Empire Redux (was Re: Foucault, Marx, Poulantzas)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

> Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> > Geography must have been a far larger nodal point under
> > pre-capitalist modes of production than under capitalism.  That
> > said, what's possible within the geography of Russia is certainly
> > much more constrained than within the geography of the former USSR
> > or socialist bloc, to take just one example.  That's no so much a
> > geographical question as a political one, however.  The USA -- or
> > Hardt & Negri's Empire -- does not recognize any boundaries; the
> > entire planet _& beyond_ is the theater of its "national defense."
>
> I just saw the odious Texas Senator Phil Gramm on TV, in a q&a with
> Alan Greenspan, complaining about European financial regulation.
> Though he was complaining about the constraints on U.S. banks'
> European operations imposed by EU regulations, Gramm phrased it as
> the EU forcing its rigid anticompetitive standards on our boys &
> girls.
>
> Doug

In _Empire_, Hardt & Negri use, as an epigram to Part 2.5, the
following remark by Thomas Jefferson: "I am persuaded no constitution
was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and
self government" (160).  They go on to invoke the _Federalist_ & U.S.
constitution as heralding "a new principle of sovereignty" (169):
"Already in this first phase, then, a new principle of sovereignty is
affirmed, different from the European one: liberty is made sovereign
and sovereignty is defined as radically democratic within an open and
continuous process of expansion.  The frontier is a frontier of
liberty.  How hollow the rhetoric of the Federalists would have been
and how inadequate their own 'new political science' had they not
presupposed this vast and mobile threshold of the frontier" (169)!
While H & N admit that this "utopia of open spaces that plays such an
important role in the first phase of American constitutional
history...already hides ingenuously a brutal form of subordination"
(169), in their zeal to spy out a promise of the world beyond the
nation state _anywhere_ (even in the most unlikely place!), they end
up theoretically neutralizing oppositions to Phil Gramm & the like
who treat the entire planet & beyond _as if it were already fully
inside the Empire_; the erstwhile citizens of a multitude of states
are now to be remade into residents of the Empire, without the rights
of citizenship, some of us to be treated as illegal aliens, others as
Green Card-bearing permanent residents.  Since all are inside the
Empire from the point of view of the US governing elite, repressive
powers of the Empire take the form of not so much wars against other
states as policing: "Here...is born, in the name of the
exceptionality of the intervention, a form of right that is really _a
right of the police_" (17), to be legitimated by the rhetoric of
non-governmental morality (e.g., "we must do something to stop
genocide & ethnic cleansing").  Hence the political prominence of
NGOs in the Empire: "What we are calling moral intervention is
practiced today by a variety of bodies, including the news media and
religious organizations, but the most important may be some of the
so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which, precisely
because they are not run directly by governments, are assumed to act
on the basis of ethical or moral imperatives....Such humanitarian
NGOs [e.g., Amnesty International, Oxfam, Medecins sans Frontieres,
and other orgs for relief work and human rights protection] are in
effect (even if this runs counter to the intentions of the
participants) some of the most powerful pacific weapons of the new
world order -- the charitable campaigns and the mendicant orders of
the Empire" (35-6), comparable to what Christian missionaries did for
imperialism in the earlier centuries.

H & N hail the Empire's power to break down states (other than the
USA) as "progressive" _despite_ their own analysis of its dark
underpinnings.  However, to be reduced from the status of the citizen
(however oppressed & marginalized) of a state (however impoverished)
to that of a permanent resident or worse yet an illegal alien inside
the Empire (though outside the USA), to be policed & patronized by
faith-based initiatives, is to be disfranchised, deprived of gains
made by earlier anti-colonial struggles, & it is this global
disfranchisement that gives new rights & powers to the Empire.

H & N do not think of the Empire-building as a project imposed from
above by the ruling class & the imperial elite.  In a typical
Autonomist & post-modern fashion, they see the Empire rising from
below: "In our time this desire [for the internationalization and
globalization of relationships, beyond national boundaries] that was
set in motion by the multitude has been addressed (in a strange and
perverted but nonetheless real way) by the construction of Empire.
One might even say that the construction of Empire and its global
networks is a _response_ to the various struggles against the modern
machines of power, and specifically to class struggle driven by the
multitude's desire for liberation" (43).  I beg to differ.  The
multitude's desire for liberation has become estranged & perverted
into the construction of Empire, because we have been beaten back in
class struggle, unable to step beyond a multitude of micro-political
antagonisms.

Yoshie