i:;m' a nd the new challenges posed by today's new facets of i m perial ism, see Panitch and G i nd i n (2004) and, in general , the ;\nic1es i ncluded in Socialist Register 2004 (Panitch and Lcys 1004), See also John Bellamy Foster (2002),
1 13
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It " CI ... III
j. :::I 1'1 CI
!1. �" 1 �"
2iii" 3
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in which it is kept by the mass med ia a n d the bourgeois cultural industry. Even if t h i s happened, t hough, there is noth ing in the book to convince the reader of the existence of struct u ral - and hence impossible to overcome - contradictions between the empi re and the m u l t i tude. On the contra ry, it would be possi ble to extend the a uthors' a rgu ment (0 say that i f the rulers behave wisely, they a re in a very good posit ion to absorb the demands of the mu lti tude by mea n s of relaxing migratory norms or pro· gressively establ ish i ng a guarantced m i n i m u m i ncome. Episodcs d ur i ng which the do minant classes have been forced to adopt progressive policies so as to hold back popular tides or in order to co-opt potential adversaries have not been infrequent in the political history of the twentieth cen t u ry, and the two measu res m entioned above are in no way i ncompatible with the su rvival of the capitalist relations of prod uction nor a re thcy i ncompatible \\oi th the con ti n u ity of i m perialism. Du ring t h e 1 980s, neol i beralism won a st rategic battle fo r the mean ings of words used in everyday speech, pan ic'ularly i n t h e public sph ere, Throughout the globe t h e word 'reform' was successfu l ly used to refer to events that a somewhat rigorous analysis would have undoubtedly classified as 'counter·reform ', The aforementioned 'reforms' were material ized i n not too reo formist policies such as the disman tling of social sec uri ty, the reduction of social provisions, the c u ts in public spending on ed ucation, health and hous i ng, and the legalization of the ol igopol istic control of the econ omy. The word 'deregula t ion' was actively promoted by the neol iberal and managcrial ideo· logists c i ted throughou t Empire to refer to a process through which gove rnmental i n tervention in economic m a t ters was suppressed in order to restore the ' natural sel f-regulation' of e('onomic processes. In fact, what 'deregulation' means is that the previous regulations esta blished by democra t ic' governments - and which led, i n some way, to a certa i n d egree of popular sovereignty - were ba nished, and after t h i s happened the capacity 1 14
to regu late the function i ng of markets was left in the hands of the most powe rfu l actors, the oligopol ies. Governmental capacity to regu late was privatized and transferred to large companies. As Samir Amin wrote, 'all the markets are regu lated, and they o n ly fu nction u nder that cond itio n . The essential thing is to know who regulates them and how' (A min ZOO l : z6). To conclude: the commonsense of the last two decades of t he previous century has been sa tura ted by the contents of neoliberal ideology. Further proof of this fact is the ready acceptance of the dogma claiming that state-owned com panies were by definition i nefficient and p roduced low-q uality goods and services; that the state was a bad administrator: that private compan ies sat isfy the demands and requirements of consumerSj t hat ol igopolies promote social progress through u n restricted market freedomj and, finally, that, as argued i n the ' t rickle-down' theory, i f the rich get richer, the wealth concentrated a t the top of the social pyramid soons spills over to reach the least advan taged sectors of the popula tion. Nowadays, all those stories face a terminal crisis of c red i bi l i ty. For a long time, the hegemony of neoli beralism was nOI only economic and ideologieal but also pol i tica l . I n tha t field too we observe a backwards movemen t . Economies do not respond as predicted and, after more than twenty years of painful experi ments, the results are dire. Argentina isjust the most recent case, but in no way the only one, that demonstrates once more the fi nal result of t he policies promoted by the Washi ngton Consensus.
.... �
The pol i ti ca l formulas of a successful neoliberal ism, whose arche
II
types are still the sinister figures of Carlos S. Menem in Argentina,
1 ...
Carlos Salinas de Gortari in Mexico and Al berto Fuji mori i n Peru,
;'
have demonstrated their inabil ity to remain in power and t heir inability to establish a new structure of domina tion in accordance ,
with the needs of t he empire's dominant classes. The ideologi-
'"
if � " • o
-
cal hegemony of neoli beralismj its capacity to ascribe new and
3' 1
con tradictory mea ni ngs to old words, is be ing rapid ly eroded.
e.
Empire could perfectly be thought of as a late chapter of that 1 15
:2,
iii '
:I
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h istory. The book was published in 2000 and its real fu nction -
I concede this was not the inte ntion of the au thors - seems
to have bee n to make a l i t tle bit more palatable the increas i ngly atrocious and despicable fea tures of the im perial ism of the end of the century. Probably noth i ng cou ld haye been more conven ient for the imperialist powers, gu ided not without fri ction and contrad ictions by the U n i ted States, than this represe n tation of the imperialist order metamorphosed i n to a phan tasmagoric system , wit hout identi fiable dominators and beneficiaries, and, above all, inspired by the most elevated legal not ions of Kantian l i neage that only t he enemies of freedom and justice would dare to criticize. While the authors were giving the last touch to their metaphysical empire, t he i mperial ists were eager to launch the Colombia Plan with its declared goa l of stabilizing the polit ical and m i l i tary situation in that cou n t ry and of control l i ng d rug t raffic in the area, whose fu nds are carefu l ly lau ndered in fiscal havens th roughou t the region that survive thanks to Washington's i ndulgence. Another of the afore mentioned project's objectives is the establishment of a strategic base in the heart of South America as a means to monitor the advances of the popular movement i n Brazil, a cou n try which , by chance, i s the home of two of the most important popular organ iza tions of the western world, t h e PT and t he MST. Another important imperi al ist i n i t iative is the Pueblal Panama Pla n i ntended to 'solve· the (apparently iccommun icable, accord ing to Hardt and Negri) co nflict in Chiapas and, in addi tion, to set u p an establishment in the largest Mexican reservoir of fresh water in order to provide Southern California with that vital liqu id . Moreover, it was imperialism that launched a 'humanitar ian intervention' in the former Yugoslavia; it constan tly sabotages the construction of Mercosur so as to facil itate the rapid formal ' i ntegration' of the La t i n American econ omies into American hegemony through the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA); and it works witho u t ceasi ng to ensure the collaboration of some regional governments, such as those of Argentina, Costa Rica 116
and Uruguay, in i m posing sanctions on C u ba for alleged human rights violations and to make i t pay an exorbitant price for its lack of docility towards American imperialism. I n other latitudes, its activism leads it to su pport its allies i n Tu rkey when they com mit genocide aga i nst the Kurd i sh m i nori ty wi thou t fear, and to sup port similar actions by I ndonesia against East Timor, and by the fascist Israeli government of Ariel Sharon against the PaJestinians. A few years earlier, the empire, allegedly i n the name of u n iversa l law, i nvaded Panama, killing t housands of in nocent civilians with the goa l of capturing Preside n t Noriega, a former collabora tor of the CIA and the DEA, a nd put in power by Was hington; i t caused more than )0,000 deaths in its offensive agai nst the Sand inista government i n Nicaragua; and it started the G u l f War. In the economic terrain, im perial ism was again active, promoting the approval of thc M u l tilatera l Agreement on I nvestments, i n order to legalize the tyra n ny of marke ts, especially i n the Third Wo rld , and it made strong efforts to ensure that the I M F and the World Bank would not lend a n ickel to those cou ntries that d i d not ac cept the 'conditionalities' imposed by the ma rket's international fi nancial i nstitutions. In this way, a recent loan to Ecuador in cluded arou nd a h u ndred and forty req u i rements of this type - among them, massive d i smissals of public servants, cuts in public social spending, an end to su bsid ies - and more than two h u n d red 'conditionali ties ' were reported i n several loa ns to su b-Saharan Africa, a l l of which were oriented to consol idate the p resence of 'market forces' i n the economy. On the o ther hand, i m perialism has bee n con stantly imposing economic pol i cies that severely u ndermine the economic sovereign ty of cou n tries in the periphery and dimi nish their li kel ihood of be i ng able to devel9P their eco no m ies, consol idate their d emocracies, a nd respond posit ively to t heir popu lations' expectations of material and spiritual progress (Stigl itz 2000)_ Leo Pa n i tch clai ms, wit h regard t o t h i s issue, t h a t a report by the World B a n k demonstrates that on the sa me year in wh ich the M lA was aborted 'there were \17
�
:
at least as many as 1 5 1 changes in the regulations that govern direct foreign i nvestments in 76 cou n t ries, and 89% of them were favorable to fore ign capital' ( Pan i tch 2000: 1 6)_ Meanwh ile, Pablo Gonzalez Casanova has developed a methodology for the study of the surplus l Tansferences from the Th ird World towa rds metropoli tan capita lism. In the twenty-t h ree years from 1972 to
1 995, the vol u me of those transfers hoovered u p by the e m p i re's dom inant classes reached the astonishi ng amount of$4.5 trill ion; the calc ulatio ns made using t h i s same methodology excl usiYely for La tin America by Saxe-Fern andez and N unes show that the figure ' s u rpasses the 2 t ri l lion dol lar threshold paid in two dec ades of globalizing neo-I iberalism, a magn i tude that is eq ual to
the combined GDPs of all the countries in Latin America and the Caribbean i n 1997' (Gonzalez Casanova 1998; Saxe Fernandez et al. 2001: 105, 1 1 1). I n a word, i m perialist oppression contin ues to exist wh ile a lost patrol of radical scholars proclai m� that the age of i m perialism
has concluded and exalts the figure o f St F rancis as the pa rad igm of the renovated m i l i tancy aga i nst the spectre of an empi re that is i m possible to seize, define or fi nd , and hence impossible to bea t . That which is openly recogn ized by scholars of im perial ism such as nrlezinski and H u n tington, magically d isappears from the ' radical critica l ' vision of rhe e m pire. M eanwhile, a p proximately 100,000 people die each day in the periphery d ue to h u nger, ma l n u tr i t ion and c u rable d iseases, because of the unin terrupted continuity of the exactions of this 'smooth space across which subject ivi ties gl ide', which the authors call e m p i re,
a non-i m perialist regi me that day a fter day prod uces a s ilent bloodbath that the bou rgeois media take pains to concea\. These people d ie without receiving the most elementary medica l care. Each year a cou n t ry of the size of Spa i n , Argentina or Colombia is wi ped off the face o f the ea rth i n the name of the despicable 'new i nternational economic order', an order that, i f we are to believe in Hard t and Negri , has ceased to be i mperia l i s t . 1 18
Ha rdt and N egri 's stubborn ness in defe n d i ng their m istaken concept ions has become st ronger since the fi rs t publication of t h e i r book, In an i n te rview with Le Monde Diplomatique, Negri i n s isted on h i s view that t h e em pire lacks any national base and t h a t i t is the expression of t h e i n ternational order created by 'collective capi ta l ' once it emerged victorious from t h e long civil war waged aga i n s t the workers throughout the twentieth cen t u l)', 'Contrar), to what t h e last s upporters of n a tional ism susta i n , the em pire is not NortJ, America n ; i n add ition, th roughout the histol)' of the U nited States they have been much less i mp e rialist than the British, t h e French, the Russians, or t he Dutch' (Negri 200 1 :
1 3 ) , According t o N egri, t h e empi re's beneficiaries a r e cena i n ly American capitalists, but also their European counterpans, those magnates who b u i l t their fonu nes with i n the Russian M a fia and all the wealthy in the Arab worl d , Asia, Africa or Latin America, who send their c h i l d ren t o Harvard and t h e i r money t o Wal l St reet. Clearly, i n this pseudo-tota l i ty of t h e e m p i re a n d i n i t s u n bearable e m p t i ness, not only is there no theoret ical space i n which t o d i s t i nguish between exploiters a n d explOi ted but also there is no room to conceive the d o m i n a n t coa l i t ion a s anyt h i ng d i fferent fro m an u n d i fferen tia ted gang of capitalists, I n t h i s way, a n d d eparti ng from t h i s anal}'lical ster i l ity, 'collect ive cap ital ' prod uces the miracle of c o n t ro l l i ng the world economy ( t h e reader should be reminded that o n ly 200 t ransnational mega corpo rations, 96 per c e n t of which have t h e i r headquaners i n j us t eigh t count ries, have a c o m b i ned v o l u m e of sales that i s higher than t h e G D P of a l l t h e countries i n t h e globe except t h e n i n e l a rgest o n es) without st ructu res, orga n izations, i n stit utions, h ie ra rc h ies, age n t s , rules or norms,l I n addition, if a ny con niet ,
2 We add: the annual i ncome of Exxon is al most equal to Australia'S GOP; thaI of Ford is s i m i l :l r to De nma rk's GOP; that oftne British' Dutch oil
company Shell is almos! double thc G OP of one of the largest oil producers in the world. Ve nezuela. General MOlors has an annual i n come thai cxcceds the combined GOP of Ireland, New Zealand and Hungary (Res!ivo
2002:
24-5).
�
-!
lOok place with i n it, such a conflict wou ld be me rely accidental or circu mstantial, a n d i t wou l d be easily solved by a ppea ling to the good-will o f the parties conce rned. Al l of a sudden the world order created by North American hegemony d u ri ng the post-war era disappears in fron t of our eyes, a n d the magnates of t h e Russ i a n Mafia seem to have the s a m e weight a nd relevance a s t h e i r N o rt h American cou nterparts. T h e main institutions which model the i n ternational i mperialist order - the I Mf, t h e World Bank, the WTO, NATO, the OECD and ot her similar institut ions - seem to bear no more relation to Washington than they do to Osama Bin Laden's family or to any other Arab magnate, a l though the orga nic i ntellectuals of the emp ire i nsist on characteriz i ng them as an i n formal part of the Nort h American governmen t . I n this pha ntasmagoric view of the e mpire, the 'conditionalities' o f the i nternational financial i nstitutions would be dictated b y a n Arab mil lionaire, a Portuguese banker, a J a panese whaler, a Lati n American oligarch and, of course, a n American busi nessma n . I n t he same way, the errat ic movements of the United Nations a re the result of a fight between the aforementioned subj eets. It is not necessary to be a n i n ternational relations expert to demonstra te t he falsehood of th is argument. Rece n t eve nts in Venezuela (the fai led coup d 'etat agai nst Hugo Chavez in April 2002) d issipate a ny doubt rega rdi ng the persistent oppressive presence of i m perialism. A coup t h a t the C I A h a d been preparing for more than a year, and which was blessed , in a sign of arroga nce close to sheer stupidity, hours after i ts occurrence by thE' presidential spokes man at the Wh ite House (violating thc Organ iza t ion of America n States' resolut ions that Washington had promoted whe n it had been conven ient for it to do so), and which i m med iately had the 'disinterested' collaboration of the I M F that, surprisingly and without anybody having to ask for i t , offered its help to the new government a t a time when it had been recognized only by the U n i ted Sta tes and its European footman , Jose M . A2:nar, the situ ation still not having been resolvE'd. This behaviour by the I M F 1 20
proves once again that thi s 'mu lti lateml orga nization' is, in reality, a m i no r department inside the Wh i te House. This record completely i nval i d a tes Negri's state ment made d u ri ng a rece nt i nte rview i n which he expanded on the issues developed in Empire: 'We think t hat there is no centra lization place within the empire. and that it is necessary to speak of a non-place. We are nOI claiming that Washington is nol impor tant: Washington has the bo mb. New York has the dollar. Los Angeles has the language and the means of commu nication' (A1biac 2002: 2). No fu rther comment.
... 7 It
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!. iii' 3 121
Epilogue
Fame and celebrity have rarely gone hand-in -ha nd with critical thinking. The h i story of political p h ilosophy teaches us that adversarial spirits have usually been persecuted and silenced by the dominant classes. In most cases, this has been ach ieved by means of more or l ess brutal coercion. Antonio Negri has been, for almost thirty years, a victim of this methodology: his m ilitancy in Italian social struggles, as well as his signi ficant contributions to both political theory and political philosophy - two fields also marked by the ups and downs of class struggles - brought down on him the fury of the Italian bourgeoisie and its political rep resentatives, and it also brought persecution, incarceration and exile. On other, less frequent, occasions, those who contest the existing social order are faced only with the i ndifference of the powerfu l . This occurs when the dominant groups find themselves in such a safe position a nd are so confident of the stability of their own supremacy that they allow the mselves the luxury of practising the an of tolerance. Needless to say, this exercise is practised only on condition that the dissident voices can be heard only by a small circle of harmless followers who lack any organic l ink with civil sociery, and who, for that reason, are incapabl e of becoming a serious threat to the dominant classes. Given this, how can we explain the ' u n l i m ited pra ise' that, according 10 John Bellamy Foster, was heaped on two leftist scholars - namely M ichael Hardt and Antonio Negri - in some of the most select intellectual bastions of the bou rgeoisie, such as the New York
Times, Time magazine and the Observer or London, to which I could add a newspaper l i n ked to the most reactionary fat·tions of Argentine capitalism, La Nacion (Bellamy Foster 2001). I n co ncluding this examination the answer seems to be clear:
the favourable reception give n by the esta blishment's mandarins to Empire shows that they read the book carefully, that they cor rectly understood its most profound message, and that they ac cu rately concluded that there was nothing within the book that could be considered incompatible with the dominant ideology or with the self-image that the powerful like to exhibit. Although the metaphysical rad icalism of its narrative and its abstruse allusions to the contrad ictions of capitalism d id not cease to i rritate the most intolerant and na rrow-minded intellectuaJs of the empire, the main argu m ent shows a surprising and welcome similarity to the main thesis that the ideologists of 'globalization ' have been promoting around the world since the 1 980s, namely: that the nation-state is practically dead, that a global logic rules the world, a nd that defyi ng this abominable structure, whose concrete bene ficiaries as well as its victims and oppressed are lost in the shadows, there is a new and amorphous entity, the ' multitude', no longer the people, let alone the workers or the proletariat. Re gardless of the repeated invocations to co mmunism and the good society that make the i mperial energumens shiver, Empire leaves the reader without answers as to why the men and women of the empire should rebel, agai nst whom, and how to create a new type of society. Although Empire formally criticizes capital ism as an inhuman, oppressive, exploitative and u n fair mode of production, it vanishes in the translucent air of postmodernity. It becomes, in a manner of speaki ng, invisible, just like American i m perialism, and in this way both are ' natu ralized '. H u nger, poveny, death, wars, diseases and the whole catalogue of hu man miseries that were observed throughout the twentieth century are rhetorically transformed in d u l l and almost i m penetrable phraseolOgy that, i n spite of the manifest intentions of its creators, hides the most ,
despicable features of neoliberal globalization and or contemIII
porary capitalism.
'E.
For the reasons displayed throughout my book, I find it highly u n l ikely that the anti-imperialist fighters of the world will find 1 23
I !i
• :t
J 1-
in Empire any realistic and persuasive argument to illu minate their path or to help them understand what is happening in the world. More l i kely, a 'counsel of surrender would be the message of a manifesto on behalf of global capital. Jt is also, l i ke it or not, the message of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire' (Meiskins Wood 2003: 63). Given its mista kes and confusions, it is easy to u nderstand why the book was acclaimed as a true revelation by some of the world 's most i mponant mass media tightly associated with the imperialist structure that overwhelms us. In any case, it is good to know that, as Hannah Arendt re minded us, 'even in the da rkest n ight we still have the right to wait for some illumination', and that this will probably come not from a colou rful conceptual and theoretical apparatus but from the smaJl lights that will ema nate from the i n itiatives that men and women adopt in order to put an end to, in Marx's words, this pai nful and barbarian 'pre-history' of humanity finally to e nter a superior stage of civilization (Arendt 1968: ix). I want to believe, going back to Hardt and Negri's work, that (he mistakes that we have ide ntified in Empire will be rectified in a new study u ndenaken by these authors. I n N egri's case I am inclined to think that the mistakes detected in this book could be due to distortions produced by a long exile, even if it is i n Paris; to the lack of abili ty to travel around the world and to confirm, with his own eyes, the sinister realities of imperialism; and fi nally, to the rarefied intellectual Parisian atmosphere, whose provincialism and splendid self-reference were repeatedly underlined by notable French intellectuals such a s J ean-Paul Sartre, or others residing i n France l i ke N icos Poulantzas. Negri's contributions to the de velopment of social and political Marxist theory do not deserve such a disappointing ending. I hope with all my heart to have, in the short term, the satisfaction of commenting, in completely d i ffere nt terms, on a new book in which Negri's extraordinary talent meets again with his own h i story.
12. 4
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1
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1 28
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1 19
Index of proper names
A ccumulation on a World Scale; 1 5 AfghaniSlan;
1 1,
So, 51 , 63
Boron, Atllio A . ; 1 8 , 46. 54. 57, 58. 67, 8 5 , 94, 105
Afriea; lJ, J8, 45, 1 1 9
Bosch. juan; 2 8
After Liberalism; 1 5
Bosnia; 67
Aguilar, Alonso; 1 1 1
Bowles, Samuel; 92
Ahmad, Aijaz; 56
Brazil: 1 9. 20, J 5 , 36. 37, 1 1 6
Alabama; 4J
Brechl. Benoll; 104
Albright, Madeleine; 56
Brilain: 1 7. J7. 55
A1thusser, Louis; 1 09
B russels; 45
Altvater, Elmar; 13
Bn.ezinski, Zbigniew; 1 1 . 68 , 69. 70,
Amin, Samir; 15, 1 1 1, 1 1 5
72. 1 1 8
Amnesty; 65
Bukharin, Nikolai; 2 , 1 3 . 23, 1 1 1
Anderson, Peny; 9, 104, 105, 106
Bull, Malcolm; 95
Annan, Kofi; 45
Bush, George Sr.; 1 1. 74
Aquinas, Thomas; 100
Bush, George W. ; 9, 1 1 . 1 2 , I J, 1 8 ,
Arendt, Hannah; 104, 1 05, 1 24
17. 6J
Argenlina; 20, J6, 74, l l 5, 1 1 6, I 1 R Arrighi, Giova n n i ; 25
California; 43, 1 1 6
Asia; 1 5, 38, 45, 5 1 , 69 , 1 1 9
Capitalism in the Age of
Australia; I S, l l 9
Globaliwtion; 25
Austro-Hungarian Empire; J9
Cardoso, Oscar Raul; 10, 1 1
Aznar,jose Maria; 8 , 1 7, 1 8 , 1 20
Cari bbean; 5 1 . l l 8 Carthage; 33
Badiou, Alain; 1 09
Castro, fidel: 98
Balibar, Etienne; 109
Central Intelligence Agency (elA);
Bangladesh; 37, 45, 48 B a ra n , Paul: 2J
1 1 7 , 1 10 Charles. Gerard·Pierre; 28
Baudrillard, jean; 109
Chavt'"Z, Hugo; 1 20
Uclgium; 5 1
Chiapas; 34, ]6, 8R, 1 16
Ilen Bella , Ahmed; 98
Chicago; 5 1 , 8J
Benjamin, Waller; 104
Chile; 74
nerlin Wall; 4J, 1 0 1
China; 1 5 , 69, 70, 1 0 1
Berluseon i , Si lvio; 107
Chiquita Banana; 66
'Big Government is St ill in Charge ' ;
Chirac, jacques; 1 4
78
Chomsky, Noam: 1 1 , I J , 1 7, 1 8 . 25,
Bin Laden, Osama; I I , 6 J , 1 20 Bismarck. Olto von; 5.1 Bobbio, Norbeno; 7 Boeing Corporalion; 45 Iloiivar, Sim6n;
III
40, 46, 4 9 , 62, 67. 76, 93, 94 Christian Democracy Pany (CUP); 109
Clan"n; 20 Clausewitz. Carl von; J I
Climon. Bill; 56
1 06. 1 07, 1 10,
Colombia; 1 18
1 23, 1 24
I ll.
1 1 4, l l 5. 1 2 1 ,
Colombia Plan; 1 1 6
Engtls, Friedrich: 2. 7. 28, 89
Common Market or the South
Eu ropean Union: 45. 76
l M E RCOSUR)j 1 1 6
Comnlllnisl Manifesto; 2 , 5 , 28. 89, 95
Europe: 18, 38, 43. 45, 68, 69, 97 ElU(on; 1 19
Considerations on Western Marrism; 104
Fabbriche del soggetto; 109
Copernican; 2
Federalist papers; 94
Costa Rica; 1 1 6
Feuerbach, Ludwig; 2
COlt. Roben; 25, 60
First World War: 3, 10, 5 2
Crisi dello slato-pinno; 109
Ford; 4 5 , 1 1 9
Cuba: 76, 1 1 7
Fortunej 46
Cueva, Agustin; 28, 8 1 , 1 1 1
Foucault, Michael; 24, 29. 30, 1 09
Czechoslovakia: 2 1
France ; 9, 37, 43, 5 1 , 55, 68, 104, 1 07 .
Dahl, Robert A.; 48
Free Trade Area of the Americas
108, 109, 1 24 (FTAA): 8 1 . 1 1 6
Davos; 23 Debray, Regis; 102
Friedman, M illon; 1 07
DeleuU", Gilles: 1 09
F ried man, Thomas: 15, 1 6, 62. 84
Denmark; 1 1 9
Fujimori. Albeno: 1 1 5
Derrida. Jaeques: 109
Fukuya ma. Francis: 16, 1 0 1
Deutsche Bank; 45
FulUr AlIlerieur; 109
oabb, Maurice; 2 3 Dominican Republic; 1 0. 74
Gabon: 2 7
Don QULrOle: 20. 3 I
Galbraith.John K . ; 1 1 2
Dornbusch, Rudiger; 1 07
Galeano, Eduardo; 28
Dos Santos, Theolonio; 28
Gates, Bill; 50, 5 1
Drucker. Peter; 84
General Agreemem on Tariffs and Trade (GATT): 56, 76
Drug Enforcement Administration (O EA); 1 1 7
General Motors: 1 1 , 1 1 9
Duke U n iversity; 93
Gennan)'; 9, 37, 45. 5 1 , 55
Duverger, Maurice: 1 1 1
Gindin, Sam: 10, I I 3
Eagleton, Terry; 100, 101, 103. 104,
Gonzalez Casanova , Pablo; 28,
Gi ntis. Herbert; 92
East Timor; 1 1 7
Gortari, Carlos Salinas de; 1 1 5
Economist. The: 78
Gramsci, Amonioj 6. 5 1 , 52
Ecuador; 66. 1 1 7
Greece; 29
Eisenstadt, Samuel: I I I
Greenpeaee; 65
EI SaiYador; 43
G reenwich Village; 29
Empire o/Chaos; 25
Group of Seven (G-7); 79
Empire: 1 . 4, 5, 6. 8, 1 0, 1 1 . 1 3. 14.
I l l.
1 18
105
Guatemala: 66
16, 1 8. 2J. 24. 25. 26. 35. 39, 47,
Guattari, Felilt: 109
59. 60. 6 1 , 75. 80, 87, 88, 90, 9 1 •
Guevara. Emesto 'Che': 98
93. 95. 98, 100. 1 03. 1 04, 105.
Gulf War; 1 2, 6 1 . 62, 63. 74, 1 1 7
131
Habermas, Ji.lrgen; 34
Jaguaribe, Hclio; 28,
Haiti; 37, 43, 67
japan ; 37, 69. 83 , 84
H ardt, Michael and Antonio Negri;
jericho; 4
III
1 , 2, 4, 6, 8, 1 1 , 1 2, 1 3 , 1 4 , 1 5, 1 7, 19, 20, 23, 2 5, 26, 29, 30, 3 1 , 3 2 ,
Kagan, Robert; 1 2
3 3 , 34 , 3 5 , 36, 37, 38, 39, 40 , 4 1 ,
Ka nt. Im manuel; 10, 89
42 , 43, 44, 45 , 4 6, 47, 4 8, 50, 5 1 ,
Kapstein, Ethan; 46
5 2 , 5 3 , 54 , 5 7, 5 8, 59, 60, 62 , 64 ,
Kaulsky, Karl; 23
6 5 , 66, 67, 68, 6g, 70, 7 1 , 72, 73,
Kelsen, Hans; 26, 27
74 , 7 5 , 77, 78, 83, 8 5 , 87, 88, 89,
Keynes, john Maynard; 10, 109 K irkpatrick,jeane; 74
90, 93, 94, 95 , 97, 98, 99, 1 00, 101, 103, 104, 1 0 5 , 106, 1 10,
I l l,
Kissinger, Henry; 38, 39 Kosovo; 2 7 , 62
1 1 3, 1 1 6, 1 1 8, 1 1 9, 1 22, 1 24
Hardt, M ichael; 87, 88, 106. l og, 1 10
Krauthammer, C harles; 1 2
Harlem; 48
Kyoto Agreemen l j 76
Hegel. Georg Wilhel m Fried rich ; 30 Hi lferding. Rudolf; 2, 23
La Anomalia Saillaje; log
Ho Chi Minh; 98
La Forma Stalo. Per la Critica
Hobbesian; 82, 83
dell 'Economia Polilico della
Hobsbawm, Eric; 1 1 1
ConslilUzionej log
Holland; 5 1
La Nacion; 1 22
Honduras; 39, So, 8 1
Labor ofDionysus. A Critique of Ihe
Hoselitz, Bert; 3 7
Slole-form; 109
H ungal)'; 2 1 . 1 1 9
Lacan,jacques; log
H u nlington. Samuel P. ; 1 2, 70, 7 1 ,
Lacandonajungle; 3 5 Landless Workers' Movement, Brazil
1 18
Hussein, Saddam; 1 1 , 16, 63
(MST); 36, 1 16 Latin America; 23 . 37, 38, 4 5 , 5 1 , 68,
11 potere consliluente; log
69, 88, 1 02, 1 1 8, 1 19
India; 23 , 37
Lenin, Vladimir Jl ich; 2, 1 3 , 23, 3 1 ,
International Convention on the
1 1 1, 1 13
Rights of the Child; 76
Les noulleoux espaces de liberte; 1 09
I nternational Coun ofjustice; 77
Lockean; 83
International Criminal coun; 7 5
Lang Twentiet/l Century, The; 2 5
International Labor Organization
Los Angeles; 33, 83, 1 2 1
(JLO); 43
Luhmann, Niklas; 26. 3 4 Lukacs, Gyorg; 54
International MonetaI)' Fund ( J M F); 2, 2 4 , 56. 59, 6 5, 7 1 , 72 , 78, 79, 8 1 ,
Luxemburg, Rosa; 1, 13, 23, 1 04 , 1 1 1
go, 1 1 3. 1 1 7. 1 20
Lyotard, Jean·Fran'iOise; 109
Iraq; 6, 7, 8, 9. 10, 1 1 , 1 3 , 1 4, 1 6, 1 7 , 20, 17, 6 1
Machiavelli, Niccolo; 33, 60, 92
Italian Communist Party (PC)); 108
Madison, james; 94
Ita l ian Radical Party; 108
Magdoff, Hany; 23
Italian Socialist Party; 1 10
Maldonado Denis, Manuel; 28
Italy; 68, 104, 108, log, 1 1 0
Managua; 77 Mandel, Ernst; 23
132
Mandela, Nclson; 98
North Atlantic Treaty Organi2:3tion (NATO); 9. 1 20
Mao Zedong; 3 1 . 98 Marini, Ruy Mauro; 28
North Atlantic; 9. 24
Marx olrre Marx; 109
Nuftez. Omar; 2 8
Marx, Karl; 2. 7. 24. 28. 2 9. 30, 3 1 . 33.
35 . 49, 58 , 89. 105. 106. 1 1 3, 1 24 Marxism; 23. 54. 70. 10 1 . 104. lOS,
106
O'Connor, James; 2 3 Obsenler; 1 2 2 Opera; e Stalo. Fra Rilloluzione d'ottobre e New Deal; 109
Massachusetts Institute or Technology ( M IT); 94 Matlick, Paul; 23
Oqueli. Ramon; 80 O rganization ror Economk Co
May 1 , 1886 Haymarket Square.
operation and Development (OECD); 65, 78, 1 20
Chkago; 5 1 McDonald's; 45
Organization or American States (OAS); 1 2 0
Medherranean; 64 Meiskins Wood. Ellen; 54. 83. 85, 86.
90. 1 1 2. 1 24
Palestinian Intifada; 3 3
Menem. Carlos Saul; 1 1 5
Palmerola; 80
Mexico; 43. 1 1 5
Panama; 80. 1 1 7
Microsoft; 15. 45
Panitch. Leo; 10. 67, 68. 69. 1 1 3. 1 1 7.
Middle East; 69
1 18
Milan; 1 08
Paris Commune; 107
M i nisuy of Intcrnational Trade and
Paris Peace Confe�nce; 10
IndusUY. Japan (Min); 84
Paris; 34. 93 , 1 24
Modem World System, The; 25
Peloponnesian war; 33
Monde Diplomat;que, Le; 1 1 9
Pentagon; 4. 9
Moro, Aldo; 1 08
Persian Gulf; 67
M ultilateral Agree ment on Investments (MAl): 59, 65, 66. 67,
81, 1 17
Peru; l i S Petras.James; 28, 1 1 1 Philadelphia; 94 Pinochet, Augusto; 74
National se-c:urity Council; 38, 69
Plato; 29
Negri, Antonio; 9. 19, 20. 42. 93. 108,
Polirics ofSubllersiOIl. The; 1 09
log, t lO. 1 1 9. 1 2 1 , 1 2 2. 1 24
Popular Pa rry , Spain (PP); 1 1 8
New EllglandJournal ofMedicine; 48
Pono Alegre; 35
NfilJ Left Revir.w; I
Poulant7.as, Nicos; 1 24
New York Times; 1 5. 62 . 84. 1 2 2
Production. POUler, and World Order;
25
New York; 6, 1 5 . 1 6. 29, 3 6 , 8 3 , 1 2 1 New Zealand; 1 1 9
Proletar; e Scato; 109
N icaragua; 10. 74. 77, 1 1 7
Ptolemy;
Nicaraguan Contras; 7 7
PueblaJPanama Plan;
Nixon, Richard; 3 8
Punic war; 33
1 00 1
16
Noriega. Manuel Antonio; 1 1 7 Nonh America; 1 19
Quademi del carcere; 52
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA); 8 1
Ranciere. Jacques; log
1 33
Rawls,john; 26
Sub-saharan Africa; 5 1 , 1 1 7
Reaga n , Ronald; 75. 79
Sweden; 78, 92
Red Brigades; l oB
Sweezy, Pa u l ; 23
Red Cross; 65 Reich. Roben; 42, 43. 44
Tajwan; 84
Restivo, Nestor; 1 1 9
Teguciga lpa; 8 1
Ricardo, David; 107
Thatcher, Ma rgaret; 79
Rome; ]3, 69. 75
Third International; 98
Rosto\\,. Walte r W.; 37
Third Reich; 54
Rousseau, jean jacques; 29, 33
Third World; 18, 23, 37, 39, 44, 69,
Russia; 6<), 70
79. 97, 103, 1 1 7, 1 1 8 Tinnanmen Square; 33
Sachs, [gnney; 23
Time Magazine; 1 22
Sandinista; 1 1 7
Tocqueville, Ale)[is de; 29, 30
Sastre, A l fonso; 7
Trujillo, Rafael Leonidas; 74
Saxe· Fernandez, joh n; 2B. 39, 1 1 1 ,
Tu rkey; 1 1 7
l iB
Tw i n Towers; 6
Schmin, Carl; 26, 3 1 . 54 Seattlr; 4, 40
Uililever; 45
Seiser, G regorio; 2B
U n ited Fruit; 66
Seoul; 34
United Ki ngdom; 8. 27, 45, 5 1 , 65
September 1 1 ; 6, 7, 36
United Nations (UN); 8 , 9. 1 5. 26, 27,
Service of Peace and justice; 65 Sharon, Ariel; 1 1 7
60, 62, 64, 65, 7 5 . 76, 1 20 United Nations Development
Shell; 45, 1 1 9
Programme (UN DP); 37, 43, 78
Shonfie[d, Andrew; 2J
United State Treasury; 8 1 , 84
Siemens; 45
Un.ited States; 9. 1 1 , 1 2 , lJ, 18, 20,
Sierra Leone; 27
2 1 , 27, 3 7 , 38, 39, 43, 45, 5 1 , 60 ,
Singapore; 83
6 1 , 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70,
Smith, Adam; 107
7 1 , 73 , 75, 76, 77. 79, 82, 83, 84 , 93, 94, 97, 1 06, 1 1 1. 1 1 3, 1 1 6,
Socialist Register 2004; 1 1 3
1 1 9. 1 20
Somalia; 67, 76 Som01.a, Anastasio; 74
University of Paris VI I I ; 109
Soros, George; 1 6
Upper West Side; 43
Sousa Samos. Boaven tu ra de; 82. 8 3
Uruguay; 1 1 7
South America; 1 16 South Korea; 3 3 , 3 5 , B3
Vargas Llosa, Mario; 102
Soulhern Command; Bo
Veltmeyer, Henry; 28
Soviet Union; B, 32, 68, 101, 105
Venezuela; 1 19, 1 20
Spain; 17, 68. 1 8 , 104, l I B
Veracruz; 10
Spi noza. Baruch; 24
Vida.!, Gorc; 6, I B, 39
St Francis of As�isi; 20, 9B. 99, 1 00,
vidrla, jorge Rafael ; 74
l l8
Vietnam War; 1 7, 77
Stiglitz, Joseph; 1 17 Strange, Susan; 14, 69, 70
Wallerstein, Imma nuel; 25, 1 1 1
Sub-commander Marcos; 34
WarSaw Pact; 101
134
Washi ngton Consensus; 59 , 79. 83, 1 15 Wash ington; 6, 7 , 8, 9. 10, 1 1 . 2 7 .
World Ordtr$, Old and New; "1 5 World Trade Center; 4 World Trade Organization (W1'O); 45 , 56, 59. 65 , 7 2, 76. 7 9, 1 0 1 ,
3 6. 6 1 . 62, 63 , 65, 66, 69, 7 0, 7 1 , 7 5, 76, 77, 80, 82, 1 16, 1 1 7. 1 20,
III
1 1 3. 1 10 WreSl'h, William; 5 1
While House; 4 . 9, 1 3, 1 6, 1 8, 45. 65, 1 20. 1 2 1 Wilson, Woodrow; 10 Workers' Pany, Bra2 i l (Pl1; 1 1 6 World Bank (WB); 2, 24. 56, 59, 65 , 7 1 , 7 2, 7 8, 79, 9°, 1 1 3 . 1 1 7, 120
Year 501. The Conquest Continues; 15 Yugoslavia; 28. 1 1 6 Zapat islas; 34. 35, 36 Zi2l'k, Slavoj ; 95
13 5
General index
aboriginal communities; 88
18, 19. 2 1 • 25. ]0. J l , J2. 3 3 . 4 1 ,
aboriginal organizations; 1 7
42. 46. 5 1 . 55. 58, 59. 67. 77. 78,
accumulation; 3. 85
79. 80. 83. 90, 9 1 , 99. 1 0 1 . 1 04,
actOr\S); 1 1 . 1 2 . 1 8 , 84, 93 . 1 1 2 , 1 1 3, 115
1 07, 1 1 1 . 1 12 . 1 1 8 , 1 22. 1 2 J capilalist accumulation; 5 1
alliancelsl; 4 1 • 5 1 . 54
capilalist class; 8 5 , 92
anarchisl(s); 16. 25
capitalist e)(ploit�tion; 3 3
anti- socialist; 5 1
capitalist relations o f production;
a nti-capitalism(s): 19
1 14
ami-capitalist(s); 1 5 . 35. 4 1
capitalist revolution; 80
anti-colonialist(s); 14, 98
capitalist society (ies); J, 54. 59. 60 .
anti-democratic; 65. 94
88
ami-fascist resistance; 9B
capitalist stare(s); 7, 56. 77 . 8 1 . 84. 85
anti-globalization; 1 6. 34
capitalist(s); 3 , 4. 7 , 1 ]. 14. 1 6. 1 7 . 30,
anti-imperialist; 98. 1 2]
3 1 , 33. 36. 47, 5 1 . 52. 54. 56. 59.
anti-popular; 94
60. 8 1 , 82. 9 1 , 92. 104, 109. 1 1 9
ant i-socialist; 5 1
casino capitalism; 1 4
anti-Slate; 53. 78
centre; 4, 1 1 . 36. 37. J 9, 40, 73, 75.
apartheid; 32, ]3. 83 aristocracy; 53
79. 82, 105 cholos; 88
anned forces; 1 2. 70, 8 1
citizen(s); 44. 69. 83. 90
au th o ri ty; 9. 26, 27 , 5]. 73 , 74. 86, 1 1 1
dt izens rights; 90
autonomy; 53. 54
citi:.:ens wage; 92 citizenship; 69. 89. 90. 9 1 , 9 5. 96
banks; 46, 56, 84 biopolitic; 92 biopolitical; 28 , 9 1 , 95, 96 biopolitics; 92 biopower; 29, 99 black; 8J bourgeois (bourgeoisie); 1 1 , 22. 29,
civil society; 52. 57. 58, 62, 72, 77. 82, 89, 90• 1 2 2 civilizalion; 1 3. 29 . ]2. 97 . 1 24 class st ruggles; 30, 68, 8 1 , 96, 1 1 3 . 122 class(es); 19. 45. 57. 60. 6 8 . 90 , 96. 10J. 106
]0, 3 2 . 50, 52. 5]. 54, 85, 88. 92•
coaJition; 30, 36. 51, 70. 79, 1 19
101. 106, 1 1 1, I I J . 1 1 4. 1 1 8. 1 2 2
roerciOOj 27. 122
business; 14. 1 6, ]2. 48. 49. 59, 7 0 . 106. 1 1 2
collect.ive subjects; 19 colonialism; 30 colonies; 15
capilal; 3, 7 . 13, 30, 35. 47. 48 . 49. 52 . 53, 69, 83. 85, 88, 9 1 . 92, 1 0 1 . 1 1 2. 1 1 8. 1 1 9 capilalism(s); 1 . 2 . 3 . 4, 1 0, 1 3 , 14, 1 7 ,
coloni7-3tlon; 2 1 commun ication(s); 33, 34, 92, 95 . 96, 97. 1 2 1 communist society: 25
com muniSI(s); 1 6, 15, 49. 68, 95. 98. 99. 1 00. 104. 1 07
doclrine(s); 1 2 , 5 1 dominant class(es); 7. 1 1 . 14. 68.
company(ie s); 14. 1 5. 1 6. 44. 45. 46. 48 . 49. 65. 66, 67. 69. 76. 79. 80.
1 14, 1 1 5, 1 1 8, 1 22 domination; 4, 1 1 , 20. 29. 30, 31, 36.
84, 85, 1 1 3, 1 1 5, 1 1 9 complcxity(ies); 8, 19. 55. 74 . 106
6 1 . 72. 73. 96. 1 1 5 drug(s); 7 1 . 1 1 6
concentration camps; 32 conflict(s); 27. 29. 3 5. 4 1 , 67. 73. 1 1 6 • 1 19. 1 20
ecologists; 1 6 economy(ies); 3 . 1 4 . 15. 23 . 24 . 36.
confrontation; 1 9. 62
39. 42. 45. 46, 47. 59 , 70, 78 . 79.
conquest; 7, 1 1 . 1 2 . 2 1 . 33
80, 83 , 84, 94, 1 00, 105. 106, 1 07,
consensuS; 9, 2 8 . 53, 54. 55. 68 . 76
1 1 4, l i S, 1 1 6. 1 1 7 , 1 1 9
conservative; 1 5. 62, 78, 103, 1 1 1
education; 32, 79. 90. 1 1 4
constituent power; 40• 93, 96
emanCipation; 9 1 • 94. 99
consume r(s); 85, 1 1 5
emancipat o ry; 20, 2 1 . 56, 68
contract(s); 27. 66. 83
empire; 1 , 4. 8, 1 1 , 1 2 , 1 3 . 15. 1 6. 18.
corporation(s); 1 1 . 13. 14. IS, 16, 1 7.
1 9. 20, 23. 26. 27, 28. 30. 3 1 , 31 ,
24 , 4 '1 , 46. 47. 48, 49. 50. 5 1 . 53.
34. 36. 3 7 . 39 . 40, 4 7 . 50 .58. 59. 60 .6 1 . 62. 63, 64. 66• 67. 68. 69,
56. 62. 79 , 84 counter-power; 40. 55
70 . 7 1 , 73. 75, 77. 79. 8 2 , 8 7. 91 • 96. 97, 99. 103. I l l ! 1 1 3. 1 14.
counter-revolution; 1 04. 1 1 3 countries colonized; 1 3
1 1 6, 1 1 7, 1 1 8. 1 1 9, 1 20, 1 2 1 . 1 23
coup d'�tat; 10. 120
empowerment; 89. 90
coyote; 43
enem)iies); 19. 20. 3 1 , 3 5 . 40. 4 1 , 48.
cuhural; 19. 55. 8 2 . 88. 101, 1 1 2. 1 1 4
7 1 . 75. 1 1 6 equal ity; 32
debate(s); 5. 6, 37. 38, 4 1 . 48 . 93. 94, 100, 109 decentred; 1 0
cstabl ishment; 10, 24. 62, 65. 85. 1 1 6 exploitalion; 20, 30, 47. 49. 88. 1 1 3 exploited; 29. 3 1 , 48. 82. 88. 9 1 , 99.
democracy; 7. 1 6 . 1 7. 1 8, 2 1 . 3 2 . 66.
1 19
7 1 . 88. 90. 92. 1 0 1 . 1 1 7 democralic order; 14, 8 2
feminists; 1 7
democratic slate; 8 1 . 8 3
feudalism; 3 1
democraLic; 4. 7 . 8. 9. 1 4 . 1 7 . 1 8 , 2 1 .
finance; 14, 46. 88
80. 8 1
financial; 3 . 72. 80. 8] , 88. 90, 1 1 7.
demonSl'ralion(sl; 1 7 . 18, 35, 101
1 20
dcpendenCY; 4, 3 8. 39, 68 deregulation of market(s); 80. 85
financ:ialization: 3
despotism; 29. 4 8
forces; 1 2. 1 7, 28. 3 6. 4 1 , 6]. 68 , 77,
forces of production; 1 1 3
delerriloria lized; 10 developlll c nt; 3 , 32, 3 3 , 35. 37, 38. 44 . 46. 47. 5 1 . 54. 59. 1 05, 1 1 3. 1 14
103. 107, 1 1 7 rree markets. 42. 48 freedom; 7. 1 2, 1 6, 7 1 . 73, 93 . 94. 98, 1 1 1
dialectic; 40, 53. 107 dictatorship; 2 1 . 3 5
ghettos; 83
d isciplinary sociery; ;1o
global market(s); 45, 69, 83. 84. 101 137
: .,. oS
global; 3. I I . 1 3 . 1 5 . 24. 26. 3°. 3 1 .
Indians; 88
13 , 34. 36. 4 °. 4 1 . 45 . 46. 47 . 48 • 49, 55 , 56 . 60. 6 1 . 62. 63. 64. 67.
individual consciences; 2 9
68 , 69, 7 1 . 72. 73. 75. 7 7 . 84. 85.
individualist; 8 2
89. 90. 9 1 , 1 1 2. 1 1 3 . 1 23. 1 24
industrialized count ries; 78. 80. 96.
individual libenies; 3 2
globa l ization ; 1 . 2 . 3. 4. 5. 14. 1 5. 1 6.
1 13
1 7. 1 9. 3 1 . 3 5. 4°. 44 . 46. 56 . 59. 73. 82. 83. 84 . 89. 99. I I I . 1 1 2 .
i n formation; 50. 77. 78. 84, 95, 96
1 23
insurgent forces; 36
insurgence; 97 i ntellectuals; 7, 20, 50, 54. 67. 7 1 , 90,
'globalphobics'; 5
98. 105, 1 09, 1 20, 1 23, 1 24
goods and services; 4. 1 1 5
im er-imperial rivalry; 14 international; 3, 8. 9. 1 1 • 1 2• 1 3 , 1 4 ,
health; 14. 48. 76. 79. 1 1 4 hegemon; 64
1 9. 23, 26. 27, 28. 33. 35. 36. 37.
hegemony; 1 1 . 3° . 60. 7 1 . 7 2. 97 . 1 1 5 .
38. 39. 4 1 . 55, 56. 58. 59, 60. 6 1 , 62, 64. 65, 69. 70, 72, 75, 76. 79.
1 1 6. 1 20
83, 84. 89, 90. 925.
historical materia lism; 25. 26. 59.
LOO.
101. 1 1 1,
1 1 3, 1 1 7 , 1 1 8, J l 9. 1 20
70, 105 h isLOry; 1 . 4, 7. 8 . 16. 1 7 . 19. 23. 43,
52. 53, 55. 63. 66. 79, 89. 96. 104.
internationalism; 33, 40. 89 i nternationalist ideology; 1 0
107. 1 14. 1 1 6. 1 1 9. 1 22 . 1 24 housing; 79. 93. 1 1 4
justice; 1 2, 1 3. 28, 6 1 , 63. 64, 65 . 66,
human rights; 16. 7 1 , 1 1 7
77. 1 1 6
humanitarian; 6 , 2 7 . 28. 56. 64, 65. labour foree; 4J. 49
66. 76, 1 1 6 human ity; 20. 75. 99. 1 24
labour legislation; 43, 49
identity; 3. 35. 73. 10 I
labour u n ions; 1 9 , 4 1 . 49. 85, 95
ideologist(s); 46. 48. 6 1 . I 1 2. I 14.
labour; 4 1 . 49, 88. 9 1 . 96
labour reforms; 85
laiss�-fa i re; 5 2
1 23 ideology; 30. 43. 53. 59. 60. 1 1 0. 1 1 3 ,
landowners; 88 latina; 47. 83
1 1 5. 123 imm igrants; 19. 43 imperialism: 2 . 3 . 40. 5. 7. 10. 1 3. 14.
19. 2 1 . 24. 23. 26. 3 °. 38 . 39. 59.
legality; J 2 Leviathans; 1 5 . 46. 83, 99 liberal(s}; 5 1 , 52. 70. 1 0 1 , 1 1 1
60 .64. 65 . 67, 68. 69. 7 1 . 73. 75.
l iberalism; 52, 108
80. 84. 1 1 2. 1 1 3. 1 14. 1 1 6. 1 1 7.
l i benarian pessimism; 103
J J 8. 1 20. 1 23. 1 24 imperia.l ist(s);
I.
3. 4. 6, 8. 9. 1 1 . 1 2 .
mafia; 1 6. 1 1 9. 1 20
1 3. 1 6. 1 7 . 1 9. 27. 32. 36. 59 , 6 1 .
mandarins; 68, 1 2 3
63. 64. 6 8. 7°. 73. 74 . 7 9. 80. 85. 100. 107. 1 13 . J l 6. 1 1 8. 1 1 9. 1 20.
market freedom; 1 1 5 market(s); 1 6, 26. 38. 42. 45 , 46, 47,
1 24
50, 57, 67. 69. 7 1 . 79. 80, 82. 8 3 .
i mperialistic; 2 7 . 28. 63. 64 income; 1 5. 43. 46. 85. 9 1 . 92 . 1 1 4 .
1 19
84, 85. 1 0 1 . J l 5. J l 7 markets' tyranny; 4. 1 7 , 82. 1 1 7 Marxist tradition; 1 05, 106. 108
1 38
mass m�dia; 7 , 70. 72. 8 2 . 1 1 4. 1 24
non-cit izens; 69
material conditions; 28
non-global(s); 16, 1 7 . 19
means of production; 9 5. 96
non-i m perialist; 1 1 8
mest izos; 88
non-national; 46
metropolis; 1 5
non-place: 24 , 1 2 1
metropolitan capitalism; 1 8 , 4 6 . 77,
non-territorial; 69 nuch:ar weapons; 32
78 , 8], 9 1 , 1 1 8 midd le classes; 88 migrants; 18, 43, 97
oi l : 1 3 , 14, 63 . 1 19
m i l itant(s)j 1 7 . 1 9 , 98, 99
oligopolist ic; 1 1 4
military occupation: 7, 8 , 1 1 , 2 1 m i litary; 1 2 , 1 5. 1 7, 27 , 4 1 , 60, 63 , 67 ,
ownership; 1 5
7 1 , 77, 80, 8 1 . 88, 1 1 6 mobilization: 1 7 . 19. 4 1
pacifism; 1 7 pacifisls; 1 6. 1 7
mode o f p roducrion: 3 . 1 04. 1 23
para militaries; 88
modern; 1 3 , 1 5 , 1 6 , 29. 32. 35. 48. 66 .
peace: 6, 1 0. 1 7, 65. 67 peasants; 88
9 1 • 102
periphery; 4 , 1 1 , 37. 38. 39, 40, 49, 60,
modernist; 48
62 , 79, 80 , 82, 85, 90. 9 1 , 1 1 7 . 1 1 8
moderniry; 32. 33
pickets: 36
multilatenllism; 8 m u ltitude(s); 1 8, 1 9. 30 . 32. 40. 4 1 , 87. 88. 89. 9 1 . 92 . 93. 94. 9 5 . 96•
planet: 64 . 96, 102 policy(ies); 3 , 6. 9, 1 8, 20, 46, 5 1 . 5 2,
9 7. 98 . 99 , 10]. 104, 1 1 3. 1 1 4, 1 23
6 1 . 63. 7 1 . 76. 78, 79. 80, 82, 85, 90. 1 1 2. 1 1 4 . 1 1 5. 1 1 7
nation (s); 3. 26, 38. 39 . 44. 60. 62,
polilical: 1 , 2, 5. 9. 1 7, 1 9 . 23, 24. 25, 26. 29. 32. 33. 36, 38. 39, 4 1 , 49,
6 5 . 66, 69, 72, 79. 80 nation building; 20. 2 1 national; 9. 10,
I I.
5 2 , 53. 54. 55, 56, 5 8 , 59. 6 1 , 65 , 68. 69, 80. 82, 84, 86, 87, 89 , 92•
1 2 , 1 3 . 1 4, 1 5, 3 1 ,
94 , 96, 97. 98. 100, 10 1 , 102, 1 0 5 .
3 5, 36 . 4 2 , 44 , 45, 46 . 47, 49 , 5 1 , 53 . 54, 55 . 56, 58 , 6 1 , 65, 70. 72•
106, 107, 1 08, 1 1 2. 1 1 4. 1 1 5, 1 1 6.
7 5. 76, 7 7 , 78, 83, 84, 87. 90, 104,
1 2 2, 1 24
1 1 3 , 1 19
politics; 8, 19. 20 , 3 1 , 5 2 . 5 3 . 54, 55 .
nationalism; 1 1 9 natjonalirYi 56
7 1 , 1 05. 106, 107 population(s)j 6. 1 8 . 2 1 , 3 7 . 46. 4 7 . 5 1 , 64. 69, 7 7, 83, 8 7 . 92. 97 . 1 1 5 .
nation-slatej 10, 1 5, 27, 32. 33 , 42, 43, 47, 50. 53. 56, 5 7 . 64 , 73. 8] . 84, 85. 86. 87, 89. 1 0 1 , 104, 123
1 17 post-capitalisl; 2 1
natural resources: 13
post-colonial: 27 , 97
nco-colonialism; 38
posl-ford ism: 1 0 1
neo-conservative: 76
posl-imperiaJisl; 2 1 , 2 7
neo-liberal: 1 . 2 , 3. 5 . 14. 1 6, 19. 20,
post-modern society; 96
2 5. 35 , 46, 59, 68. 78 , 82, 89, 99 ,
posl-modernity; 9 1 . 9 5 , 1 2 3
100, 104, 1 1 1 , 1 1 2 , 1 1 3. 1 14. 1 1 5,
post-structuralism: 1 0 7
1 1 8 . 1 23
post-war: 2 3 . 64, 8 9 , 1 20
neo-liberalism: 59. 79, 9 1 . 10 1 , 1 1 3, 1 1 4. 1 1 5 , 1 1 8
pOI-banging protesters: 36 poverty; 98, 99, 1 23 1 39
power; 13. 24. 27 . 19. 30. 33. 36. 40.
social relotions of production: 1 1 3
56, 60. 6 1 . 62. 63. 64. 70. 72. 7 3 .
social science: 13. 28. 29. 7 0
74. 7 7. 8 1 . 89 . 92. 93. 94. 96. 97.
social struggles: 4 1 . 12 2
99. 103. 1 1 2. 1 1 5. 116. 117
social wage: 9 1 . 91
privatc companies; 83. 1 1 5
socialism; 32. 68
profits; 6. 1 5. 49. 76. 8 5
socialist(s); 1 6. 95. 1 0 1 . 104
progress: 1 6. 32. 50. 66. 79. 1 1 5. 1 1 7
sociery of comrol: 29. 30
progressive policies; 1 1 4
sociery: 6. 21 . 15. 30. 31. 4 1 , 52. 59.
proletariat; 88. 95. 1 23 propeny; 46. 94. 96
97. 99. 106. 1 1 1 . 1 1 3. 1 23 sove reignry (sovereignties): 9. 10. 1 2 ,
public agenda; 100
13. 53. 56• 66. 67. 7 1 , 73. 74. 75 ,
public em ployees; 88
76. 77. 82. 1 1 4, 1 1 7
public expenditure: 77. 78. 79. 1 14.
1 17
state: 3. 7, 10. 26, 42, 49. 50 , 5 1 . 52 •
53. 55, 56. 5;. 60. 65. 66, 67. 70•
public opinion: 16. 1 7
7 1 . 73. 77. 78. 79, 80, 8 1 . 82. 83,
public sector; 79. 90
84. 85. 86, 87, 89, 90. 9 1 . 92, 98 .
public sphere; 1 1 4
100. 1 09. 1 1 2• 1 1 5. 1 20 state·owned companies: 79. 1 1 5
racism: 48
strike(si: 33. 1 0 I
reaclionary; 19. 33. 1 2 3
structuralism: 100
reappropriation; 92. 9 5
structure; 2, 3 . 8 . 1 1. 1 3 . l B . 19. 39.
reform(s); 7 8 . 8 5 . 9 5 . 1 14 regime; 4. 1 1 . 2 1 . 31 . 40. 55. 62. 67.
80. 87. 88. 1 1 8
56. 57. 58. 69 . 70. 73 , 74. 90. 1 0 1 . 1 1 1 . 1 1 3. 1 1 5. 1 1 9, 1 13. 1 24 subsidies; 44. 84. 1 I 7
regulation(s); 5 1 . 80. 1 1 4. 1 1 8
subversive: 4 1
relationships of force; 89
superpower:
repression: 5 1 . 6 1 . 88. 96
75. 76
I I,
12, 60. 68. 7 1 . 73.
republicanism: 87
supranational: 1 0. 64. 65. 72. 83
republicans; 98
surplus-value; 47, 85
resistance movemenls; 9
system(s): 1 , 2. 8. 13. 1 4, 1 9, 23, 24,
revolution; 1. 55. 80. 84, 87. 9 1 • 97.
98. 99. 101. 101. 10] revolutionary: 4 1 . 9 1 . 98. 103. 104.
27. 37. 38. 39, 59 . 6 1 . 64, 72, 79. 82. 83. 84 . 90. 94. 100. 102. 103. 104, 1 07. 108. 1 1 2, 1 13, 1 16
105. 106 taxes; 1 5. 44, 85 secularization: 32
technology: 42. 44. 70, 84
semi·cilizens: 69
territorial occupation: 1 3, 2 1
sexism: 48
territorial; 10, 1 1 , 1 2 , 1 5, 36, 69, 73.
sexual m i norities: 88 slavery: 32 . 33. 64, 91
97 territory; 14, 94
social classes: 88
terrorism; 7. 7 1
social democracy; 90. 1 08
Texas ranchers; 16
social forces; 35. 53, 58. 102. 1 07
theory: 2. 7. 37. 39. 44, 48. 54. 56.
social movement(s): 16, 18. 19. 66.
106 social ordeJ{s): 36. 59. 1 23
89. 97. 100, 1 06, 107. 109. 1 1 5. 1 22. 1 Z4 tradition: 25. 29. 32, 60. 70
tribes; 1 7 trickle-down theory; 1 1 5
walis); 6. 7, 10.
I I.
u. 1 3 , 14. 16 . 1 7 .
1 8. 20. 2 1 , 2 7. 32 . 3 9 . 6 1 , 62, 6] , 64. 98, 1 05, 1 1 9, 1 23
unaccountabilil)'; 8 1
w8te lis); 2 . 6, 14. 93 , 1 1 6
unemployment; 80
wealth; 1 1, 43, 46, 62 , 85. 94, 96, 99.
unification; 40. 5 1 . 69. 83
1 15
unilateralism; 1 2
women; 88, 104 . 123, 1 24
un iversal community; 10
wor kelis ); 43. 49, 5 1 , 85. 88, 9 1 , J 08 ,
unsustainable; 9
J 1 9, 1 23 working class; 1 0 1 , 107
value; 1 3. 54 victim(s); 8. 10. 33. 56. 63. 76. 8 3 .
world economy; 3 , 24 , 39, 45. 46 , 47 , 84, 1 1 9
105. 1 2 2 . 1 23
world order; 8, 1 2, 26, 3 1 , So, 59. 64,
waged labour; 43. 9 1
world population; 2 1 , 37 . 46, 5 1 , 9 7
wllr crimes; 7 5 . 77
world records; 7 5
67, 70. 73. 74, 87. JOO. 1 20
