Once Again on Empire and imperialism
Posted to www.marxmail.org on July 13, 2006
In the latest issue of the Nation Magazine, Michael Hardt makes a valiant but ultimately doomed attempt to rescue
his Empire thesis from the dustbin of history. Ultimately, this involves coming
to terms with the recent focus on "imperialism" made ineluctable by
the last 4 years of hellish assaults on Islamic peoples in the third world. Hardt grants that for some gullible souls, "The Bush
doctrine of unilateralism was, in fact, nothing but a new name for
I can certainly understand Michael Hardt's frustration. Unlike him and Toni Negri, these "leftist intellectuals" were content to stick within the limits of Marxism and not try to supplant it with jazzy new theories. Writing a brand-new theory takes at least 5 years or so, but writing those oh-so-boring Monthly Review books with the word "imperialism" in the title is no challenge at all. Contrary to the John Bellamy Fosters of the world, Hardt insists that "imperialism is no longer an adequate concept for understanding global power and domination, and clinging to it can blind us to the new forms of power emerging today."
You see, if you have a proper dialectical handle on world
affairs as Michael Hardt does, you'll understand that
Now that he has effectively punctured musty old ideas about imperialism, surely as dated as last year's car models, Hardt puts forward his counter-thesis, which was first elaborated in the pages of the July 2001 "Empire".
My view is that the
recent failures of US imperialist adventures are not simply the result of
tactical errors or bad luck but of a profound shift in global power structures.
One might say that the United States is not powerful enough today to be an
imperialist power--and I think that is true, but it misses the deeper, more
important point: that imperialism and its methods are losing their
effectiveness and another form of global domination is emerging in its stead.
So if imperialism no longer exists, what has taken its place? The answer, of course, is Empire:
Antonio Negri and I proposed before 9/11 and the "war on
terror" that the coming global order should be understood in terms not of
imperialism but Empire, by which we understand a wide network of collaborating
powers, including the dominant nation-states, supranational institutions like
the IMF and World Bank, the major corporations, some of the major NGOs and
others. This, we claim, is the emerging power that will maintain global
hierarchies, keeping the rich rich and the poor poor, keeping power in the hands of the few. Such an Empire
is the political form adequate to the interests of global capital rather than
simply the capital of one nation or another. Partly for that reason, for being
more purely capitalist, its forms of domination, social segregation and
geographical divisions of the globe will be even more severe, its structures of
poverty more brutal and its forms of exploitation more degrading.
In a possible retreat from the extreme anti-nationalism of "Empire," Hardt now seems prepared to accept the possibility that the new assertiveness of the Latin American left might constitute a "progressive" alternative to the more powerful and more dangerous elements of the Empire that he analogizes to a monarchy. Opposed to the American state acting as a King, united, lesser "aristocrats" can mount a challenge:
Indeed, the
"Bolivarian" strategy of the Venezuelan government seeks to
capitalize on the election of progressive governments in so many countries in
Latin America by forming partnerships from Uruguay and Argentina to Brazil and
Bolivia, and perhaps in the future also with Ecuador or Mexico. Acting alone,
of course, none of these nation-states has the power to confront the
Hardt even grants the possibility such states might act on behalf of the people even if they don't achieve the elevated status of the ideals professed on behalf of the "multitude" in "Empire":
Some governments that
defy the neoliberal order and US command--
Yet in the final analysis, it is better not to get your
hands dirty by managing the affairs of state. Compared to the nasty business of
wielding power, it is far better to emulate purer but less powerful phenomena
such as the EZLN in
So much of this is wrong that one hardly knows where to begin in corrected it. It is an embarrassment of riches.
To start with, imperialism does not rest on the assumption that there is some kind of hegemon. If anything, WWI and WWII demonstrate that wars break out when rival groups of monopoly capital have insufficient power to impose their will on each other. The emerging ability of Russia and China, for example, to counter U.S. (and British) political, economic and military influence in certain places in the world does not mean that the concept of imperialism is obsolete, only that the specific dynamics have evolved. If China is about to build an automobile factory in the USA or if Russia uses its oil and gas as leverage against Western Europe, we can only understand this as signs that U.S. power is limited.
But there are precedents for this. During WWI, Germany the
British intercepted German cables to Mexico promising return of their land back
in the United States if they became an ally. According to some historians, this
forced the
There has been jockeying for power among major capitalist
rivals since the mid-19th century. Furthermore, Lenin never tried to
identify a hegemonic "center" in his writings about imperialism. If
anything, the decline of the
In 1926, Leon Trotsky--a most "classical"
Marxist--wrote an essay titled "Europe and
"This is revealed most graphically and incontestably in
Although it would require nearly as much space as this
article to explain, suffice it to say that the tensions that preceded WWI and
WWII are mounting once again. In a desperate attempt to control oil, the
To confront this mounting menace, it is necessary to achieve laser-like clarity on the dominant questions of the past century, namely how to take power and to wield on behalf of the world's overwhelming majority: those who are forced to sell their labor power. Any obfuscations about "multitudes" and "Empire" only get in the way.