'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their thesis was the argument that the commercial and military rivalries that characterised the old capitalism had been superseded.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that Hardt-Negri misrepresent the argument to resurrect Kautsky's thesis that inter-imperialist rivalries could be superseded in one ultra-imperialism - whilst still paying lip-service to the left-wing icon Lenin.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.
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
-- James Heartfield