'Empire' after Iraq

'Empire' after Iraq (4) 

The WEEK
ending 27 July 2003

'EMPIRE' AFTER IRAQ

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been superseded.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superseded in one ultra-imperialism - whilst still paying lip-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.

Particularly useful in understanding the weaknesses of the 
anti-war campaign is James Heartfield's critical account of its 
predecessor, in the essay 'Capitalism and anti-capitalism'. 
Heartfield sees the burgeoning anti-capitalist movement as less 
of an alternative to capitalism as an echo of the inner 
uncertainty of the elite itself. Analysing the precursors of
anti-capitalism in environmentalism, indigenism and direct 
action, Heartfield patiently explains the anti-democratic 
character of these lobbies. Most provocatively, he charges the 
anti-capitalists with posing as irredentists, who in the end are 
seeking to moderate capitalism, not overthrow it.

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