Anonymous Comrade submits:

Empire After Iraq"

James Heartfield

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's book Empire (Harvard, 2000)
summarised the state of the capitalism for a burgeoning
'anti-capitalist' protest movement. The veteran Italian Marxist and his
American academic acolyte drew on the ideas of the '1968' generation of
radicals to characterise a new global capitalism. Central to their
thesis was the argument that the commercial and military rivalries that
characterised the old capitalism had been superseded. Though one
military power had indeed prevailed at the end of the Cold War, the
United States was obliged to act in the universal interests of the world
capitalist class, rather than its own. Hardt and Negri characterised
this trans-global capitalist domination Empire, which they insisted took
priority over any one imperialist interest.
The contributors to a new collection "Empire" and US Imperialism take
issue with Hardt and Negri (in Interventions: International Journal of
Postcolonial Studies, Volume 5, no 2, 2003). New Left Review contributor
Peter Gowan situates Empire in a genre that generalises the experience
of the Clinton presidency's foreign policy, with its emphasis on
international cooperation. 'Yet with the arrival of the Bush
administration and especially after 11 September 2001, this 1990s
picture of a united transatlantic axis seems to be rapidly weakening, if
not shattering' (p220).

In an excellent introduction to the debate guest editor Bashir
Abu-Manneh unpicks Hardt-Negri's relationship to the Lenin-Kautsky
debates over imperialism early in the twentieth century. Abu-Manneh
shows that Hardt-Negri misrepresent the argument to resurrect Kautsky's
thesis that inter-imperialist rivalries could be superseded in one
ultra-imperialism -- whilst still paying lip-service to the left-wing
icon Lenin. Abu-Manneh's presentation shows that -- like Kautsky before
them -- Hardt-Negri's theory of an abstract Empire floating above
national rivalries is a poor guide to an actually dominant hegemonic
power. By removing the specificity of national capitals and national
states, 'Empire', 'capitalism is left unchallenged' (p173).

Also featured in the collection are contributions from Leo Panitch
(editor of the Socialist Register), showing the US elite's complicity in
the creation of Al Qaeda, radical geographer Neil Smith (whose account
of the skull-duggery in the elevation of China and France onto the
United Nations' Security Council is worth the price of the journal
alone), and Saskia Sassen, making the case for the role of international
advocacy organisations in the creation of an international civil
society.

The collection indicates the strengths and weaknesses of the radical
left-critique of contemporary imperialism. Peter Gowan's innate
scepticism towards militarism is a good counterweight to those attempts
to read a positive impulse into intervention overseas. Gowan astutely
sees that 'almost any progressive cause that did not touch on the
neo-liberal project in capital-labour relations or on the drive to open
economies in the South to EU capitals could be championed by the EU as a
means of gaining support from left-oriented social groups and
intelligentsia in Europe and beyond'. The best of these critics
understand that elite 'anxiety may issue in a dangerous recklessness,
but it is also a sign of an imperialism that is uncertain about itself,
without the confidence of any kind of mission, except the assertion of
power for its own sake' (Arif Dirlik, p. 211). Gowan too sees not
strength but 'weakness in the efforts of American elites to legitimate
the drives of the American state in the post-cold war world' (p. 229).

On the negative side, the charge that Hardt-Negri are too abstract in
their characterisation of Empire tends to reduce to the critical point
that, 'it's not "Empire" in the abstract, it's the Americans that are
the problem'. Syracuse University's Crystal Bartolovich distils the
anti-American chauvinism into its most vulgar by insisting that not just
American elites are uniquely depraved, but so too are American workers.
Uncritically repeating the findings of the UN World Development Report,
she charges American people with gobbling up the world's resources --
oblivious to the way that these registers of 'resource depletion' are
entirely fixated upon the level of distribution, masking the fact that
American workers produce as great a share of the world's goods as they
do its pollution.

Anti-Americanism credited with a positive potential has served to push
the left in Europe into a myopic embrace of the most destructive,
European elite institutions, from the International Criminal Court at
the Hague and the UN Security Council to the European Union and the
Chirac government. The account of the US blindly wrecking international
institutions tends to romanticise these as vehicles of positive change,
where in fact they have served as rubber stamps for military
intervention in Bosnia, Kosovo and Africa.

Interventions is available from Alison Donnell, Centre for Colonial and
Postcolonial Studies, Department of English and Media, Nottingham Trent
University, Nottingham NG11 8NS, or Taylor and Francis www.tandf.co.uk