1

Kenneth Surin
Duke University

EMPIRE RECONSIDERED: SOME RESERVATIONS, MUCH GRATITUDE
Let us ask ourselves to what extent is the devaluation of labor-power
important for the advancement and perfecting of the process of real
subsumption of labor within capital, which is typical of capitalist
development in this phase? Within this process, is there a moment of
qualitative differentiation such that in the development of the
capitalist mode of production we go from the completion of real
subsumption to a phase in which the valorizing function of labor is
suppressed? To what extent does this new figure of the mode of
production characterize the present crisis?

Toni Negri
1


For Steven Salaita


Before addressing issues posed by Empire and its accompanying volumes Multitude and
Commonwealth, it is important to delineate, however schematically, the conjuncture that gave
this project of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri its enabling conditions. Here, two dates have a
particular and pregnant resonance, namely, 1968 and 1989. Later, another conjuncture will
be invoked-- the financial crisis that began in 2007-- this time with a view to understanding the
current conditions underlying a present-day reception of the trilogy of Hardt and Negri.

1968
Virtually from the time insurrections of 1968 failed, attempts have been made by thinkers
of the left to account for their failure. For Louis Althusser, the student revolutionaries, their
intentions notwithstanding, were too petit-bourgeois to form a truly revolutionary alliance with
the proletariat (in Althussers eyes of course only the proletariat could be a revolutionary force);

2

for Jacques Lacan, the students, despite their avowals to the contrary, were still looking for a new
Master to take the place of the old Master, and thus doomed to fail; for Ernest Gellner (a critic)
and Raymond Williams (a qualified supporter), it was because the student revolutionaries were
not able to expand their movement into a broader-based coalition of those putatively dissatisfied
with the post-World War II status quo. And so on, and so on.
1968 signaled many things, but two of these stand out for our purposes. The first is
that the failure of 1968 convinced the liberal-democratic capitalist elites of Western Europe and
North America that they could somehow prevail, despite being shaken by weeks of serious rioting
on the streets of several of their major cities. The revolution of 1968 petered out eventually, and
the long march of some of its principal protagonists to the camps of Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher, or to the green and other less radical new social movements, was emblematic of a
significant shifting of the political tectonic plates.
When economic conditions subsequently worsened in the capitalist democracies, as they
did in the 1970s and 80s, this growing conviction on the part of the ruling elites that they were
now really capable of riding-out any potential revolutionary opposition contributed to the
emergence of a new conjuncture, now indelibly associated with the names Reagan and
Thatcher, to which we now give the title neoliberalism. It is now commonplace to state that
the advent of neoliberalism as the primary regime of capitalist accumulation also signified the
end of the post-World War II concordat between capital and labor, and that in the process of
dismantling this concordat neoliberalism initiated a period of capitalist triumphalism that lasted
until the onset of the financial crisis associated, at least in its initial phases, with the collapse of
the American housing bubble in 2007. In such times of raw capitalist hegemony, it is more or

3

less easy to anticipate that many hitherto oppositional groups will be pressured to retreat in
order to recompose themselves in the spirit of some kind of accommodation or else face the
stark alternative of outright dissolution.
Here it has to be acknowledged that in the two decades or more of retreat on the part of
the official Left after the failure of 1968, it was the feminist movement, in all its many and varied
manifestations, some not overtly identified with the Left, that became the torch-bearer of those
radical impulses that somehow survived the reactionary gleichschaltung that emerged after the
failure of 1968. Of course later on a substantial body of marxist or post-marxist reflection would
emerge which took the failure of 1968 as its starting-point-- one thinks here of Raymond
Williams, Deleuze and Guattari, Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancire, and Toni Negri prior to his co-
authorship of the Empire project.
2
But while the socialist and communist Left in the North
Atlantic struggled in this or that way to regroup and survive during this dispiriting post-68 period
of enervation and loss of confidence on the part of the project of emancipation, it was the
sturdily innovative feminist movement that was at the forefront of radical practice and thought.
However, despite the current pervasive atmosphere of pessimism, this struggle for left-wing
reclamation and renovation somehow survives (one thinks here of the Occupy Movement and
the recent massive demonstrations in many cities of the world calling for substantive measures to
deal with global warming) despite many setbacks and lost ground in the countries of the North.
The reception accorded Empire when it appeared ten years ago certainly confirms this
impression, as does the ongoing resistance to the austerity measures introduced by center-right
European governments in response to the economic crisis that began in 2007.

4

It has also to be acknowledged that other important struggles continued to take place
after the failure of 1968 in the North Atlantic-- hence, the defeat of the apartheid regime in
South Africa only took place in 1991, and there were protracted struggles against colonialism on
the rest of the African continent, with Angola and Mozambique gaining their independence in
1975, and Namibia in 1990.
3


1989
1989 represented a quite different conjuncture. If 1968 and its aftermath somehow
signaled the capacity of the capitalist liberal democracies in the North Atlantic to survive a serious
insurrectionary challenge, 1989 signaled the seemingly absolute triumph of the capitalist
democracies over their sole ostensible opponent at that time, to wit, the Soviet Union and its
satellites. This post-1989 situation created a state of affairs in which the then prevailing post-
1968 conjuncture, with its ensuing neoliberalism, could further be augmented by a clear-cut
American hegemony or exceptionalism (we are the indispensable nation, as then Foreign
Secretary Madeline Albright boasted), an arrangement generally given the title
neoconservatism. The convergence of the neoliberal post-1968 and the neoconservative post-
1989 conjunctures created another practical and theoretical challenge for marxism. 1989
represented emblematically the failure of actually existing socialism, and this in turn created a
state of affairs which allowed opponents of marxism to claim, often with unconcealed glee, that
since marxism was inextricably linked to the fate of actually existing socialism, it followed that
the death of Soviet-style communism necessarily portended the demise in toto of marxism as a
viable political and economic paradigm.

5

The expiration of a Soviet-style communism resulted in a further crisis for marxism-- if
1968 had demonstrated in the end the capacity of the capitalist democracies to survive their
internal insurrectionary pressures, 1989 showed that Soviet-style communism was unable to
survive any significant pressure, whether from inside or outside. All that was left after the
downfall of actually existing socialism was the equivalent, more or less, of Francis Fukuyamas
end of history, meaning that no serious challenge conceivably existed to the prevailing capitalist
economic dispensation now led by the United States. However, the attacks by al-Qaeda
associated with 9/11 discredited Fukuyama and his end of history mantra (which never really
amounted to an argument worth taking seriously, and is now the subject of many a joke) in
nearly an instant, but this did not in itself detract from the fact that the fall of actually existing
socialism after 1989 posed a challenge of shattering proportions for those of us still wedded to
the marxist paradigm. What if there was in truth no real alternative to the capitalist mode of
production and accumulation, events such as 9/11 notwithstanding? Was there anything
approximating to a theoretical breathing-space for the marxist paradigm after the collapse of
actually existing socialism in 1989? Or was unending retrenchment the only thing in prospect
for marxism and its allied anti-capitalist movements?
It is in this post-1968 and post-1989 conjuncture that the project of Hardt and Negri
should be located. Just as the events after the failure of 1968 created a space of strategic
potentiality that the feminist movement came to occupy as a viable vehicle of emancipation for
those of us located in the West, the failures associated with 1989 created a similar space of
strategic potentiality. But what was this space, and who were the likely social and political
subjects and agents possessing the capacity to occupy this space? And which theoretical

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paradigm could characterize and analyze the capacities of agents and subjects embedded in this
new and different theoretical and practical space?
Here one needs a slight digression. There are broadly socialist paradigms which dont
oppose the post-1968 and post-1989 dispensations in any decisive way, but which seek instead to
transform themselves within the rubric of these dispensations-- here one thinks of some
versions of postmodern marxism, the so-called new New Left, etc. And then there are
doctrinaire versions of marxism which view the failures associated with 1968 and 1989 as mere
historical blips, in no way requiring marxism to come seriously to terms with these seemingly
epochal events, this basically being the position of the unreconstructed Old Left.
What Empire did was to cut the Gordian Knot represented by a postmodern leftist
accommodation of this post-1968/post-1989 conjuncture and an Old Left repudiation of this
same conjuncture. Some critics dismissed Empire and its successor volumes as a problematic
postmodern marxism or even a postmarxism, primarily because it substituted the notion of the
multitude for that of class (here the position of someone like Alex Callinicos comes to mind), but
this in and of itself does not vitiate the claims of Hardt and Negri (more will be said about this
later).
4
In any event, these and other worthwhile quarrels notwithstanding, the marxist
paradigm has no alternative but to accept its need to be revised as the forms of capitalism
themselves mutate-- to see things otherwise is to freeze marxism into a stultifying orthodoxy.
What Empire accomplished was to find a way out of the impasses represented by the
emblematic dates of 1968 and 1989 by providing us with a new and innovative paradigm. If
1968 showed somewhat convincingly that the traditional industrial proletariat of the West and
North was now drained of anything approximating to a revolutionary impulse (perhaps best

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symbolized by the fact that the French Communist party sided with Charles de Gaulle against the
May 1968 student anarchists), Hardt and Negris multitude delineated an alternative space for
the germination and housing of these revolutionary impulses.
If 1989 signified the extinction of a viable actually existing socialism, Hardt and Negri
provided an alternative socialist vision, one not lodged in the stone-like bureaucratized
institutions of the State (as was the fate ultimately visited on the Bolshevik adaptation of
socialism), but rather in molecular and biopolitical formations that on the contrary were not
subject to wholesale capture by the apparatuses of the State. I myself find it impossible to
dispute these strategic motivations underlying the Empire project, even if I am not in full
agreement with all the theses adumbrated by Hardt and Negri. In a nutshell: after the failure of
the moment that was 1968, a new range of loci had somehow to be found for the generation
and maintenance of revolutionary desire.
After the collapse of actually existing socialism in 1989, the previous conception of the
purportedly intrinsic relation between the State and revolutionary socialism was discredited, and
an alternative non-statist basis for this socialism had thus to be sought. Or at any rate, this was
the only prospect on the leftist horizon, assuming of course that this quest for an alternative
theoretical and practical configuration of revolutionary desire, and a non-statist version of
socialism or communism, is something worth undertaking. Since I happen to share the strategic
motivations Im associating here with Hardt and Negri, it is pointless for me to find fault with this
or that specific argument in Empire and its accompanying volumes. Instead, let us see if these
strategic motivations could potentially lend themselves to embodiment in one or more other

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model of radical transformation, models which may, or may not, possess continuities with the
model developed by Hardt and Negri in their trilogy.
But first some remarks are in order about the variables that feature potentially in any field
in which these strategic motivations are to be embedded. This kind of inquiry is
metatheoretical, and unavoidably so, in that it purports to specify and elucidate the variables
constitutive of the field which has to exist prior to the embedding of these strategic motivations,
and this because this field is the condition of possibility for the processes involved in this
embedding. Or put in other words: before we can know how a strategy or motivation is likely
to function, we have to identify the field in question (as noted a field is a theoretico-practical set
of conditions of possibility), which determines which particular functions are viable, and which
arent. (There is a glance here at Michel Foucault, but expansion of this suggestion waits for
another time.)
The variables which constitute the field for a more or less adequate description of the
functioning of contemporary capitalism, and also for its predecessor versions, include the
following: the particular pressures exerted by the international system; the role played by
nationalism and ethnic groupings; the nature of the economy (industrialized, semi-industrialized,
agrarian, etc.); the impact of regionalism; the presence and range of particular ideologies; the
array of positions enabled by the political spectrum (hence in the United States there are main
two political parties but in effect only one position on the political spectrum since both the
Republicans and the Democrats are parties wholeheartedly beholden to capital); the
occupational structure prevalent in a society (e.g., states or regions with unionized industries

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tend to differ in terms of general political orientation from those that have no large-scale industry
or where the industries involved tend to be non-unionized, and so forth).
While I share the strategic motivations embodied in the Empire trilogy-- namely, the quest
for an alternative theoretical and practical configuration of revolutionary desire, and a non-statist
version of socialism or communism-- I nonetheless see the implementation of these motivations
a little bit differently from Hardt and Negri, especially where the role of the state is concerned.
There are states which have failed or are on the verge of collapse (Somalia, Yemen, the Congo,
Iraq, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, to mention the most obvious examples), and these states
cannot provide even the most basic conditions for sustainable economic development. For this
to happen there has to be a minimally functioning state apparatus with some capacity to initiate
these basic conditions for economic development. Socialism or communism, were they to take
root in a country like Somalia, would almost certainly have to be affiliated with the state
apparatus, at least in the early stages of society-wide mobilization for economic development.
Even in states that have been relatively successful in their pursuit of economic development, such
as the so-called East Asian Tigers, the instrumentality of the state has been hugely important for
their economic advancement.
5

The efficacy of the state and its associated governmental apparatuses has also displayed
itself in the American response to the current economic crisisdespite the fact that the United
States of course is the country where anti-statist and small government ideologies are peddled
more vociferously and insistently than in any other high-income country. At first sight it would
appear to require an almost incomprehensible alchemical process to transmute what was
palpably a crisis of the banking system underwritten by Wall Street into what the crisis is now

10

widely perceived by many Americans to be, namely, a crisis of the entire American social security
system that allegedly will threaten the benefit levels of large numbers of Americans for decades
to come. What seems like an act of occultationthe overnight making-over of a crisis for Wall
Street into one for Main Street (with the latter then having to foot the taxpayer-bill for the
reckless profligacy of the denizens of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Bear Stearns, Merrill
Lynch, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, et al.)certainly required the active connivance of many
protagonists, such as an obsequious media, the deeply corrupting influence exerted by the
American plutocracy on its politicians through the lobby system, a political apparatus slavishly
beholden to the corporations, a popular culture with a robust know nothing component
generally disposed to upholding a status quo militating against the very interests of those
belonging to this constituency
6
, and so forth. But this great risk shift from Americas wealthy
elite to its less-wealthy citizens-- who now have to contend with competitive pressures on their
jobs and benefits (with public-sector workers being particularly targeted by right wingers) that
are not even on the horizon where rich Americans are concerned-- simply could not have taken
place without the leadership and active participation of the state and its affiliated agencies over
the course of several decades (i.e., the period extending from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama).
7

Without the policies adopted over a sustained period of time by the US Treasury, the Federal
Reserve, and successive occupants of the White House, that is, the entire apex of American state
system, this systemic risk shift simply could not have taken place.
8

It has to be acknowledged that the nature and function of the state has undoubtedly been
modified by the pressures associated with globalization, so while the state continues to retain its
instrumentality, this instrumentality has been adapted and altered considerably in the last few

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decades. Nowhere have these changes been more visible and efficacious than in the way
financial capital has mushroomed exponentially to now exert its influence on a planetary scale.

2007- ?
The foregoing poses the question of how the dominant mode of capitalist accumulation
todayfinancialization-- is to be analyzed. Toni Negri, in a postscript to a collection of essays on
global financialization, provides some insights into how financialization can be incorporated into
the theoretical framework underlying the Empire trilogy.
9
According to Negri, financialization is
fundamentally a return, albeit with several new twists, of the rentier mode of capitalist
accumulation. Contemporary financialization for Negri is essentially the expropriation and
exploitation of the common. Thanks to the primacy of the intellectual worker, whose work is
necessarily cooperative, labor power is now lodged in the cooperative endeavors of the
multitude and not in the individual laborer, so financial rent today is an extraction of profit from
what is produced by and in the common-- though capitals cunning of reason conceals this
extraction by resorting to legal formulas (what Negri calls constituted power) which grant the
rentier a legal entitlement to this gain. But the constituent power of the multitude will not be
denied, and so it rebels against the rentier and the legal fictions which buttress the activity of the
rentier (greatly expanded since the 1960s), in order to return to the common what has always
belonged to it. The current financial crisis is thus a space of opportunity for the multitude to
expropriate the (expropriating) rentier. I happen to agree with the core of Negris analysis, but
want for the rest of this paper to mention a couple of considerations which take the description

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and elucidation of contemporary financial capital in a slightly different direction (while still
remaining within the remit of the view of financialization endorsed by Negri).
Rent-seeking is indeed the raison detre of the current system of global financialization,
and a long tradition of economic thought (some of it decidedly not marxist) has acknowledged
that rentiers do not have a productive function within the economy, but with a monopoly on
rights to financial assets, licensing arrangements, etc., are nonetheless able to amass
considerable wealth from deals or opportunities made available by the possession of such
rights.
10
The nub of a rentier-based system is a fundamental asymmetry of power which
permits rentiers (the denizens of Wall Street most notably) to view any economic surplus be it
income from real estate holdings, corporate cash flows, or even a governments capacity to tax or
ability to sell off public enterprises as a potential source of revenue to pay interest on debts.
11

As was seen with the recent housing bubble, the financial rentiers standard ploy is to provide a
debtor with the credit needed to invest in the financial instruments created by the rentier in
question. Unlike previous structures for credit provision, which were premised on an
expectation of the ultimate repayment of the debt, the rationale underpinning the current credit-
and-debt system is not repayment, but unending indebtedness (as long as the debtor can at least
pay the interest on the debt involved-- witness the practice of the credit card companies, who
have been known to confiscate the cards of customers who pay off their balance every month).
12

The result is a more debt-leveraged economy, since according to this rentier/bankers-eye
standpoint (my) debt, any debt, when packaged in the appropriate way, is the source of (their)
profit. The American financial system has been massively over-leveraged in recent years, with
an especially powerful upswing beginning in the early 1980s during the Reagan presidency and

13

lasting until the 2007 financial collapse.
13







The concomitant of this enormous expansion in the liabilities incurred by borrowers is a
This over-leveraging of debt has persisted, a reduction notwithstanding, despite the
supposed end of the Great Recession. Thus the debt-to-income ratio (which historically has been
well below 90 percent), peaked at almost 130 percent just before the recession, but was still
Household = total household sector domestic debt (consumer and mortgage debt); public = total
public sector domestic sector debt (local and federal); business = total non-financial business sector
domestic debt (corporate and non-corporate); financial = total financial sector; domestic debt.
Percentages shown in the graph are average annual real rates of growth of overall domestic debt
and of gross domestic product (GDP) in each period, respectively. Source: US Federal Reserve 2009.
Flow of Funds accounts of the United States, at http://www.federalreserve.gov/datadownload


14

above 100 percent the end of the third quarter of 2013, and is now increasing again.
14
Total
household debt stood at a record $12.7 trillion in 2008, fell to $11.2 trillion in 2011, but rose to
$11.65 trillion in March 2014.
15

Of course, the liabilities of those who incur debt by borrowing are reflected, willy nilly, in
the corresponding increase in the assets of those who supply credit to those acquiring debt by
borrowing. As Michael Hudson says, the creditors asset thus has as its necessary counterpart a
liability on the part of the debtor (some may be inclined to say duh! in response to this seeming
truism, but it conveys the essence of the technology of dispossession that has come to exist in
many rich countries since the 1980s-- poor countries have of course customarily lived with some
form of dispossession or other over the course of their history).
Truism this may be, but its not too well concealed secret is a decisive asymmetry of power
between banker-creditor and the debtor. When our debt becomes a source of income for a
banker-creditor, this income for the banker-creditor generally is not invested in the expansion of
productive capacity. Instead, this revenue is used to finance corporate takeovers and
speculation on currency markets, etc., and the resulting corporate earnings are used to pay back
creditors (primarily by buying back shares
16
) rather than financing the production of new assets.
Whatever the financial gadgets used, the almost inevitable outcome is that these earnings are
used to finance yet another round of speculative activity, and the entire cycle begins again. As
a result the economies of the North have become financialized and post-industrialized, with an
accompanying global inflation of real estate, stock, and bond prices. The inexorable rise in asset
prices since 1947 is conveyed in the following figure, which also shows how this rise in asset

15

prices is closely paralleled by the equally impressive rise in the income share of the top 10% of
income earners:
17





At the same time, as we have seen, the bottom 90% of income earners have not been the
beneficiaries of this colossal growth in asset prices, reflecting their almost total exclusion from
the driving center of this finance-based logic of accumulation.
Negri is therefore absolutely right to say that this financialized global system represents a
theft of the common, but overcoming it will involve a supersession of the asymmetries of power
fin assets = value of financial assets as percentage of GDP, and top 10% = income share of the top 10%
(excludes realized capital gains). 3-year moving averages. Sources: Piketty, T. and Sez, E. Income
Inequality in the United States, 19131998, Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 118 (2003), no. 1, 139,
[data updated to 2006 at http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/TabFig2006.xls]; and US Federal Reserve 2009.
Flow of Funds accounts of the United States, at http://www.federalreserve.gov/datadownload





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that constitute the basis of this technology of dispossession. The bankers who run the economic
systems of the North are able to create these financial instruments or gadgets on their computers
(the euphemistically termed electronic credit), and in in any event, as Michael Hudson, the
former Wall Street banker, points out:
It is not widely recognized that most commercial bank loans merely attach
debt to existing assets (above all, real estate and infrastructure) rather than
being invested in creating new means of production, or to employ labor, or
even to earn a profit. Banks prefer to lend against assets already in place
real estate, or entire companies. So most bank loans are used to bid up
prices for assets, especially those whose prices are expected to rise by
enough to pay the interest on the loan.
The outcome is the equivalent of the proverbial free lunch for the banker, while public goods are
targeted as mere potential investment opportunities for yet another round of free lunches for
the banking sector (witness the unconcealed desire of the American commercial and investment
banks for a slice of this countrys social security system).
18
Transforming, or rather superseding,
this irrational and inequitable rentier system will require a refocusing on the creation of public
goods (the common in Hardt and Negri, involving the generation of capital for public enterprises
such as the modernization of basic infrastructure), but for this to happen the current system of
debt servitude will have to be abolished. Quite simply: those in debt today have to spend their
income on remunerating the bankers, and not on goods and services. Income devoted
overwhelmingly to the servicing of debt simply cannot be directed to new investment in
productive industries and services, and there has to be a comprehensive movement away from

17

purely extractive rentier enterprises to their opposing counterparts which generate public
goods.
19

The prevailing system of bank-superintended debt peonage not only indentures those in
its grip, but it has another consequence. Bankers and top-tier managers in all sectors generally,
have for the last few decades become tethered to stock options, as opposed to salaries, for
increasingly bigger proportions of their incomes. Those whose incomes depend on stocks, as
opposed to wages, are freed from the discipline of wage-earning (e.g., the way a shift worker is
required to clock-in for work punctually and only take prescribed breaks, to display deference to
supervisors, to have a good attitude, etc., as opposed to the sheer latitude afforded the person
with huge tranches of portfolio income who can call their investment adviser or broker from a
paradise island or luxury yacht at a time exclusively of their own choosing). For a top manager
rewarded by stock income for doing Gods work, the primary goal has to be leveraging the
value of your company, more often than not involving resort to patently contrived and fictitious
financial devices, the virtual accountancy engaged in by Enron being a typical case in point, as
opposed to boosting the companys investment in actual productive capacity.
20

What will it take to overcome this system? Candor compels us to acknowledge that the
odds of this happening any time soon are virtually insurmountable. After all, for three decades
now the incomes of 90% of Americans have suffered a decline in real terms, and yet Middle
America has been totally quiescent while the likes of Lloyd Blankfein, Robert Rubin, and Henry
Paulson (the latter two were also CEOs of Goldman Sachs, and also served as Secretary of the
Treasury in the Clinton and G.W. Bush administrations respectively) acquire obscene wealth by
being the architects of a casino capitalism that does little or nothing for the productive base of

18

the economy. Moreover, as I argued in my 1998 attempt to reformulate dependency theory,
the extraction of surpluses from financial dealings now takes place throughout the business cycle,
as opposed to occurring at its end when the economy faces declines in productivity (the latter
being the more marxist traditional view, taken-up more recently by the late Giovanni Arrighi
amongst others).
21
Abolishing or neutralizing the economic logic which permits a very small
group to gorge themselves at the trough of rent-seeking financial deals will therefore require the
elimination of an entire regime of accumulation-- phasing-out this system of accumulation is
going to be a simply mammoth undertaking. The upheavals associated with the ongoing crisis
notwithstanding, Wall Street has pocketed vast sums of taxpayer money disbursed through the
TARP Program, done its best to declaw or circumvent the Obama administrations feeble
attempts at regulation of the banking system, retains many of the arcane business practices that
created the mess in the first place, and is conjuring-up a new generation of exotic financial
products for another round of casino capitalism.
Of the potentially achievable small measures available in the shorter term, the banking
system has to be regulated more effectively and rentier income taxed at the appropriately high
rate, which it is not in the current tax regime, especially after George W. Bushs tax cuts for
wealthy Americans. (Dream on, some of you will say). Rewards and inducements now
benefitting rentiers to the exclusion of most of us have to be redirected to the production of
public goods and services. After all, a hospital cleaner contributes more to society than an
investment banker.
22


19

But the ultimate transformation will require the supersession of the current system of
capitalist accumulation and its grotesque technology of dispossession, as the authors of Empire
argued from the beginning.



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NOTES
1
Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy, trans. Timothy S. Murphy
and Arianna Bove (London: Verso, 2005), 60.
2
For accounts of 1968 and its legacies, to which I am much indebted, see Kristin Ross, May 68
and its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Max Elbaum, Revolution in the Air:
Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che (London: Verso, 2006); and Fredric Jameson,
Periodizing the Sixties, in Sohyna Sayres, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, and Fredric
Jameson, eds., The 60s Without Apology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 178-
209.

3
The fact that the countries of the South have seen more direct and pressing forms of social
transformation in recent decades than their counterparts in the North-- extending from the
above-mentioned struggles against apartheid in Africa to recent events in Tunisia-- may lend
support to the view that revolutionary change is more likely to be initiated in the South than in
the North. When this is coupled with the acknowledgment that the current system of capitalist
accumulation is tilted against the poorer South, the conviction that radical change is more likely
to emerge in the Third World than in the First becomes hard to resist.

The vitality of feminism has not been confined to the domains of everyday life. An
accompanying efflorescence in the intellectual sphere has also taken place, with exciting and


21


powerful developments taking place in history and historiography, cultural anthropology, critical
theory, political theory, legal theory, post-classical economic theory, geography, literary studies,
and classics. Sheila Rowbotham has been a pioneering figure in both of feminisms political and
academic spheres, and her memoir Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties (London:
Verso, 2001) is a fascinating reflection on the difficulties and challenges women in her position
faced in their quests for public and personal legitimacy.


4
For Callinicos, see his Toni Negri is Perspective, International Socialism: a quarterly journal of
socialist theory 92(2002), at http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj92/callinicos.htm
(accessed on September 22, 2014).
5
On the role of the state in East Asian economic development, see Chalmers Johnson, MITI and
the Japanese Miracle: the Growth of Industrial Policy 1925-1975 (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1982); Robert Wade, Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of
Government in East Asia's Industrialization (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990);
Alice Amsden, Asia's Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989), and The Rise of "The Rest": Challenges to the West From Late-
Industrializing Economies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). See also Linda Weiss, The
Myth of the Powerless State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).


6
American polling organizations have devised categories to account for this grouping and its
(right wing) voting preferences: euphemisms such as low information voters, voters with

22


information gaps, NASCAR voters, are used to designate an electoral bloc which is persuaded
and mobilized not so much by the policy-positions of politicians as it is by hot button or wedge
populist issues-- abortion, gun ownership, prayer and the teaching of creationism in schools,
immigration reform, displaying the Ten Commandments in court houses, Muslims and sharia
law, death panels and health care reform, the will o the wisp of high taxes-- issues carefully
crafted by election strategists and advisers such as Karl Rove and Dick Morris to appeal to
precisely this electoral constituency.

7
The term risk shift is taken from Jacob Hacker, The Great Risk Shift: The New American
Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), who
argues compellingly that the American capitalist system is now orchestrated to permit its
financial elite to amass wealth by engaging in risky business undertakings while transferring to
less wealthy Americans the costs incurred by any failures of these undertakings. A classic recent
instance of a risk shift is the taxpayer-financed bailout of the too big to fail Wall Street banks,
whose managers have continued to pay themselves bloated bonuses while many Americans
continue to lose their jobs in the ongoing economic recession. Or as the Cambridge economist
Gabriel Palma has described the behavior of the American banks during the current crisis: life
can now continue as if nothing had ever happened as there was now the guarantee that the Fed
would always be available at the other end of a 911 call. See Jos Gabriel Palma, The Revenge
of the Market on the Rentiers: Why neo-liberal reports of the end of history turned out to be
premature, at http://www.econ.cam.ac.uk/dae/repec/cam/pdf/cwpe0927.pdf (accessed on
September 22, 2014). I am indebted to Palma for several valuable insights. A similar

23


government-sponsored risk shift has also taken place in Britain, thanks to the policies of New
Labour and the current Lib-Con government. It could be argued that there was some spillover of
the Wall Street boom on to Main Street, in the form of elevated housing values, surging pension
funds, etc., but this view can almost certainly be countered by the fact that these gains were
wiped-out by the huge losses which occurred after the Wall Street bubble burst, and the fact that
most of the initial gains experienced by Main Street were used to incur yet more debt-- debt
being perceived to be not too onerous thanks to the historically low interest rates set by the Fed
under Alan Greenspan.

8
Simon Johnson, former chief economist at the IMF, and thus hardly a radical, maintains that the
need for stricter banking regulation, urgently required after the meltdown of the US banking
system that precipitated the current recession, is in fact being side-stepped by the Obama
administration. See Johnson, Tunnel Vision, or Worse, from Banking Regulators, at
http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/20/tunnel-vision-or-worse-from-banking-
regulators/?ref=business (accessed on September 22, 2014). The state facilitates a regime of
accumulation as much by passivity and inertia as it does by concrete action.

9
Toni Negri, Postface, in Andrea Fumagalli and Sandro Mezzada, eds., Crisis in the Global
Economy: Financial Markets, Global Struggles, and New Political Scenarios, trans. Jason Francis
McGimsey (New York: Semiotext(e), 2010), 262-71.

10
John Maynard Keynes, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, argued that
rentiers should be euthanized (as Negri points out).

24



11
In the foregoing I am much indebted to Michael Hudsons lapidary presentation to the Council
of Economic Advisors to the President of Brazil (CDES) in September 2010. See Where is the
world Economy Headed? Challenging the Model of the North, at
http://counterpunch.org/hudson09202010.html (accessed on September 22, 2014). Hudson, a
former Wall Street economist, provides a trenchant and quite brilliant account of the failures and
shortcomings of neoliberalism. I am deeply indebted to Hudson, and borrow many of his
formulations, but only accept with some qualification his claim that neoliberalism is an
intellectual betrayal of the legacy of the French Physiocrats and Adam Smith. Of course it is, but
the more important question is whether Hudsons primary proposals-- reducing the part played
by neoliberal rent-seeking initiatives and acknowledging the indispensable contribution to the
economic surplus in any country made by the public sector and its associated goods-- can be
implemented without a supersession of the prevailing system of capitalist accumulation. One
suspects that the rhetorical, and deeply cunning, force of Hudsons argument resides in his claim
that neoliberalism fails because it cant even meet the standards for adequately functioning
capitalist markets promulgated by Adam Smith and the Physiocrats. Yes, neoliberalism does
indeed betray the classical liberal economists. But what if rigged markets are a fundamental
problem, and an insurmountable one at that, for the entire capitalist system? This of course is
where Marx began his interrogation of classical economics, and especially its weddedness to the
chimera of pristine and perfect markets. See Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, trans. Harry
Quelch (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1920). An analysis of neoliberalism, coming to the
same conclusions as Hudson but providing a more comprehensive critique of markets and

25


marketization from a marxist perspective, is to be found in David Harvey, A Brief History of
Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

12
It could be argued that the guilt-free attitude of the Wall Street bankers in the face of the
mayhem they created has now percolated to the indebted masses themselves, who have been
known to default on their loan repayments without batting an eyelid.

13
For this figure, see the article by Jos Gabriel Palma (note 7 above). The figure above
corresponds to Figure 4 in Palmas text. Palma says of this development that domestic debt
grew 5-fold in real terms (to almost US$50 trillion) between 1980 and 2007, or from a relatively
stable 150% of GDP before 1980 to about 350% in 2007. In turn, securitized debt grew fourteen
times faster than bank loans leading to a situation in which by 2007 more than half of USs
banking was being handled by (what Geithners likes to call) a parallel financial system better
known as shadow banking (a term coined by Paul McCulley in August 2007 at an annual Fed
symposium). US banks were similarly over-leveraged. To quote Palma again: By the time of
the [2007] crisis, Lehman was leveraged to the tune of 22 times its net worth. As for Merrill
Lynch, by 2006 it had US$44 billion in CDOs [Collateralized Debt Obligations] and mortgage bonds
(a 13-fold increase in three years), with fees flowing from them reaching $700 million. By then,
their exposure to sub-prime securities was already higher than their entire shareholders' equity
value.

14
On this see Shaila Dewan An Ambiguous Omen, U.S. Household Debt Begins to Rise Again,
New York Times, February 14, 2014, at

26


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/19/business/economy/an-ambiguous-omen-us-household-
debt-begins-to-rise-again.html?_r=0 (accessed on September 26, 2014).

15
On this rise since the Great Recession see Neil Shah U.S. Household Debt Increases, The Wall
Street Journal, May 13 2014, at
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304081804579559813544267206
(accessed on September 26, 2014).

16
Hence the real scandal, barely registered of course, regarding the way American banks have
used their TARP monies (paid for by taxpayers) not to invest in businesses and other productive
activities, but to buy back shares (thereby increasing their market value), and of course to pay
their managers stupendously high bonuses while the majority of people in this country have to
contend with stagnant or falling incomes. The practice of paying huge bonuses on Wall Street
was not slowed down by the crisis: Nine banks that received government aid money paid out
bonuses of nearly $33 billion last year -- including more than $1 million apiece to nearly 5,000
employees -- despite huge losses that plunged the U.S. into economic turmoil. See Susanne
Craig and Deborah Solomon, Bank Bonus Tab: $33 Billion, The Wall Street Journal, July 31 2009
at http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB124896891815094085 (accessed on September 22, 2014).
The trend has continued, regardless of the course taken by the US economy. Describing it as a
bonus bonanza, The Wall Street Journal says that according to the New York State
Comptrollers office, Wall Street firms handed out $26.7 billion in bonuses to their 165,200
employees last year [2013], up 15 percent over the previous year. See Sarah Anderson, Wall
Streets 2013 Bonuses Were More Than All Workers Earned Making the Federal Minimum,

27


March 12 2014 at http://billmoyers.com/2014/03/12/wall-streets-2013-bonuses-were-more-
than-all-workers-earned-making-the-federal-minimum/ (accessed on September 22, 2014).


17
This figure corresponds to Figure 12 in Palma, The Revenge of the Market on the Rentiers.


18
To quote Dean Baker: The financial industry knows a cash cow when they see one. It would
take more than $10 trillion in private accounts to generate the same amount of money as Social
Security pays out each year in benefits. If the financial industry collected just 1.0 percent of this
sum in fees each year, it would mean another $100 billion a year into the coffers of the Merrill
Lynch set, in his Who can Fight off the Social Security Pillagers?, at
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/21-6 (accessed on September 22, 2014).


19
On this need to move away from rent-seeking to more productive enterprises, see Robert
Pollin, Resurrection of the Rentier", New Left Review 46(2007), 140-153.
20
Lloyd Blankfein, the egregious chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, who owns more than $500
million in Goldman stock, and who still gave himself a salary of $68 million in 2007, calls himself a
blue-collar guy, and insists hes doing Gods work. See John Arlidge, I'm doing 'God's work'.
Meet Mr Goldman Sachs, Sunday Times, November 8, 2009, at
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6907681.ece?token=null
&offset=0&page=1 (accessed on September 22, 2014).


28


21
Kenneth Surin, 'The Reanimation of Dependency Theory in the Age of Finance Capital, Cultural
Logic 1:2 (Summer 1998) at http://eserver.org/clogic/i-2/surin.html. Christian Marazzi has
provided the fullest elaboration to date of the proposition that the extraction of surpluses from
financial dealings now occurs throughout the business cycle in his The Violence of Capitalism,
trans. Kristina Lebedeva (New York: Semiotext(e), 2010). For Arrighi, see The Long Twentieth
Century: Money, Power and the Origins of our Times (London: Verso, new ed., 2010).
22
Martin Shankleman, Cleaners 'worth more to society' than bankers study, at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8410489.stm (accessed on September 22, 2014). The study,
conducted by the New Economics Foundation, says hospital cleaners create 10 of value for
every 1 they are paid, and bankers are a drain on the economy because of the harm they did to
it. The report says that bankers destroy 7 of value for every 1 they earn. Advertising
executives and tax accountants also constituted a drain on the economy, while childcare workers
and recycling employees, like hospital cleaners, added value to it. The principle behind the study
is that a job not only creates or destroys value, but depending on its nature, it can also enable
other workers to create, or not create, value in their turn. A job can thus have a multiplier
effect.