>"Despite recognizing all this, we insist on asserting that the
>construction of Empire is a step forward in order to do away with any
>nostalgia for the power structures that preceded it and refuse any
>political strategy that involves returning to that old arrangement,
>such as trying to resurrect the nation-state to protect against
>global capital. We claim that Empire is better in the same way that
>Marx insists that capitalism is better than the forms of society and
>modes of production that came before it. Marx's view is grounded on a
>healthy and lucid disgust for the parochial and rigid hierarchies
>that preceded capitalist society as well as on a recognition that the
>potential for liberation is increased in the new situation"
>- Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, p. 43
Interesting this should come up in parallel with the Kosovo (Kacek massacre) tread. Coincidence? I'm sure C. Burford and other imperialists would agree with Negri here (for imperialism is foremost a political, and not economic, phenomenon and therefore involves subjective questions of ideology, belief and political allegiance - unlike, say, the question of working class choices in food products which, though there certainly exists an ideological component, is primarily an issue of economics).
But the quote below is an excellent reason to reject the Hardt/Negri work, while, like any other work, salvaging any interesting nuggets it might contain. It hardly follows that "Empire is better *in the same way*" (emphasis added) "that Marx insists that capitalism is better than the forms of society and modes of production that came before it." This argument by parallelism is a sleight of hand that confuses a general characterization of mid-19th century capitalist society and economy - a characterization already given the tinge of historical retrospective even then - with the contemporary reality at the beginning of the 21st century (heh, thanks to the arbitrariness of calendars, we can really leverage some "distance" here :-) where it no longer generally applies. How can "Empire" be "better" (historically progressive) if, in this same sense, capitalism no longer is? Only if the project calls on reliance upon the State to reform Capital. In practice, it could be another argument for voting Democrat.
On the contrary, it can be argued that imperialism - including the present-day Washington "Empire" - is necessarily, always and everywhere the most retrograde aspect of the whole process of "globalization" (putting aside for the sake of argument the disputed meaning of this term), because what (if anything) is possibly historically progressive about this process is to be found in its economic, not political, aspect.
The state, whether national, imperial or otherwise, continues to be the final repository of all the regressive tendencies thrown off by society in the course of its (presently capitalist) development, including not a few "left wing" leftovers in or supporters of, government - as Marx noted, famously enough, in "The Eighteenth Bruimare". (This precisely defines the problem of the socialist state as well). The Hardt/Negri "Empire" exists to contain global development, not promote it. Its contemporary (historicized by Hardt/Negri) relation to the nation-state may entail smashing it down when it involves errant semi-colonial "rogues" such as Serbia or Iraq, but these incidents are far, far overshadowed by the enormous and ever-continuing fortification of the foundational *nation-states* of present-day "Empire" - above all, the keystone/empire nation-state, the United States, without which the whole network edifice would crumble, taking capitalism with it. Under "Empire" the nation-state - in the shape of particular dominant nation-states, generally grows stronger, not weaker.
This conception of "Empire", like its economic counterpart "neoliberalism", is nothing but a fashionable intellectual illusion. If we strip away the Althusserian/poststructuralist encumbrances (lightly sprinkled with a bit of postmodern spicing here and there), all we have is the statement - unintended by the authors - that the United States is the most historically progressive nation-state in the world today, simply because it is most capable of knocking down the barriers presented by other, weaker, nation-states. This "despite recognizing" various contradictions of latter-day "Empire".
This would certainly come as a surprise to a certain left/progressive thread of North American historiography which views (correctly, I believe) the United States as resting on a basically pre-capitalist foundation - or shall we say still encased within a pre-capitalist framework, despite its massive rupture by an extra-constitutional Cold War regime ( *not New Deal*, although this greased the skids, assisted, of course, by the usual gaggle of Left admirers of the prowess of the "progressive" imperial nation-state). For in fact - not simply in theory - this North American state is the most archaic, and not the most progressive, of contemporary republican nation-states - with the exception of a certain parliamentary dictatorship called "The United Kingdom". Retrograde dependencies such as Saudi Arabia do not warrant mention in this context - although a certain cultural-historical geopolitical pattern might be seen to emerge here, which would be no coincidence.
But here is exposed the second ruse in the parallelism: this archaic character is disguised in the presentation of an ostensive historical "progression" of the state form from "nation" to "Empire", while with the same movement it produces an error: it separates the analysis of state forms from that of the economic form of "globalization". This analytical approach to the subject matter will always produce error in the contemporary historical era when capitalism generally is no longer historically progressive at any level, global or otherwise, but rather is marked by a decomposition whose predominant feature is the ever more complex intertwining of economy and society with the state, involving the dissolution of the traditional (and historically progressive in their time, progressive because they tended to devalue the state) bourgeois distinctions between state and civil society, public and private, however utopian in their bourgeois form. This is why the parallelism must be presented in relation to a 19th century past, one very different from our own.
But what else is to be expected from warmed over Althusser, surely one of the more unfortunate intellectual trends to afflict leftists in the postwar.
>. . . Marx's view is grounded on a
>healthy and lucid disgust for the parochial and rigid hierarchies
>that preceded capitalist society as well as on a recognition that the
>potential for liberation is increased in the new situation"
>- Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, p. 43
>
>but it is not obvious that empire is more susceptible
>to liberation than nation-state. The contrary seems
>more likely to me.
>mbs
Here I must agree!
-Brad Mayer Oakland, CA /***********************************************************************
"Sure I was young and impulsive once--I wore every conceivable pin.
Even went to Socialist meetings and learned all those old union hymns.
Ah, but I've grown older and wiser, and that's why I'm turning you in. So Love Me, Love Me, Love Me--I'm A Liberal."
-Phil Ochs
************************************************************************/