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The
massive attacks against the WTC and the Pentagon back on
September 11, 2001 and its aftermath -particularly, the
growing interventionism and "unilateralism" of
the US's foreign policy- has raised an intense debate among
the intellectuals and all the strands of politics worldwide.
Many old (and not so old) ideas are being put to the harsh
test of the new events. Toni Negri's views -one of the most
outstanding Autonomist thinkers-, which were outlined in
his book Empire, are also facing a litmus test now. We took
issue with his views in an earlier issue of this journal.
(1)
In an interview published in the Italian daily Il Manifesto,
on September 14, Negri sets out his point of view on the
turn in America's foreign policy in the wake of the blasts.
He also puts forward some political alternatives to challenge
the reactionary offensive launched by the US government.
In Negri's views, the attacks confirmed that: 'If New York
could be bombed just as London, Berlin or Tokyo could…,
a new global order [i.e., the 'Empire'] had come to life
fully'. However, the American backlash would be a turn about
in the situation. That 'is taking the shape of a contrary
and regressive backlash with regards to the imperial tendency.
A counter-drive, a violent imperialist backlash both within
and against the Empire…' (2)
Can we say that S11 has completely confirmed that the 'Empire'
has already climaxed? Furthermore, is the imperialist reaction
unleashed by the American government at odds with the 'imperial
tendency'? A correct answer to these questions is a key
issue, since they should enable us to raise a correct policy
to fight back Bush's offensive.
Empire failed the test
We believe
that the facts have given the lie to the views postulated
by Negri in his book Empire, and this for the following
reasons:
a) The attacks against the symbols of American economic
and military might have shattered the notion of an 'Empire'
that 'lacks any territorial center of power and which is
not based on fixed frontiers or barriers.' According to
Negri, the latter 'is a non-centered and de-territorialized
governmental apparatus...' (3), a new world order superseding
the imperialist epoch.
As many commentators have already pointed out, the colossal
impact of S11 was not just due to its catastrophic magnitude,
the number of casualties or else the spectacular nature
of the attack. Contrariwise, its significance lies in the
fact that it hit the hegemonic power and the centerpiece
of the imperialist system worldwide -the US. That turned
S11 into a momentous event, a turnabout for international
politics. If Bin Laden, Al Qaeda or whoever launched the
attack had agreed to Negri's views -i.e., there are no longer
any outstanding centers of power and the 'Empire' is a 'non-existent'
point spreading through an intangible web devoid of any
hierarchical structure- they would have never hit those
very real targets.
b) The
new doctrine of 'pre-emptive war' of the US government,
which is putting it on collision course with Iraq, stands
at odds with Negri's description of the 'new type' interventions
engineered by the 'Empire'. Negri holds that 'the imperial
armies are requested to intervene by one or more of the
parties involved in an already existing conflict.' In this
way, 'The Empire was not born out of its own will, but rather
it is called into being on the basis of its ability to solve
conflicts. The Empire is thus brought to life and its interventions
legitimated when they have been made part of the chain of
international consensus which allows for a solution to existing
conflicts.'
This description is nothing but an adaptation to imperialist
propaganda, which justified the interventions of imperialism
in the 1990s for the sake of a 'humanitarian' excuse. The
1999 Kosovo War is a most telling example of that. Back
then, both the US and its European NATO allies made their
case for an imperialist war against Yugoslavia under the
guise of halting the horrific ethnic cleansing of the Kosovars
perpetrated by Milosevic. Negri's theoretical schema proved
helpless to assess the true geopolitical goals underpinning
the US intervention in the Balkans, at a time when Europe's
dependence on the US's political and military muscle was
revealed once again. Nowadays, when both the rhetoric and
the ways of American imperialism have shifted, the fallacious
nature of such postulates is even more obvious.
How does the new National Security Strategy of the US fit
into such a framework? President Bush himself claims that
he pursues the goal of confronting 'the worst threats before
they come up'. What shall we make of the threat of war against
Iraq, which has been not only rejected by this country but
also by the Arab bourgeoisies as a whole, and is hardly
desired by most of the European powers? Evidently, a 'pre-emptive'
war waged by the US after S11 is at odds with the description
postulating that 'the imperial armies are requested to intervene
by one or more of the parties involved in an already existing
conflict' -as Negri characterized the military interventions
in his book Empire.
c) The two previous questions lead us to a third issue at
stake: the view holding the nation-state is in decline and
in the process of being superseded by a new form of sovereignty,
made up of a series of national and supra-national bodies
acting in unison with a common logic -what Negri calls the
'Empire'. This vision goes hand in hand with that holding
that 'globalization' has brought about a new form of world
government -a widespread belief in the aftermath of the
Cold War. Blair himself was in his time a standard-bearer
for such crusade, when he pompously announced the world
his International Community Doctrine at the time of the
first military NATO intervention in Yugoslavia.
Even before taking office, Ms. Condoleeza Rice, Bush's National
Security Adviser, clearly anticipated that the new American
administration 'would proceed along the steady lines of
national interest, not those of the interests of an illusory
international community.' (4) The US's growing unilateral
drive, along with Bush's use of S11 to push ahead with an
aggressive geopolitical strategy has sparked off the opposition
of rival powers, thus throwing the so-called 'international
consensus' into disarray -America's national interest was
disguised in those robes during the Clinton administration.
The display of international solidarity with the US on the
part of the other powers after the attacks of S11, which
legitimated the war against Afghanistan, have turned sour
now one year later -never mind the rest of the powers eventually
caves in, or lets the US have its way against Iraq at the
UN Security Council out of fear or else prevarication.
Dialectics
remains the key to understand imperialism
In an
earlier issue of this journal, we pointed to the coincidence
of many tenets of Empire with the notion of 'ultra-imperialism',
coined by Kautsky in the early 20th century as a result
of a theoretical operation that overlooked the clashing
interests and the dynamics of the actual states of the time.
In Negri's views, once we have reached the stage of the
'Empire', 'the class struggle impinges upon the organization
of power unchecked. Having reached a world level, capitalist
development is confronted directly with the multitude, without
mediation. That is why the dialectics, or, in fact, the
science of the limits and their organization, vanishes altogether.
The class struggle, pushing the nation-state towards its
own abolition and outgrowing the fetters it set up, poses
the advent of the Empire as a bedrock for both analysis
and conflict.'
Certainly, the thrust towards the internationalization of
capital and the productive forces -objectively boosting
a broader internationalization of the class struggle as
well- has grown significantly in the last few decades. But
Negri endows that tendency with an overpowering force and
mistakes it for present-day capitalism, thus turning his
approach into an abstract schema which precludes any likely
mediation or limits imposed on it, one that does away with
the contradictions or shortcomings enshrined in it and thus
fails to envisage the contradictions at work in capitalist
development.(5)
For Negri, those developments that just do not correspond
with the already fully-fledged and unstoppable imperial
thrust are mere trifles appearing as external phenomena
completely alien to it. This leads Negri to regard the Bush
administration in the following way: 'The group that has
got to power with Bush is an exquisitely reactionary one,
bound to a populist ideology rather than an ultraliberal
one (6), pursuing the upholding of some mega-structures
of American power such as the control of the energy and
the development of the military industrial system. Those
people have remained at the sidelines of the third industrial
revolution and do not support it, but on the contrary, regards
it with hostility since the New Economy is also in crisis...'
(7)
Certainly, we don't harbor any doubt about the deeply reactionary
character of the Bush administration. However, Negri uses
the term in a literal sense, i.e., to refer to a government
pursuing the restoration of things already abolished, which
is set against innovation altogether, or else represents
old-fashioned ways of power and rule. Quite on the contrary,
the Bush administration represents those forces pushing
American imperialism to new directions. Unlike Negri, The
Economist, challenging the popular view of Texas as a state
of cowboys and oil derricks, claims "Texas is the second
most populous state after California and the second mega-state
with the quickest growth after Florida, having doubled its
population since 1960. Texas is one of the few states importing
people both from the US and abroad. The wide resources available
in the state and the weak regulations there have turned
it into a hotbed for business. Corporate giants as American
Airlines and J.C. Penney, a retail sales network, have moved
their headquarters there. Austin, the state capital is the
quickest growing high-tech hub in the country. Among the
features of this state, the following can be mentioned:
once a mostly rural state, now it harbors three of the ten
largest cities in the US. A state once dependent on commodities
has now switched to a highly diversified economy. The oil
industry has been transformed, switching from the mere exploitation
of oil to selling highly sophisticated know-how around the
world. Flourishing high-tech companies like Dell, EDS and
Texas Instruments, are absorbing highly educated professionals
from the whole country... Texas is transforming itself,
from Mississippi into California.' ('The future is Texas.
If you want to see where America is heading, start by studying
Texas', The Economist, latest 2002 edition)
Negri's view of the rise of Bush is predicated upon the
separation of the realms of the economy and that of politics.
For him, the 'globalization' is the worldwide reflection
of the growing cooperation in the field of production -an
autonomous process carried out by the 'multitude' itself,
in which capital has lost control of the productive process.
(8) At this level, exploitation can only be maintained by
checking the integration of the world, which is something
inescapable, by means of political power (9) -i.e., by force.
In other words, Negri separates the process of internationalization
of the economy -which he regards as a spin-off of the autonomous
ethos of labor- from the mechanisms of political domination.
This separation leads him to say that 'the markets might
become the true obstacle for Bush' -a most remarkable observation!
As we explain in another article of this journal, Bush is
a political development that represents a reactionary backlash
to the break of the unstable equilibrium of the 1990s. At
the same time, it also reflects an attempt by the US to
impose an aggressive geopolitical strategy aimed at consolidating
an advantageous position in the inter-imperialist competition
with its rival powers.
This is what comes out of an analysis of present-day and
actual imperialism. But Negri remains alien to that methodology
and to these conclusions, since he throws dialectics out
of the window. He deals with the inter-imperialist rivalry
opposing the states to one another, and the big multinational
corporations with them, by isolating it from the class struggle
related to those still existent states, considered as permanent
features of the capitalist system at the dawn of the 21st
century.
S11 and the American backlash that followed, far from confirming
Negri's theses and a supposedly imperialist reaction within
and against the 'Empire' as such, show that the increasing
internationalization of the last few decades has, on the
contrary, exacerbated the contradiction opposing the ever-broadening
development of the productive forces on one hand, and the
social relationships of production on the other -which is
in turn revealed by the very existence of national states
themselves. The growing militarism and the heightened inter-imperialist
tensions, are the clearest expression of that contradiction.
Political consequences
The theoretical schema designed by Negri in Empire leads
him to reformist conclusions disguised by other radical
ones. The former are have to do with his positive and celebratory
assessment of the process of 'imperial building', adapting
himself to the ideology of the ruling class on 'globalization'
and its 'benefits'. The radical conclusions are those concerning
the existence of mature conditions for communism -it was
this that endowed Empire with a subversive tone in the face
of the prevailing rhetoric holding that there is no alternative
to capitalism.
As the international scenario changes, Negri's theoretical
perspectives lead him to forsake his more radical conclusions
and to deepen his reformist orientation, one whose main
thrust lies in an anti-Bush stance as opposed to a clear
and consequent anti-imperialist strategy. He has gone on
the record voicing his preference for the Democrats like
a 'lesser evil' with regards to the Republicans, has called
for a new dialogue with the reformists, and harbors illusions
in the development of the European Union.
At the time of the last November elections in the US, he
stated that: 'If Bush wins or loses the elections will make
a difference. Of course we all hope the Democrats to win,
no matter how feeble and mean the alternative they might
be able to offer.' (10) This is nothing but a beautifying
of the same imperialist party that launched the war on Kosovo
under the Clinton administration, and which has also given
its wholehearted support to all the measures taken by Bush
in the wake of S11.
Here is another example of his political turn. He said that
'in the face of a return to barbarism, we need to know how
to put up resistance, on a possible common ground with the
reformists… The problem boils down to knowing how to
make it work... How to fight against the war, what kind
of alliances we should build with the reformist imperial
aristocracies…' The need for the broadest united front
against an eventual attack on Iraq, even with reformist
currents or parties that claim to oppose the war, is an
obligation for the revolutionaries. However, we want to
emphasize the political turn of Toni Negri, who has switched
from open hostility against the trade unions themselves
(not only their bureaucratic leaderships) and the traditional
left parties, be them the Western Social Democrats or else
Neo-Communists, to a new line aimed at a (strategic?) accommodation
to those very same 'reformist imperial aristocracies.'
On the other hand, Negri claims that 'today, Europe is the
place for any kind of political project. Also because it
is a place with plenty of social forces -strata of the intellectual
productive labor- interested in a new social organization.
This one should be built from below, mobilizing the multitudes,
so that a united Europe can be a ground for performing a
subversive role within the global order.' This represents
a change vis-à-vis the theses espoused in Empire.
There he stated that the continued American hegemony was
predicated upon the power and the creativity of the US proletariat,
'where the US proletariat appears as the most subjective
figure heralding the desires and the needs of the international
or multinational workers in the most complete way'. The
reactionary turn in US politics and Europe's subsequent
opposition to Bush's unilateral course account for the shift
in Negri's expectations, who has now placed his bets on
the Old Europe. (11)
Negri's theoretical approach proves helpless to deal with
the various types of domination and the turns in imperialist
politics, a blunt instrument of no help to fight against
them in a revolutionary way. The consequences of the inadequacy
of his views for grappling with reality become even more
evident in the face of the current aggressive course of
American imperialism. Negri once hailed the unfolding of
the 'Empire', but now this is revealed as nothing but sheer
political adaptation to the supposedly non-imperialist quarters
of the world bourgeoisie. The political drift of one of
the main mentors of the anti-global movement, akin to that
of other intellectuals as well, is fuelling the disorientation
and confusion of whole swathes of that movement in the wake
of S11. The postulates on a new 'Empire' should be cast
aside then, and a coherently anti-imperialist program should
be raised if we are to carry out a coherent revolutionary
strategy against the war drive against Iraq, the so-called
'war on terrorism' and US imperialism's warmongering. And
that program is no other than that of socialist revolution
worldwide. |
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NOTES
1 Juan Chingo & Gustavo Dunga, 'Empire or Imperialism?'
in International Strategy N° 17 (Estrategia Internacional
N° 17).
2
Il Manifesto, interview to Toni Negri by Ida Dominijanni,
14/09/02.
3 Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt, Empire, Spanish Edition.
4 Condoleeza Rice, 'Campaign 2000 - Promoting the National
Interest', Foreign Affairs, January/February 2000.
5
We should note that in the abovementioned interview, the
journalist remarks -after listening to Negri speak about
the 'novel' nature of Bush- that Negri's description 'is
not a minor contradiction. It makes the process of building
of the "Empire" much more convulsive than he envisaged
it.' (Il Manifesto, 14/09/02). Furthermore, in his last
conferences, Negri himself has begun to soften his position,
paraphrasing Gramsci when he remarks the 'no more' for imperialism
and the 'not yet' of the 'Empire'.
6 This contradicts the goals set out in the National Security
Strategy of Bush, which contains a whole chapter devoted
to further the continuity of neoliberal policies that 'will
bring about a new era of global growth through free market
and the free trade.'
7 Once again, Negri's theoretical schema fails the test
of events in presenting the clique around Bush as hostile
to the New Economy. The personal relationship of the Texas-based
Enron's CEO with the Bush clan is a most telling example.
It ranked as the seventh largest US corporation before going
bankrupt. In a recent book, this company is described like
this: 'Enron represents the inroads of e-commerce in the
realm of economic infrastructure, as long as Enron traded
an entire series of items such as natural gas, electricity,
steel... through the Internet.. Donato Eassey (from Merrill
Lynch) sensed then [in June 2000] that 'Enron stands in
a unique position to become the General Electric of the
New Economy'.' Vijay Prashad, Fat Cats and Running Dogs.
The Enron Stage of Capitalism
8 This characterization is a result of the transformations
in the organization of labor and the prevalence, according
to Negri, of 'immaterial labor'. These have turned knowledge
in the main means of production, one that cannot be alienated
by the capitalists, thus granting the worker the unprecedented
chance of controlling the productive process. This postulate
overlooks the material conditions underpinning exploitation
in a capitalist society relying on the private ownership
of the means of production.
9 In his General Intellect, Constituent Power, Communism,
Negri puts out the following view: 'The difference separating
the current phase of development of the capitalist mode
of production from previous ones is the fact that the social
productive cooperation, previously brought about by capital
itself, stands now as a foundation for all of its policies
or, rather constitutes its very condition of existence...Therefore,
capital can only appear as a political subject, as a State,
as power. On the contrary, the social worker is the producer,
prior to the production of any given commodity, of social
cooperation itself... Through all the phases of the development
of the capitalist mode of production, capital has always
adopted the form of cooperation... Nowadays, the situation
has changed completely. Capital has become a mesmerizing,
spelling force, a ghost, an idol: around it revolve radically
autonomous processes of self-valorization and political
power alone can force them, with the carrot or the stick,
so that they begin to subordinate themselves to the capitalist
form.' [our emphasis]
10 Il Manifesto, 14/09/02.
11 Many intellectuals are going down this road, some of
them going much farther. That is the case of Walden Bello,
one of the main critics of capitalist globalization, who
hailed the standoff between Europe and the US as '...a positive
step for the majority of the world. This opens the possibility
that the Europeans may begin to deal in a positive way with
the problems of injustice and poverty in the developing
world, dealing also with the structures of western rule
that they are by an large responsible for. This paves the
way for innovative global alliances that can be beneficial
for most of the world, including the eventual creation of
an alliance made up of Europe, Africa, Latin America and
Asia against American hegemony. Of course, Europe has its
own series of oppressive measures, such as the Common Agricultural
Policy, which is one of the major causes of agricultural
disasters in the developing world. Its corporations are
as exploitative as the American ones and its restrictions
on immigrants are too often more draconian than those imposed
by Washington. However, the need to pursue alliances to
oppose Washington's unilateral thrust might provide an incentive
to go for the reform of such institutions.' |
