... The term "Empire" in [Michael] Hardt and [Antonio] Negri's analysis does not refer to imperialist domination of the periphery by the center, but to an all-encompassing entity that recognizes no limiting territories or boundaries outside of itself. In its heyday, "imperialism," they claim, "was really an extension of the sovereignty of the European nation-states beyond their own boundaries" (p. xii). Imperialism or colonialism in this sense is now dead. But Hardt and Negri also pronounce the death of the new colonialism: economic domination and exploitation by the industrial powers without direct political control. They insist that all forms of imperialism, insofar as they represent restraints on the homogenizing force of the world market, are doomed by that very market. Empire is thus both "postcolonial and postimperialist" (p. 9). "Imperialism," we are told, "is a machine of global striation, channeling, coding, and territorializing the flows of capital, blocking certain flows and facilitating others. The world market, in contrast, requires a smooth space of uncoded and deterritorialized flowsŠimperialism would have been the death of capital had it not been overcome. The full realization of the world market is necessarily the end of imperialism" (p. 333).
Concepts such as center and periphery, these authors argue, are now all but useless. "Through the decentralization of production and the consolidation of the world market, the international divisions and flows of labor and capital have fractured and multiplied so that it is no longer possible to demarcate large geographical zones as center and periphery, North and South." There are "no differences of nature" between the United States and Brazil, Britain and India, "only differences of degree" (p. 335).*
Also gone is the notion of U.S. imperialism as a central force in the world today. "The United States," they write, "does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project. Imperialism is over. No nation will be world leader in the way modern European nations were." (pp. xiii-xiv). "The Vietnam War," Hardt and Negri state, "might be seen as the final moment of the imperialist tendency and thus a point of passage to a new regime of the Constitution" (pp. 178-79). This passage to a new global constitutional regime is shown by the Gulf War, during which the United States emerged "as the only power able to manage international justice, not as a function of its own national motives but in the name of global rightŠ.The U.S. world police acts not in imperialist interest but in imperial interest [that is, in the interest of deterritorialized Empire]. In this sense the Gulf War did indeed, as George Bush claimed, announce the birth of a new world order" (p. 180).
Empire, the name they give to this new world order, is a product of the struggle over sovereignty and constitutionalism at the global level in an age in which a new global Jeffersonianism -- the expansion of the U.S. constitutional form into the global realm -- has become possible. Local struggles against Empire are opposed by these authors, who believe that the struggle now is simply over the form globalization will take -- and the extent to which Empire will live up to its promise of bringing to fruition "the global expansion of the internal U.S. constitutional project" (p. 182). Their argument supports the efforts of the "multitude against Empire" -- that is, the struggle of the multitude to become an autonomous political subject -- yet this can only take place, they argue, within "the ontological conditions that Empire presents" (p. 407).
So much for today's more fashionable views. I would now like to turn to the decidedly unfashionable. In contrast to Empire, István Mészáros' new book Socialism or Barbarism represents in many ways the height of unfashionability -- even on the left.* Instead of promising a new universalism arising potentially out of the capitalist globalization process if only it takes the right form, Mészáros argues that the perpetuation of a system dominated by capital would guarantee precisely the opposite: "Despite its enforced 'globalization,' capital's incurably iniquitous system is structurally incompatible with universality in any meaningful sense of the termŠ.there can be no universality in the social world without substantive equality" (pp. 10-11)....
..."[T]he capital system is articulated as a jungle-like network of contradictions that can only be more or less successfully managed for some time but never definitively overcome" (p. 13). Among the principal contradictions that are insurmountable within capitalism are those between: (1) production and its control; (2) production and consumption; (3) competition and monopoly; (4) development and underdevelopment (center and periphery); (5) world economic expansion and intercapitalist rivalry; (6) accumulation and crisis; (7) production and destruction; (8) the domination of labor and dependence on labor; (9) employment and unemployment; and (10) growth of output at all costs and environmental destruction.* "It is quite inconceivable to overcome even a single one of these contradictions," Mészáros observes," let alone their inextricably combined network, without instituting a radical alternative to capital's mode of social metabolic control" (pp. 13-14).
According to this analysis, the period of capitalism's historic ascendance has now ended. Capitalism has expanded throughout the globe, but in most of the world it has produced only enclaves of capital. There is no longer any promise of the underdeveloped world as a whole "catching-up" economically with the advanced capitalist countries -- or even of sustained economic and social advance in most of the periphery. Living conditions of the vast majority of workers are declining globally. The long structural crisis of the system, since the 1970s, prevents capital from effectively coping with its contradictions, even temporarily. The extraneous help offered by the state is no longer sufficient to boost the system. Hence, capital's "destructive uncontrollability" -- its destruction of previous social relations and its inability to put anything sustainable in their place -- is coming more and more to the fore (pp. 19, 61).
At the core of Mészáros' argument is the proposition that we are now living within what is "the potentially deadliest phase of imperialism" (the title of the second chapter of his book). Imperialism, he says, can be divided into three distinct historical phases: (1) early modern colonialism, (2) the classic phase of imperialism as depicted by Lenin, and (3) global hegemonic imperialism, with the U.S. as its dominant force. The third phase was consolidated following the Second World War, but it became "sharply pronounced" with the onset of capital's structural crisis in the 1970s (p. 51)....