JAC Volume 23 Issue 1

For revolutionary Marxists, leftist intellectuals, working-class militants, and freedom fighters worldwide, the twentieth century seemed to offer a well-defined and knowable history, starting with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and proceeding through the revolutionary uprisings after World War I in Germany and Hungary, the Spanish Civil War and the struggle against fascism in the interwar period, the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, the national liberation struggles, and the heyday of Third World Marxism in Asia, Latin America, and Africa in the wake of World War II. In the opening decades of the century, proletarian revolution in Russia set the stage for a millenial struggle, where the common interests of working people, the poor, and the oppressed around the globe provided the basis of an international solidarity capable of transcending national boundaries and remaking the world in the name of the toiling masses. The unifying vision was to extend the victory of the Russian revolution—to end imperialism, abolish class society, and build an international workers commonwealth.

What gave this history its legibility and persuasive force was the deep-rooted belief that imperialism, as Lenin put it, is the final stage of capitalism. This sense of finality had two related meanings that must be recognized to understand what made twentieth-century history a knowable ground of revolutionary action for theorists and militants. The first (and perhaps more familiar) is the idea that imperialism, by creating a world market and monopolies of finance capital, had established the historical circumstances of its own crises, as shown in the inter-imperialist slaughter of World War I and the rise of fascism. From this perspective, imperialism is the final stage because capitalism has ex hausted its progressive historical mission and is locked into political, social, and economic contradictions it cannot transcend. On the other hand, the second meaning of the finality of imperialism is revolutionary will, the political desire that a moribund and increasingly destructive social and political system must be the final stage—what Trotsky called the "death agony"—of capitalism. From this perspective, emphasizing the internal development of imperialism alone cannot fully explain its finality, as mechanical versions of Marxism sometimes try to do. Instead, the finality of imperialism is equally a matter of articulating the revolutionary forces (what used to be called the "subjective factor") to the trajectory of the historical period (the "objective conditions"). For this reason, the finality of imperialism in the twentieth century depended as much on political clarification to resolve the crisis of revolutionary leadership as on the sobering realization that history had boiled down to the alternative of socialism or barbarism.

At times—say in 1968, with student strikes around the world, the revolutionary upsurge against Gaullism in France, and calls for an international anti-imperialist front and "two, three, many Vietnams"—it actually felt like the forces were gathering to overturn the old order and institute a new historical era. I recall that moment in 1968, when so much seemed possible, because for many the very history on which the spectre of revolutionary change relied—a usable past of epochal struggles between labor and capital, colonizer and colonized, socialist and capitalist modes of development—ended, in a final symbolic crash, in 1989, with the fall of the Soviet Union and the Stalinized worker-states of eastern Europe. The official "death of communism" in 1989 is a decisive date that appeared to undermine the Marxian romance of the twentieth century, propelling what remained of the historical left and its fellow travellers into what felt like a history without teleology or intelligible shape. To say that the unprecedented, even unthinkable events of 1989 disoriented the left is to understate the gravity of the matter. In the 1990s, militant impulses dispersed into identity politics, new social movements, and localized struggles, while a postmodern incredulity toward the master narrative of revolutionary Marxism replaced the felt sense that capitalism had grown senile and socialism loomed as the future of humanity.

Compounding the disorientation of the left—and the sudden absence of a meaningful history—was the capitalist triumphalism after the fall of the Soviet Union. Academics, journalists, and the denizens of right wing think tanks invented a post-Cold War history that marks the period after 1989 indelibly as a "new world order"—the "end of history" and beginning of the "clash of civilizations." "Shock and awe" took place long before the Iraq war, at the cognitive level, as pundits and policymakers recognized that, without rival superpowers, the U.S. holds the financial leverage and unchallenged military supremacy to exert its will on the world. In the aftermath of 9/11 and the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the U.S. and its "coalition of the willing," liberals and conservatives alike are now speaking frankly and openly about the inevitability of American empire, distinguishing only between the "hard" version of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolkowitz, and Richard Perle and the "soft" version of Joseph Nye, Michael Ignatieff, and Paul Berman. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that PBS is about to broadcast a series on the British Empire, with a book tie-in by the shameless pro-imperialist Niall Fergusson. The question, as Fergusson and others put it, is whether Americans have the character and stamina to fulfill the legacy of empire thrust upon the U.S.

At any rate, given the current media monopoly of liberal and conservative apologists for American empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire takes on added salience. Published before 9/11 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Empire offers a bold periodization in which Empire (always capital without a definite article) represents a new historical stage supplanting the modern era of intercapitalist nation-state rivalries, the uneven development of core and periphery countries, and the once epoch-defining class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie. Empire, as Hardt and Negri describe it, is an imaginative geography of the globalization of world space, where boundless flows of capital, labor, and information transcend the older imperialist order and yet at the same time plant the seeds of the destruction and transformation of Empire.

What makes Empire so invigorating to read at this point is that, unlike establishment versions of the incontestable power of the U.S., Hardt and Negri see Empire as highly vulnerable to revolutionary desire. Empire offers a much needed dose of revolutionary optimism by telling a post-1989 history of globalization from below, where the "multitude"—a revolutionary force of the poor, the have-nots, and the wretched of the earth—are already waging a scattered and uncoordinated yet permanent intifada in Tiananmen Square, on the West Bank and Gaza, in the 1992 Los Angeles riots, in Chiapas, and in the strike waves in France in 1995 and Korea in 1996. For Hardt and Negri, the alternative that shapes the lived history of revolutionary militants is no longer that of socialism or barbarism, as it was for the Old Left. Instead, the terms themselves have changed, transfigured into barbarian hordes of the multitude gathering at the gates of Empire.

The reception of Empire is an interesting one. It was hailed at its publication in 2000 by mainstream reviewers at the New York Times and elsewhere, along with academic leftists such as Stanley Aronowitz and Lawrence Grossberg, as the "next thing" to revive a flagging postmodern theory industry. There are good reasons, I think, the book acquired critical acclaim, for it offers a genuinely inventive analysis of the shift from modern to imperial sovereignty that casts the history of European modernity along new lines. At the same time, though the book has been roundly (and often correctly) criticized from orthodox Marxist perspectives, it nonetheless belongs in the Marxist tradition (which may account for its current neglect in mainstream discussions of American empire). But if it belongs to Marxist tradition, Empire, I must note at the outset, is thoroughly revisionist, verging on the crackpot at times. And it is ultimately disappointing in terms of its political program. Yet, as a Marxian poetics, it succeeds in much the way the Situationists and the idea of the "society of the spectacle" succeeded in the 1960s by fashioning a picture of the world and thereby making its vocabulary virtually unavoidable. Empire is a quirky, at times just plain wrongheaded, visionary work struggling to produce a truth out of the new post-1989 global realities.

The pleasure of reading Empire derives in part from Hardt and Negri's utterly unembarrassed efforts to write history on a grand scale, with a sweeping narrative, epochal change, and dramatic contending forces. Though Empire describes the postmodernization of economic production, its desire for totality and metanarrative distance it from the aims of much postmodern theorizing. For example, Hardt and Negri locate the origin—and the "problem"—of European modernity in the Renaissance and earlier instead of in the Enlightenment where postmodern theorists conventionally place it. For Hardt and Negri, the "primary event of modernity" can be traced to Duns Scotus, Dante, and others in the late Middle Ages, who discovered "the plane of immanence" and affirmed "the powers of this world." European modernity begins, from this perspective, not simply as the secularizing impulse in a textbook Age of Humanism but as a "whole series of philosophical developments stretching from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century," whose "revolutionary" outcome is that the "powers of creation that had once been consigned exclusively to the heavens are now brought down to earth." For figures as diverse as Nicholas of Cusa, Thomas More, Francis Bacon, Galileo, Spinoza, and the early Protestant sects, the discovery of immanence established the ontological grounds to recognize human dignity and value the capacity of human experience, experiment, and labor to transform the world. Accordingly, the "horizon of immanence" coincided with the "horizon of the democratic political order" by investing creative, revolutionary potentiality in the multitude. "Bodies and brains were fundamentally transformed," Hardt and Negri say, by the "historical process of subjectivization"—by an "irreversible change in the mode of life of the multitude" that "posed humanity and desire at the center of history."

In Hardt and Negri's account, European modernity arises in a crisis of authority and governability as counterrevolution posed order against desire, seeking to reappropriate the immanent powers of the new humanity by transferring them to a transcendental plane beyond the control of the multitude. Two clashing modes of modernity have been entangled at the heart of European history, and, for Hardt and Negri, the Renaissance is emblematic of this tension in modernity, with its revolutionary recognition of human equality in Europe and the recently discovered New World, on one hand, and the challenge that European mastery faced in perpetual civil war at home and the demands of conquest and domination abroad, on the other. If, as Hardt and Negri note, by the end of the seventeenth century—following the "cyclone" of the Reformation, the English Civil War, and the ravages of the Thirty Years' War in Germany—the forces of order had largely triumphed, the victory was not a decisive one, nor could it be. The birth of European modernity instituted in effect a permanent state of civil crisis as the grounds of the modern nation-state. In this regard, Hobbes provides the "first political solution to the crisis of modernity" by locating the transcendence of the sovereign not in theological authority but in the "immanent logic of human relations," where the "contract of association" is linked inextricably to the "contract of subjugation."

For Hardt and Negri, the problem of sovereignty is central to the formation of modernity, and the plot line of Empire traces the shift from the modern territorial sovereignty of the nation-state to the deterritorialized imperial sovereignty of Empire. Hardt and Negri tell an idiosyncratic tale in which imperial sovereignty is prefigured in the nineteenth-century U.S. of Jefferson, the Monroe Doctrine, and Jackson by the "tendency toward an open, expansive project operating on an unbounded terrain" where the American frontier reveals that the "fundamental characteristic of imperial sovereignty is that its space is always open." Hardt and Negri narrate a "passage to Empire" that pivots on the virtual Americanization of European imperialism. It is a genealogy they intend to replace the modern story of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism—to go beyond what has been known in postcolonial theory as the European encounter with its Other and in Third World politics as national liberation and decolonialization.

Roosevelt's New Deal concoction of Taylorism, Fordism, and Keynesianism figures in Empire as both a crucial culminating moment in modernity and the "first instance of a strong subjectivity that tended in the direction of Empire." Originally a response to the political allure of the Bolshevik Revolution and rising working-class militancy at home and abroad, the New Deal, for Hardt and Negri, begins the "real process of surpassing imperialism" as it extends the reach of its regulatory networks beyond the domestic programs of the Great Depression into the post-World War II settlement of the Marshall Plan and the Bretton-Woods agreement. The basic principle of Empire that the New Deal begins to perceive is that power has no stable terrain but is constantly moving through the networks that constitute imperial sovereignty and political subjectivity. In the idea of Empire, the America of the New Deal appears not as a territory located in space and time but "simply as the fabric of an ontological human dimension that tends to become universal." Hardt and Negri's Empire, therefore, cannot reside in an actual seat of power, as imperialism once did in the metropolitan centers of Europe and the U.S. Instead, Empire represents the globalization of power and a supranational form of political sovereignty that displaces the sovereignty of nation-states with a logic of rule that is so diffuse and omnipresent that it recognizes no boundaries and occupies no place.

Under Empire, the world becomes a "smooth place," without the inside and outside of a national bourgeoisie and an international proletariat, Europe and its colonies, First World and Third World. The dialectics of base and superstructure collapse in the formation of Empire as language, communication, cooperation, and immaterial labor enter into the means of production (this is the "postmodernization"_or "informatization"—of production referred to above), and "constant capital tends to be constituted and represented within variable capital, in the brains, bodies, and cooperation of productive subjects." For Hardt and Negri, the class struggle that once promised to appropriate the means of production and resources of representation on behalf of the proletariat has been replaced by a dynamic of corruption and generation, as Empire becomes a blockage of desire and an "impediment to life" associated with disease and mutilation, a decayed effort to frustrate the generativity of the multitude and its hybrid bodies "enriched with intellectual and cooperative powers."

A question to ask of Empire is whether it reproduces, inadvertantly or not, what Gillian Hart calls the "impact" model of globalization—the disabling discourses and productions of knowledge about globalization that call up inexorable and irresistible market forces, flows of capital, and information networks radiating out from the metropolitan core that dismantle national borders and reshape local ways of life in the periphery. What makes such discourses disabling, Hart argues, is that they do not simply describe the effects of globalization but are actually constitutive of them, by ascribing a deterministic inevitability to economic and cultural globalization. This is the disempowering logic of the neoliberal consensus in the post-1989 period—the belief, as everyone from Margaret Thatcher and Bill Clinton to the African National Congress in South Africa holds, that there is no alternative to free trade, deregulation, and structural adjustment. Moreover, as Hart notes, leftists have not been immune to the impact model of globalization, producing their own disabling versions out of economism and a technological determinism that at times can be just as breathless about deterritorialization and transnationalism as the corporate gurus.

Hardt and Negri guard against an impact model of globalization by combining Deleuze's sense that desire is active and power reactive with the Italian far-left tradition of operaismo and autonomia. In a radical attempt to read history from below that verges on what I would call transcendental workerism, Hardt and Negri offer the fundamental axiom of Empire: that the productive creativity and political struggles of the proletariat always precede and prestructure the shifting forms of social and economic life under capitalism. To put it bluntly, the proletariat has all the historical agency, to which the capitalists can only respond and seek to channel into institutions of domination and control. For example, in the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism, from the modernization to postmodernization of production, the decisive moment, for Hardt and Negri, has already occurred as the old disciplined industrial working class is replaced by a productive subjectivity based on flexibility, mobility, cooperation, and knowledge—a "social worker" who emerges within the new "communicational, linguistic, and affective networks" of production that grow out of the social movements and "transvaluation of values" in the 1960s. As Hardt and Negri put it, "immaterial labor thus seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism."

By the same token, the diasporic flow of populations in the era of globalization have overcome the separation of First and Third Worlds in the older core-periphery models of imperialism, establishing the grounds for a new internationalism, a "counterimperial ontology" based on nomadism, exodus, desertion, hybridity, and miscegenation. According to Hardt and Negri, the "most wretched of the earth becomes the most powerful beings, because its new nomadic singularity is the most creative force and the omnilateral movement of its own desire is itself the coming revolution."

To my mind, this is a glorious vision of the creativity and autonomy of the multitude, generalized on ontological grounds from European modernity to the global realities of the world post-1989. But if Empire succeeds, as I suggested earlier, as a Marxian poetics, I am not at all convinced it works politically. For one thing, Hardt and Negri's emphasis on "immaterial labor" simply rehashes, with a decidedly postmodern information-age inflection, earlier "new class" theories about the role of intellectual labor under late capitalism. More telling, though, is the fact that Empire never makes quite clear how the new social worker in the Silicon Valleys, ad agencies, and research and development institutes of postindustrial capitalism is going to link up with undocumented workers at home and the superexploited abroad to form an anti-imperial "posse" to replace the proletariat of The Communist Manifesto. Hardt and Negri's three-point program of global citizenship, a social wage and guaranteed income for all, and the right to self-control and reappropriation of the means of production is certainly a noble one that can—and should—be supported by progressive people worldwide. But finally, in my view at least, it simply reproduces the conundrum of the anti-globalization movement of Seattle and Genoa about how to join the political agitation of First World anti-imperialists to the Third World workers caught up in globalization's race to the bottom. For all of Empire's talk about a "smooth world," I think the development of underdevelopment remains a stubborn political and economic reality.

But if the poetic flair of Empire cannot transcend in a persuasive way the persistence of old-fashioned imperialism as the final stage of capitalism, I want to read it as more than just another instance of the postmodern ecstasy of theory that tries to accomplish rhetorically what it cannot do politically. For me, the beauty of Empire is the revolutionary will and desire that suffuse the work, figured in its closing section as the revolu tionary militant, who, unlike the "sad, ascetic agent of the Third International," poses "against the misery of power the joy of being." In one the most beautiful passages in a beautifully written book, Hardt and Negri call on Saint Francis of Assisi to refuse "every instrumental discipline" and oppose the "mortification of the flesh." What I find altogether persuasive—and inspiring—about Empire is that it asks readers to identify with St. Francis' opposition to nascent capitalism and thereby to affirm, at the level of lived experience, the "irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist."