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Internationalism revisited or In praise of Internationalism
Benita Parry
Empire
(Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri; Cambridge, MS: Harvard, 2000; ISBN
0674006712)
Although proceeding from very particular theoretical premises, the Hardt/Negri
thesis on the epochal shift from imperialism to the decentred and deterritorialized
terrain of 'Empire'1 impinges on contemporary debates
about globalization. Whether this is conceived as a break with capitalism's
pre-existing forms or an intensification of its inherent contradictions
and conflicts, will decide the deductions made by theorists about prevailing
modes and relations of production, the location and dissemination of power,
the actual or potential oppositional energies of classes, and the sites,
shapes and goals of revolutionary projects. On these issues the positions
of Empire reiterate and countermand those advanced by both Marxist
and postmodernist theorists, rendering the book's variable perspectives
consistent and discrepant with its declared ambitions as a manifesto of
political insurrection.
A decade ago Michael Sprinker had observed that with the demise of the
Soviet Union, the disintegration of the socialist bloc, and the end of
the heroic era of liberation struggles, there had been a retreat of traditional
left intellectualism and the development of other intellectual formations
situated on the left but disengaged from Marxism2. Were Sprinker
alive and writing now he would have had the pleasure of noting the many
signs of Marxism's return to intellectual life, and amongst the numerous
glosses on Empire are those which consider whether a study that
situates itself as preserving/transcending Marxism, can be received as
part of this trend. Stephen Shapiro, for example while welcoming Empire
for 'inaugurating a long-overdue confrontation between contemporary
strands of neo-Anarchist thought ... and a reconstituted Marxism',
has observed that by 'refusing the geography of uneven development,
Hardt and Negri's work cannot align itself, in any meaningful sense,
with Marx's diagnosis on capitalism's need to appropriate new
zones of labour-power, the primitive accumulation that results in core/periphery
differences'3. In a less forgiving critique, Tim Brennan,
who traces the book's conceptual provenance to the autonomia
movements of the Italian far left, council communism, the theoreticism
of Continental philosophy and nineteen-sixties counter-culturalism, maintains
that this cognitive apparatus is translated into 'a gathering together
of positions that are substantively incompatible', the 'pattern
of reverential borrowings from Marxism' involving 'simultaneously,
its rejection and diminishment'4.
But if Empire is not recognizably Marxist in its methodology, eschewing
as it does the necessity of confronting state power, neither is it post-Marxist
since it has not relinquished economic and political explanations for
cultural ones, or subordinated class, however radically this is redefined,
to ethnicity, gender and sexuality, nor discarded class struggle, even
if this is abstracted from its accustomed usage. Moreover the authors
declare an idiosyncratically articulated allegiance to communism. In this,
Empire remains outside of the current consensual ideology, retaining
as it does a commitment to a revolutionary transformation that is beyond
capitalism5. A mode suggesting an aufheben6
rather than an abandonment of Marxism may predispose some on the left
to give Empire a cordial reception, and I for one am able to sign
up to much of the book's recapitulation of capitalism's historical
development, its indignation at the system's iniquities and its undimmed
hope in an emancipatory politics. All the same there remain for me problems
with a dizzying conceptual promiscuity induced by the heady cocktail of
Marxist, autonomist and postmodern paradigms. In particular because the
Deleuzian notion of lines or paths of flight, of flows and borderless
continuums is used as a trope of thinking processes and invoked as a template
of real world conditions, these disposals converge in an insouciant disregard
of the actually existing circumstances in what the authors insist is a
post-imperialist era. A mismatch between a retrospect resting on received
Marxist narratives and delivered with sober mien, and the fantastical
prospect on the present and future enunciated in an euphoric rhetoric,
makes the reading of this book a lesson in the difference between intimations
of a reasoned Utopia, and wish-fulfilment presented as imminent event.
As troubling are the consequences of transposing the localized theoretical
heritage of the autonomia movement onto a world arena. Elsewhere
Hardt had written that 'Laboratory Italy refers no longer to a geographic
location, but ... to a specific modality now available to all of us,
of experimenting in revolution'; and having surveyed the economic
and political shifts unique to western Europe, and more particularly as
these were played out in workers' struggles in Italy during the nineteen-seventies7,
he goes on to insist that 'Italian revolutionary thought ... can
now be recognized as relevant to an increasingly wide portion of the globe
in a new and important way'8. So insular a vision of spaces
that once constituted the empires of Europe is, I suggest, contingent
on the authors' neglect of the heterogeneous socio-economic formations
existing within capitalism's global system, and it is salutary to
contrast the indiscrimination of the fuzzy world-outlook pervading Empire
with the close analyses of geographical terrains, institutional structures,
modes of production and class forces undertaken by Marxist theorists in
the colonized world when devising their own experiments in revolution.
There are moments when it could appear that it is an extravagance of style
which distinguishes Empire from previous attempts to detect a radical
rupture within capitalism's forms, and in this sense the book has
received proleptic replies. For some time now Neil Lazarus has argued
against 'discontinuist historico-philosophical assumptions'
and 'endist' logic, insisting that the intensification and reconfiguration
of capitalist social relations do not represent a new era of capitalist
development9. Also writing prior to the appearance of Empire,
David Harvey had asked whether the quantitative changes that have occurred
within capitalism's global process did indeed constitute a qualitatively
'new era of capitalist development', to which self-posed question
he initially gave a qualified 'yes', which was immediately countermanded
by the assertion that because globalization entailed the profound and
uneven temporal and geographical reorganization of capitalism, 'there
has not been any fundamental revolution in the mode of production and
its associated social relations'10.
This unevenness, according to Samir Amin, intensifies capitalist social
relations on a world scale even though the South is now being differentiated
between those peripheral societies that are undergoing industrialization
(East Asia, Latin America, India and South East Asia) and those (Africa
and parts of Arab world) which are not11 - the last including
nation-states where in world terms the whole nation is the active and
reserve army of labour. Amin goes on to observe that with the erosion
of the great divide between industrialized centre and non-industrialized
periphery, there has emerged 'new dimensions of polarization'
defined by a country's capacity to compete in the world market'12,
resulting in 'a new hierarchy, more unequality than ever before,
in the distribution of income on a world scale, subordination of the industries
of the peripheries and reducing them to the role of subcontracting'
(Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, pp. 3-5)13.
Thus although an enthusiast of Empire has claimed that Hardt and Negri
'do insist on the unevenness of capitalist development'14,
it would seem that the 'rhizomatic method' which they favour,
together with their passion for decentring, contrive to inhibit adequate
attention to the structural hierarchy and polarization endemic to contemporary
capitalism15. And where inequalities persist, so do borders
remain in place and so are flows of populations, cultures and socialities
distorted.
At stake in the argument advanced by Hardt and Negri is the question of
whether autonomous struggles that have dispensed with class organization
and party formations can mobilize an effective 'counter-globalization'.
To doubt the efficacy of spontaneity is not to dismiss the significance
of the proliferating 'New Social Movements'16, or
what John Holloway, who is sympathetic towards autonomist or operaismo
/ workerist theories, has called the lived struggles against invisibility,
'the hidden world of insubordination' and anti-power - even
if, as he concedes, these remain in the absence of class consciousness
and interconnectedness, harmless to capital17. Nor is it to
minimize the importance of anti-capitalist protest directed at the regulation
rather than the transcendence of the global system. Such movements command
the critical support of Ray Kiely who in refusing a 'reform-revolution'
dichotomy, advocates a position 'somewhere between on the one hand
Leninist vanguardism, where struggles are subordinated to the will of
the Party that holds the "correct knowledge", and on the other
direct action and autonomist perspectives that uncritically celebrate
struggle without attempting to analyse the efficacy and progressiveness
of such struggles'18.
But this too, I suggest, rests on a false dichotomy since it misconstrues
the Marxist conception of a dialectical interaction between revolutionary
spontaneity, or the voluntary and active agency of the masses, and a central
vanguard party. As Ernest Mandel has written, it was understood by the
theorists of the Russian Revolution that the leading role of the party
'had to be continuously fought for politically and won democratically;
the majority of the workers have to be convinced, they have to give their
consent ... the party is an accompaniment to the self-activity of the
masses'19. In Gramsci's exposition the relationship
is posited as an institutional dialogue with the subaltern classes where
the work of the party must be structured by 'the formation of a national-popular
collective will, of which the modern Prince [Gramsci's coded word
for the Communist Party] is at one and the same time the organiser and
the active, operative expression'20. Rejecting the twin-errors
of intellectuals who either display contempt for spontaneous struggles
or extol spontaneity as a political method, Gramsci endorsed as exemplary
those movements where the leadership set out to mediate, organize, educate
and direct spontaneity rather than to lead it: 'This unity between
"spontaneity" and "conscious leadership" or "discipline"
is precisely the real political action of the subaltern classes, in so
far as this is mass politics and not merely an adventure by groups claiming
to represent the masses' ('The Modern Prince', p. 198).
We could also consider Georg Lukács' gloss on Lenin's
concept of party organization: 'the group of professional revolutionaries
does not for a moment have the task of either "making" the revolution
or - by their own independent, bold actions - of sweeping the inactive
masses along to confront them with a revolutionary fait accompli. Lenin's
concept of party organization presupposes the fact - the actuality - of
the revolution (italics in original)21. Thus, Lukács
maintains, when Lenin urged that the role of revolutionary intellectuals
was to bring socialist consciousness to the workers' movement 'from
the outside', this should be understood as providing theoretical
knowledge about the regime as a totality. The relevance of this perception
surely persists, for without understanding capitalism as a system, spontaneous
struggles are limited in their capacity to challenge its institutions,
threaten it globally, or offer the prospect of a different social order.
How then does Empire conceive a project of 'counter-globalization'
that in ideology, composition and method is distinct from the traditions
which envisaged nation-based proletarian movements joined within a socialist
international? Post-Marxists appear to be agreed that proletarian class
analysis is exhausted, received notions of class agency and organization
anachronistic, and the nation-state no longer an adequate framework for
opposition to contemporary capitalism. As a consequence all declare internationalism
obsolescent. One such instance is a blunt rejection: 'Proletarian
and socialist internationalism ... have become embarrassments to contemporary
socialists ... if the old internationalism is dead, then the internationalisms
of the new social movements (women, ecology, peace, human rights) are
alive and kicking'22. A less blatant case for 'rethinking
... the older Marxist notion of internationalism' within the current
global restructuring and heterogeneity of contemporary capitalism, has
been made by Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd who challenge 'class antagonism
as the exclusive site of contradiction', and fault those movements
which prescribe political and state-oriented goals, proposing instead
the equal importance of cultural, feminist and anti-racial struggles 'that
do not privilege the nation and are not necessarily defined by class consciousness'23.
But the most elaborate obituary of proletarian internationalism is to
be found in Empire.
Proceeding from the supposition that the supranational operations of capitalism
have rendered an international proletarian formation inconceivable, Hardt
and Negri are able to pay their retrospective respects to proletarian
internationalism for having 'constructed a paradoxical and powerful
political machine that pushed against the boundaries and hierarchies of
the nation-state', while pronouncing that its time 'is over'
(p. 49). For, according to the authors, 'the restructuring and global
expansion of capitalist production' has in 'the absence of a
recognition of a common enemy against which struggles are directed'
(p. 55) caused the death of class solidarity and given birth to a new
proletariat which 'is not a new industrial working class'
but 'the general concept that defines all those whose labor is exploited
by capital, the entire cooperating multitude' (p.402, italics in
original). If the categories of 'a new proletariat' and 'the
multitude' here appear to be conflated, they are elsewhere differentiated.
Concerning the new proletariat, the authors relegate industrial, artisanal
and agrarian labour on the grounds that 'the figure of immaterial
labour power (involved in communication, cooperation, and the production
and reproduction of affects) occupies an increasingly central position
in both the schema of capitalist production and the composition of the
proletariat' (p.53)24. This paradigm, dubious even when
restricted in its application to Western Europe and North America25 - where
manual labour, wherever its operations are located, remains the ground
on which communicative and affective labour can exist and flourish26 - is
offered as a universal model and therefore relevant to those parts of
the world subject to combined and uneven development where pre-nascent
and 'classical' capitalist conditions remain prevalent.
Having redefined the composition of the proletariat, the authors then
implicitly differentiate this constituency from 'the multitude' - the
dispossessed masses who while certainly exploited by capital, are certainly
not coterminous with those 'involved in communication, cooperation,
and the production and reproduction of affects'. This introduces
a category that could appear to be pre- or non-Marxist - a subset akin
to populist notions of the people or the poor, classifications from which
class self-understanding is absent - but which claims to supersede
Marxism. As used by Hardt and Negri, the multitude, now exceeding its
original Italian connotation27, signifies all who by engaging
in fragmented and dispersed forms of resistance are the actual and potential
agents of global revolution. It is they who moved by deterritorializing
desires had dismantled imperialism's structures and called empire
into being; and it is they who by '[p]roducing and reproducing autonomously',
construct both 'a new ontological reality' (p. 395) and a new
historical moment. Where the international cycle of struggles 'based
on the communication and translation of the common desire of labor in
revolt seem[s] no longer to exist', and communicable solidarity in
struggle is impossible, it is the multitude who inaugurate local, specific
and immediate events which 'blocked from travelling horizontally
in the form of a cycle ... are forced to leap vertically and touch
immediately on the global level' (pp. 54-5). Thus through spontaneous
struggles without programmes, strategies and party, the always mobile
multitude is destined to construct 'a counter-Empire, an alternative
political organization of global flows and exchanges' (p. xv).
That this assertion is repeated does not mean that it is substantiated
or even elucidated (see pp. 55, 58, 60, 61): consider the labyrinthine
enunciation of an elusive case premised on a perception of globalization
as a depthless body invisibly undermined by the microscopic and poisonous
circulation of disaffection: because 'Empire presents a superficial
world, the virtual centers of which can be accessed immediately from any
point across the surface', the multitudes, by ' focusing their
own powers, concentrating their own powers in a tense and compact coil',
initiate 'serpentine struggles' which 'slither silently
across [the] superficial imperial landscape ... [and] strike directly
at the highest articulation of imperial order' (p. 58; the order
of phrasing has been rearranged). Although conceding that political alternatives
to empire do not yet exist, Hardt and Negri confidently proclaim, and
in the present tense, that '[d]esertion and exodus are a powerful
form of class struggle within and against imperial post-modernity'
(p.213)28. And they go on to prefigure a luminous future: 'A
new nomad horde, a new race of barbarians, will arise to invade or evacuate
Empire', a species which will destroy 'with an affirmative violence
and trace new paths of life through their own material existence'
(pp 213, 215). Gone is the political and economic battle of organized
revolutionary subjects against the state power vested in a ruling class.
And given Hardt and Negri's modest proposals for the Right to a Social
Wage and Global Citizenship, gone is a real politics of insurrection29.
The sheer academicism of the Hardt/Negri pronouncements on appropriate
forms of struggle against what they refuse to name as imperialism, emerges
when two articles, one by Hardt, the other by an activist in the Brazilian
landless movement, are juxtaposed. In his report of the World Social Forum
at Port Alegre in Brazil, Hardt identifies the political differences cutting
across the forum: the anti-globalization position which 'poses neoliberalism
as the primary analytical category' and looks to 'national sovereignties,
even if linked by international solidarity ... to limit and regulate
the forces of capitalist globalization'; and that position which
'is more clearly posed against capital itself ... opposes any
national solutions and seeks instead a democratic globalization'30.
For Hardt both stances identify the same sources of the crisis; however
each implies a different form of political organization, the one adhering
to traditional parties and centralized campaigns, the other working via
vertical networks of the multitude in a global democratic movement.
If we look at how the fight against global capitalism is narrated by an
activist in the land occupations taking place in Brazil, the Hardt/Negri
strictures on the limitations to an anti-globalization position appear
inconsequential for in this account the perspective of centrally organized
local struggles of agrarian labour conducted within and against the regime
of a nation-state is one directed 'against capital itself'.
Nor does usage of the term 'neoliberal' suggest anything but
an understanding of and a will to counter and overcome the capitalist
system. The story of the Movimento Sem Terra told by João Pedro
Stedile31 is about a planned and organized mass social movement,
independent of but not detached from left political parties; a movement
acknowledging that 'the comrades with the greatest ideological clarity'
have played an indispensable role in organizing, educating, and promoting
class consciousness; a movement which has forged relations of solidarity
with the Zapatistas - despite considering that this remains a national
struggle not yet able to broaden into a class struggle (p 99); a movement
perceiving its own activities as part of an international network of farmers'
movements with a presence in eighty-seven countries ('Landless Battalions',
p. 99).
In response to his interlocutor's question on the help that groups
in North America and Europe could give, Stedile, reiterating the axiom
that internationalism begins at home, replied: 'The first thing is
to bring down your neoliberal governments. Second, help us to get rid
of foreign debt ... Third fight - build mass struggles. Don't
delude yourself that because you have a higher living standard than us,
you can build a better world. It's impossible for you to maintain
your current patterns of consumption without exploiting us' ('Landless
Battalions', p 103). What emerges from Stedile's revisions of
the analysis and strategies of the older communist movements and his sophisticated
political grasp of what internationalism might mean to-day, is that his
stance is more insurrectionary in fact and revolutionary in prospect than
Hardt's nebulous 'vertical networks of the multitude' destined
to build 'a democratic globalization'.
Hardt and Negri's theoretical aversion to nation-based struggles
replicates that of the postnationalists for whom all nationalism, at all
times, is a tainted form of oppositional consciousness, and the nation-state
always a doomed site of resistance32. This tendency chooses
to overlook that in traditions which gave theoretical and political sustenance
to socialist and internationalist anti-colonial movements, the nation
was regarded, as Neil Larsen puts it when describing Lenin's position,
'from a consciously historico-political, even strategic perspective'33.
I will not here rehearse the powerful arguments made by Neil Lazarus and
Tim Brennan on the need to distinguish between the different historical
forms of nationalism; and in response to the assertion that nation-state
has effectively been superseded, I will do no more than refer to those
who, writing from various vantage points, observe that 'although
contemporary globalization has complicated the nation-state form, it has
not rendered it obsolete as a form of political organization'34;
or maintain that the nation-state remains 'the only concrete terrain
and framework for political struggle'35, or locate it
as the singular site on which international solidarity can grow and the
one way under modern conditions 'to secure respect for weaker societies
or peoples'36.
Despite conceding the historical role played by what they call 'subaltern'
nationalism, and even while saluting 'the freedom fighters of all
the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist wars' (p. 412), Hardt and
Negri are adamant in castigating the outcome of these struggles:
"The very concept of a liberatory national sovereignty is ambiguous
if not completely contradictory. While this nationalism seeks to liberate
the multitudes from foreign domination, it erects domestic structures
of domination that are equally severe ... The postcolonial nation-state
functions as an essential and subordinated element in the global organization
of the capitalist market ... From India to Algeria and Cuba to Vietnam,
the state is the poisoned gift of national liberation. (pp. 133-4;
italics in original) "
This adamantine stance disregards the distinctions between the programmes
of bourgeois and Marxist currents within liberation movements, the first
seeking to inherit an intact colonial state and appropriate it to promote
their own class interests, the other aspiring to abolish the state apparatus
and replace it with democratic institutions. Furthermore, not only do
Hardt and Negri appear uninterested in the circumstances that have culminated
in the retreats of almost all left post-independence regimes, but they
overlook that where the postcolonial nation-state is complicit with the
capitalist market, this is a consequence not only of capitalism's
universal power but of an ideological choice made by the comprador leaderships
of many/most new nation-states who refuse any moves towards delinking
the local economies from the global system37.
Within postcolonial studies, the verso to the postnationalist recoil from
nation-based political struggles, is an affection for dispersal, transit
and the unhomely38. Although Empire does not situate
itself in this discussion where 'diaspora' is a privileged term,
the authors' discovery of new figures and new forms of international
resistance in the non-systemic mode of perpetual and irrepressible subjective
movement will be congenial to many postcolonial critics. And indeed it
is in the Hardt/Negri book that acclaim of dislocation and dissemination
takes manic form: 'Nomadism and miscegenation', Hardt and Negri
announce, 'appear here as figures of virtue, as the first ethical
practice on the terrain of Empire ... The real heroes of the liberation
of the Third World may really have been the emigrants and the flows of
population that have destroyed old and new boundaries' (pp. 362-3)39.
If those who concentrate on physical movement and cultural volatility
do draw a necessary attention to the acceleration of 'transnational
circuits'40, an embrace of geographical displacements
as the desirable norm pays little heed to the punitive barriers hindering
the passage of populations from South and East to North and West - restrictions
that are structural to an uneven capitalist world-system. Neither do they
address the material and existential conditions of the relocated communities
which include economic migrants, undocumented immigrants, refugees, asylum
seekers and victims of ethnic cleansing, and whose mobility far from being
an elective ethical practice, is to a large degree coerced41.
Most significantly, the focus on diaspora leaves in obscurity the vast
and vastly impoverished populations who cannot and might not choose to
migrate, who are not part of the reservoir of cheap labour in either the
home cities, the Gulf States or the old and new metropolitan centres;
who still engage in subsistence farming, or in extracting raw materials
and producing goods under pre-capitalist conditions for consumption in
the North, or who are economically redundant and constitute an underclass.
Without suggesting that such populations inhabit a timeless world, or
that their material and psychic lives, not to speak of the commodities
they produce as labourers, peasants and artisans, are invariably unaffected
by the penetration of the world-market42, I am proposing that
these communities do not have access to the pleasures of the multiple
consciousness available to those émigrés who occupy an agreeably
liminal location within a cosmopolitan environment. If such reservations
should not preempt recognition of the new energies that can be generated
amongst migrant populations, especially when relocated in protean urban
environments, the Hardt/Negri description of the multitudes in perpetual
and life-enhancing motion must all the same appear illusory rather than
visionary: 'In effect what pushes from behind is, negatively, desertion
from the miserable cultural and material conditions of imperial reproduction;
but positively what pulls forward is the wealth of desire and the accumulation
of expressive and productive forces that the processes of globalization
have determined in the consciousness of every individual and social group
(Empire, p. 213). Such optimistic projections are a reminder of
Empire's spectacular failure to address the substantive and
experiential situations of the settled populations of the nation-states
of Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Paul Smith has drawn attention to theorists and critics seduced by '[m]agical
notions such as that of fully global space replete with an ecstatic buzz
of cyber communication, or of an instantaneous mobility of people, goods
and services, or of a global market place hooked up by immaterial money
that flashes round the globe many times a minute'43. Without
suggesting that Hardt and Negri advance this facile case, the delivery
of their thesis on 'perpetual motion' and 'the processes
of mixture and hybridization' generated by Empire, (p. 60) is all
the same as resonant of a specious exhilaration:
"The passage to Empire emerges from the twilight of modern sovereignty.
In contrast to imperialism, Empire establishes no territorial center of
power and does not rely on fixed boundaries or barriers. It is a decentred
and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates
the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages
hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through
modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperialist
map of the world have merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow.
(pp. xiii-xiii)"
The Hardt/Negri definition of 'Empire' as decentred and deterritorialized
coincides with others that also circumvent the might of an actually existing
colossus which has aptly been described as 'an empire ... predicated,
like past empires, on political control for the purpose of economic control,
and resource and surplus extraction44. For as Peter Gowan argues,
'[A]ny prospect of bringing humanity towards genuine unity on a global
scale would have to confront the social and political relations of capitalism
with a clarity and trenchancy from which most representatives of this
current shrink; and any hope of altering these can only be nullified by
evasion or edulcoration of the realities of the sole superpower'45.
Significantly when Samir Amin urges the building of a global political
system that is not in the service of the global market, he looks to the
creation of anti-comprador fronts within the old and new nation-states
that would be capable of preparing 'the ground for a people's
international, robust enough to deal with world-devouring appetite of
capital' (Capitalism in the Age of Globalization, p.150).
This is a reminder that Old Internationalism offers an inspiration to
those engaged in reinventing programmes, structures and strategies in
the fight against contemporary global capitalism46. The backing
of institutionalized Internationals is no longer available; nor are the
histories of past Internationals invariably edifying. But those who regard
themselves as anti-imperialist should surely acknowledge the urge towards
and the practice of a borderless resistance to capitalism's unbounded
oppression. It therefore seems imperative that Internationalism and the
Internationals, for long objects of study in the social and political
sciences47, become part of a broader interdisciplinary discussion48.
If this happens, then the concrete and refined historical analysis of
Lenin and Trotsky on the national question and internationalism is essential
reading; as is the need to become acquainted with the paradoxical programmes
and strategic interventions of the Third International under the Stalin
regime, during which the project of building socialism in one country
and the immediate interests of the Soviet Union deformed the commitment
to international solidarity49. This is not to deny that for
whatever byzantine reasons, the USSR did render military and financial
assistance to embattled colonial populations, and did by its very presence
stay the armed fist of the United States.
For some time Marxists had anticipated that the most immediate prospects
for organized mass class struggles against capitalism's dominance
lay in the once-colonized world where the urban and rural poor are experiencing
exploitation at the hands of recently empowered native ruling classes
and popular dissent is endemic. Writing now David Harvey claims that '[t]here
is not a region in the world where manifestations of anger and discontent
with the capitalist system cannot be found' ('Globalization
in Question', p.13), and he goes on to urge the necessity of systematically
coordinated struggles against capitalism, arguing that because local and
broad-based movements lack coherence, direction and a vision of an anti-capitalist
alternative, it is urgent that dispersed popular resistances which do
not immediately appear to be proletarian in the traditional sense, are
brought together. And although Harvey is not committed to an old-style
vanguard party 'that imposes a singular goal', he insists that
'[w]e still badly need a socialist avant-garde ... We need not
only to understand but also to create organizations, institutions, doctrines,
programs, formalized structures and the like' ('Globalization
in Question', pp.15,16). To embark on such work presupposes that
globalization is recognized as yet another reconfiguration of systemic
capitalism, that the theoretical repudiation of internationalist anti-capitalist
movements is dispelled, that the concept of the party is restored in a
form disentangled from its Stalinist distortions, and that the notion
of the engaged intellectual is again in place. If this perspective makes
sense, then the Hardt/Negri insistence on 'Empire' as a paradigm
shift from capitalist-as-imperialism will appear mistaken, and their trust
in the autonomous and spontaneous creative capacity of the multitudes
to deliver communism, must seem a mirage.
A longer version of this article is to appear in a special issue of
'Interventions, the International Journal of Postcolonial Studies',
dedicated to Empire. Interventions is published 3 times a year by Routledge
and is available via Taylor and Francis, PO Box 25, Abingdon, Oxon OX14
3UE.
e-mail : enquiry@tandf.co.uk
Notes
1 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire , Cambridge, MS: Harvard, 2000,
pp. 49, 50
2 'The National Question: Said, Ahmad, Jameson', Public Culture,
6:1, p 3-29
3 Shapiro 2002: 'Mythologies of Autonomy: Capitalist Space and Left
Institutionality', unpublished paper.
4 'The Empire's New Clothes', to appear in Interventions.
5 For a brilliant inveighing against those who hold positions under the
'spell of universal permanent capital', see István Mézáros,
Beyond Capital: Towards a Theory of Transition, London: The Merlin Press,
1995.
6 "Aufheben: (past tense: hob auf; past participle: aufgehoben; noun:
Aufhebung). There is no adequate English equivalent to the German word
Aufheben. In German it can mean "to pick up", "to raise",
"to keep", "to preserve", but also "to end",
"to abolish", "to annul". Hegel exploited this duality
of meaning to describe the dialectical process whereby a higher form of
thought or being supersedes a lower form, while at the same time "preserving"
its "moments of truth". The proletariat's revolutionary
negation of capitalism, communism, is an instance of this dialectical
expression of this movement in the method of critique developed by Marx."
Aufheben
http://www.geocities.com/aufheben2/
7 For a critique of the theoretical thinking of this epoch see 'From
operaismo to "autonomist Marxism"' in Aufheben, No 11,
2003, pp. 24 – 40.
8 Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and
Michael Hardt, Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp.
1, 4. Since it is impossible to follow the arguments in Empire without
some acquaintance with the concepts and esoteric vocabulary of the Italian
extra-parliamentary left, Hardt's explanatory introduction to Radical
Thought in Italy is an invaluable guide to the book's theoretical
assumptions. Asserting that the axes of revolutionary thought within the
Euro-American framework have now shifted from German philosophy, English
economics and French politics to French philosophy, U.S. economics and
Italian politics, Hardt claims that Italian revolutionary politics can
serve as a model 'for experimentation in new forms of political thinking
that help us conceive a revolutionary practice in our times ... the
experiments conducted in laboratory Italy are now experiments of our own
future' (p. 9).
9 See Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World, Cambridge
: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 41-51
10 Globalization in Question', in Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 8, No
4, Winter 1995, pp 1 –17, pp. 5, 12.
11 Capitalism in the Age of Globalization: The Management of Contemporary
Society, London: Zed Books, 1997, p. 147. Writing about China, Chinese
scholars have shown that 'about 80% of the Chinese people live either
at the bottom or the margins of society', some 14% of the total available
workforce or 100 million people are unemployed or pauperized, and the
implementation of market-led modernization has issued in 'a return
to conditions common during the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth-century' - low
wages, long hours, absence of safety regulations, frequent disastrous
accidents. See He Qinglian, 'China's Listing Social Structure',
New Left Review, 5 Sept/Oct 2000, pp 69-99, p 85, 87; and Wang Hui, 'Fire
at the Castle Gate', New Left Review, 6, Nov/Dec 2000, pp 69-99
12 Amin defines this world market as dictated by the monopolies he names
as: technological, financial control of world markets; access to planet's
natural resources, media and communication monopolies, monopolies over
weapons of mass destruction.
13 According to the World Outlook Report of the IMF which appeared in
2000 'in the recent decades, nearly one fifth of world's population
have regressed. This is arguably ... one of the greatest economic failures
of the 20th century'. In the same year the World Bank reported in
frustration: 'One legacy of socialism is that most people continue
to believe the State has a fundamental role in promoting development and
providing social services'. Cited in Greg Palast, The Best Democracy
Can Buy, London: Polity Press, 2002, p. 50, 47. We can also consider the
case made by the sociologist Michael Mann who while acknowledging that
'North' and 'South' are not strictly geographical
designations, finds that the North continues to widen inequalities, the
most important divide being what he calls an 'ostracizing imperialism',
whereby 'one part of the world both avoids and dominates the economy
of the other', since 'most of the world's poorest countries
are not being significantly integrated into transnational capitalism',
being considered 'as too risky for investment and trade'. 'Globalization
and September 11', in New Left Review, 12 Nov/Dec 2001, pp 51-72,
p. 53-4.
14 Peter Green, 'The Passage from Imperialism to Empire: A Commentary
on Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri', in Historical Materialism,
Vol 10 :1, 2002, pp. 29 – 77, p. 43
15 In reviewing George Soros's book On Globalization, Joseph E. Stiglitz,
the economist who was fired by the World Bank for his measured criticism
of its policies, mused :'The world of international finance and economics
is astonishing. What would seem to be basic, and even obvious, principles,
often seem contradicted. One might have thought that money would flow
from rich to the poor countries; but year after year exactly the opposite
occurs.' New York Review of Books, May 23 2002, p 24-26.
16 See Leslie Sklair, 'Social Movements and Global Capitalism',
in The Cultures of Globalization, ed Fredrick Jameson and Masao Miyoshi,
Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. For some statements from the horses'
mouths on the new social movements and notions of a new internationalism,
see Naomi Klein, 'Reclaiming the Commons', New Left Review,
9, May/June 2001, pp. 81-89, John Sellars, 'The Ruckus Society',
New Left Review, 10, July/August. 2001. pp. 71-85, José Bové,
'A Farmers' International ?' New Left Review, 12, Nov/Dec,
2001, pp 89-109 and David Graeber, 'For a New Anarchism', New
Left Review, 13, Jan/Feb 2002, pp 61-73, all in Series entitled 'Movements'.
17 Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revolution Today,
London: Pluto Press, 2002, p.157.
18 'Actually Existing Globalisation, Degloblisation, and the Political
Economy of Anticapitalist Protest', in Historical Materialism',
Vol 10:1, 2002, pp 93-121, footnote 95, pp 115-6.
19 Trotsky as Alternative, trans Gus Fagan, London: Verso. 1995, pp. 80-1.
20 'The Modern Prince', in Selections from the Prison Notebooks
of Antonio Gramsci, ed and trans. by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell
Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971, p 133.
21 Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought (1924), London: New Left
Books, 1967, p. 26.
22 Peter Waterman, 'Internationalism is dead! Long Live Global Solidarity',
in Global Visions, ed. Jeremy Brecher, John Brown Childs and Jill Cutler,
Boston: South End Press, 1993, pp. 257-61, p 257.
23 Introduction to The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed.
Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997, p 2.
24 On concepts such as "immaterial labour", "mass intellectuality",
and "general intellect" see also Hardt, Radical Thought in Italy,
pp. 2, 5
25 For a close reading of the flaws in their 'faddish version of
the technological and institutional changes in the sphere of production',
see Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, 'Gems and Baubles in Empire',
in Historical Materialism, Vol 10:2, pp 17-43 pp. 34-5.
26 The Hardt/Negri recognition that 'the great innovative sectors
of immaterial production, from design to fashion, and from electronics
to science' could not function without 'the "illegal labor"
of the great masses', seems not to extend to acknowledging the dependence
on 'legal' manual labour.
27 Previously Paola Virno, in 'Virtuosity and Revolution : The Political
Theory of Exodus' had defined the multitude as a new species once
'radically heterogeneous to the state' but who as 'a historical
result' of the transformations 'within the productive process
and the forms of life', have become absolute protagonists obstructing
and dismantling 'the mechanisms of political representation'.
Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virgo and Michael
Hardt, Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p.201
28 Exodus as Hardt is party to explaining elsewhere, is a term 'that
might be understood ... as an extension of "the refusal to work"
to the whole of capitalist social relations, as a generalized strategy
of refusal or defection'. See Glossary of Concepts in Radical Thought
in Italy', no page number.
29 Although I hesitate to cite Slavoj Zizek because I lose my way in the
labyrinths of his arguments, I cannot resist quoting his call to 'repeat,
in present worldwide conditions, the Leninist gesture of reinventing the
revolutionary project in the conditions of imperialism and colonialism
... the key Leninist lesson today is that politics without the organizational
form of the party is politics without politics'. 'A Plea for
Leninist Intolerance', in Critical Inquiry, Vol 28: No. 2, Winter
2002, pp. 542-566, pp. 553 and 558. For an expanded version see Zizek,'s
Introduction and Afterword to Revolution at the Gates : A Selection of
Writings From February to October 1917, London: Verso, 2002
30 'Today's Bandung?', New Left Review, No 14, March/April,
2002, pp 112-118; p. 114
31 'Landless Battalions', New Left Review, No 15, May/June,
2002, pp. 77-104
32 Vilashini Coopan remarking on 'the ease with which hybridity displaces
race and nation' in the postcolonial discussion, has made a strong
case for locating these categories within other axes of social existence
(class and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, culture and community) and
theorizing the coextensiveness of the terms in a context that is both
comparative and historical. See'W(h)ither Post-colonial Studies?
Towards the Transnational Study of Race and Nation', in Postcolonial
Theory and Criticism, ed Laura Chrisman and Benita Parry, Cambridge: D.S.
Brewer, for The English Association, 2000, pp. 14 and 19.
33 Determinations: Essays on Theory, Narrative and Nation in the Americas,
London: Verso, 2001, p, 11
34 Pheng Cheah, 'Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom
in Transnationalism', in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond
the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press. 1998, p. 291
35 Fredric Jameson, 'Taking on Globalization', New Left Review,
4 July/August 2000, p 65
36 'Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism', in New Left Review,
7, Jan/Feb 2001, pp 75-84, p 77. For an overview on the debate, see Crystal
Bartolovich, 'Global Capital and Transnationalism' in A Companion
to Postcolonial Studies, ed Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray, Oxford: Blackwell,
2000.
37 For some discussion on revolutionary liberation movements, see my 'Liberation
Theory : Variations on Themes of Marxism and Modernity', in Marxism
and Modernity, ed. Crystal Bartolowich and Neil Lazarus, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002
38 For articulations of positions which welcome diaspora for the enriching
experiences this affords, as the location from which to theorize the contemporary
condition, and as in itself engendering a mode of thinking that can roam
far and wide because liberated from the fixity of place and community,
see for example Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge,
1994; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996; Ali Behdad, 'Global Disjunctions, Diasporic
Differences, and the New World (Dis-)Order', in A Companion to Postcolonial
Studies, ed Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray, Oxford : Blackwell, 2000
39 It is sobering at this point to be reminded by Nigel Harris that 'Most
people are fundamentally rooted at home, and only the margin of the most
energetic, talented and ambitious move - if they can afford the high
costs ... And when they move, they do so specifically to earn money
with which they can then return home, not to go into exile.' 'Everybody
in?' Red Pepper, August, 2000, pp. 26-7, p 26.
40 See for example Manthia Diawara observation that in West Africa '[a]ll
sorts of merchandise from a variety of origins are on display in traditional
markets ... Everything from computers, fax machines, and brand-name
shoes to gold jewellery is found covered with dust in the market-place.'
'Regional Imaginary in Africa', in The Culture of Globalization,
ed Jameson and Miyoshi, Durham: Duke University Press, 1998
41 Consider the women from China, Bangladesh, Thailand and the Philippines
who 'have paid a recruitment fee in order to be shipped to Saipan,
a half-forgotton US island in Micronesia. On arrival they are crowded
into barracks where they have to work 70-80 hours a week without anything
but a floor to sleep on. Because Saipan is a US territory, everything
produced there is duty-free and without quotas, ready to be sold in the
mainland at The Gap, J. Crew and Ralph Lauren stores, proudly bearing
a "Made in USA" label'. See 'Sweatshops are everywhere',
in Red Pepper, Jan 2002, p 10
42 See The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Jameson and Miyoshi, Durham:
Duke University Press,1999
43 Millennial Dreams: Contemporary Culture and Capital in the North, London:
Verso, 1997, p 13.
44 Rahul Mahajan, author of The New Crusade: America's War on Terrorism
(Monthly Review Press) writing in Red Pepper, September 2002, 'Iraq
and the new Great Game', pp. 17-18, p. 18.
45 'Neoliberal cosmopolitanism', New Left Review, 11, Sep/Oct
2001, pp 79-93. p. 93. For another optimistic vision of globalization
from below, see Richard Falk. 'The Making of Global Citizenship'
in Global Visions, ed. Jeremy Brecher, John Brown Childs and Jill Cutler,
Boston: South End Press, 1993, pp. 39.
46 It is surely fitting to recall some recent and more distant manifestations
of a theoretical position and a political allegiance grounded in class
affiliation, and anti-imperialist partisanship: an Indian exiled by the
Raj who assisted in the formation of the Mexican Communist Part (N.N.Roy);
the participation in the Spanish Civil War of African-Americans volunteers
to the Lincoln Brigade; a Caribbean intellectual (C.L.R James) who involved
himself in both Pan-Africanism and metropolitan left politics; African
insurgents who during the nineteen-seventies greeted the popular anti-fascist
upsurge in the imperial homeland while engaged in fighting the Portuguese
army in Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-Bissau; an Argentinean (Ché
Guevara) instrumental in the making of the Cuban insurrection, subsequently
a combatant in the anti-imperialist Congolese war and then a prime mover
of the abortive revolution in Bolivia during which he was killed; a French
intellectual (Régis Debray) who was imprisoned for his part in
the same uprising; Cuban troops defending the newly independent regimes
of Mozambique and Angola against the military incursions of the then South
Africa acting on behalf of international capitalism.
47 See Alejandro Colás, 'Putting Cosmopolitanism Into Practice:
the Case of Socialist Internationalism', in Millennium: Journal of
International Relations, Vol.23, No.3, 1994, pp 513-534
48 This process has already begun: see Robert Young, Postcolonialism:
An Historical Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, Tim Brennan, 'Postcolonial
Studies Between the European Wars: An Intellectual History', in Marxism,
Modernity and Postcolonial Studies, ed. Crystal Bartolowich and Neil Lazarus,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002 and Perry Anderson, 'Internationalism:
A Breviary', New Left Review, 14, March/April 2002, pp 5-25.
49 The conduct of the Soviet Union towards the anarcho-syndicalists and
the P.O.U.M during the Spanish Civil War is one such notorious instance,
as is the failure of the PCF to support the colonial wars in French Indo-China
and Algeria.
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