dr.woooo writes:
"The Same Old Empire (Oops, I mean Imperialism)...

by sasha k

Before September 11 2001, calling the US an Empire put one in the realm of the paranoid, the left or the academic, but now all that has changed. Everyone is using the word, both pro and con. It has been used so much that President Bush himself has had to respond:
"We have no territorial ambitions, we don't seek an empire," Bush remarked on Veterans Day, continuing, "Our nation is committed to freedom for ourselves and for others."
Yet, while the word is used all the time these days, it often seems to have little content. It is a shock word, for sure. Or it is assumed that the meaning is simple metaphor: the US Empire is a repeat of the Roman Empire--something made visible by the post-911 moves of the US, especially against Iraq. As a content-less word, Empire stands in the way of understanding; it is the big Thing that stands today unassailable, untheorizable, like totalitarianism and Fascism. There are, however, a couple of accounts of Empire that do attempt to fill out the concept, to spell out its content and to argue that this Empire is truly new, that the present Empire isn't just a repeat of the Roman Empire. The much discussed (at least in the academic world) Empire (2000), by Michael Hardt and the Italian autonomist Marxist Antonio Negri (the Hegel of today), came out before the September 11 attacks. Hardt and Negri argue that Empire is a new and progressive (moving forward with history) paradigm of rule or sovereignty, unlike the old forms of sovereignty such as the Roman Empire or capitalist imperialism: "Imperialism was really an extension of the sovereignty of the European nation-states beyond their own boundaries.... In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers" (Hardt and Negri, p. xii).

One of the more controversial aspects of Empire is the place the US plays within Empire. While the US occupies a privileged position, it is not the center or even the leader of Empire in the way old imperialist nations ruled over their territories. Within this new imperial sovereignty, power operates through networks and not from territorialized centers. The US plays an important role in this network, but cannot control it. Also, unlike European colonial imperialism and the Empire of Rome, the present Empire has no outside, according to Hardt and Negri. The whole globe is within Empire. Of course Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech was an attempt to define an outside to Empire, territories with no legitimate government and which act in defiance to the construction of Empire. Yet, when reading Hardt and Negri's book, the paradigmatic approach gives one the impression that we have almost reached communism; all we have to do is throw off the parasitic capitalist class. This is in part because of Negri's particular mutation of autonomist Marxism. Whereas most autonomist Marxists see the working class as fully part of capital but pushing towards a potential autonomy, Hardt and Negri seem to see the working class (or the multitude), which was the force that brought Empire into existence, as autonomous in the present, as outside of capital.

As John Holloway states, "To overlook the internal nature of the relation between labour and capital thus means both to underestimate the containment of labour within capital (and hence overestimate the power of labour against capital) and to underestimate the power of labour as internal contradiction within capital (and hence overestimate the power of capital against labour). If the inter-penetration of power and anti-power is ignored, then we are left with two pure subjects on either side. On the side of capital stands Empire, the perfect subject, and on the side of the working class stands the militant" (Holloway). Hardt and Negri shift from an autonomist Marxist focus on class struggle to a focus on the development of forms of sovereignty. Empire, as a separate subject, is the culmination of such a development, but Hardt and Negri's paradigmatic account often paints Empire as an inevitable or even finished product, and it is to this point that September 11 intervened.

After September 11, Empire's thesis has been somewhat weakened. The Empire that has been coming into view over the last year and a half is quite different from Hardt and Negri's idealizing sketch. When asked of this contradiction in an interview after September 11, Negri stated, "What is absolutely new with respect to the book's structure is the fact that the American reaction is configuring itself as a regressive backlash contrary to the imperial tendency" (Negri). This "is an imperial backlash within and against Empire that is linked to old [territorial] structures of power, old methods of command..." (Negri). For Negri, the "gravity of the situation today" lies in the contradiction between the progressive move towards Empire and its network form of power and the Bush administration's regressive move to reinforce territorial forms power, to rebuild an old style imperialism. Perhaps the inevitable Empire isn't so set in stone after all; but Negri does all he can to argue that the Bush administration is a regressive anti-Empire move, a move against the inevitable development of forms of sovereignty, of the imperial tendency. Yet what makes Bush's Empire a move backwards in history, anachronistic, and the Empire that Negri outlines a move forward? What makes the history of Empire so determined, inevitable? As Ida Dominijanni, interviewing Negri, states, this contradiction "is not negligible. It makes the process of construction of Empire much more accidental than you had described it" (Negri).

Negri's view of capital as an autonomous, economic entity comes back into view here: Negri states in the interview that it is the markets that form the real obstacle to Bush's war in Iraq. It is capital that is the progressive force that pushes towards imperial sovereignty, not the force of an autonomous working class. This sounds like we are back to the bourgeois revolution, or that the constitution of Empire is the second bourgeois revolution. So what of the power of the multitude? Negri argues that the multitude need to both abstain from the game and form alliances with reformists of the Empire against the reactionaries such as Bush and his cohorts: a new United Front.

Yet, is the Empire Hardt and Negri outline the only form of empire that can be distinguished from the Roman Empire and the imperialism of an earlier time? Are there other ways of understanding the post 1960's transformations of capitalism or post 1989 shift in forms of sovereignty? Perhaps Bush isn't completely wrong in stating that the US has no territorial ambitions. In a somewhat darker vision than Hardt and Negri, Alain Joxe, of the Interdisciplinary Center for Research on Peace in France, suggests that the US is constructing a different sort of empire, an Empire of Disorder. This Empire is much more the result of the contingencies of history and the present needs of capitalism. Within this concept of Empire, the actions of the Bush administration and its wars are not simply regressive, but instead take part in the formation of a wholly new Empire that differs as much from the imperialisms of the past as from Hardt and Negri's Empire.

In a new book entitled Empire of Disorder, Joxe says the US has refused the imperial role of conquering and subjugating peoples and territories, and instead "it operates on a case-by-case basis, regulating disorder, repressing the symptoms of despair instead of attacking its cause." The disorder of the post-Cold War world is brought about by capitalist globalization, which has increased the divide between rich and poor nations. Instead of trying to solve this problem, the US, manager of this disorder, has attempted to push the disorder to the margins of the world. And it is in these marginal and impoverished regions that the US has unleashed its violent repression, destroying and moving on to other cases of disorder.

The US has no vision or plan to solve the root cause of disorder in the world. "For the first time perhaps, humanity has embarked on an ocean of disorder with no final order insight," remarks Joxe. Any such plan would up set the America's utopian, neo-liberal dream of a free market of chaos from which to extract its profit and of opening global financial markets that can absorb surplus US capital.

All the US center to this Empire of Disorder can offer the poor of the world is a high-tech, permanent war, a war that Vice President Cheney has said will probably last more than a lifetime. Since the first Gulf War, the military has even come up with new theories of war to accomplish this task of managing and marginalizing global disorder; in this "asymmetrical war" new technologies will be vital. This high-tech war is the New Deal of our present world, sucking up the surplus capital that has been a drag on the US economy since the 1970s. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has backed a plan for a Revolution in Military Affairs that stresses high-tech, light weight and mobile military forces, especially precision bombing to take care of "hot spots." In the long run, this Revolution in Military Affairs will be used to suppress and destroy a revolution in social affairs that could put an end to neo-liberal capitalism's asymmetrical economy.

The first post-911 war, the war in Afghanistan, was a test case. As David Hendrickson, in "Towards Universal Empire: the Dangerous Quest for Absolute Security," states, "Well after al-Qaeda and the Taliban were routed, when securing a stable government in Afghanistan was clearly the objective to which military operations should have been subordinated, the United States continued to operate under rules of engagement that were more appropriate to the intensive days of the war--to the acute embarrassment of the Karzi government and at serious cost to its political viability. Those failures were not accidental. At bottom they are rooted in an American approach to war that is singularly ill-fitted to the purposes of political reconstruction" (Hendrickson, p. 9). Hendrickson continues, backing up Joxe's thesis, that, for the US, war is now conceived of "as a short and sharp engagement, and the purpose of American arms is to rout the enemy and then get out" (p. 10). Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board and close to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, has extraordinarily suggested that the Iraqi transition could be like that of Romania at the end of the cold war, remaining very stable on its own and allowing the US military to leave very quickly. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has said that we should look at Afghanistan to see what a bright future the Iraqi people could have. There will be no Pax Americana, no inclusion of the Iraqi people as citizens of empire. As Wolfowitz said in an interview on CNN, it is up to the Iraqi people to build democracy, not the US. The US is, of course, interested only in repressing opposition, using up surplus capital in the exploitation of Iraq and the building of a new, grand war machine and maintaining control over the price of oil. During the Clinton years, the discourse of human rights, the global ideology of left accommodation to capitalism, was linked up to a new type of war, a humanitarian police action to maintain the peace within the neo-liberal Empire. But that Empire has since changed form, and the discourse of human rights is playing a more minor role justifying the Iraqi war than the Kosovo or even Afghan war. As Hendrickson states, "for the American people, the case for a second Iraqi war must ultimately rest not on visions of peace through conquest and enlightened imperial administration but on the ground of 'ultimate national security'" (p. 10). Politics is the mediation of class violence and economy; democracy is the suspension of class/civil war. The discourse of human rights is the present form of left-wing global politics, the left wing of capital's attempt at suspending class war. Even though the new Empire continues to use human rights discourse to buy off its left wing, it offers no true global politics, global democracy, no mediation of violence and economy; it is the military repression of class war.

The Clinton years seems to have lulled leftists into the false sense of inevitability of the future: liberalism and the human rights war seemed to be the form of the future, the singular form of war in the post-Cold War period. But the Kosovo-style, humanitarian war was in part the result of the post-Cold War US's inability to find the right enemy. Negri's statements on Bush's reactionary status notwithstanding, since September 11, a mutation in this future has occurred, and the relationship between war and Empire has changed as well. The ideal humanitarian police action within the global, neo-liberal Empire is not the only present form war can take within the Empire of Disorder. The abstract "terrorist" and the image of Usama bin Laden as enemy has filled the role of the Other, and has provided much firmer ground for war to stand upon than the humanitarian intervention. This does not mean that the humanitarian or human rights war has disappeared, only that its role within the legitimating structures of war has changed. While human rights discourse still stands as the primary left-wing accommodation to capital, security and paranoia for security for the "civilized" peoples of the world has trumped human rights.

Slavoj Zizek has suggested that today we have two types of war: on the one side we have ethno-religious conflicts with their violation of human rights and we have security wars that result from an attack on a global power (Zizek, p. 93). But neither are truly wars in the old sense of the word. In the first case, we have the intervention of a humanitarian police action. In the second case, of which Afghanistan and Iraq are examples, the enemies are not true legal combatants, they are "rouge states" and terrorists, and are not subject to the rules of war. Not that human rights plays no role in the second type of conflict; it clearly does, but it does so in a different way. It is not the primary justification for war--security for the civilized is--but humanitarian aid is now given by the US military itself to clearly demarcate the line between the "illegal combatants" or "rogue rulers" and the true (and freedom loving) citizens of the attacked state. This is a necessary move to legitimate the category of "rogue state" or "illegal combatants."

The left's attempt to expand the inclusion of more and more people as citizens under the present global regime is exposed in all its weakness under our new conditions. For, ultimately, almost all of us are excluded, and a project of inclusion as citizens within Empire is really just the reinforcing of the democratic mask that claims for us abstract human rights. And unlike the Clinton era rhetoric that went along with such niceties as global human rights, within a general environment of fear, the US government under Bush has managed to make security threats the justification of Empire: not an Empire with a vision, but an Empire of Disorder.

Any attempt to step out of the present, to become autonomous subjects, has always meant giving up on the ideology of accommodation to capitalism, on the idea of an Empire of Human Rights to which we could all belong. For such an Empire is an impossibility for capitalism--class struggle will not disappear--and a mask for its operations.

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Hendrickson, David. 2002. "Towards Universal Empire: The Dangerous Quest for Absolute Security." World Policy Journal, Vol. xix, No. 3, (Fall).

Holloway, John. 2002. "Going in the Wrong Direction, or Mephistopheles, Not Saint Francis of Assisi." Historical Materialism.

Joxe, Alain. 2002. Empire of Disorder. New York: Semiotext(e).

Negri, Antonio. 2002. "Imperialist Backlash on Empire: Antonio Negri interviewed by Ida Dominijanni."

Zizek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso."