Empire & Imperialism

A Critical Reading of Michael HardL and Antonio Negri

AnUO A BORON

'THIS MOST 1'�ENCH4""T "NO D[VASTATING CRITIQUE 01 Hardr anr1 Ne gr l ' s

mlstai<en Clnd conl(JsecinOllons 01 a dcterrtlOllillt/e<l and dect!lltcfcc1 Emptfc
con'es from one of tile moM creatllie ancl cOJnlllllted soci al ist ,!ltL'lIectual" In
tnc con l i ne nt that has llilO lhe most flfstnano expel1ence of the dctual
worklflgs 01 Amcllean ImDt.!naiism Boron not anI', contront!> Hard! amJ Ne�fI �
ab5\r£lCtlon5 w l !11 'thl� prosaic L.,tHl Amencan eonlQnJporar) I cal l l ) hul
subleels Iht'li work to d Dfotounrl theorcilcilt amI cmpilitill r.:t,Jlal ton Wllltt'n
wllh N.ccplloncil �el �e and olten bltmg hUlllour. this IS il hoo" ;n.1: cleser\les
10 be ",lclCI) read.

LEO PANITCH CoEOltor. SOClill151 Register. D,sllllgUished Rescilfch

Professor of POhllcal Sc.(!nce. Yorl< Unlvt'ISlt�. CanadiJ

THE SCOPE o r lHIS LUCID .\·�D Co\R[rl:L DISSECTION 01 1\llJt'I� lIel(l !Jel""s
olJOUI !lIe emerging \�ortcJ 010"1 e .1tmth. .... ell Q�'I()no tile IlIl111lmtlil! stud� thar
IS Its Illlrn._'clltilr. turge!. Boron SIIlPS a.... il�· lil�t!r after la)er of 1ll15Ulider
!'.!ilrldlng concefOlOg . DIll Imperialism' ilflfj I!S CllfI('rl! \'arlant� He 1t."'lev.."
lilt' P(!rSISlence of tile dll\e to cuntrol n"lurill ft!SOllrcc!> Ih,' rchanc!:! 01
transnil!.onill fIlm!> on d po\\el ful hOille slate the dangers of a�olrJlI'g
political econo m\ . ana muel, elst' ThIS li<tlUdule sllJd� UI�\·{.'lops ill I
Ifllportanl �rSPt'C;I,\e on oresent rCilh1tes and \',11.11 must be lJone to Cel""
for WflfO OilSI (JCIII(!Vt..'lllenIS on l'flltlflClp.lllon from InJustice. oPP'CSSIOII dl1U
degradatIon

NOAM CHOMSk'l'

'BEYOND HIS mE/I,CH"NT ENC.\GEM!:NT \,;1111 the argument!'. of !-Iardt cilIa

Negr •. Boron otter" nls o....n 1I1SIghifui ami eloquent anill',5IS of locla\ s
'glollillo,ed worfd ;,n(1 Ih£' pOSSllll"!'!?S 01 lis trallsformatlon T he frUitful
COllllJrrlilltOn ul Ireorelicai flgour dnl1 Cli""�. ('mplriCal ilnall�I'" ollll political
passIon 'S Just 1I11� ImlLl 01 thmg we need 011 the left

ElLE'" M£ISKIJ4§ WOOD Authol 01 [llIp.,e vI CalJltiJl

ISBN 1 84277 577 4

9 �1Il��l�l l�IJllIJI1
About this book
Harvard achola r Mic:hael Hardt and Italian 1�l'twing intelJ«tuaJ Toni
NelJrl's maj or book, Emplrr, quickly became 0 huge bestseller wh�n
it WH pub l lahed in the United States. It W85 widely lauded by or­
gans, such a' the NN York TiIJlt:s, not usually known for their think·
ing in terms of empi� and Imperialism. But many intellectuals in
other parts of the world - among them Atillo Boron - �re deepl)'
disturbed by the book, reeling that It was analytically misconceived ,

undermiMCI poUlkai resistance to imperialism, and igaomllhe

concme experience and inte Umual analysis of the Third World.
Alilio Boron argues that Hardt and Negri's concept of im peria l ' ­

ism without an address', however well intentioned their commit­

ment to buman emancipation and a Muer world, Ignora the
fundamental parametrrs of modern imperialilm. Professor Boron
unpicks thrir argumenl5 and confronts them wim me social, «a­
nomic and political �alides of intensified capi:talm exploitation in
today's world. Among Ihe trenchant prunts he makes:

The nation Illite, rar trom being weak�ned, remaiM a crucial

ag.:nt of th� capltallll! core, deploying a la� anenal of eco­
nomic weaponry to protect and extend its position, and actively
promoting globalization in hs own interests. It is only the state
in the periphery thaI has �n dramllrlcally wukC'ned - in frla·
lion both 10 transnational corporations and to l-ore s ta te s and
supranalional enlitie5like the US and the EU.
Hardt and Negri are also wrong, he argues. in picturing produc·
lion under globalization 115 disregarding nalional frontiers, This
does nOI apply to labour. nor to cutting-ed� t«hnology.
And their substltulion or a nebulous 'mullitude' for identiftable
social forces lind antagonistic social groups merely confuses
political reality, as does the'lr curious depktion or Ihe' super­
rxploiled Third World migrant worker as II postmodem hem who
is changing Ihe world.

Boron conclud� that Empirt is • libertarian pessim ist product

o f thtl defeat of th� socialist left in the 11)805 and 1990S. Ics authof5
have ablUldoned social theory In favour of a poetic abstraction
which rovers up the reality of a glo balization process whose more
cynical apologists do nOI he l lta l e in p �sen llng as a proJ«tion of
American power,
Critical prflUeforthu book
'11Ii5 i51 a pGWI!rful polemic, in the best RnH of the word, ap.inst
a t'uneatly fashionable book. But it I. also mont than tbaL Bt)'ond
his lRnchant enpguuen t with lbe arpnnen15 of Marcil and Negri,
Boron offen. In acceuibJe prolllC, his own insightful and eloquent
IInalyais of today" "globalized" world and the posaibilities of Its
transformation. lhe fruitful rombinadan of theoretical ripr and
clarity, empiriaal analysis and polldcal passion is jlUt tIw kin d 01
thingW'e need on the lelL' EU.n /rIeiHitU Wood, alllho,ofEmp�
orCaplw

'Atillo Boron moantl a �re, but neceauy, critidam of the

poslllolU put forward by Hardt and Negri, who . have aligned
..

themselva with the anempt by IntelllJent rigbcwingel1l to neutral·

iu the potential for popular mobJUaadon on the part of mO¥mlentl
su pportive of a different Idnd of gJobalhation.' SamJr A min

''nIe IiCOpe oflhis lucid and careful disSft'tion of widely held beliefs
about the emerging world order extends well beyond lf1tt in ftu ential
study that is Ita immediate targft.. Boron strips away layer after layer
of mlrrundentanding concerning "old i mperialism and its cumnt
"

variants. He reviews the penlstence of the drive to conllOl natural

resoun:cs, the reliance of transnational firms on a powerful home
state, the dangers of a\'Oiding political economy, and much else. He
brlnp out clearly tbe need for "an adequate s�ial canoeraphyof
1M fteld" where an -emanC'lpatory bame" must be waged If It iii to
havt' any hope of success. In a critique of common illusions about
contemporary aociety. Boron Identifies and strelsn the significance
of social ron:cl thaI have eme� and are enp� In the c1usic:
ItNggtes that ronstantly take new forms, but �f1ect much the same
duper institutional factors and conOicling Imerests. 'nib valuable
study develops an Imponanl penpec:tive on present realities and on
what must be done to carry forward .,..t ach�m enlJ In emancipa­
t ion from Injustl�, opprasion, and degradation: NOlI'" C"OIftIkJ

'It is highly appropriate that the IDOl! mnchant and devastating

critique oC Hardt and Negri's mlstakrn and oonfuse'CI notions of a
deterrltorialized and decenacred Empire sbould have come from
one of the most crea� and committed sodali..: intdJcctuals in the
continent that hal had the most 8nt-hand experience of the artUaI
workinll of American Impertallam.. Writing in the tradition of-and
in the procca doing much to � - 1M Latin American debates
on dependency, neo-c:olonlalism and imperial ism oflhe 19']01,
Boron not only confronts Hardt and Nqri's abatraL'rions with .�
prosaic Latin American contemporary mality', but aubj«ts melt
work to a profoun d th�retical and em pirim refutation. Writtrn
\\ith ocepdonal WM and often biting hUmour, this is a book that
especially desenres to be rud by all those ac:tlviIU who, a. Boron
aptly notes in the preface to this new English edition, haw been
Influenced by Hardt and Negri's 'aevere mlatakea of diagnosis and
interpretation, which. il8ccepted by tM group. and orpnlzations
that today are tIyinglo defeat imperialism, could become the cause
or new and long-luting defelts.' Uo Ptmitch. C�Editor, SOCiaUst
Regisler; Carulda R�turh Chair in ComparrzUw Politiclll Economy
and DininpJ.h«J Re.eatrh PrrJ/rllor ofPolirica/ SciMC�, York Uniw,..
sity. Canada

Abouc the author

AliIlo A. Boron is Exec:utiw SecrWlry of the Latin American Council
of Social Sciences (Cl.I\CSO) and Professor of Political Theory at the
Unlftnil)' of Buenos Aires. He we. educ:ated In .vpntina and Chile,
be f ore doing his doctoral depft at H8J\IlIJ'd in the United S1ate5.
He ha. taught at some of the mOld important academic IRltlhl­
tiona in Argenti na. Bra.il, Chile, Mexico and Pueno Rico. In the
Unhed States he has bftn a vilirilll profeBSOl' at the universities of
Columbia, Mrr, Notre Dame and UCLA, and in Britain hu ledUred
at Wuwlck and Bradford u.rtiwnities. He is the author or editor or
nint' t>ook. (In a numlwr of IJInguaps), lnefuellng Stall, CapittlUsm
tJnd DDrlocrocy in Latill America (1995). His particular interat i5 the
relationship � IlatH. markets and d� durin, the
prOCftS of neo-liberaI rntructuring. 10 2004 he was awarded lhto
Cay de las America. Prize for 'Empirr' tlrullmp�rltlIJ.m.
ATILIO A. BORON

Empire and imperialism

A critical rcading of Michael Hardt

and Antonio Negri

lrilnslalnl by Jessica Casiro

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 Contents

Acknowledgements I vill
Prc£acC' I t
Prologue to the English-language edition I 6

I On perspectives, the limits of viliibility and blind spots I �3

2 Tbe constitution oftbe empire I �6

3 Markets. transnationa1 corporations and national
economies I 42
4 Alternative visions oBhe empire I 58
J The nation-state and the Issue of sOllereignty I 73

6 111(' unsolved mystery of the multitude I 87

7 Notes for a sociology of revolutiona", thinking in times

of defeat I gB
• 111e persistence of imperialism I 1 11

Epilogue 1111
Bibliography I 115
Index of proper names I 130
Geneml index 1136
Acknowledgements

A number of people have read all or pan of the ma nu­

script, making possible the completion of this book.
Special thanks are due to Ivana Brighenti, Florencia

F.nghel, Jorge Fraga, Sabrina Gonzaln, Bellina In'y,

Migud Rossi, Jose Seoane, Emilio Taddei and Andrea

Vlahusic for their encouragement, comml'nl5 and

criticism. Jessica Casiro did a superb job of translating

the I1Ilher baroque original Spanish into an austere but

Mill lively Engtish. Of cou rliC , none oflhem should be

blamed for the errors and short<.'Omings of the book,

caused entirely by the stubbornness of its author.

Preface

First, a little bit or histol)'. (n september 1001, one of the editors

of New L�ft Rt1I;ew invited me to contribute a chap ter to a col­
lection of essays to be published by Verso in London. The book
was to contain a series or critical comme ntaries about Emp;n by
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000); their �pon� wouJd
be added l a ler) Given that my co ntrib ution rrached Inordinate
p roponions, it was clear that it could not be included in that
book. Far from being discoura�d, I realized that the work I had
already done. considering the importance of the theme, deserved
a fresh start, so, after broadening some analyses, enlarging on a
few commenlS, adding new data and new refiections, the result
wall thlB book.
What is related in the previous paragraph is the fesuh of his­
lOry and circumstances. '[bere �re also more important reasons
Ihat inspired me to write my book. First, th� was the need to
consider vel)' seriously the work of two scholars of the intellectual
calibre of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Their In�lIectual and
politil.'81 trajectories, so broad and proliflc , es�dally in the case
of the latter, make them deserving of respect an d for tha t reason
1 t'lUlmined vel)' carefully the assenions they made throughout
Empin, 0 polemic that had such a strong p ublic impact. second,
Ihe subject matterofthis b ook is of great importance: the empire,
or, t o use a definition that seems to me more appropriate, the
imperialist system in its current phase.
Th� difficulties in undC'rtaking such a task are many. I sha� the
authors' critical view or capitalism and neoliMral globalization,

, "1"Iw book a�. aftrr rol\5i�Rblt drily. in 100J without thr final
rhllprrr by Hardt and Negri. Seor Balakri.bnan (1003).
" and applaud th�ir courage in examining such a crucial topic.
\I
.2 In Cart, DO matt� how deeply I disagree with Hardt and Negri'.
!
� interp�18tions, I must admit that their nvision and update of
the subject were necessa ry both because the deficiencies of con­
ventional analyses of the left with regard to the transformations

coxperienc:ed by bnperla1ism over the last �nry-fM: years had

beco me impossible to igno� and needed lII'gmt updating, and
because the shortcomings of the 'pemh unique' on this matter
- spread urbi rt orb; by the lMF, the World Bank and the ideo­
logical agencies of the imperiaJ system - to which the neoliberal
theory of globalization gives expressio n, are even gRater. For
those like t.he writer of this book, to whom the fundamental
mJIsion of both p hilosophy and political theory is to change the
world aDd not just to interpret it (to dte the weU-known 'Thesl.a
on Feuerbach' by Marx), a correct theoryconstltutet an invaluable
tool with which the popular movements that resist neoliberal
globalization can navigate, with a reasoMble amount of accuracy,
through the lrOubled waten of contemporary eapiblJism. One of
the main factors inspiring this book Is my sttong beUef th.t Hardt
and Negri's reapon� to this chaUenge i, bighly unsatisfactory,
and that it could lead to new political defeats.
It is mdent that a phen omenon such as toclay's imprrialism
- its structure, its logic of functioning, its consequences and
its conuadlctJona - cannot be adequately understood from a
close rea ding of classic texts by Hilferding, Lenin, Bukharin and
Rosa Luxemburg. Thit is not because they were wrong, a. the
right lOYd to claim, but because capitalism is a changing and
dynamic Jystem that, as Marx and EnpJswrote in the Communist
MQniJ�stD, 'constantly rrvolutionlzes itst"lr. Therefo�, we cannot

understand early nftnry-Hrlt-antury imperialism by mcling only

those authors , but nclth� can we undel'lltalld It without them.
The goal Is to mOft forwards in a reformulation that, depaning
from the Copernican rn'Olution produced by Man's work. which
provides us with an interpretatift due that is essential for explain·
ing capitalist society, will mnlt'rpret with audadty and creativity
the clusic:al heritap of studies on imperialism in the Upt of
the transformations of the prnenL Today's imperialism is not
the same as the one that existed thirty �ars ago; it has changed,
and In some ways the chan� has b�n ftry imponanl, but it
has not changed into iu opposite, as neollberal mystification
suggestl, giving rise 10 a 'global' economy in which we are aU
·interdependent'.lt still exisbl, and it stUi oppresses peoples and
nations and creates pain. destruction and death. In spite of the
changes, il stiD keeps its identity and structure, and it still plays
the same historical ro le in the logic of the global accumuJation
of capital. Its mutadons. its volatile and dangerous combinadon
of persistence and innovation, require the construction of a new
framework t:lutt will allow us to capture its present nature.
This Is n ot the place to examine different theories about
I mperialism. Let us say. to sum up, that the fundamental featurn
of imperialism, pointed out by the clu.aicall1uthon at the time
of the Fint World War, remain unchangrd In their esscntW.
given that imperiaU.sm is not an ancillary future of contemporary
capitalism or a policy implemented by some It'tes, but a new
stage in the dev elopmen t of this mode of production whose
fundamental tmlts have persisted to the p�sent day. This new
stage is characterized. now even more than In the past, by the
concentration of capital, the owrwhelmlng predominance or
monopolies, the incmasingiy important role p�d by financial
capital , the expo" of capital and the division of the world into
different 'spheres of InOuence', The acceleration of globalization
Ihat took place in the tlnal quarter of the hut century, inslt'ad of
weaken ing or dissolving the imperialist structures of the world
ecoqomy, mapifled the ItnaC'tural asymmetries that define the
insenion of the different countries in it. While a handful of deftl·
oped capitalist n.tiom increased their capacity to control. at least ,

panially, the productive proc:eaes at a global level, the financial­ a

a"
iUlion of the international economy and the growing circulation II

3
" of goods and services. the great majority of countries witnessed
'"

i
a.
the growth of their external dependency and the widening of
the gap that separated them from the centre. Globalization, in
shon, consolidated the imperialist domi nation and deepened the
submission of peripheral capitalism" which became more and
more incapable of controlling their domestic economic proct'S5eS
even minimally. The continuity of the fundamental parameters
of imperialism , nOl so much of its phenomenology, is ignored
throughout Hardt and N�'s work, and this negation is what they
have called 'empire'. What I seek to demonstrate here is that. in
the same way that the walls of Jericho did not collapse because
of the sound of Joshua and the priests' trumpets, the reaJity of
empire does not fade awny when confronted by the fan tasies of
philosophers.
The fact that Hardt and Negri's work appeared at a time when
the periphery's dependency and the imperialist domination have
grown to levels previously unknown in history is nolo min o r
detail. This is why the need to h8� a renovated theoretical toolbox
with whieh to understand imperialism and fight against it is more
urgent than ever. It will be very bard to win this battle without
a clear understanding of the nature of the pheno meno n . It is

precisely because of this need to know that Empin has had 5lK'h
an extraordinary impact on the large masses of young , and not
so young, people who from Seattle on have mobilized throughout
the world to put an end to the systematic genocide that imperial­
ism is committing in the countries of the capitalist periphery, to
social regression, and to the disenf ran ch isement that is taking
place to a similar extent in both the most advanced and the most
backward socirties, to the criminal destruction of the environ­
ment, to the degradation of demOC'ratic regimes rntrained by the
tyranny of markets and the militarism that, following the attacks
on the World Trade Center and the �ntagon, has permeated
the White House and other privil�d places in which decisions
affecting the lives of millions of people a� made. Desp i te the

4
nobll' intentions nnd intl'lIectual and political honesry of our
authors, about which I have no doubt, their book - regarded by

man}' as the 'Twenty-first Century's Communist Manifesto' or

a'i a revived 'Little Red Book' for (he slN,'alled 'globalphobics'

'" contains Sl'rious mistakes In terms of diagnosis and interprr­

tation which, if accepted by groups and organizations uying to

defeat imperialism, could become the intellectual cau� of new

and long-lasting defrats, and not only in the theoretical arena.

This is why I have attempted to put forward my critiques and to

face the costs and risks entailed in criticizing a book which, for

several reasons, has become an important theoretical reference

for the movements critical of neoliberal globali7.ation. I believe

that a sincere debate about the theses developed in Empire can

be a powerful antidote to such worrying pMsibilities.

BIIl.'nl>sAirt's. March 2002

Prologue to the English-language
edition

Thii book srcks to debate, bolh from a theoretical 5t4ndpoint

and in the light of the lessons provided by historical and con­

temporary experi ence , the theses that Michael Hardt and Antonio

N� drvelop in Emp;rr(lOOO), Wh ile in previous editions I have

chosen not to examine some events that were bo th momentous

and s pectacula r, suc h as the atrocious 9/11 attacks in New York

and Washington - although tbf)' se riously challenged the core

of Ha rdt and Negri'S theoretical argument - at present such an

altitude is not only impossibl e but also undesirable. [ndt'ed,

the Iraq war has had the same effect on the analysis proposed

In Emplr� as the collapse of the Twin Towers had on American

self-confidence.

Much water has Howed under the bridge and much blood has

been shed as a consequence of the persistence of imperialist

policies since the original pUblication of Empirt QI.d Imptrialism

in S pa nish in 1001. It hi necessary. therefore, to render an account

of these new realities, If, In writing it , my origi nal idea had been

to crea le a 'living text', to employ Antonio Gramsci's felicitous

exp res s ion, the book could hardly remain impervious to the vicis­

situcks of. period l ike ours. c ha ractcrized by In Hnile horror and

terror dealt against defenceless populatio ns - an inftnite war

or, as Gore Vidal suggest ed , I perpetual war waged allegedly in

pursuit of pe�tual peace - and b)' the unrestrained aggression

against human society and nature pe rp etrated in the name of

corporate profits and stock (!xchan� prices. These villainies are

called, with unpa ralleled cynklsm, 'humanitarian wars' fought

[0 bui ld a more secure, peacerul and just worid by characters 8ll

notorious as the Bushes, Aznars, Blairs and Berlu5conis who today

command tM heights of the core capltall .. states. Through me

macabre manipulation of worcb and the systematic misinfonna­

tion incessantly reproduced by the mass media, almost all of
which is under the steely control of capital, their technologicaUy
ultra-sophisdcated terrorism appears 15 regrettable but unavoid­

able 'collateral damap' and their wars of pillalf and conquest

become no ble cruadea in fllYOUr of fRedom and dem�racy .

The objec i or this Prologue, therefore, is to present so me

theories rqarding the characterization of the current p hase of
imperialism in the light of the lessons arising flOm the new epoch
inaugurated by the events of 9111 and, In partic:uJar, by the Iraq
war. Such a revision is essential not only to foil the propaganda

orchesltRted by Washington and projected worldwide In relation

to the us military occupadon of that country, but bei:au se as we ,

shaU see in the foUowing pages, even within the ranks of the left
an unfortunate confusion prevails with reprd to imperialism and
the forms in which it currently manirest5 itselt A confusio n that
is made WOIW by the malignant trend among a stuable majority

oC progressive intellectual. to be 'poUtie'eUy correct ' Of, as the

Spanish playwright Alfonso Sanre said, to be �11 thinking', that

is, to abstain from challenging the dominant sUent premilSt's of
our age w h i ch as Marx and Enpls diacowred in their early texts.
,

ore none other than the Ideas of the dominant class.

Given that without an accurate analysis of rulity there cannot

be a co rrect pol itical line Cor combating the s.coulps or imperial­
Ism, clearing up this matter turns into an issue of the greatest

importance. This Prologue seeks to add its humble contribution

to th at undertaking.

Tht : harsh IYbuttals' oftht war in Iraq

Let us begin by paraphrasing an expression employed by

Norbeno Bobbio, 'the harsh rebuttals of history'. to refeT to the

refutation, according to his analyses, of the Marxist theory of the
state' owing to the changes ellperienced by democratic capital -

7
II isms during the twentieth century. The military occupation of
�

r Iraq. declared by Washington with the suppon of its main client

l goftmment. the Uniled Kingdom. and of its luckily short·li�

Spanish lackey, Jose M. .unar, has in due course generated an
extremely harsh refutation of the ambitious theorizations of

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri thai are the object of this book.
The �nu that unfolded in the international arena after the
publication of Empire in 1000 have incontrovertibly refuted, with
the fottefulness of historical fact, the rash theories they propose
in their book. The latter not only proved itself incapable of ad­
equately interpreting the history of imperialism and its current
structure, but also of accounting for the defining features of the
new phase begun after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
end of the post-war world order.
An examination of some of the main 'theoretical vicdms' of

recent epoch-making events would include the following items.

1 Hardt lind Nevi's conception ofth� role ofth� United Nations

and international law. As pointed out in txtelUo in this book,
the authOR of Empir� grossly exaggerate the Importance of the
United Nations and International law. Lacking the theoretical
instruments necessary to allow them to perceive all the nuances
and complexities of the structure of the imperialist system
- since such instruments are not to be found in the 'toolbox' of

French postmodem philosophy, Italian politics and US economic

scienl.'t!. the authors' three acknowledged &Ources of inspiration

- they naively take for granted the 'democratic' appearance of

multilaterallsm and of the Unitc-d Natjoru system. They conse­

quently confuse the empty formalities of the empire with its con­
stitutive matter. thus mistaking fonn for substance. The contrast
between lhislma� and �aJity is evident even to beginneR in the
study of international �lation6. Blinded by the inadequacies of

their faulty theoretical framework, once again transformed into

a veritable prison for thought, Hardt and Negri an unable to
see what was evident to evnybody else: the invasion unilaterally

8
decreC!d by Pr�sident G eo rge W. B ush caused the contrad ictio n
between their th�orization and reality to �come as glaring as it

was unsustainabl�. Vi olali ng th� al le ged ord�r �mbodied in the

United Nations and intemational law, the United States decickd
- as official policy rather than as a position paper circulating
surreptitiously in Washington, written by some para no id hawk
in t he Pentagon - to ignore any resolution to the contrary that
the Security Council mig h t ado pt, not to mention the General
A sse mbly, nnd invade Ira.q. Faithful to Lbat attitude, me White
House did not hesitate to move to the defence or its supp osedly
threatened national security. ignoring both the need to build
laborious political agreements as required by the United Nations
Chaner and the need to submit to the dictalC1i oC intern atio nal
legislation that it had always co ns idered to be a men: tribute
to demagogy and thai needed to be obeyed only i n so rar as It
did not affcct Washi ngton 's inlerests. This position was adopted
�n despite its high p olitical COlts, such as the ruptun: or the
North Atlanlic conRnsus, the crisis in NATO and the serio us
altrrcation with France and Germany, the after-efTects or which
will M visi ble for a long lime. Afler the aggteuion apin...t Iraq
had been carried out. the Security Council una nimously adopted a
resolution in October 1003 call i n g for the democratic and shared
reconstruction of that country, bu t this wu merely a post MI­
lum legi timiza tio n of imperialist aggrHSio n that had de stro)-ed

the tottering remnants of the post-war order. As Petty Anderson

poignantiy ob served , this unanimoU8 vote to which the Security
Coun"U soLemnly welcomed the puppet government Htablished
by the White House in Iraq as the incarnation of Imqi sovereignty,
whUe calling on the patriotic resistance movements agai nst the

invasion to cease their activities, �stowed the official blessing

,

of the united Natioru;' highesl auLhority on t he American take-

over of Iraq (Anderson zOO4= 51-Z). This resolution, however, was
wrongiy interpreted by Antonio Negri in a recent interview IS
proof of Us ca pit ulation to the United Nations, when it was exactly

9
 the opposite: the impotent resignation of the UN in the race of

J
the brutal outrage �mmiltcd by washington (Clrdoso 1003).
Yet, the ab su rd ity of this interpretation - admittedly, always
difficult - of the cu rrent situation is 1150 repeated throughout
Empirr in its interpretation of the put. This dangerous tendency
to confuse rhetoric and reality led the authors, for example, to

cull the "gure or President Woodrow Wilson tn accordance

with the most conventional ideological elements of America's
establishm ent creed that present him as an 'idealist', an amialble
and tireless builder of peace and a man ins pired by the noblest
Kantian idea oC universal community. In their own warda, Wilson
'adopted an internationalist ideology of peace as an expansion
of the con5titutioDal conception of network power' (p. 174). This
vision ignore s, among other things, the acid remarks made by
John Mayn ar d Keynes about the duplicity and bypocrisy that
Wilson exhibited at the Paris Peace Conference after the First

World War, which led the English economist to conclude that the
American president was 'the palest fraud on ea rth ' (Pan itch and
GLndin 1004= 1:&). Or to disregard the fact, in no way trivial, that
it was during Wilson's pruidency that Ill8..rines OttUpied the Mex­
ican port oCVeracruz and imaded Nicaragua and the Dominican

Republic, surely to help the locals gain a Ruer understanding of

Kant', hrpetual P�ace.
1 Th� connption of the sup�dly th'luntoriJJliutl and de­

centrrd character of imp�rialism. Another of the victims of the

Iraq war has been the proposition that d��d the obsolrscenc:e
oC territorial - and to a pat extent materi al - issues in favour
of the virtual, symbolic: and immaterial. This volatilization of the
territorial elements of i mperiali sm (and of capitalism) alkgedly
results in s�ral inevitable consequences: first, the irrever5iblr
displacement of ancient sove�igntles, based on archaic ter­
ritorial nation-statt'S, by a 'smooth', supposedly supranational

space, a place where a new im�riaI sowmgnty would be �id

of any vestiges of links with national stales and. therefore, of

10
any territorial or geographical rderen�. Second, the gradual

disappearance of. territorially located centre lhat 'organizes'

the international structure of domination. Given the former,

the classic distinction between centte and periphery, North and

South, vanishes into thin air. Instead ofthis, what would aJlegedly

characterize the empire would be the primacy of a global logic

of domination overcoming traditional national interests whose

bellicose reaffirmation caused innumerable 'imperialist' wars in

the past. Thank God, this period is now ovtrl

If one thing was demo nstrated by the aggression unleashed
against Inq, and before that in Afgh4nisran, it was the merely

illusory character of these conceptions so dear to the authors of

Empirr, which Bush refuted with the rude manners of a Texas

cowboy. One of the Orst readings that we caD make of the events

in Iraq is that (pace Hardt and Negri) the United States has ful1y

assumed its condition as the imperialist superpower, and not

only does not attempt to hide that condition, as happened in the

past, but even boasts of it. It intervened militarily in Iraq. as it

will surely do elsewhere, serving the grossest and pettiest defence

of the interests of the conglomerate of gigantic oligopolies that

form the dominont clus In the USA, iDternts which, thanks to the

alchemy of bourgeois h�mony, have been miraculously trans­

Formed into the national Interests of the Untted Stateti. It would

be possible now to paraphrase the old motto of General Motors

by saying that, In the current imperialist phase, 'What Is good for
the US corporations is good too for the Unit� States'. The oilmen

who today fe�1 at home in the Oval OffIce pounded, with absurd

pretexts, a country to take pos..'iession of the enormous �aJth it

harbours in its subsoil. Plainly put, the military occupation of

Iraq-is essentially a lrnitorial conque5t for plunder carried out by
the main actor or the imperialist structure of our time under the
pretext of preventing the deployment of yet unfound weapons of
mallis destruction and of �nging the eftn less Hkrly collabora­
tion of the Saddam regime with the former US mercenary Osama

11
II Bin Laden. "0 conclude: there is nothing 'd�trrritorialized' or
::I

f immaterial there, Ills the old practice of conquHt and plunder

1 repeatrd for the umpteenth time by t.he same old actors wearing

new costumes and showing some technical innovations. Essen­

tially, it is the samr tim�honoured imperialist 6tOI)'.

Nothing, therefore, can be more inaccurate than the image

evoked by Hardt and NrgrIln their book in which Washington

becomes militarily Im'Olved all over the world in response to II

universal clamour for the imposition of international justice and

legality. A plethora oHar-right publicists - especially Robert Kagan

and Charles Krauthammer - ha� eme� into public view to

juslify this reaffirmation of an imperialist unilateralism which

cares little or nothing for International justice and 1�lity, join­

ing forces with other authors such as Samuel P. Huntington and

Zbigniew Bnezinski. who some �ars ago had already outlined tM

strategic imperatives of the 'lonely superpower' and the urgent

need to take up the challenges posed by its role as 1M focal point

of a vast territorial empire. One of those challenges, certainly

not the only one, is the right - actually the duly. by vinue of the

'manifest destiny' that turns the United States Into the all�dly

uni�rsal carrier of the freedom Dnd happiness of peoples - to

go to war as often as necessary to prevent the fragile and highly

unstable 'New World Order' proclaimed by Gf'Ol'g1! Bush Sr at the

end of the first Gulf War from collapsing like a house of cards.

And none of this can be done without considerably reinforcing

the state-based national sovereignty of the USA and its effective

organs orintemational operations, mainly its armed forces. This

is why the United States' militaJy expenditure has grown to almost

half the planet's entire milital)' outlay_ More�r. it should be

borne in mind that. as Noam Chomsky has rightfully o�rvtd,

the new American strategic doctrine announced by the Bush ad­

ministration in September 1001 entails a plan to rule the world

by force dUll has nol btt'n heard since Adolf Hitler made similar

announcements in the mid-19.10s. certainly nol a minor detail

11
(Chomsky 1003a). In this way, the idyllic idea poRd by Hardt and
Negri - the United StaIn giving up the defence of its national
interesL'I and the exercise of imperialist power, and tran.sCecring
its sovereignty to a chimerical empire, for the sake of which the
White House magnanimously responds to international requests
for global justice and law - was buried under an avalanche of
'5man bombs' unleashed on Iraqi territory.
J A healthy imperialist detul body. Another of the lessons of

the Iraq war baa b�n the updating of some of the fealures that
characterized the 'old imperialism'. In the authors' version, the
emphasis placed on virtual elements established an unbruch­
able frontier between the 'old imperialism' and the supposedly
new empire, the former being understood as that system of inter­
nalional relations which fiued, approximately, within the canons
established in Lenin's analysis and which to a great extent was
shared by some classical authoni on the subject such as Bukbarin
or Rosa Luxemburg. One such feature was, precisely, the terri­
torial occupation and the pillaging of the natural resowces of
the countries colonized or subjected to imperialist a�5Sjon.
From a reading of Empirt there emerges a theoretical conception
indifferent to the iuue of access to slIategic resources for the
world of production and the sustainabUity of capitalist civiliza­
tion itself, explained by the strong emphasis the authors place
on the (nowadays undoubtedly important) immaterial aspects of
the process of creation of value and the transformations of the
modem capitalist corporation. Yet, the Iraq war, starting with
its tragi·comical groundwork, demonstrated how inaccurate
this conception was. We have only to recall President Geo� W.
Bush, whh his quirky pathetic smile barely disguised, exhorting
Iraqi, not to destroy their oil wells and to refrain from KIting
them on fire, to understand the crucial importance of access
"II
to, and control of, strategit: natural h.'sources in the allegedly
a
current world imperialist structure. Oil constitutes, at this time, 0-
ca
c
the central nervous system of internalional capitalism. and its CD

13
 i m portance is even greater than that of the world of fi nance.
!
S' The latter cannot function without t he former: the entire edi fice
!
A.
of what Susan Stra nge has correctly labe l led 'cas i no capitalism'
wou ld coll apse within m i n u tes i f oil d isappeared. And the latter,
we know, wi ll be exhausted in no more than two or three genera­
t ions. It would constitute unforgivable naivery to suppose that
French d i ss idence in the face of US outrages in Iraq is fou nded
on the d e mocratic and an ti-colon ial ist convictions of Jacques
C h i rac or on the u nquenchable desi re of the French right to
ensure for the I raq i people the full enjoyment of the del ights of
a democratic order. What prompted F rench i n t ra nsigence was.
on the con trary, somet h i ng far more prosaic: t he permanence
of that co untry's oil companies in a territory that con ta ins the
world's second-largest oil reserves. Aga i nst what Hardt and Negri
induce us to believe in their subl i mated - and hence complacent
- view of the e mpi re, one of the possible future scena rios of the
i nternational systcm is that of a heightened i n ter-imperial ri va l ry
i n which the sacking o f s t rategic resources, such as o i l and water,
and the stmggle for a new carve-up of the world could wel l lead
to an ou tbu rst of new wars of pillaging, analogous in their logic
although different in the i r appearances to those which we have
known ove r the cou rse of the twe ntieth ce ntury, in the days when
i m peria l i s m enjoyed enviable health and was not dea d , a s they
wa n t us to believe is the case today.
4 A nother victim: the view developed in Empire oj the en-one­
ously labelled t.ransnational corporations. I ndeed, Hardt and N egri
endorse - unconsciously, I assume - the vision of the capi talist
world assiduously cultivated by the main US and European busi­
ness and manage ment schools and the theorists of neoli beral
'globa lization'. As is wel l known, in the thi nking of the right the
i rresisti ble rise of globalization is a natura l phenomenon as un­
controllable a s the movement of the s ta rs , and one tha t gives rise
to a new world of i n terdependent economies, Economic agents
therefore operate on a level fiel d free of the obstacles previously

14
set up by powerfu l nat ion-states. In this space, free competition
reigns, and the old asymmetries, with their hateful d i sti nctions
between metropolis and colonies, are a th ing of the past. evoked
only by left ists nos ta lgic for a world that no longer exists.
Accord ing to this i n terpreta tion, not o n ly h as there been a
decli ne in the 'national' economies, devoured by the farrago of
globalization, but large corporations have entirely sloughed off
the last vestiges of t he i r national ascript ion . Now they are all
t ransnational and globa l , and what they req u i re to operate e ffi­
ciently is a worldwide spacc freed from the old ' national' h u rd les
and restrictions that migh t h inder their movements. With i n a
supposedly a nti-ca pitalist reading this space would be the em­
pire, precisely as i t is cha racterized i n the work of Hardt a nd
N egri. As I shall demonstrate i n the following pages, the reality is
light-years away from this vision. There is a n elementary distinc­
tion (completely ignored i n the work under review) between the
t h eatre of opera tions of the compan ies and tJle territorial space
in wh ich thei r ownership and cont rol materialize. Even in the
case o f modem corporate Leviathans - a sma l l proportion of the
total number of companies existing i n the world - whose scale
of operations is clea rly pla ne ta ry, ownershi p and con t rol a lways
have a national base: compan ies a re legal entities i ncorporated
in a specific country and not merely regis tered at the U nited
N a tions in N ew York. They have headqua rters i n a given city,
obey a specific national l egal fra mework that protects them from
potential expropriations, pay taxes on their income and profits i n
[he cou n t ry where their headquarters are loca ted, and so o n .
T h e New York Times's conservative col umnist Thomas Fried­
man scorned the Sil icon va lley execut ives who li ke to say:

We are nOt an American company . . . We arc I B M Canada, I B M

"
Australia, I B M China ... Then, t h e next lime IBM China gets in
a
trouble in China, call Jiang Zemin for help. And the next time I
c
Congress closes another military base in Asia, call M icrosoft •

15
11/ navy [0 secure [he sea l ines in the Pac ific. And the next t ime
:::t
f Congress wants to close more consulates and embassies, call
e
IlL
Amazon_com to order a new passpo rt. (Friedman, 1999)

I n case t h i s argu ment does not look persuasive enough to dis­

pel the myth o f the 'transnational' nature o f the modern capitalist
enterprise, the con duct o f the White House i n Iraq and its bru tal
insi stence, with the u ncultured manners of Texas ranchers, that
the beneficiaries of the war und ertaken in the name of freedom
and d emocracy (a nd of t he need to free the world from the threat
of a dangerous monster like Saddam) must be restricted to US
corporations (especially but not only Halli burton) d emonstrate
the mistakes made in t h e theses developed in Empire. Not only
that. It is no longer sim ply an issue of US corporations obtain­
i ng the lion's share o f t he spoils o f the I raq operation; the very
manner in which these privileges were d istributed among com ­
pa nies all l i n ked to the governing US gang rcca l ls the methods
employed by the fam i l ies of the New York Mafia to d ivide up
control ove r busi ness in the c i ty. What relation is there between
this impe rialist ca rve-up and t he i dyllic theorizations found i n
Empire? Absolu tely none.
S Social movements opposed to neoliberal globalization. Lastly,
a few paragraphs a re needed to exa m i ne t he role performed by
those movements opposed to neol iberal globalization that the
capi ta l ist p ress, and this is no coi ncidence, cal ls 'non-global' or
'anti-globalization'_ The h a rdly i n nocent pu rpose of this semantic
choice is more than evident: to t ransform the critics o f neoliberal
globalization into a ntediluvi a n monsters who seek to halt t h e
march o f h i story and o f technological progress. ' N on-globa l '
activists thus appea r before t h e eyes o f world p u b l i c opinion
as a m u l t i farious set o f melancholy seekers after U topia in a
world that, as Francis Fu kuya m a and George SOlOS have said .
dances to t h e tune of the ma rkets. Th rown together a re soeial­
ists, communists, ana rchists, ecologists, pacifists, human rights

16
militants, femi n i s ts , aborigi.n al orga n izations and all sorts of sects

and tribes, who wilfully ignore the fact that for the first time in
h istory the world has been ' u n iversalized' fol l owi ng an America n
pattern, and for that reason the end has been decreed for a l l

k i n d s o f m i ll enarianis ms and particu larisms. Yel , contrary 10 this

biased opinion, the m ovements that resist the markets' tyra nny
believe that a n ot her globaliza t i o n is possible (a nd u rgently neces­
sary), that the curre n t one is the product of the, u ntil recently,
u nc o n tes ted pred o m i n a nce of l a rge corp orations_ Th en, th ere
is nothi ng natura l about the curren t shape of gl obalizat i on; i t
i s the producl of the defeat su ffered by popular, left-wing a n d

dem ocratic forces i n the 1 970S and 1980s. Hist ory, far from having
ended , is just at its begi n n i ng, and the curre n t situa t i o n can and
m ust be reversed.
The vigorous emergence of such m ovements contra d icts some

central planks i n H ardt and Negri 's book. The ' n on-globals' have
earned the huge merit of havi ng lau nched a large pacifist m ove-
ment even before t he begin n i n g of operat i ons in I ra q . Wh ile,
as N oam Ch omsky reca lls, pacifism in relation t o the Viet nam
Wa r did n ot appear, a n d then t i midly, u n t il m o re t h a n five years
after the begi n n i ng of the m i l i t a ry escalation in South Vieln a m ,
i n the case of lhe recent w a r on I raq t h i s m ovement man aged
t o a rticulate massive protests of u npreceden ted vigou r weeks
befo re the begi n n i ng of h ostilities. It is calcu l a ted that some 1 5
m i l l i on people demonstrated for peace i n maj or cities through out
the w orld. I n B ri t a i n and Spa i n , countries ruled by gove rnments
complicit in US i mperia list aggress i o n , s t reet dem onstrations
reached a n u n p recedented size. The governments of Blair and A:z.-
nar p rovided an exe mplary less on on the li mitations of capitalist
dem9cracy by ignori ng, with absolute cyn icism, what the dem os,
the supp osed s overeign of an allegedly dem ocratic pol itical o rder,
demanded \vith its m obilizations and its a n swers to nu merous
a
p u blic opin i on su rveys. As 1 have a rgued elsewhere, i n d e m o- f
c ratic capitalisms what matters is the 'cap i ta l i s m' component i

17
GI of the formula; the 'democrat ic' part is merely an accessory to
:l

8' be respected as long as i t does not a ffec t anything considered

1 fu ndamental (Boron 2002). This imperial pillaging was decided by

the 'ru l i ng j u nta' that cu rrently governs the U n ited States. Let us
reca l l , with Go re Vida l , t hat Bush is the first U S president to reach
the White House t h rough an institutional coup perpetrated by
t ha t country's Supreme Court - t here was no need to be bothered
by democratic 'formalit ies' (Vidal 2002: 1 58-9). The petty despots
d id what ( hey wan ted and continued with the plan drawn up by
White House hawks, d espite i ts overwhe l m i ng repu d iation by
the public. (n Spa i n , over 90 per cent of those interviewed were
aga i nst going to war, despite wh ich the government of the Popular
Pa rty con t i n ued with its po licy. The terrorist attack of 11 M arch
2004, and t he shameful l i es of the Aznar government, prompted
his resou nd ing electoral defeat. Noam Chom sky is right when he
observes that, for Bush, Ru msfeld and their friends, 'Old Europe,
the bad E u rope, were the countries where the gove rn m e n ts lOok
the same posi tion as the overwhe l m i ng majority of their popula·
t ion . New Europe were t he co untries where the governments over'
ruled a n even larger proportion o f their popu lation. The criterion
was absolutely explicit - you could n't say more d ramat ically ' )
hate a n d despise democracy' (Chomsky 2003 b: 29).
All the above is to the poin t because, in Empire, the a uthors
celebrate as the real 'hero' of the s truggle aga i nst the empire
the anonymous and u p rooted m i gran t , who abandons his or
her homeland in the Th i rd World to penetrate t he belly of the
beast and , from there a n d along with others who l i ke h i m or
he r constitute the famous ' m u l l itude', fights the masters of the
un iverse. Wit hout d i m i n ishing the i m portc1nce which t h ese social
actors may have, the t ru th is that what has been seen in rece nt
years - a nd especially in the demonstrations against the wa r i n
early 2003 - i s the vigour o f a social movement t h a t has solid
roo ts in the social s truc t u res of metropol i tan capitalism and
that attracts n umerous supporters, especia l ly a l though not only

La
among t he young, from large social sectors that are su ffering a n
accelerated process o f d ecay by virtue of neol iberal globa l iza tion.
This is not (0 deny t he pa rticipation of groups of i m m igrants in
such mob i l izations, but the fact is that the soc ial com position of
these movements suggests that the presence o f the latter i s , more
than anything, marginal. In any case, because of its complexity
and radical nature, its origi nal i n nova tion as regards the strategic
organization of collective subjects, its discursive models, its style
of action and, lastly, i ts m i l i tant a n t i -capit.alism, the ' non-global'
movement represents one o f the most serious challenges that
the empire has to face . Th is l i kewise co nst itutes a new aspect
t h a t raises serious doubts abOllt the t heses d rawn up by H a rdt
a nd Negri rega rd ing the s u bj ects o f social confrontation and t he
u ncertai n sociological physiognomy of t.he ' mu l t i tude'.

To recapitulate
We are living at a very special moment in the history of im­
perialism: the transit ion from one phase ( let us call i t 'classical')
to another whose deta i l s are only just beginni ng to be sketched out
but whose general ouu ine is a l ready clearly discernible. Nothing
co uld be more m istaken than to posit, a s Hardt and Negri do
i n their book, the existence o f s uch an implausible entity a s an
empire \vithout i m peria l ism - a paralysing pol itical oxymoron.
Hence the need to argue aga i n s t their t heses, since, given the
cxceptional gravity of the current situation - a capita lism increas­
ingly reactionary in the social, econom ic, political and cultura l
spheres, o ne that crimi nalizes social protest and m i l i tarizcs inter·
nationa l pol i t ics - only an accurate d iagnosis of t he stru c t u re
and operat ion of the i nternational imperialist system wil l a llow
t hose social movements, political parties, labour unions and
,

popula r o rganizations of a l l types that want to overthrow the cur-

rent situation to face new jou rneys of struggle with any chance
a
of success. An accurate d iagnos is is also needed to identify the .r
c
empire's enem ies. To consider, as Negri does, that Lula in Brazi l CD

19
 and Kirchner in Argentina represent a species of resolute 'empire
!
f fighters'; or judging as 'absolu tely positive' the first year a n d a hat(

1 of Lu la ' s government i n Brazi l , t u rn i ng a deaf ear to the deepening

of the neoliberal cou rse of the economic policy imp lemented si nce
his accession to the presidency; or assuring his readers t hat the
Kirchner government has refused to pay the debt, an aston ishing
d iscovery for the Argentinians who every day read in the press the
i nord i nate amou nt of dollars be i ng punctual ly paid to foreign
creditors - these are certa i n ly not the best ways for intellectuals
to help defeat the empire (Dua rte-PIon 2004: 1 ).
The i l lusion that we can u nderta ke the st ruggle withou t a
p recise knowledge of the terrain in which the major ballies of
hu manity will be fough t can only lead to new and overwhelming
defeats. Dear Don Quixote is not a good example to be i m i tated
in poli tics; confu si ng windmills with powenu l knights with la nces
and armour was not the best path towards the real ization of his
drea ms. Nor wil l St Francis of Assisi, a nother figure exalted in
H a rd t and Negri 's text, serve as a model for inspira tion. I n fact,
no emancipatory struggle is possible withou t an adequate social
cartography to describe p recisely the t hea tre of ope ra tions, and
the social natu re of the enemy and its mecha nisms of domination
and explOi tation.
The d is tortions that result from a mi sta ke n conception, such
as is mainta i ned by Ha rd t and Negri, can be astoniShing. It is
sufficient here to quote the latter when he states, among other
t hings, that 'the war in I raq was a coup d 'e ta t by the U n i ted S tates
against the em pire' (ibid . ). I would l ike to conclude by quoting
extensively from a n i n terview gran ted by Negri to [he Argenti ne
newspaper Clarl'/I d ur i ng his visit to Bu enos Aires, whose elo­
quence is u nsurpassable. In it Negri avers that the current Un ited
S tates occupation of Iraq does not constitute a case of

colonial a d m i n i s trati o n but rather a classical case of nation

,

building. And therefore it is a transformation in the direction

20
 of democracy. This is the pretext of the United States. Ir is a
milita r)' occupation that toppled a regime, but afterwards the
problem is nation building, in other words an attempt at a
tra nsition, not at colonization. I t would be like saying that the
fac t of turn i ng from dictatorship to democracy in H ungary or
Czechoslovakia is a colonization. There is no attitude of that
type in the Un ited States administration. These Americans want
to seem nastier than they are. (Ca rdoso 200))

It is conve nient to ask ourselves, in the face of this incredible

confusion, i n which a war of pillage and territorial occu pation
appears to have been swee tened i n to an altru istic operation of
n at ion-bu ilding and the expon of democracy: will i t be poss i ble
to advance in the concrete st ruggle against the ' really existing'
i m perial ism a rmed with such c rude t heoretical i n s t ru m e n ts
as are proposed by these a u t hors and that lead them to such
nonsensical conclusions? U l t i mately, to philosoph ize is to make
d i sti nctions. A phi losophy incapable of differentiating between
a war of conquest a n d the process of nation-building is a bad
philosophy.
To advocate carefully the features of a new society will be to
little avail without a realistic knowledge of the physiognomy of
the c u rre n t soc iety that must be overcome. A post-eapi ta l ist a n d
post-imperialist world is possi ble. More t h a n that: I wou ld say i t i s
essen tia l , because, if i t continues t o operate under the predatory
logic of capitalism, mankind is head i ng lOwa rds sel f-d estruction.
But before building this new society - more humane, just, free
and democratic than the preeed i ng one - it wil l be necessary to
em ploy all our energies to overcome the one that today oppresses,
ex plojts and dehuman izes us, and that condem n s al most half the
world's popu lation to subsist mise rably on less than two dollars
'V
a day_ And this t rue emancipa tory epic has, as one of its most
a
imponan t en abling cond itions, the existenee of a real i stic and I
c
precise k nowledge of the world we seek to transce nd_ I f instead of II
u this we are the prisoners of the illusions and mystifications that
:I
f a re so efficiently manufactured and spread by the ideological ap-

1 paratuses of the bou rgeoisie, our hopes of build i ng a be tter world

will i neluetably sink. This book seeks to be a modest contribution
towards avoiding such a sad and cruel outcome.

Buenos A ires, September 2004

1 On perspectives, the li mits of visibility
and blind spots

Something that may surprise the reader of Hardt and Negri is the
sea nt a tten tion that Empire pays to the li terature abou t imperial­
ism_ In contrast with Len i n and Rosa Luxem burg, who made a
careful review of the numerous works on the topie, our authors
have op ted to ignore a great part of what has been written a bou t
the issue. The literature with which they deal is a eombination of
North American social science, especially international political
economy and international re lations, mixed w i th a strong dose
of Fre nch philosophy. This theore tical syn thesis is packaged in
a clearly post modern style a n d language, and the fi nal prod uct
is a theoretica l mix that, despite the au thors' i n tentions, is
u n l i kely to d isturb the serenity of the moneyed lords who year
after year gather in Davos. Due to th is, a l most a l l the citations
are taken from books or a rticles pu blished within the limits of
the French-American academic establishment. The considerable
literature concern ing imperia lism and the fu nction ing of the
imperial system produced in Lat i n America, I ndia, Africa and
other parts of the Third World does not even merit a footnote.
Discussions within classical M arxism - Hilferding, Luxembu rg,
Len in, Bukhari n a n d Kautsky - about the topic are al located a
brief chapter, while the con troversies of the post-war period oe­
cupy a n even smaller space. Names such as Ernst Mandel, Pau l
Bara n , Pa ul Sweezy, Harry M agdoff, James O'Con nor, Andrew
Shonfield, Ignacy Sachs, Paul Matlick, Elmar Altvater a n d M aurice
,
Dobb are conspicuous absences in a book that pretends to shed
new light on an entirely novel stage of the history of capital. It
is not surp risi ng, thus, that this enterprise offers a vision of the
empire viewed from above, from its dominant s trata . A partial
II and u n i lateral vision, t herefore, u nable to perceive the totality of
c
o the system and to accou nt for its global manifestations beyond

what, presumably, occurs on the North Atlantic shores. Thus, the

resu h i ng vision is particula rly narrow, a n d the blind spots are

n umerous and i m porta n t , as I w i l l demonstrate t h roughout the

pages that follow. In short, Empire offers a vision that wants to be

a critical exa m i na t ion going to the root of t h e problem, but given

t h e fact that it cannot ema ncipate itsel f from the privi leged place

from where it observes the social scene of its time - the opposite

of what occurred with Marx who, from London, knew how to

detach h i m sel f from that fate - i t is trapped i n the ideological

nets o f the dominant classes.

How can the n egation of the rol� played by two crucial i n ­

s t i tu t ions that organize, m o n i to r and su pervise the day-to-day

operation of the empire - the I n ternational Monetary Fund a n d

the World B a n k - barely mentioned i n the almost five h u n d red

pages of the book, be u nderstood if not from t he limitations of

a North Atlantic perspective? Barely six pages a re reserved for

a n a n a lys i s of t ra n s n a t ional corporations, strategic players in

t h� world economy, only half of the amount devoted to issues,

presuma bly so crucial and urge n t , such as the ' non-place of

power'. The eleven pages d evoted to Baruch Spinoza's contribu­

t ions to political p h i losophy, or the s ixteen d�voted to exploring

the mea ndcri ng of Fouca u l t ' s thought and its relevance to u nder­

sta n d i ng the imperial order, can hardly be considered s ensible

for those who see the world not from the i mperial system's vertex

but (rom its base.

For t h is and many other reasons, Empire is a n i n trigu i n g

book that combines some i ncisive i l l u m i nat ions a bout o l d and

new problems with monumental m istakes of a pprec iation and

i nterpret a tion_ There is no doubt that the authors a re strongly

1 The page references a re taken from Ihe original E nglish-language

cdilion : F:lnpire (Cam bridge , MA: Ha rvard U n iversity P re s s . 100 1 ) .

24
com m i t ted to t h e construction of a good soc iety a n d , specifi­

ca lly, a com m u n i st society. Th is com m i tment appears many times

t h roughout t h e book and d eserves enthusiastic s upport. S u r­

p r i si ngly, however, the a rgu m e n t of Empire has noth i ng to do

with the great t rad ition of h istorical materia l i s m . The audacity

exhi bited by the authors whe n , swi m m i ng ag-a i nst t h e t ide of

established prej ud ices and the neoli beral commonsense of our

li mes, they d eclare their loyalty to comm u nist ideals - 'No, we

a re not a na rchists bur com m u nists' (p. 350); ' the irrepressible

l ight ness and joy of being com m u ni st' (p. 4 13) - collapses like a

house of cards when they need to explain and analyse the i m perial

order of today.' At that pOi n t , theoretical a n d political i n d ecisive­

ness take the place of decla matory concl usiveness. In th is sense,

i t is imposs i b le to ignore the contrast with other works about the

same topic, such as S a m i r Am i n 's Accumulation on a World Scale

( 1 9 7 4) , Empire of Chaos ( 1992) a n d , the most recent, Capitalism

ill the Age of Globalization ( 1997); or Tile Long Twentieth Century
by Giovan n i Arrigh i (1995); or Year SOl . The Conquest Continues

( 1 993) a nd world Orders, Old and New (1994) by Noam C homsky;

o r Production, Power, and World Order by Robert Cox ( 1987); and

the works of I m manuel Wal l e rstei n , The Modern world System

( 1 974-88) a n d After Liberalism (1995). And the res u l ts of such a

comparison a re extremely u n favoura ble for Hardt and Negri .
2 The constitution of the empire

Empire begi ns with a section devoted to 'the pol i tica l constitution

o f the presen t ' , which fol lows a Preface in wh ich the authors

i n t rod uce the main thesis of the book: an empire has emerged

and i m perialism has ended ( p p . xi-xvii). I n the fi rst part of the

book, the analysis of the world order begins in a surprisingly

formal istic mode, at least for a Marxist, s i n ce the constit u tion

of the empire i s laid out in narrowly j u rid ical terms. Thus, the

world order, far from being conceived as the h ierarch ical and

asym metrical orga n i zation of states, markets and nations under

the general d i rection of a n i nt e rnat ional domi nant b l oc, is

m i s represen ted i n Hardt and Negri ' s analysis as a proj ect ion of

the U n ited Nations' formal orga nizat ion. This s u rprise is then

i n te n s i fied when the i n trigued reader real izes that the conceptual

i nstru ments used by Hardt and Negri to examine the world order

problem are borrowed fro m such un prom ising toolboxes as the

ones used by a group of authors so foreign to hi storical material·

ism - and of such little use for a deep analysis of th i s type of issue

- such as Hans Kel s e n , N i klas Luhmann, Joh n Rawls and Carl

Sch m i tt . Supponed by authorities such as these, it comes as no

surprise that the results of this init ial incursion i n t o the subject

matter are far from satisfactory. For example, the U n ited Nations'

role i n the so-ca l led worl d order is grossly over-esti mated: 'one

should also recognize that the notion of right defined by th e

UN Charte r a l so points toward a new positive sou rce of j uridical

prod uction, effective on a global scale - a new center of normat ive

production tha t can play a sovereign j u rid ical role' (p. 4).

Hardt and Negri seem to ignore the fac t that th e U n ited

Nat ions is not what it appears to be. In fact, because of its b u reau­

cracy and elitism, th e UN is an o rgan izat ion destined to support

the interests of the great imperialist powers, especially the United
States. The effective UN 'juridical production' has little substance
or impact when it concerns matters that contradict the interests
of the U n i ted States and its allies. The authors over-estimate
the very marginal role played by the United Nations General As­
sembly, where the votes of Gabon and Sierra Leone are equal
to those of the United S tates and the United Kingdom_ Most of
the General Assembly's resolutions are reduced to dead letters
unless they are actively supponed by the hegemonic power and
its panners. The 'humanitarian war' in Kosovo, for example, was
carried out in the name of the United Nations but completely
bypassed the authority of the Security Council and the General
Assembly. Washington decided that a m i l i tary intervent ion was
necessary and that is what happened. Years later, George W. Bush
Junior invaded and devastated Iraq without the authorization of
the Secu rity Council, not to mention the approval of the General
Assembly. Naturally, that bears no relationship to the production
of a universal law or, as Kelsen trusted, with the emergence of a
'transcendental schema of the validity of right situated above the
nation·state' (p. 6). The imperial istic nature of the 'really existing'
United Nations, not the one imagined by our authors, is sufficient
to prove the weakness of the following affi rmation: 'This is real ly
rhe point of depanure for our study of Empire: a new notion of
right, or rather, a new inscription of authority and a new design
of the production of norms and legal instruments of coercion
that guarantee contracts and resolve conflicts' (p. 9 ).
Thi s fantastic and childish vision of a supposedly post-colon ial
and posl-imperialist international system reaches its clima.'I( when
they conclude that 'All interventions of the imperial armies are
solici'ld by one or more of the parties involved in an already
existing conflict' (p. 1 5); or when they hold that the 'first task of
Empire, then, is to enlarge the realm of the consensuses that sup­
port its own power' (p. 15); or when they assure already astonished
readers that the intervention of t he empire is 'legitimated not by

27
o right bu t by consensus' in order to ' i n tervene in the name of any
� type of emergency and superior ethical pri nciples' such a s 'the

appeal to the esse n tial values of j ustice' (p. 1 8). I s i t the ' hu man­

itaria n ' i n tervention in the former Yugoslavia that our a u t hors

have i n m i nd ? Indeed, as wi ll soon become clear. This i ncred ible

nonsense allows them to conclude that, under the e m pi re , 'the

right of the police is legit imated by u niversal values' (ibid.). I t is

telling that such a radical thesis i s supported by evidence provided

by two bibliogra phic references that all ude to the conventional

literature of i nternational relations and whose right-wing bias is

eviden t to even the least- i n formed reader. The vol uminous Lat i n

American bibl iography about i mperialistic i n tervention produced

by a uthors such as Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, Agustin Cueva, RUy

Mauro Mari n i , G regorio Seiser, Gerard-Pierre Charles, Ed uardo

Galeano, Theoto n io dos Santos, Juan Bosch, Helio Jaguaribe,

M a n uel M aldonado Denis, is ignored_!

The second chapter of Part 1 is devoted to biopolitica l prod uc­

tion. It opens with a laudable statement of intent: to overcome the

l i m i ta t io ns of the j urid ical fonnaJism with which they began t he i r

i n tellectual course, descendi ng, i n t he i r own word s , to the mat­

erial cond itions that susta i n the legal a nd i ns t i tutional fra mework

of t he empi re . The i r obj ect ive is to ' d iscover t he means and forces

of the produ(·tion of social reality a long with the subjectivities

that animate it' (p. 22). U n fo rtunately, such beautifu l i n tent ions

re main m e re declamations, as thc i nvoked materialistic condi­

t ions 'va n i s h into thin air', to use the wel l-known metaphor by

Marx and E ngel s in t h e Manifesto, a n d some venerable ideas

from the social sciences are prese nted as i f they were the latest

I When Ihi5 work was practically fi n ished, a n exccllenl book by Saxe­

Fe rnandl"'I: , Petras, Vcltmcyt'r and Nuilez \\':lli givc n 10 mc bUi I was able to
rake only margi nal advantage of i l s empirical and interpretalive ric h ness

(S3xe'Femandcz et a l . 200 1 ). In any calie, t he reader is reco m m e nded to

consult t hat (ext in order 10 expand some of the analyses unden .. ken in t h i s
book.

28
'discovery' by the Parisian rive gauche or New York's Greenwich

Village. Fou cault's theorization a bo u t the t ra nsit jon to the sociecy

of control, for example, revolves round the supposedly new notion

t hat 'Biopower is a form of power that regulates social l i fe from its

in terior' , o r that 'Life has now become [ . . . ] a n object of power'

(pp. 23, 24)·

It wo uld not take long to find in the extended western po litical

tradition, t h a t begins at least in t he fifth cen t u ry Be i n G reece,

ideas surprisingly similar to what today, with the fan fare that

supposedly celebrates great scientific accomplishments, is called

the 'biopower'. A q uick look at the l i terature wou l d show dozens

of citations from a u thors such as Plato, Roussea u , de Tocquevi lle

and M arx, to mention only a few of the most obvious, that refer

precisely to some of t h e 'great novelties' produced by the social

sciences at the end of the twentieth century, Plato's insistence

on the psychosocial aspects - summarized in the p h rase 'the

individual's character' - that regulated the social a n d pol i t ical l i fe

of the Athenian pol is is wel l known , as is t he young Marx's em·

phasis on the subject of the 'spiri tualization of the domination' of

the bou rgeoisie by the exploited classes. I t was Rousseau who

stated the i m portance of the p rocess by which the dominated

were induced to be lieve t hat obedience was a moral ducy. Thi s

m a d e d isobe d ie nce and rebe l l ion a calise for serious con flict

within i nd ivid ual consciences. In short, for H a rd t and Negri,

who are dazzled by Foucault's (an author who deserves our res·

pect) t heoretical in novations, it could be highly educational to

..
read what \\las written a century and a half ago, for i nstance, by o
::I
Alexis d e Tocqueville: 'Formerly cyranny used the clumsy weapons

of chains and hangme n; nowadays even despotism, t ho ugh i t

�,
::1'.
o
see "1ed to have noth i ng more to learn , has been pe rfected by ::I
o
-
civilization: And d e Tocquevi lle continues, saying ancient cyran­

n ies 'to reach the soul, clumsily struck at the body, and the soul,
escaping from such blows, rose gloriously above it'. I n stead, mod­

ern 'democratic' tyranny 'leaves t he body alone and goes straight

29
o for the soul' (de Tocqueville 1969: 255). Th is step from c h a i n s and
l hangmen to i n d ividual manipu lation and cont rol of ideology and

behaviour h as been christened by Foucault the t ransit ion from

the disc i p l i n a ry society to t h e society of con trol. But, as we know,

to name something is completely d i ffe rent from d i scovering i t .

I n this case, the creature h a d a l ready bee n d iscovered and h ad a

name. What Fouca u l t with his renowned a b i l i ty d id was to give i t

a new, and very attractive, n a m e , different from the o n e everybody

knew. Nevertheless, it cannot be said t hat we are in the presence

of a fu nda mental theoretical i n novation.

The first part of the book concl udes with a chapter devoted

to alternatives withi n the e m p i re . It begi ns with a statemen t as

perplexing as it is rad i ca l : 'The m u l t i t u d e called the E m p i re i nto

bei ng' ( p . 4 3 ). Con t ra ry to most common i nte rpreta t ions within

the left, H ard t and Negri be l i eve t hat the e m p i re is not the crea­

tion of a world capita l ist coa l i tion under the A merican bourgeois

hegemony but the (defensive?) response of capital to the class

st ruggles against conte mporary forms of domination and oppres­

s ion n u rt u red by 'the m u l t i t u d e 's des i re for l i beration' (ibid .). At

th is poi n t , H ard t and Negri e n ter a terra i n plagued w i t h cont ra·

dictions. They i ns ist that the e m pi re is good si nce i t represents a

'step forward ' in overcom ing colonialism and i m peri a l i s m . They

insist on t h i s even a fter assu ring us, w i th the help of H egel, that

the fact that the e m pi re 'is good in i tselr does not m e a n that it is

good 'for itselr ( p. 4 2). They continue: 'We claim that Empire is

better in the same way that M a rx insists that capita l i s m is better

than the forms of society and modes of p rod uction that came

be fore it' (p. 43). However. a few l ines earlier, the a u t hors say that

the empire ' constructs its own relat ionsh ips of power based on

explo itation that are in many respects more b ru ta l than those it

destroyed' ( i b i d . ). Despite this, the empire is ' better' because, they

assert, it enhances the potential for liberation of the m u l ti tude, an

assu m ption that has not been confirmed by experience and that,

i n Hardt a nd Negri 's case, is surrounded by a dense m e taphysical

30
and, in certa i n ways, religious halo, as I shall show in t h e final

pages o f t h i s work. Where that b l issfu l l ibera t i n g poten t i a l is

a n d how such possibil ities could be realized i s somet hing the

authors expla i n , in a s i m pl istic and u nsatisfactory way, i n the

last chapter of t h e i r book .

O n the o t h e r h a n d , t o say t h a t the e m p i re is 'better' means

that the real capi tal ist world order - and this is precisely the

e m p i re - is something d i fferen t from capital i s m . Marx's argu­

rnent referred to two d i ffe ren t modes of prod uction a n d com­

pared t h e poss i b i lities and perspectives opened by capitalism to

the ones offered by the decay of feudalism. Are the au thors t ryi ng

to say t h a t the e m p i re means the overco m i ng of capitalism? Is

it that we have tra nscended i t without a nybody not ic i ng such

a fabulous h i storical cha nge? Are we now in a new a n d better

society with renewed poss i b i l i t ies for l i bera t ing and e m a n c i pa­

ting practices?

It seems t h a t Hard t and Negri have b u i l t a straw m a n , an i r­

rational and i m mutable leftist who, in the face of the challenges

posed by global iza t ion, i nsists on opposing local res ista nce to

a process that is global by na t u re . Local means, in most cases,

' na tional ' , bu t t h is d is tinction is irreleva n t in their analys is. They

say that the strategy of local resistance ' misident i fie s a n d t h u s

masks the enemy' (p. 45). S i n c e Hardt and Negri wa n t to t a l k

pol i t ics seriou sly - and w i t h o u t t h i s being a formal concession

to Schm i t t b u t to Clausewitz, Leni n and Mao - who is the enemy

�
t h en? The answe r to this very concrete question could not be �
II
"
more d isappoi nting since we are told that 'The enemy is not a o
::I
III
s u bj ect but, rather, is a spec i fic regime of global rel a t ions that 2'•
..
C
we call E m p i re ' (pp. 4 5-6) . N ational s truggles conceal t h e view of ..
ii"
::I
the r� al mechanisms of e m p i re , of the existing a l t e m a t ives, and
�
of the l i be rating poten t ials that agitate in its wom b. H ence, the
;.
II
oppressed and exploi ted masses of the world are convened for a
.,
final battle aga i n s t a regim e of global relat ions. The beloved Don
3
"
Quixote appears once aga i n , afte r several cen t u ries, to t i l t at new �.
wi nd m i l l s while the sordid m i l l ers, ignoring the multitude's rage ,
continue with business as usua l , rul i ng the i r countries, exploiting
the masses and manipulating the culture.
Hardt and N egri view the empire as the historic overcoming of
modernity, a period for which they s upply a somewhat d i storted
vision. Indeed, modernity left a l egacy of ' fra tricidal wars, devas­
tating "development, " cruel "civil ization," and previously u n i m ­
agined violence' ( p . 46). T h e scenario that modernity presents i s
o n e of t ragedy, signified b y the presence of 'Concentration camps,
n uclear weapons, genoci dal wars, slavery, apartheid' (ibid.). And
from modern i ty, Hardt and N egri deduce a straight l i ne that leads
to the nation-state without mediation. The nation-sta te is noth i ng
but t h e ' i nel uctable cond ition for i m pe rialist domination and
i n nu merable wars' . And i f now such an aberration 'is d i sappear­
ing from t h e world scene, then good riddance!' (ibid.).
There are several problems wi t h this pec u l ia r i n terpretation of
modernity. I n the fi rst place, i t i s a mistake to offer an extremely
u n i latera l and biased reading of it. Hardt and Negri are right when
they enumerate some of the horrors produced by modernity (or
perhaps in modern i ty and not necessarily because of it), but whi l e
doing s o they forget some other results of modernity, such as the
nowering of individual l i berties; the relative equality establ ished
in the economic, pol itical and social terrains, at least in the de­
veloped capitalisms; u n iversal suffrage and mass democracy; the
com i ng of socialism despite the fru stration generated by some of
its concrete experiences, such as the Soviet U n ion; secularization
and the lay state that emancipated the masses from the tyranny of
t radi tion and religion; rationality and the scientific spirit; popular
education; econ omic progress; and many other accomplishments.
These too are part of modernity's inheritance,and many of t h ese
accomplishments were achieved tha n ks to popu lar struggles and
i n stren uous oppos i t ion to the bourgeoisie. Second, do Hardt
and Negri really believe that before modernity none of the social
evil s and h u man a be rrations that p lagued the modern world

32
was already there? Do they by any chance believe t hat the world
was inhabited by Rousseau's noble savages? Do they not sit uate
t hemse lves in the same position as the critics of Niccoli:> Machi­
ave l l i who denounced the Florentine theoretician for being the
' i nventor' of political crimes, treason and fraud? Have they not
heard about the Punic or Peloponnesian wars, the destruction of
Carthage, the sack of Rome and, more recently, the conquest and
occupation of the American continent? Do they bel ieve that before
modernity there were no genocides, apartheid or slavery? As Marx
did wel l to re mind us, we are victims of both the development of
capital ism and its lack of development.
Once H a rd t and N egri have asserted the substantive a n d
historical continu ity between modernity a n d t h e na tion-state,
t hey rush to reject the a n tiquated ' proletarian i nternationalism'
because i t presupposes an acknowledgement of the nation-state
and i ts crucial role as an agent of capital ist exploi tation. G iven
the ineluctable decadence of the nation-state's powers and the
global nature o f capital ism, this type o f internationalism i s both
a nachron istic and techn i ca l ly reactionary. But thi s is not a":
toget her with t he 'proletarian i n ternationalism', the idea of the
existence of an ' i nternational cycle of struggles' disappears. The
new battles, whose paradigmatic examples a re the Tiananmen
Sq uare revolt, the Palesti n ian Intifada, the 1992 race riots i n
Los Angeles a n d th e South Korean strikes of 1996, a.re specific
and motivated by 'immed iate regional concerns i n such a way
that they cou ld in no respect be l in ked together as a globally
expanding chain of revolt. None of these events inspired a cycle
of struggles, because the desires and needs they expressed cou l d
n o t b e tra nslated into d i fferent contexts' (p. 54).
F�om t h is categorica l assertion, for which i t wou l d req u ire
considerable effort to p rovide support ing evidence, ou r a u t hors
an nounce a new paradox: ' i n our m uch celebrated age of com­
mu nication, struggles have become all bu t incommunicable' (p. 54,
em phasis i n original). The reasons for this i n co m m u n icabi l i ty

33
remai n shadowy, but we should not lose hopc in the face of the
impossibility of horizontal co m m u n ication a mong the rebels
because, in real ity, i t is a blessing. Under the logic of the empire,
H a rd t and Negri tell their i mpat ient readers, the message of these
battles w i l l t ravel vertically on a global scale, auacking the i m perial
con stitution i n its n ucleus - o r, what they call with a mean ingful
slip, j umping vert ically 'to the virtual center of Empire ' (p. 58).
H e re, new and more form idable p roblems besiege their a rgu­
ment_ In the fi rst pl ace, those that de rive from the very d a nge rous
confusion between axiomatic assu mptions and empi rical o bser­
vations. To say that the popul a r battles a re incommu n icable is
an extremely important assert.ion_ Unfortunately, H a rdt and N egri
do not offer any evidence to demonstrate whether this is mere
supposition or the rcsu lt of a historical or empi rical investigation.
Faced with th is s ilence, there a re a bundant reasons for suspecting
that this problemalique reflects the less than healthy influence
of Niklas Luh ma n n and J ti rgen Habermas over Hardt and Negri.
A quick exploration of the nebu lous concepts put forward by

t hese German scholars i s enough to con firm the sca n t utility

that their const ructions have when i t comes to anal)'sing popular
struggles. Th is, though, does not p revent either of t hem from be­
ing extremely popu lar among the ranks of t he disoriented Ital ian
left. In this sense, the Luh m a n n ia n theses on social i ncomme n­
s u rab i l i ty and H abermas's proposals conce rn i ng com m u n icative
action seem to have gready i nfl uenced H a rdt and Negri , a t l east
to a greater extent than t hey a re wil l i ng to recogn ize. But leaving
a side this b rief excursus towards the sociology of knowledge, if the
i ncommun icabil ity of the struggles preve nts them from i n flaming
t he desires and needs of peop l e from other countries, how can
we expla i n the speed with which the erroneously named 'anti·
globa l ization ' movement spread all over the world? 00 H a rd t and
Negri really bel ieve that the events i n Ch iapas, Paris and Seoul
were t ru ly i ncommunicable? How can they ignore the fact that
the Zapatistas, and especially sub-commander Marcos, became

34
international icons for the neoli beral globalization critics and for
the a n ti-capitalist ba ttJes i n five contine nts, i n fl uencing i mpor­
tant d evelopments i n t hese con flicts waged at local and national
levels?
Second, Hardt and Negri mainta i n that one o f the m a i n
obstacles p reven ting t h e com m u n icability of the battles i s the
'absence of a recogn ition of a common enemy against which the
struggles are d i rected ' (p_ 56). We do not know whether o r not
th is was the case among the French or South Korean strike rs , but
we suspect that they had a cleare r idea than our a uthors regard­
ing the identity of their antagon ists. Concerning the Zapat.istas'
experience, H ard t and Negri's t hesis is completely wrong. From
the begi n n i ng of their battle, the Chiapanecos had no doubts
and knew perfec tly we ll who thei r enemies were. Aware of this
real i ty, t hey organ ized a n extraordinary eve nt i n the d epths o f
the Lacandona j u ngle - an i nternatjonal conference aga inst neo­
l i be ral globa lization , attended by h u n d reds of pa nicipants from
arou nd t he world who discussed some of today's most burning
problems. The abi l ity of the Zapatistas to convoke a co n ference
o f this type refu tes, in practice, anothe r of Hardt and Negri's
theses - the one that bemoans the lack of a s u itable com mon
and cosmopolitan language i n to which to t ranslate the languages
u sed in d iverse nat ional struggles (p. 57). The successive confe r­
ences that took p lace in the Lacandona j u ngle, togerhe r with the
d e monstra tions against neoli bera l globalization and the world
social forums held i n Porto Al egre , B raz i l , show that, contra ry to �
•
,.
what is said in Empire, there is a common language and a com­ o
:I
mon understa n d i ng among the different social forces fighti ng
the d ictators h i p of capita l .
�,
::t.
o
If,the old battles are no longe r relevant - Marx's o l d mole :I
o
-
has d ied, to be replaced by the ' i n fi n ite u n du lations' of the
modern snake, accord i ng to Hardt and Negri - the strategy of
the anti-capita l ist jou rneys has to change. National co nf1icts a re
not co mmunicated ho rizo ntally b u t jump d irectly to the vi rtual

35
o centre of the empire, and the old 'weak l i n ks ' of the impe rialist
� chain have d isappeared. The a rticulations of the global power that

exh ibited a particular vulnerabil ity before the action of insurgen t

forces n o longer exist . The refore, 'To ach ieve sign i fi cance, every

s truggle must attack at the heart of the E m pire, at i ts strengt h '

( p . 58). S u rprisingly, after having argued i n t h e book's Preface

that the empire ' i s a decentered and deterritorial izing apparatus

of rule' (p. xi i), the reader stumbles across the novelty that local

a n d nat ional battles must rise at the cen t re of the empire, though

our authors rush to explai n that they are not referring to a terri·

torial centre bu t to a (supposedly) virtual one. G iven t h a t the

empire includes all the components of the social orders, even

the deeper ones, and knowing that it has no l i m i ts or front iers,

the notions of 'outside' and ' i nside' have lost the i r mea ni ng. Now

everyt h i ng is i nside the empire, and its n ucleus, its heart, can be

attacked from a nywhere. If we are to believe Hardt and N egri ,

the Zapat ista uprising in Chia pas, the i nvasion of land by the

La ndless Workers' Movement i n Brazil (MST) or the pot·banging

protesters and pickets in Argentina a re no d i ffere nt from the 1 1

September attacks i n New York and Wash ington. I s i t i ndeed l i ke

t h i s? J udgi ng from the d i fferent types of reactions to all these

events, it would seem that t h i s i s nOl the perception held by those

at the ' Empire'S heart'. On the other h a nd , what mean i ng should

we assign to t h is expression? Are we talking of the cap i t a l i s t

nucleus, the centre, t h e i mperialist coalit ion with i ts wide n i ng n e t

o f concentric circles revolving round American capitalist power,

or what? Who are the concrete subjects at t h e 'Empire's heart'?

Where are t hey? What is thei r art iculation with the processes of

production and c i rculation of the i nternational capi talist econ·

omy? Which institutions normatively and ideologically crystallize

t hei r domination? Who are their poli t i cal represen tat ives? Or is

it just a set of im material rules and p rocedu res? The book not

only does not offer any answers to t hese q uestions, but does not

even formu late t he q uest ions.

 At this stage, H a rd t a n d Negri's theorization makes its way to

a real disaster. By asserti ng that eve ryt h i ng is i nside the e m p i re,

thei r theory completely removes from our horizon of visibility

the fact that structural h ierarchies a nd asym metries exist pre·

cisely there, a n d that such d i fferences do not disappear s imply

because someone h as decla red that everything is i n s i d e t h e

empire a nd noth i ng is left outside. Studies undertaken by La t i n

American schol a rs and writers over decades do agree, beyond

the d i ffe re nces, on the fact that the categories of 'centre' and

'pe riphery' e njoy a cerlai n capacity, a t least a t fi rs t , to produce

a mo re refined portrait of the i n te rnational system. Everything

seems to i n d icate th a t such a disti nction is more usefu l than

ever i n the current circu mstances, because, a mong other thi ngs,

t he growing economic margi nal ization of the South has sharply

accentuated pre-existing asymmetries. In order to con fi rm this

assertion i t is enough to rem i n d ourselves of what the U n i ted

Nations Developme n t Programme's (UNDP) a n n ual reports poin t

o u t with regard t o h u m a n development: i f a t t h e begin n i ng of the

1960s the ratio between the rich es t 20 per cen t a nd the poorest

20 per cen t of t h e world population was 30 to 1, at the end of

t h e twen tieth ce n t u ry this ratio had grown to almost 75 to 1.

I t is true tha t Bangladesh and H a i t i are i nside t h e e m pi re, but

are they because of t h is i n a pOSi tion compa ra ble to that of the

U n ited States, France, Germany or Japa n ? Hardt a n d Negri clai m

t hat even though they a rc n o t identica l from the production and

c i rculat ion point of view, between 'the U n i ted States a nd B razil, �

•
"
Britain and I ndia [ ] are no d iffe rences of n a t u re, only d i ffer· o
;:,
III
ences of degree' (p. 335). ::r.
C
This categorical conclusion cancels the last forty years of ::r.

debates and research t hat took place not only in Lat i n America g
but also i n the rest of the Third World, and it brings us back to

the American theories in vogue in the 19 50S and at the begi n­

n i ng of the 1960s, when a uthors such as Wa lter W. Rostow, Bert

Hosel itz and m a ny ot hers elaborated their ahistorical models

37
of econom ic development_ Accord ing to these const ruc tions,

i n both ni neteenth-century Europe and the U nited Sta tes and

in the h i storical p rocesses t h a t took place i n the middle of the

twentieth century in Latin America, Asia and Africa, economic

growth fol lowed a l i near a n d evolu t io n i s t path, begi n ning i n

underdevelopment a n d concluding i n development_ This type of

reasoning was based on two false assumptions: first, that societies

located a t either extreme of the continuum share the same n a tu re

a n d that they are essentially the same. Their d i fferences, when

existent, were only in tenns o f d egree, as H ardt and Negri would

later say, a n assenion that was , and still is, completely false. The

second assu m ption: the organization of i nternational markets

has no st ructural asymmetries that coul d affect the chances of

deve lopment fo r nations in the periphery. For t hose au t h o rs

mentioned above, tenns such as ' d ependency' o r ' i mperi a l i s m '

were n o t useful when d escri b i ng the rea l i ties of t h e system a n d

they were more than anything e l s e a t ribute t o political - a n d

hence not scientific - a pproac h es, with w h i c h a n understa n d i ng

of economic develop ment was sought. The so-called 'obstacles'

for development lacked structural foundations. Instead they were

the product of clumsy polit ical deci s ions, u nfortunate and poorly

informed choices made by the ru le rs, or easily removable inertial

factors. In Hardt and Negri's terms, a l l the cou nt ries were 'insidc'

t h e s}'stem.

I n this imagi n a ry return to the pas t , it i s i mponant to remem­

ber the fol l owing: at the begi nning o f the 1970s, the Lat in Amer­

ican debate about dependency, i mperia lism and neo-coloni a l i s m

had reached its a pogee, and its resonance deafened t h e Academy

and American political circles. Its impact was of such magni­

tudc that Henry Kissinger, then c h ief of the National Seeurity

Cou ncil and on his way to beco m i ng Seeretary of State under

R ichard N ixon, consid e red i t necessary to i n tervene on more

t h a n one occasion in the d i scussions a n d debates caused by

the Latin Americans. Hardt and Negri ' s t h esis about the non-
d i fferemiation of the nations wi t h i n t h e empire calls to m i nd the

cynical comments made by Kissinger about t h i s topic. Expressing

his rej ection of the idea of Third World econom ic dependency

a n d ques tion ing the extension and i m portance of the structural

asymmetries in the world economy, Kissinger observed: ' today

we a re a l l dependent. We live in an i n terdepe n de n t worl d . The

U n ited States depend on the H o n d u ran bananas as much as

Honduras depends on the American computers . ' 2 As can be easily

concluded, some of the sta tements expressed wi t h such fi n al i ty i n

Empire - for in stance, that there are no more d i ffe rences between

the cen t re and the periphery of the system, that there is no longer

an 'outs ide' , that the players m e rely d i ffer in degree, etc. - are

far from new. These affi rmations began to c i rcu latc t h rough the

words of theoreticia ns clea rly affiliated to the right, who opposed

a theory o f ' i n terdependence' and i m perialism, and who refused

to accept that the i nternational economy was characterized by t he

radical asym metry that separated the nations in the centre of t he

system from those a t the peri phery.

H a rd t a n d Negri conclude t h i s section of the book by i n t ro­

d u c i n g the two-headed eagle , the e m bl e m of the old Austro­

H u ngarian E m p i re , as a conveni e n t sym bol for the c u rren t

e m p i re. However, i t i s necessary t o i ntroduce a little reworking

of this image si nce the two head s woul d have to look i nwards,

as if they were abou t to a ttack each other. The first head of t.he

i m perial eagle represents the j u rid ical structure - not the eco­

nomic foun d a tions - of the e m p i re. As we have s a i d , there is very

little pol it ical economy in t h i s book and the absence of the most

elementary men t ion of the economic s t ru cture of the empire i n

wha t i s outli ned a s its emblematic i mage reveals the strange paths

t h rough which ou r a u thors have ven t u red and on which they have

2. Henry Kissi nger is considered by the nove-list and playwright Gore­

Vidal to be 'the most conspicuous c ri m i na l o r war loose around the- world'
(c(, Saxe·Femandt"l et 3 1 . 200 1 : 25).

39
o completely lost t h e i r way. That is why the eagle's second head,
� sta ri ng at the one that represe nts the e m p i re's juridical order,

symbolizes 'the p l u ral m u l t i tude of p roductive, c reative subjectiv­

i ties o f global ization' (p. 60). This m ultitude is the true

abs ol u t ely posit ive force that pushes the d om i n a t i ng power

toward a n abstract and e m p ty u n i fication, to which it appears as

the d istinct alte rnarive. From this perspective, when the const i ·

tuted power o f E m p i re appears merely a s privation of bei n g and

production, a s a s i m p l e abstract and empty t race of the const itu­

e n t power of the m u l t i tude, then we will be able 10 recogn i ze the

real stand point of our analysis. (pp. 62-3)

In short: those interested i n exploring the alternatives to the

e m p i re will fi n d very l ittle help in t his section of the book. What

they will find is a death certificate for t he archaic ' p roletarian

i n ternational ism ' (without a ny mention of the new in ternational­

ism that e ru p ted strongly from Seattle);J a petj tion of p rinci ples

in the sense that the popular st.ruggles are i ncommunicable and

laek a eom mon language; an e m barrassing silence regard i ng the

rela tionship with a concrete enemy whom the o m nipotent mul­

titude faces or, i n the best case, a n i m m ob i l i z i ng vagueness ('a

regi me of global relationsh ips'); t h e d isappearance of the 'weaker

l i n ks' and the d isti nction between centre and periphery; a n d

that the o l d dist inction between s trategy a n d tactics has disap­

peared because now there is only one way of ba u ling against the

empire and it is strategic a n d tactical at the same t i m e . This way

is the rising of a constituent coun ter·power that emerges from

i t s wom b , some t h i ng hard to u nderstand in light of Hardt a n d

Negri's rejection of dialectics. The only lesson t h a t c a n be learn t is

3. For more on t his, I suggesl looking at thc compilation prepared by the

Observatorio Social de I\ m eric- a Lalina of CLACSO in an issue devoted 10 ule
'new intern:llionalism' with lexts by Noam Chomsky. Ana F.st11er Ceceiia,
Christophe Agu ilon, Rafael Freire, Walde n Be l lo , Jaime ElOlay and Francisco
Pi n eda (OSAL, 6, January 2002).
that we must trust that the multitude wi ll fi nally assume t he tasks
assigned them by Hardt and Negri. How and when t h i s wi l l occur
cannot be found in the book's contents. There is no d i scussion
about the ways of fighting; the o rganizational models (assu m i ng,
as the aut hors do, that the parties and labour u nions a re illustri­
ous corpses)j the mobil ization strategies and the con fro ntational
tacticsj the a rticulation among the economic, pol itica l a nd ideo-
10gicaJ confl icts and oppositionsj the long-te rm objectives and
revolutionary agendaj the political instru ments used to put an
end to the iniquities o f global capital ism; i nternational a lliances;
the m i l itary aspects of subversion promoted by the multitudc;
and m any other topics of similar t ra n scenden ce. Neit her i s there
any attempt to relate the current postmodern d iscuss ion abou t
the subversive i mpulse of the multitudes to previous debates
about the labour movement and a nti-capitalist forces in general,
as if the pbase in which we a re now had not e merged from the
u n folding of past social struggles but had erupted, i nstead. from
the phi losophers' heads.
What we do find i n this part of the book is a vague exhorta tion
to trust in the transformational potential of the multi t ude. who.
in a myste rious and u npred ictable way, wil l some day overcome
all resistance and blocks, and subdue its enemies to To do
what? To build what type of society? Its i ntellectual m e n tors still
do not say.

41
3 Markets, transnational corporations
a nd national economies

A Recurrent Confusion
H a rd a n d Negri's naive acceptance of a cru c i a l aspect of world

market ideology clearly i l lu strates the consequences of their rad­

i c a l i ncomprehension of contempo rary capitalism_ I nexpl icably

stubborn in maintain ing the not very in nocent m yth that nation­

states are c lose to d isappearing completely, the a u thors make

their own, as if it were a t ruth revealed by a prophet, the opinion

of the fo rmer US Secretary of Labor, Robert Rei c h , who wrote:

as almost every fa('tor of production - money, technOlogy,

factories, and equipme nt - moves effortlessly across borders,

the very idea of a [national) economy is becoming meaningless,

In the fut ure ' t h e re w i l l be no national products or technologies,

no nat ional corporations, no national industries, The re will

no longer be nat ional economies, a t least as we have come to

un derstand that concept.' (p, 1 5 1)

It is hard to bel ieve [hat an i nte l l ectual of Toni N egri 's cal­

i bre, who i n the past has shown a s t rong i n terest i n t h e study of

econom ics, cou l d c i te an opinion such as the one above, First of

a l l , Reich s h rewdly speaks of ' a l m ost every factor of p roduction',

a n e lega nt way of avoiding the e m ba rrassing fact that there is

a nother crucial factor of production, the l a bour force, which does

not ' m ove effortlessly across borders' This belief i n the free mo­
_

b i l i ty of productive fac tors is to be fou nd at the hean of corporate

American ideOlOgy, determi ned as it is to e m be l l i sh the assumed

virtues of the free market at the same time as i t condemns a ny

type of state i nt e rve n t ion that does not favou r monopolies or

ol igopol ies or that i n t roduces at least a m i n i m u m level of popular

or democratic control over economic processes. From their s trat­
ospheric platfonn, Hardt and Negri seem to ignore the fact that
Reich was the Secretary of Labor in a government that presided
over one of the most dramatic periods of wealth and income
concentration in the history of the United States, It was a time
when waged labou r saw some of the most important pieces of
labour legislation dismantled and when precarious nes s reached
u nprecedented levels not only in the rural districts of Alabama
and California but also in the U pper West Side of Manhatta n ,
where hundreds of elegant stores recrui ted iIIeg-d l i m m igrants
to assist their clients, paying them salaries well below the legal
m i n i m u m . Perhaps the authors refused to acknowledge that none
of these workers would have crossed American borders without
cons iderable effort. The h istory o f these m igrants is one of vio­
lence and death, pain and m isery, su ffering and h u m i l i a tion, And
it is a history in wh ich the crucial player is the nation-state that
H a rdt and Negri describe as 'decl in ing', Before writ ing about
such issues, it would have been appropriate had the authors inter­
viewed a n u ndocu mented worker from M exico, EI Salvador or
Haiti to ask him what the expression ' [a migra' means, a term used
to refer to the U nited States' i m m igration police, the very mention
of which terrifies the i m m igrants. Or maybe the authors could
have asked how much the worker had to pay to enter the U nited
Sta tes i llegally, how many of his friends died i n the a ttempt a n d
what the word 'coyote' means o n t h e Cal i forn ian border. Have f
they not heard about the unsuccessful m igra nts who died in the i-
desert under a baking sun (bu t comfo rted by Reic'h's words)?
&
a
Can they ignore the fact that every year the Mexican-American i
:::I
fron tier takes more human lives than the infamous Be rlin Wa l l a
::r.
o
th roughout its entire existence? It would also b e appropriate to :::I
a
ask similar questions of il legal i m m igra n ts in France and the
It
rest of Europe. A q u ick look at U N OP or the In ternational Labor o
:::I
o
Organ ization (ILO) repons wou ld have saved them from making :i
i·
major m i stakes such as as the one mentioned a bove. '"

43
 It is not thei r only m istake. Our authors seem to believe that
money, technology, factories a n d equipment a re a lso s u bj ec t

to u n l i m i ted mobi l ity. Money is, no d o u b t , the most mobile o f

t h e four, b u t even s o i t i s t i e d to certain restrictions, albeit not

extremely strict ones. But what about technology and the rest ?

D o t hey rea l ly bel ieve that technology a n d t h e other factors o f

production ci rculate a s freely across borders as Reich proclaims?

Which technology a nyway? Do they mean last generation techno­

logy? This is someth i ng that even a primary school child al ready

knows. Obviously, technology and i t s p roducts circulate, but the

ones thaI move more freely are su rely not the latest or the best.

Th i rd World countries know that they can have access without

problems to obsolete or semi-obsoletc technologies, relics already

abandoned by the nations at the forefron t of the planet's tec h no ­

logical developme n t . I f t h e best techno logies c i rculate freely as

corporate-speak assures us, why is it that we wi tness so many

cases of industrial espi onage in a l l the developed coun t ries? How

can we explai n i ndustrial p i racy, i llega l copying and im itations

of a l l types of tech nologi<.'s and products·?

That Hardt and Negri accept some of the cen t ra l ass u m ptions

of the ideologues of globa l ization i s a matter of extreme concern.

Their belief in the disappearance of nat ional products, com panies

a n d indust ries is absolu tely indefensi ble i n the l ight of d a i ly evi­

dence that shows the vital ity, especially in developed cou n t ries, of

customs taxes, non-tariff barriers and spccial su bsidies through

which governments seek to favour their national products, com­

panies and economic act ivi ties. The au thors l ive in countries

where protect ionism has an extraord i n a ry stre ngth and can be

ignored only by those who i nsist on denying its existence s i mply

because it has no place in their theory. The American govern­

ment protects its i nh a b i ta n ts from foreign compe t i t i o n from

Mexican strawberries, Brazi l ia n cars, Argent i n e seam less steel

pipes, Salvadorian texti les, Chi lean grapes and Uruguayan meat ,

while on t h e other side o f the Atlantic, t h e European citizens are

44
safely prolected by 'Fortress Europe' which, while hypocritical ly
proclaiming the virtues of free trade, seals its doors aga i nst the
' Ih real' posed by the vibrant economies of Africa, Lat i n America
a nd Asia.
Regardi ng the declared d isappearance of national companies,
a simple test wou l d be enough to demonstrate t h is mislake. For
ex.ample, Hardt and N egri should tl)' to convince a friendly gov­
ernmenl 10 expropriale a local branch of a 'global' finn (an d ,
therefore, supposedly u natlached t o a n y national base) s u c h a s
M icrosoft, McDonald's o r Ford ; or, i f they p refer, I hey could t l)'
t o do Ihis w i l h Deulsche Bank, Siemens, Shell o r U n i lever. The n
we would have only to wait a nd see who would step forward to
demand that t he decision be revoked . I f the compan ies were
t ru ly gl oba l , it would be the job of Kofi An nan, or of the general
d i rector of the World Trade Orga nization (WfO), to appear i n
fron t of the government i nvolved i n order 10 put pressure o n it
i n the name of global markets a nd the world economy. However,
it is more l ikely that, instead of those characters, an am bassador
from the U n ited States, Germany or the U ni led Kingdom wou l d
lum u p t o d e m a n d , w i l h their usual rudeness and i nsolence, the
i m mediale reversal of the decision u n der the threal of pun i s h i ng
the country wil h all types of sanctions and penal ties. If this hypo·
thetical example seems too com pl icated , H a rdt and Negri should
ask themselves, for example, who was Ihe Boe i ng representative
in t he tough negotiations with Europea n Un ion officials for t h e �
D
..
commercial competition with A i rbus. Do they bel i eve t h a t the Jr"

interests of the former were defended by a C EO from Bangladesh

!
D
:::I
who had received his M BA from the U n iversi ty of C h icago or G.
:::I
i nstead by top American government officials with the help of
3,
o
Iheir a � bassador i n B ru ssels and aCling logelher with the While
House? In Ihe real world, a n d not i n the nebu lous republic i m·
!
It
agined by philosophers, the latter is what really occurs. Th i s i s o
:::I
o
someth ing Ihat any student o f economics learns only two weeks 3
ii'
into classes. '"

4S
 Can Hardt and Negri ignore the fact t h a t the 200 mega-corpora-
I
l: l ions that preva i l in the world markets register a comb i ned total
�

of sales that is greater than the G N P of a l l the cou ntries i n the

world combined except for the nine l argest? Their total annual
i ncome reaches the $7, 1 00 tri l l ion threshold and they are as big
as the com bi ned wealth of 80 pe r cent o f the world population,
whose income barely reaches S3,900 t ri l l ion. Despite this, these
Leviathans of the worl d economy employ less than one-third of
1 per cent of the world popu lation (Barlow 1 998). The neoli b­

eral globa l ization ideologists' rhetoric is not enough to disguise

the fact that 96 per cen t of those 200 global and transnational
com panies have their headqua rters i n only eight countries, are
legally registered as i ncorporated com panies of eight coun tries;
and their board of d i rectors s i t i n eigh t cou ntries of metropol­
iran capitalism. Less than 2 per cent o f their board of d i rectors'
members are non-nationals, while more than 8 5 per cent of a l l
their technological developmen ts have originated wit h i n t h e i r
'nat ional frontiers'. Their reach is globa l , but their property and
their owners have a clear national base_ Their earni ngs now from
a l l over the world to their headquarters and the loans necessary
to finance their operations are conveniently obtained by their
headquarters i n the national banks at in terest rates i mpossible
to find in peripheral capita l i sms, than ks to which they can easily
displace their competi tors (Boron et al 1 999: 233; Boron 20oob:
1 1 7-23).

Noam C homsky, for instance, c ites a study by Winfried Ruig·

rock and Rob Van Tu lder on the top 100 corpora t ions o f the
1 993 Fortune l i st accord ing to wh ich 'virtually all o f the world ' s

largest corpora tions have experienced a decisive support from

govern me nt policies and trade barriers to make t he m viable.'
I n addition, these authors also noted that at least 20 compa nies
would not have su rvived by themselves have t heir governments
not 'intervened by e i ther socia lising losses or by simple ta keovers
when the companies were in t rou ble' (Chomsky 1 998, Kapste in
1 9 9 1 /92, Ru igrock and Van Tulder 1995). I n short, despi te what

the a u thors of Empire assert, nation-states still are crucial players

in the world economy, and national econo m i es sti l l exist.

The postmodern logic ofglobal capital

In l i ne with t h e a rgument developed in the previous section,

Hardt and Negri state that a profound change i n the logic with

which global capital operates has taken place with the constitu­

tion of the e m pi re . The predom i nant logic these days is that of

post modernism, with its e mphasis on e xa l t i ng the i n stantaneous,

the a lways cha nging profiles o f desires, the cult of individual

e lection , the ' pe rpetual shopping and t h e consu mption of com­

m od i t ies a n d commodi fied i mages [ .. _ ] d i fference a n d m u lti plic­

ity [ ] fet ishism a n d simulacra, i ts contjnued fascinat ion with

the new and with fash i o n ' (p. 1 52). A l l t hese lead ou r aut hors to

conclude that m a rket i ng strategies fol l ow a postmodem logic,

s i nce marketing is a corporate p ractice i ntended to maxi mize

sales from t h e com mercial recogni tion a n d exploitation of d i ffe r­

ences. As populations become i n c reasi ngly hybri d , the possibility

for creating new ' ta rget markets' is e n hanced. The consequ ence

is that m arketing u n folds an endless array of comm e rcial strat­

egies: 'one for gay Latino males between the ages of eighteen and

twenty-two, another for C h i nese-American teenage girls, and so

forth ' (po 152).

Aware that, by pre tending to i nfer the global logic of capita l

from marketing strategies, they a r e on a sl ip pery slope, Hardt a n d

Negri t a k e a s t e p forwards t o assure us that the s a m e post modern

logic also prevails at the heart of t he c a pital i st economy: t h e

sphere of p rod uction. For th is, they recal l some rece n t develop­

ments in the m a nagement field, where it is stated t hat corpora-

l

tions m u s t be ' mobile, flexible, and able to deal wit h d i fference'

(p. 1 53). As cou l d have been foreseen, the naive acceptance of

these assu med advances of ' m a n agemen t science' - i n t r u t h ,

stra tegies t o strengthen t h e extraction of s u rplus v a l u e - led Hardt

47
and Negri to a completely ideal ized vision of contemporary global

corporations. These appear as 'much more diverse and fl u i d cui'

t u ra l ly tha n the parochial modern corpora t io n s of previous years ' .

A con sequ ence of th is greater diversi ty and fl u i d i ty is eviden t in

the fact that, according to the authors, 'the old modernist forml>

of racist and sexist theory are the expl icit enemies of t h i s new

corporate c u l tu re' (p. 1 53). Because of this, global companies are

anxious to include:

d i ffe rence within their realm a n d t h u s aim to maximize crea·

tivi[)" free play, a n d d iversity in the corporate wo rkpl ace. People

of all d i fferent races, sexes, a n d sex u al orientat ions should

potentially be inclu ded in the corpora t io n ; the d ai ly routine of

the work place should be rej u ve n a t c d with uncxpe("led changes

and an a t m os phe re of fu n. Break down the old boundaries and

let o n e hund red f)owers bloom! (p. 1 53)

After rcading these l ines, we cannot avoid asking to what extent

corporations a re home 10 the relat ionships of prod uction; are the

salaried exploited or, i n contrast, are they real earthly para d i ses?

I t does not seem to req uire a management expen to conclude that

the rosy description given by the a ut hors bears l i ttle relationship

to rea l i ty, si nce sexism, racism and homophobia are practices that

still enjoy enviable health in the postmodern global corporation.

Maybe this i m proved corporate atmosphere has someth ing to do

with the fact tha t, as reported i n the New England}oumal of Medi·

cine, d u ring the apogee of America n prosperity, 'African·American

men in Harlem had less probabil i ties of reaching t he age of 65

than men i n Bangl adesh' (Chomsky 1 99 3 : 278). Hard t and Negri

consta n tly fal l against the subtle ropes of corporate l iterat u re and

the free market ideologists. I f we were to accept t h e i r points of

view - actually t h e points of view o f the b usi ness school gurus

- the whole debate arou nd the despotism of cap i ta l within the cor·

poration loses its meani ng, as it does every time more demands

i n favour of the democratization of fi rms are made by theoreti·

cians of Robert A. Dah l 's statu re ( Dahl 1995: 134-5). Apparently,

t he structura l tyran ny of capital va n ishes when wage-labourers

go to work not to earn a living but to entertain t h e m selves in

a n agreea ble c l i ma te t hat a llows them to express their des i res

without restriction. Th i s portra i t hardly squares wit h the stories

reponed even by the most capi tal-involved sectors of t he press

about the extension of the work day in the global corpora t i on, the

devastating i mpact of labo u r flexi b i lity, the degradation of work

and of thc workplace, the growing frequency with which people

are laid off, the precariousness of employmem, the trend toward s

an aggressive concemration of salaries wi th i n the com pany, not

t o mention horror stories such a s the exploitation of chi ldren by

many global corporations.

It seems u nnecessary to insist, before t hese two authors who

idemify themselves as com m u nists and scholars of Marx, on the

fact that the logic of capita l , be it global or national, has little

to do with the i mage projectcd by busi ness school t h eoret icians

or eclectic postmodern philosophers. Capital m oves t h rough

an i ncxorable logic of profit-generation, whatcver the social or

environmental costs may be. I n order to maxim ize profits a n d

i ncrease security i n the long tenn, capital travels a l l ovc r the world

and is capable of establishing i tself anywhere. The pOlitical condi­

t ions are a matter of maj or i m porta nce, especially i f there is a

need to maintain an obedient and well-behaved labour force. Cor­

porate blac kmail is also e�t remely releva nt, given that the global

firms, with ' t heir' government's su pport, seek to ga in benefits

from the ext raord i n a ry concessions made by the h ungry states

of the impoverished periphery. These concess ions range from

generous tax exemptions of all kinds to the i m plementa tion of

labou� legislation comrary to workers' imerests, or of the type that

d iscourages or weakens the activism of labou r u n ions capa ble of

d i s turbing the nomlal atmosphere of business. I n the developed

world , i nstea d , i t is more d ifficult to d ismantle workers' advances

and ach ievements, a n d the pro-labou r legiSlation sanctioned i n

49
the gol den period of the Keynesian stllte, but this is compensated
for by the greater size of the markets in societies where social
progress has created a pa ttern of mass consumption not usua l ly
available i n the peripheral cou n t ries.

Transnational corporations and the nation-stale

Cha pter 3.5 of Hard t and Negri's book is devoted to the m ixed
constitution of the empire. It opens, however, with a s u rprising
epigraph that demonstrates the u n us ua l pe netration of bou rgeois
prej udices even i n to the m inds of two in tellectuals as l ucid and
cult ured as Hardt and Negri. The epigraph is a statement made
not by a great philosopher or a distingu i shed economist, nor by
a renowned statesman or a popular leader. I t is, i nstead, a few
words pronounced by B i l l Gates: 'One of the wonderfu l th ings
abou t the i n formation highway is that virtual equity is fa r easier
to ach ieve tha n real-world equity We are all created equal in
the vi rtual world' lp. 304).
Two brief co m me n ts . Fi rst, it is hard to u nderstand t h e reason
why a chapter devoted to exa m i n i ng the problems of the m ixed
constitution of the e m pire begi n s with a banal quote from B i l l
Gates about the su pposed eq u i ty of the information h ighway.
Maybe it is because q uoting Gates has become fashionable a mong
some European and American progressive i ntel lectuals. Th e
reader, even one who is well d isposed, cannot but feel i rritation
before this t ri bute pa id to the richest man i n the world , someone
who i s the most gen uine personification of a world order that,
supposedly, Hardt and Negri fen'en t ly desi re to cha nge.
Second, and even more imponant, Ga tes is wrong, deeply
wrong. Not a l l of us have been created e q ual in the i n formation
world a nd the fa ntastic virtual u niverse. Surely, Gates has never
been in con tact with even one of the three bill ion people in the
world who have never made or received a phone call. Gates and
Hardt and Negri should remember that i n ve ry poor countries,
such as Afgha n istan for insta nce, o n ly five ou t of a thousand

50
people have access to a te lephone. This horrifying figu re is far
from being exclusive to Afghani stan . I n many a reas i n southe rn
Asia, in sub-Saharan Africa, and i n some u nd e rdeveloped coun­
t ries i n Lati n Ame rica and the Caribbea n , the figures are not
much better (Wresch 1996). For most o f the worl d's popu lation,
Gates's com ments are a j oke, i f not � n insult to rheir miserable
and i n h u mane l ivi ng cond itions.
Leaving aside this u n fortu nate begi n n i ng, the chapter intro­
duces a d ivision of ca pitalist development i n to t h ree stages. The
first extends throughout the eighteenth a nd n i neteenth cent u ries.
It is a period o f competitive capital ism, characterized accord ing
to Hardt and Negri by ' re latively l i t tle need of state i n tervention
at home and abroad' (p. 305). for the a uthors, the protection­
ist policies of the UK, the USA, France, Belgi u m , Holland and
Germany, and t he pol icies of colonial expa nsion promoted and
i mplemented by the respective national governmen ts , do not
qualify as 'state intervention ' . I n the same manner, the legisla­
tion passed, with differen t degrees of t horoughness i n all these
countries over a long period and desti ned to repress the workers,
would also nOt qualify as examples of state i n tervention in eco­
n omic and social l i fe. It should be taken i nto consideration that
such legislation incl udes the Anti-Combination Acts of Engla nd,
the Le Chappellier law i n France, the a nti·socia l ist legislation of
Chancellor Bisma rck in Germany, who condem ned t housands
of workers to exile, and the legal norms that made possible the �
a
..
b rutal repression of workers i n t he U n ited States, symbolized 1r'

by the massacre of Haymarket Square, Ch icago, o n 1 May 1 886.

!
a
:::s
G ramsci formulated some very precise observations about the a.
:::s
'Southern Question' i n which he demonstrated that the com plex a
�o
o
system
,
of a l l iances that made Italian u n i ficatjon possible overlay :::s
!.
a set of soph isticated econom ic po l icies that in fact supported
It
the dominant coa lition. It was G ra msci who poi nted o u t the o
:::s
o
'theoretical mistake' of the l i bera l doctrines that celebrated the 3
iO
supposed Iy hands-off an itude, the passivity of the state in relation VI

51
to the capitalist acc umula t ion process. I n h i s Quadern;, Gramsci

wrote: 'The iaisse'ljaire is also a mode of state regu lation, i n t ro­

duced a nd maintained by legislative and con s tra i n i ng means. I t

is a d e l iberate pol icy, aware of i t s own obj ect ives, and not t h e

spon taneous a n d automatic expres s io n of the econo mic events.

Consequently, the laissezjaire l i be ralism is a political progra m '

(Gramsci 1 9 7 1 : 160).

The reason for t h is gross error must be fou n d in the inability

of l i beral writers to recognize the fact that the distinction between

the political society a n d the civil society, between economics a n d

pOli tics, ' i s made and presented a s if it we re an organ ic d i s t i nc­

tion , when it is me rely a methodological d istinct ion' (ibid.). The

'passivity' of the state when the fox en ters the henhouse cannot

be conceived as the inaction proper to a neutral player. This be­

haviou r is called com pl icity or, in some cases, conspiracy. These

brief exa mples are enough to prove that conve n tional knowledge

is not capable of prov i d i ng adequate guidelines to explain some

of the central features of t he fi rst period iden t i fied by Hard t a n d

Negri. Certainly, t he passivity of the state was not one o f t h e m .

I t i s t ru e � h a t , i n comparison w i t h w h a t happened in t h e period

following the great depression, the levels of state i ntervention

were lower. But this does not mean that there was no i n tervention,
or that the need for it was weaker. On the contrary, there was

a great need for state in tervention and the d i fferent bou rgeois

govern ments responded adequ ately to t h i s need. Naturally, after

the F i rst World War and the 1929 crisis, t hese needs increased
to an extraordi n a ry degree, but t h a t should not lead us to bel i eve

that before these dates the state d i d not play a primary role i n

the process of capitalist accu mulat ion .

The most serious problem with Hard t and Negri's interpreta­

tion e merges when they get to the ' t h i rd stage' i n the h istory of
the marriage berween t he state and capital. In their own word s:

'Today a t h i rd phase o f this relationship has ful ly mature d , i n

which l a rge tran snational corporations have effectively surpassed

52
the j u risdiction a n d authority of nation-states. It would seem,
then, that this centu ries-long d i a lectic has come to an end: the
state has been defeated and corporations now rule the ea rth!'
(p. 306, em phasis i n original).
This statement is not only wrong but also exposes the authors
to new rebu ffs. Worried about having gone too far wi th their
anti -state en thusiasm, they warn u s that it i s necessary ' to take
a much more nua nced look at how the rela tionsh i p between
state a n d capital has changed' (p. 307). It is at the very least
perplexing that, after having written this sentence, the authors
d i d not proceed with the same conviction to erase the previous
se ntence. This con fi nns the suspicion tha t the fi rst one represents
adequately enough what they think about the subject. For them,
one of the cru cial features of the c urrent period is the displace­
ment of state fu nctions and pol itical tasks i n to other social l i fe
levels and domains. Reversing the hi storical process by wh ich the
nation -state 'expropriated' the political and administrative fu nc­
tions retained un ti l then by the aristocracy and local magnates,
such tasks and fu nctions have been re-appropriated by somebody
else in this th ird stage in the history of capital. B u t by whom'? We
do not know, because i n Hardt and Negri's a rgument there is a
meani ngful si lence at this poi nt. Hardt and Negri begin assuring
us i n an a'\iomatic way that the concept of national sovereignty is
losing its effective ness, withou t bothering to provide some type
of em piri cal reference to support this thesis. The same happens �
a
with the fam ous thesis about 'the autonomy of the pol itica l ' . If ;.
CD
�
1/1
evidence for the first thesis is com pletely absen t, all that can be a
�
said i s that it is a commonplace of con tem porary bou rgeois ideol­ �
:I
ogy; concern i ng the second thesis, Ha rd t and Negri are completely a
:t.
o
wrong. To support their interpreta tion , they m a i n ta in : 'Today a �
e..
notion of pol i t ics as an i ndependent sphere of the detennina­
�
tion of consensus a n d a sphere of mediation among con fl icting o
&
social forces has vc ry little room to exist' (p. 307). Question : when 3
ii'
and where was pol i t ics r hal 'i ndepe ndent sphere' or that simple 1/1

53
e
'sphere of mediation'? To this i t could be answered that what is in
� crisis is not so much politics - which might well be in crisis, bUI
t-

for other reasons - but a Schmittian conception of pol itics, which

progressive European a nd Ameri can in tel lectuals cul tivated wi th
an obsessive passion for many years. As a resu lt of that addiction,
the confusing doctri nal constructions of Nazi theore tician Ca rl
Sch mitt - not only an academic bUI also a lead ing ju dge in the
Third Reich - we re interpreted as a great cont ri bution to poli ti cal
t heory capable of prOvid i ng an escape rou te fo r the oft-proclai med
'crisis of Marxism'. But, conU'ary to Schmitt's teachings, poli tics i n
capi taJ ist societies was never an au tonomous sphere. This d iscus­
sion is so wel l known, generating rivers of ink in the 1960s and
1980s, that there is no need to sum marize it now. For the p u rpose
of this book, a brief reference to a cou ple of works that approach
this problem i n a d i rect manner (Meiski ns Wood 1 995: 1 9-48;
Boron 1997: 95-137) will suffice. In any case, our authors are
closer to the truth when they write, a few lines later: 'Pol itics does
not d i sappear; what d isappears is any notion of the a utonomy of
the pol it ical ' (p. 307). Once again, the problem here is less wit h
politics - which h a s undoubtedly changed - t h a n with the absurd
notion of the auto nomy of politics and of the pol itical, nu rtured
for decades by angry ant i-M arxist academ ics and intellectuals,
who desire to maintain, against all t he evidence, a fragmentary
vision of t he social, typical of what Gyorg Lukacs characterized
as bou rgeois thought (Lu kacs 1971).
In Hardt and Negri 's interpretat ion, t he decl ine experienced
by the autonomy of pol itics gave place to an ultra-economicist
co nception of the consensus, 'determined more sign ifica n t ly by
economic factors, such as the equilibria of thc t rade balances and
specu lation on the value of cu rrencies' (p . :107). I n this way, the
Gramscian theorization t hat saw the consensus as the capacity
of the dom i n a n t alliance to guara ntce an intel lectual and moral
d i reetion that would establish it as the avan t-ga rde of the devel­
opment of n at ional e nergies, is entirely left out of the aut hors'

54
analysis of the state i n its curre n t stage. I nstead, the consensus

a ppears as the mecha n ieal reflection of the economic news,

a set of mercantile calculation with no room left fo r political

med iations lost i n the darkness o f t ime. Its reductionism a n d

econom icism com pletely distort the com plexity o f the conse n s u s

cons truction p rocess i n con temporary capitalism, a n d , i n a d d i ­

t i o n , they do n o t fail t o pass t h e test that demonstra tes how o n

i n n u me rable occasions sign i ficant pol itical turbulence occ u rred

at moments i n which the economic variables were moving i n

the ' right d i rection', as European a n d America n h istory o f the

1 960s demonstrates. Besides, times of deep economic crisis d i d

no t necessarily t ranslate i nto t h e swift collapse of pre-exist i n g

pol itical consensuses. Popu lar passivity and acquiescence we re

noticea ble, for example, in the o m i nous decade of t h e 19 30S

in France and Brita i n , someth i ng very d i ffere nt from what was

oecurri ng in neighbouring Germa ny. In consequence, it is u n­

d en iable that, given that politics is not a sphere a u tonomous from

social l i fe, the rc is a n int.i mate con nection berwee n econom ic

factors a nd political, social, cultural a n d i nternational factors

that, at a certa i n moment , crysta ll izes in the construction of a

long-lasting pol i tical consensus. That is why a ny reduc t i o n i st

conceptual scheme, either economicist or politicist, is i ncapa b l e

of exp l a i n i ng real i ty.

The co nclusion of the authors' analysis is extraord i n a ri ly im­

port a n t and can be su mmarized in this way: the decline of t h e

political as an au tonomous sphere 'signals t h e decline, too, of a ny

independent space where revolution cou ld emerge in t he n a tional

pOl it ical regime, or where social space cou ld be t ransformed

u sing the instru m e n ts of the state' (pp. 307-8). The trad i tional

ideas o f b u i l d i ng a coun t e r-power or of opposing a national resist-

I

a nce aga inst the state have been losing more and more releva nce

i n the curre n t c i rcumstances. The main fu nctions of the state

have m igra ted to other sphe res a n d domains of the social l i fe,

especially towards the 'mechanisms of command on the global

55
level of the transnational corporations' (p. 308). The resu l t of
this process was somet h i ng l ike the destruction or suicide o f
the national democratic capitaJist state, whose sovereignty frag­
mente d and dispersed among a vast collection of new agencies,
groups and organizations such as 'banks, i nternational organisms
of planning, and so forth [ ] which all i ncreasingly refe r for
legitimacy to the transnational l evel of power' (p. 308). [n relation
to the possibili ties opened before th i s nansfo rmation, t he verdict
of ou r aut hors is rad ical a nd unappea l ing: 'the decl ine of the
nat ion-state is not simply the resu l t o f an ideological pos i t ion
that m ight be reversed by a n act of polit ical wil l : i t is a structu ra l
and i rrevers i b l e process' (p. 3 36). The d ispersed fragme n ts of
the state's old sove reignty and its i nherent capacity lO inspire
obedience to its mandates, have been recovered and reconverted
' by a whole series of global j u ri d ico-economic bod ies, such as
GATT, the World Trade Organization, the World Bank, and thc
I MF' (ibid.). G iven that the global ization of the production and
c i rculation of goods caused a progressive loss of e fficacy and
effectiveness in national pol i tical and j uridical structu res which
were powerless to con t rol players, p rocesses and mechanisms
that greatly exceeded their possi bilities and that d isplayed their
games on a foreign board, there is no sense in t rying to resurrect
rhe dead nation-state. Aijaz Ah mad ( 2004: 5 1 ) provided a tim ely
rem inder that it was none other than Madeleine Al brigh t who, as
Secretary of State d u ring the Clinton a d m i n i stration, expou nded
s i milar theses by sayi ng that both 'nat ionality' and 'sovereignty'
belonged to an 'out dated repenoire of polit ical theory' u nable
to accou nt for the ' new structu res of globalization and impera­
tives of " h umanitarian i n te rven tion·. .. The authors assure us
that not h i ng cou l d be more negative for fu ture emanci palOT}'
struggles than to fal l victim to nostalgia for a n old golden era.
Still, if it were possible to resu rrect the nation-state, there i s
a n even more important reason t o give u p this en terprise: th i s
institu tion 'carries w i t h i t a whole series of repressive structu res
and ideologies [ ] and a ny strategy that relies on it should be
rejected on t hat basis' (p. 336). Let us su ppose for a moment that
we cons ider this argumenl val i d . In that case we should resign
ourselves to contemplat i ng not only the ineluctable decadence
o f the nation-stale but a lso the fall of the democra t ic order, a
result of cen tu ries of popular struggles t h a t inevitably rest on
the state s t ructure. Hard t and Negri do not delve very deeply i n to
this subject of vital im portance. M aybe they do not do so becau se
t hey assu me, m istakenly, that i t i s possible to ' democratize' t he
markets or a civil society structu ra l ly divided i n to classes. This
is not possible, as I have explained carefu l ly elsewhere (Boron
20oob: 7 3-132). Therefore, which is the way Out?

57
4 Alternative visions of the empire

The ethical empire. or the postmodem mystification of the

'really existing' empire
At this stage of their journey, Hardt a n d Negri have clearly

gone beyond (he point of no ret urn, a nd their a n a lysis o f (he

'rea l ly ex.isti ng' e m pi re has given place to a poetic and meta­

p hysical construction that, on the one hand, maintains a distan t

similari ty to rea l i ty, a n d , on the other h a n d , given precisely those

characteristics, offers sca nt hel p to t he social forces i n terested in

transform ing t he national and i n ternational s t ructures of world

capital ism. As Charles Ti l ly (2003: 26) put it rather bluntly, t he

authors 'orbit so far fro m t h e concrete rea l i ties of conte mporary

cha nge t h a t their readers see l ittle but clouds. hazy seas a n d

nothingness beyo n d ' . The general d iagnosis i s wrong due to

fatal problems of analysis and intcrpretation tha t plague their

t heoretical scheme. To this I cou ld add a series of extremely

unfonunate observations a nd comment aries that a patient reader

could find without grea t effort. But if t he reader were to refute

them, he would be obl iged to write a work of extraordinary mag­

nitude. Since t hat is not my inten tion, I wi ll con t i nue with my

anaJysis cen t red o n the weaknesses of the general interpretative

t heoretical scheme.

To begi n, allow me to reaffirm a ve ry elementary but extremely

i m porta n t poi n t of depa rture: it is i m possible to do good political

a nd social philosophy without a solid economic analysis. As I have

shown elsewhere, that was exactly the path chosen by the young

Marx as a pol i tical philosoph er, once he precociously understood

the l i m it s of a social and pOlitical re(Jection that was not firmly

anchored in a rigorous knowledge of civil society (Boron 2000a).

The science thal unveiled the anatomy of civil society and the
most i nt i m ate secrets of the new econo m ic orga nization created

by capitalism was politicaJ economy. This was the reason why

the fou n de r of h istorical materialism devoted h i s e nergies to the

new discipline, not to go from one to t he other but to anchor

his reOections on cri t i q ues of the existing social orde r and his

a n t icipation of a fu ture society i n the bedrock of a deep economic

a nalysis. Tbis a nchorage in a good political economy, a 'regal way'

to reach a t horough knowledge of capit alist society, is precisely

what is m issing in Empire. [n fact, the book has very little of

econom ics, and what it has is, in most cases, the convenlional

version of the economic a na lysis taught in American or Europea n

busi ness schools or the one boosted by the publicists of neo­

l i bera l globalization, com bined with some isolated fragm e n t s

o f M a rx i s t political economy. In shon: b a d economics i s used

to a n a lyse a topiC such as the i mperiaJist system that requires a

rigorous t reatment of the matter appeali n g to the best of what

pol itical economy could offer. As M ichael Rustin persuas ively

argues, Hardt a n d Negri'S 'description of the major t re n d s of de­

velopment of both the capi ta l ist economy, and of its major fonn s

of governance, is plainly in accord with much curre n t a n aJysis of

gla blization' (Rus t i n 2003: 8).

Conseq uen t ly, readers will find themselves with a book that at­

tempts to analyse the i nternational order, supposedly a n empire ,

a n d in which o n ly a couple o f times will they stu m ble across

i n stitutions such as the I M F, the World Bank, the WTO a nd o ther

agencies of the current world order, call it empire or i mperia lism.

For example, t h e word 'neoliberalism', wh ich refers precisely to

[he ideology and the econom ic-pol itical form u l a prevailing dur­

i n g the last q uarter of the twentieth ce n t u ry whe n the curren t

econo Pl ic order was rebuilt fro m head t o we, merely appears

throughout the book, in the sa me way as the Multila t era l Agree­

ment on I nvestments (MAl) a n d the Washi ngton Consensus. The

i mpression that the reader gets as he co n t i n ues to read the book

is of fi n di ng h i mself before two acade mics who a re very well

59
 i ntentioned but who are completely removed from the m u d and
�
: blood t hat constitute the daily l i fe or capital ist societies, especi­
ally i n the periphery, a nd who have launched themselves to sail
across the oceans of the empire anned with defective maps and
i n ferior instru ments of navigation_ Thus, bewildered as Qu ixote,
they take appearances as rea l i t ies. Therefore, when t hey descri be
the pyra m i d o r t h e e m pire's global const itution, Hard t a n d N egri
assure us that: 'At the narrow p i nnacle of the pyram i d there is
one superpower, the U nited States, that holds hegemony over the
global use of force - a superpower that can act alone but prefers
to act in col laborat io n with others under the u m brella or the
United Nations' (p. 309).
It is very hard to u n derstand such a naive comment, in which
the sophistication expected o r scien tific a n alysis is completely
lacking. To begin with, the reduction of the concept of hegemony
to the use o r rorce is inadmissible. H egemony is much more
than that. Regard i ng the themes of empire and i m periali s m ,
Robert Cox once wrote t h a t hegemony cou l d b e represented a s
'an adjustment among t h e material power, the ideology and the
i nstitutions' (Cox 1 986: 225). To reduce the i ssue of hegemony
to its m il itary aspects only, whose i mportance goes beyond all
doubt, is a major m istake. American hegemony is m uch more
complex than that. On the other hand, we are told that t he U n i ted
States ' prerers' - surely because of its good will, i ts acknowledged
generosity on international matters and its st rict adherence to the
principles of the J udeO-C h ristian tradition - to act in collabora­
tion with oth ers. One cannot hel p but wonder i r the twen ty-some­
t hing pages that Empire devotes to a reflection u pon Mach iavel li's
t houghts were written by the same a u thors that then p resent
a n i n terpretation of the United States' i n ternational behaviou r
so antithetical t o the teach i ngs o f the Flore nt ine theorist a s t he
one J have q uoted . The ' prererence' of the U nited States - of
course I am talking ofthe American government and its dominant
classes, and not about the nation or the people o r that country

60
- for collaborative action is m e rely a mask beh ind which the
imperialist policies are adequately d i sgu ised so tha t they ca n be
sold to i nnocen t spirits. Through t h i s operation, whose efficacy is
demonstrated once aga i n i n their book, the policies of i mperial
expansion and domi nation appear as i f they were real sacrifices
in the name of humanity's com mon good . It is reasonable to
suppose that the American government's top officials and their
numerous ideologists and publicists cou ld say something like
this, someth i ng that nol even t he most subm issive and servile
allies of Washi ngton would take seriously. It is entirely u n rea­
sonable for two radical critics of the system to believe these
deceits.
Th i s i s not the first time that such a serious m istake ap pears
in the book. Al ready in Chapter 2.5 t hey had written:

I n the wan i ng years and wake of the cold war, the re sponsib i l i ty

of ex e rc is i n g an international police power ' fel l ' squarely o n

t h e shoulders of the U n ited S ta tes. The G u l f War was t h e first

t ime the U n ited States could e xerc ise this power in its full form.

Really, the war was an operation of repression ohe ry l iule

interest from the point of view of the objectives, t he regi ona l in­

teresls, and the political ideologies involved. We have seen many

such wars conducted d i re c t ly by the United States and i t s allies.

I raq was accused of having broken i n t e rn a ti on a l law, and it thus

had t o be judged and pu n is h ed . The i mportance of the Gulf War

derives rather from the fact that it presented the U nited States
as t h e only power able to manage international justice, not as
a function of its own national motives but ill lhe /lame ofglobal
right. (p. 1 80, emphasis i n original)

In. co nclusion, and con t rary to what the a ncest ra.1 prej udices
nurtured by the i ncessa nt a n ti-American preaching of the left
i ndicate, what we learn after reading Empire is that poor Uncle
Sam had to assume, despite his reluctance and agai nst h is wil l ,
t h e responsib i l ity of exercising t h e role o f world police man after

61
.. decades of u n fru it ful negotiations trying to be exem pted from
:::I

.f such a distressing obligation. Therefore, the power ' fe l l i nto' his

hands while all the diplomacy of the State Depanment was busy in

the reconstruction , on gen uine democra t i c grounds, of the U nited

Nations system. Meanwh ile, top waS h i ngton officials travelled

around the world trying to l aunch another round of North-Sou th

negotiations focused on reducing t he irrit a t i ng i nequal it i es o f

the i n t ernational dis tri bu t i on of wea l t h a n d t o strengthen the

languish ing governme nts of t h e periphery by teaching t hem how

to resist the exactions by which t hey are subdued by the giga n t i c

tra nsnational corporat ions. Those two radical scholars, l o s t i n the

darkness of theoretical confusion, find someone to give [hem a

hand who, in the light of t h e day, t hey discover is Thomas Fried­

man, the very conservat ive edi tori a l writer of the New York Times

and spokesm a n for the opinions of the American establishment.

According to Fried m a n , the i n t e rve ntion of the U n i ted Sta tes

in Kosovo was legitimate (as was the one in the Gul f for other

reasons) because it put an end to the e t h n i c cleansi ng practised

in that region and, therefore, it was 'made in the name of global

righ ts', to u�e an expression dear to H a rdt and Negri. The tru th is

that, as Noam Chomsky has demonstra ted, t he ethnic cleansing

of the sin ister regi m e of M ilosevic was not the cause but the

consequence of the America n bom bings (Cbomsky :200 1 : 81).

Let us return to the Gulf War, deplorably c haracterized by t he

a u thors as a 'repressive operation of scarce i n terest' a nd l i ttle

importance. first of a l l , it is convenient to remember that t h is

operation was not precisely a wa r but, as C h omsky i nforms us,

a slaughter: 'the term "wa r" hardly applies to a confronta tion

i n w h i c h one pa rt ma ssacres the other from an u n reachable

d istance, while the civil society i s destroye d ' (Chomsky 1 994 : 8).

The authors a re not worried abou t this type of disquiSition. Tbeir

vision of the coming of the e m pire with its plethora of libera t i ng

a n d ema ncipating possi bil i ties ma kes t h e i r eyes look u p so, for

that reaso n , t hey are unaware of the horrors a nd miseries that cu r-

62
ren t i m perialist pol icics produce in h i s tory's mud. If the C hrist ian

theologians of the M iddle Ages had their eyes completely t urned

to the con templation of God and for that reason did not real ize

that hell was surrounding t h e m , the authors are so dazzled by the

l u m i nous perspectives t hat open with the coming of the empire

that the butchery inaugurated by this new historical era does

not move them to write a single line of lamentation or compas­

sion. Masters of the art of 'deconstruct ion ', they are shown to be

com pletely i n capablc of applying t h i s resource to the analysis of a

war that was i n real ity a massacre. They also fa i l to recognize, let

us not say denou nce, t h e enormous nu mber of civil i an victims of

the bombi ng, the 'collateral damage' and the criminal e m bargo

that followed the war. Only cou n t i ng the chil d ren, the n umber

surpasses 1 50,000 victi ms. They also remain silent about t he fact

thaI, despite his defeat, Saddam remained i n power, but with the

consent of the world's boss to repress a t will the popu lar upri si ngs

of the K u rds and the S h ia m i nority (ibid.).

Finally, how realistic can an analysis be t hat considers the Gulf

War, located i n a zone conta i n i ng the world's most important oil

reserves, a matter of marginal i m portance for the U n i ted States?

Should we t h i n k then that washi ngton launched its m i l i t a ry

operations moved by the i m perious necessity t o ensure the pre­

dominance of 'global righ ts' and not with the goal of reaffirm i ng

its i nd ispu ta ble primacy in a s t rategic region of the globe? Was

President Bush's decision to raze Afghanistan while trying in vain

to discover the whereabouts of one of its old partners, Osama Hin

Laden, motivated by the need to m a ke poss i ble this demand for

u niversal jus tice? How to describe such foolish ness?

This vis ion of the e mpire's concrete functioning, a nd of some

u n p l e",sa nt events such as the Gulf War, is i n l i n e with other

extremely pole mic definit ions made by the authors. For example,

that 'the world police forces of the United States act not with an
i m perialistic bu t a n i m perial inte rest'. The grou n d i ng for this

affi rmation is pretty simple and refers to other passages of the

 book: given that i mperia lism has disappeared, swallowed by the
�
:. commotion that dest royed the old nation-states, an intervent ion
by t he ' hegemon' makes sense only as a contri bution to the stabil­
ity of the empire. The pillage characteristic of the imperialistic era
has been replaced by global rights and i nternational justice.
Another issue outlined by Hard t and Negri renects with greater
clari ty the serious problems that a ffect their vision of the really
existing i nternational system which before their eyes becomes
a type of ethical empire. Thus, referring to the ascendancy that
t he Un ited States achieved i n the post-war world , the authors
mai n ta i n that:

With the en d of the cold war, the United States was called to
serve t he role of guaranteeing and adding juridical efficacy to
this eomplex p rocess of the formation of a new supranational
right. Just as in the first century of the Christian era the Roman
senators asked Augustus to assume i m perial powers of the ad·
ministration for the public good , so too today the i n t ernat i o na l
monetary o rgani zat i o ns ( t he United Nations, the international
organizations, and even the humanitarian organizations) as k the
U n i ted States to assume the central role in a new wo r l d order.
(p. 18J)

The equ ivoca l contents o f this passage o f Hard t a n d Negri's

work are vel)' serious. First, they con sider analogous two situa·
tions that a re completely d i ffer�nt: the one of th e Roman Empire
in t h e first ce ntul)' and t he curren t one, when the world has
changed a l i ttle if not as much as we would l i ke. And the old
order that preva iled around the Mediterra nean basin based on
slaveI)' does not seem to have many a ffin ities with the current
i m perial ist system that today covers the enti re planet and which
includes formally free populations. Second, however, i s the fact
that Roman senators demanding that Augustus assume i mperial
powers is one thing and the people subdued by t he Roman yoke
asking lor this is another, very different, thing. Cena i n ly, there
is a consi dera ble majority of American senators who repeatedly
lobby the White House on the need for acting as an a rticu lating
and orga nizing axis for the benefit of the com panies and national
i n terests of the U nited States, as we will see in the following
chapters. Another, very d i fferent thi ng is that people, nations and
states subjected to US im perialism wou ld demand such a thing.
At this poi nt, Hard t and Negri 's analysis becomes muddled with
American esta blishment thought because it refers to questions
supposedly asked of Wash ington by the U n ited Nations. When
did the General Assembly request such a thing? , because this is
not a matter that can be solved by an organ as little representa­
tive and a nti-democratic as the Security Council; and even less
by the ' i n ternational monetary org-a niUltions'. In this case, are
they referring to the I M F, the World Bank, the WTO or the IDB
as 'represe ntatives' of the people's rights? What are they talking
abou t? In any case, and even when they had reclaimed it, we k now
very well that such institutions are, in fact, 'informal depa nmen ts'
of the American government and completely lack any u n iversal
legitimacy to take up an initiative such as the one men tioned. And
what can be said about the humanitarian organizatio ns? As fa r as
I know, neither Amnesty or the Red Cross, neither Greenpeace or
the Service of Peace and J ustice, or indeed any other known orga n­
ization has ever formulated the petition stated in the book.
Maybe Hardt a n d Negri are thinking about the main role ta ken
by the U n i ted States in the promotjon of a new supranational
j u ridical framework, which, for reasons that will soon be u nder­
stood, has been cond ucted in secrecy by the governments i nvolved
in this enterprise. Indeed, for many years, Washingto n has been
syste matically working on the establishment of the Multi lateral
Agrerment on Investments ( MAl) and has it as a priority on its
political agenda. To move forwards wi th this proposal, the White
House counts on the a lways uncond itional collaboration of i ts
favourite client-state, the U n i ted Kingdom, and that of the over­
whel m i n g majority of the governments in the OECD. Among
 the rules that the USA has been t rying to i m pose to conso l i date
5
.2 u n iversal justice and rights - surely i n s pi red by the same l i ter·

ature as the au thors - a re two epoch·making con t ri butions to

legal science. The first i s a doctrinarian i n novation, thanks to

which for the fi rs t time in history compa n ies and states become

j uridical ' persons' enjo}'i ng exactly the same legal status. States

are no l onger representatives of the popular sovereignty and the

nation and have become s i m ple economic agents without a ny

type of prerogative in the courts. It is not necessary to be a great

legal scholar to be a ble to qualify thi s 'j u ridical advancement',

zealously sought by Wash ington, as a phenomenal retrogression

that neglects the progress made by modern law over the last t h ree

hundred years.

The second contri b u t io n : having taken i n to account the

extraord i n a ry concern of the American govern ment fo r u niversal

law, t he MAl p roposes the abo l i t ion of the reciprocity principle

between the two p a rties sign i ng a contract. If the MAl were

approve d , something that so far has not been possible thanks

to tenacious opposition from humani tarian organ izations and

diverse soc ial movements, one of the parties to t he cont ract

woul d have rights and the other one only obl igations. G iven t he

characteristics of the 'really ex.i sting' empire, it is not hard to

find out who would have what: co mpanies would have the right

to take states to th e courts of j ustice, but the states wou l d be

debarred from doing so with investors that d id not comply with

their obligat ions. Of course, given the well·known concern of

the American gove rnment to guarantee un iversal democracy, it

i s permitted for a state to file a law suit against a nother state,

with which t h ings become more even. Thus, i f the governments

of Guatemala or Ecuador had a problem with Un ited Fruit or

Chiquita Banana, they wou l d not be a ble to file a suit aga i n st

those compan i e s , but they would be free a n d would have a ll the

guarantees in the world to do i t against the government of the

Un ited States, given that, despite what H a rdt and Negri thi nk,

66
those companies are American and are registered in that country.

Now we can understand the reasons why t he negotiations that

ended i n a d raft MAl were conducted i n a bsolute secrecy and
beyo nd any rype of democratic and popular control (Boron 2OO 1a:

3 1 -62j Chomsky 2ooo a : 259-60; Lander 1 998).

Given such a huge distortion of the empire's realities, it is not

surp ri s i ng that the authors conclude:

In all the regional confl icts of the late twent ieth century, from

Haiti to t he Persian Gulf and Somalia 10 Bosn ia, the United

States is called to intervene militarily - and these calls are real
and substantial, not merely publicity stunts to quell U.S. public

dissent. Even if i t were reluctant, the U.S. m i l itary would have to

answer the call in the name of peace a nd order. (p. 1 8 1 )

N o comment.

The empire as it is, portrayed by its organic intellectuals

Hence, it seems to be sufficiently p roved that Hard t and Negri's
analys i s of the contempora ry world order i s wrong. based on a
seriously distorted read ing of the current transformations that
are taking place in state formations and i n the world markets of
contemporary capitalism. This i s not to deny that, occaSionally,
here a nd there, the reader can find a few sharp reflections and
observations related to some timely issues, but t he general picture
that flows fro m their a nalysis is t heoretically wrong and politically •
i
self·defeati ng. 3
a
A good exercise that cou ld help Hardt and Negri to descend �.
�
from the structura l i st nebula in which they seem to have sus­ <
iii·
pended their reasoning - 'a new global form of sovereignty' (p. xii),
i'
WI
'a sp�cific regime of global relat ions' (pp. 45-6) - would be to read
l
the work of some of the main organic i ntellectuals of the empire.
Leo Pan i tch has ca l led attention to a mea n ingful paradox: while
f
It
the term ' i m pe rial ism' has fallen i nto d isuse, the realities of im­ 3
'V
perialism are more vivid and i m p ressive t h a n ever. Th i s paradox is �.
.. much more accule in Latin America, where not only the tern,
:J
.f 'imperialism' but also the word 'dependency' have been ell.-p elled
from academ ic language and public discourse, precisely at a time
when the subjection of Latin American countries to transnational
economic forces has reached u nprecedented levels. The reasons
for this are many: among them the ideological and political defeat
of the left and its consequences stand out. The adoption of the
language of the victors and the inability to resist their blackmail,
especially among those obsessed with preserving their careers
and gaining 'public acknowledgement', reinforces this subjec·
tion. This phenomenon can be verified not only in L-a tin America
but also in Europe and the United States. In Europe, it is mainly
evident in those countries i n which communist parties were very
strong and the presence of the political left vigorous, such as in
Italy, France and Spain. This is why Panitch suggests that if the left
wants to face real ity, maybe 'it should look to the right to obtain
a clear vision of the direction in which it should march' (Panitch
2000: 18-20). Why? Because while many on the left are i nclined
to forget the existence of class struggles and imperialism (fearful
of being denounced by the prevailing neoliberal and post modern
consensus as self·indulgent and absurd dinosaurs escaped from
the Jurassic Park of socialism), the mandari ns of the empire, busy
as they are giving advice to the dominant classes who are faced
daily by class antagonists and emancipatory struggles, have no
time to waste on fantasies or poetry. The pract.ical necessities of
imperial administration do not allow t hem to become distracted
by metaphysical lueubrations. This is one of the reasons why
Zbigniew Brzezinski is so clear i n his diagnosis, and instead of
talking about a phantasmagorie empire, such as the one depicted
by Hardt and Negri, he goes directJy to the point and celeh rates
withom shame the irresistible ascension, in his own judgement,
of the United States to the condition of 'only global superpower'.
Focused on assuring the long·term stability of the impe rial ist
phase opened after the fal l of the Soviet Union, Bn.ezinski identi-

68
fies three mai n guiding principles of the American geopol itical
strategy: first, to impede the collusion among, and to preserve the
dependence of, the most powerful vassals on issues of security
(Western Europe and Japan); second, to maintain the submission
and obedience of the tributary nations, such as Latin America and
the Third World in general; and third, to preve nt the unification,
the overflow and eventual attack of the 'barbarians', a denomina­
tion that embraces countries from China to Russia, including the
Islamic nations of Central Asia and the Middle East (Brzezinski
1998: 40). Crystal clear.
The former US National Secu rity Cou ncil chairman·s observa­
tions offer a clear vision without beating about the bush, distant
from the vague rhetoric employed by Hardt and Negri and, pre­
cisely because of this, extremely i nstructive of what these authors
call empire and Panitch calls 'new imperialism'. In 1989, long
before Brzezinski expressed these ideas, Susan Strange, not ex­
actly a Marxist scholar, wrote an article. Had it been read by our
authors, it would have saved them time and prevented them from
making extremely serious mistakes. Strange said:

What is emerging is, therefore, a non-territorial empire with its

imperial capital in Washington DC. If the imperial capitals used
to anract courtesanS of foreign provinces, Washington instead
attracts 'lobbies' and agents of the international companies,
representatives of minority groups dispersed throughout the •

empire and pressure groups organized at a global scale. [ ... J i

..
:2
D
As in Rome, citizenship is not limited to a superior ra,·e and
i'
"
the empire contains a mix of citizens with the same legal and
<
political rights, semi·citizens and non-citizens, such as the slave iii'
0'
:2
population
,
in Rome. [ . . . ] The semi-citizens of the empire are III
o
-
many and they a re spread out. [ ... ] They include many people
:J-
employed by big transnational finns that operate in the trans­ et
CD
national stmcture of production that assists, as they all well 3
'U
know, the global market. This includes the people employed :i"
69
.. in transnational banking and, very often, the members of the
:t
.e 'national' armed forces, especial ly those that are trained, armed

by, and dependent on the United States a rmed forces. It also in­

cludes many scholars in medicine, the natural sciences and the

social sciences, as in business management and economy, who

view the American professional associations and universities as

t hose peers before whose eyes they want to shine and excel . It

also includes t he people in the press and the mass media, for

whom the American technology and the examples offered by

the United States have shown the way, changing the established

inst i tu tion s and organizations. (Strange 1989: 167)

I t i s u nquestionable t h at , despite her rejection of M a rx­

ism, Strange's d iagnosis of the inrerna tional st.ructure and the

organ ization of t h e e m p i re has more i n common w i th historical

materialism than the One that a ri ses from Hardt and Negri's work.

This is not the fi rs t li me t h a t a rigorous and objective liberal,

t h a n ks to the realism that informs her a n a lysis, provides a vision

that is closer to Marxist a n a lysis t h a n that p rovided by a u t hors

tacitly or outspoken ly identified with tha t theoretical tradition.

I n addition to t he vibrant perspective t h a t Brzezinski a n d Strange

have offered us, we have a crude diagnosis made by one of t h e

most d i s t i ngu ished t h eoreticians o f American neo-conservatism,

Sa muel P. Huntingt o n ; h e also h as n o doubts about the i mperial·

ist ch aracter of the curren t world order. H u n tington'S concern i s

w i t h t h e weakness a n d vul nerability of t h e USA a n d its cond ition

as the 'lonely s h e ri ff' . This condition has obliged Washi ngton

to exen a vicious i n ternational power, one of the consequences

of wh ich could be the form a tion of a very broad anti-American

coal i tion including not o n ly Russia and C h i na but also, though

in d i ffering degrees, the Eu ropean states, which cou l d p u t the

current world order i n cri s is . To refute the scepticS a n d refresh

the memory of those who have forgotten what the imperial ist

relationships a re , i t is convenient to reproduce in extenso the long

70
string of i nitiatives that, according 10 H u nt i ngto n , were d riven by

Washington in recent years:

To press other countries to adopt American values and practices

on issues such as human right s and democ racy; to prevent

that t h i rd countries acqu i re mil i tary capacities susceptible of

i nterfering with the American military superiority; to have the

American legislation applied i n other societies; to qualify t h i rd

cou n tries with regards to their adhesion to American standards

on human rights, drugs, terrorism, nuclear and missile proli fera­

tion and, now, religious freedom; to apply sanctions against

the countries that do not conform to the American sta ndards

on these issues; to promote the corporate American i n terests

under the slogans of free t rade and open markets and to shape

the politics of the I M F and the World Bank to serve those same

i nterests; [ . .. ] to force other countries to adopt social and

economic policies that bene fi t the American economic in terests,

to promote the sale of American weapons and preven t t hat other

countries do the same [ . ] to categorize certain cou ntries as

. .

'pariah states' or cri m i nal Slates and exclude them from the

global institutions because they refuse to prostrate themselves

before the American wishes. (Huntington 1 999: 48)

Let us be clear, t h i s is not i n ce nd i a ry criticism by an e nemy

of A merican imperia l i s m , rather it is a sober acco u n t written by

o n e of its most l u c i d organic i n t e l lectuals, concerned about the

self-destructive trends t h a t have a risen fro m America's exercise

o f its hegemony i n a u n i polar world. Given the images t h a t a rise

from t h e work of the t h ree authors whose ideas we have p res­

ented, t he someti mes poetic and at other times m etaphysical d is­

cour.;e of H a rd t and Negri vanishes because of its own l ightness

and its rad ical d iscon nection with what H u n ti ngton a p p ropriately

cal l s the respons i b i l i l.ies of the ' lonely superpower', What emerges

from Hardt a n d N egri's a nalysis is that the ass u m e d ' n ew form o f

global sovereignty' exercised by t h e world ' E m pire', which woul d

71
 impose a new global logic of domination, is not a world empire
!i
.e but 'American logic of domination'. There is no doubt that there
are supranat ional and transnational organizations, just as there is
no doubt t hat beh ind them lies the American national i n terest.
It is obvious that the American national i nterest does not exist in
the abstract, nor is it i n the i nterests of the American people or the
nation . It is in t he interests of the big corporate conglomerates
which control as they please the government of the U nited States,
Congress, t he judicial powers, the mass media, the major u niver·
sities and centres of study and t he framework that allows them to
retain a form idable hegemony over civil society. Inst i tu tions t hat
are su pposedly 'intergovernmental' or i nternational, such as the
I M F, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization , are at
t he service of corporate America n i nterests. The intervent ions of
t he USA i n other regions of the world have different motivations,
but did t hey take place. as Hardt and Negri cla im. to establ ish
international law? I n this sense, Brzezinski could not have been
more categorical when he said t.hat the so-called s uprana t ional
institu t ions are, i n fact, pa rt of the imperial system, someth i ng
that is particularly t rue in the case of the international fi na ncial
i nstitutions ( Brzezi nski 1998: 28-9).
5 The nation-state and the issue of
sovereignty

As we have seen in previous chapters, according to Hardt and

Negri, the const itution of the empire overlays t h e decadence and

final, supposedly inexorable, collapse of the nation-state_ Accord­

i n g to our authors, the sovereignty t hat nation-states retained in

the past has been transferred to a new global st ruct ure of domi­

nation i n which decadent state formations play an i ncreasingly

marginal role. There are, we a re assured, no imperialist players

or a territorial centre of powerj nor do there exist established

barriers or limits or fixed identities or c rystallized hierarchies.

The transition from the age of i m perialism, based on a collec t ion

of bell icose states i n permanent conflict among t hemselves, to

the age of the e m p i re, is signalled by the irreve rsible decl ine

of the institu tional and legal fou n dations of the old order, the

nation-state. It is because of this t hat Hard t and Negri plainly

reject the idea that the U nited States is 'the ultimate authority

that rules over t h e processes of globalization and the new world

order' (p_ xiii). Both t hose who see the U nited State9 as a lonely

and om nipotent superpower, a fervent defender of freedom, and

those who denou nce that country as a n imperialist oppressor, are

wrong, Hardt and Negri say, because both parties assume that the

old nation-state's sovereignty is still in force and do not reali:te

that i t is a rel ic of the past. Unaware of t h is mutation they also

fail to u nderstand that i mperialism is over (ibid .)_

LFt us exa m i ne some of the problems that this in terpreta t ion

poses_ In the first place, let us say that to assu me that t here can

exist something l ike an authori ty able to govern 'all the processes

of globalization and t h e new world order' is not an i nnocent mis­

take. Why? Because given such a requirement t h e only sensible

., answer is to deny the existence of such an authority. To say that
.�
... a certain structure of power can control all thc processes that
occur in its jurisdiction is absurd. Not even the most elementary
forms of organization of social power, such as the ones reported
by anthropologists studying 'primitive hordes', were capable of
fulfilling such a requirement. Fortunately, the omnipotence o f
t h e powerfu l does n o t exist. There are always loopholes and,
invariably, there wil l be things that the power cannot control.
Even in the most extreme cases of despotic concentrations of
power - Nazi Germany or some of the most oppressive and feroci­
ous Latin American dictatorships such as Videla's in Argentina,
Pinochet's in Chile, Trujillo's in the Dominican Republic and
Somoza's in Nicaragua - the authorities at the time demonstrated
an incapacity to control 'all the processes' unfolding in their
countries. To say that there is no imperialism because t here is
no one who can take control at a world level a world whose
complexity transcends the limits of our imagination - constitutes
a dismissive statement. It is a question of finding out i f i n the new
world order, so celebrated by George Bush Senior after the Gulf
War, there are some players who hold an extraordinarily elevated
share of power and whose interests prevail systematically. It is
a question of examining whether the design of this new world
reflects, somehow, the asymmetric d ist ribution of power that
existed in the old world, and how it works. Of course, to talk about
an 'extraordinarily elevated' share of power is to admit that there
are others who have some power, and i f we speak of systematiC
predominance it is also accepted that there may be some devia­
tions that, from time to time, will produce unexpected results.
Th is being said, let us continue with a second problem. Hardt
and Negri'S analysis ofthe issue of sovereignty is wrong. as is their
interpretation of the changes experienced by social structu res in
recent tjmes. Regarding the issue of sovereignty, they seem not to
have noticed that in the imperialist structure there is a yardstick
of evaluation, or, as Jeane Kirkpatrick, the US Ambassador to the

74
U n i ted Nat ions d u ring Ronald Reaga n 's first term , sai d , there is
a double standard with which Washi ngton judges foreign gove rn­
ments and their actions. One standard is used to evaluate the
sovereignty of the friends and allies of the U nited States; a nother,
very d i fferent, is used to judge the sovereignty of neutral cou n tries
and its enemies. The national sovereignty of the former m ust be
p reserved and strengthened, the laner's should be weakened and
violated without scruples or false regrets. Prisoners of their own
specu lations, Hardt a nd Negri cannot perceive this d isturbing
duality, believing thus that there is a 'global logic' beyond and
above the national i nterest of t he superpower and u ndeniable
'centre' of the empire, the United States. For au thors so i n terested
in constitu tional and j u ri dical matters, as is the case of Hardt
and Negri, the deplorable performa nce of Washington regarding
the acknowledgement of i n ternational treaties a nd agreements
provides a timely douche of sobriety. As is well known, the U n i ted
States has repudiated any i nternational ju rid ical i nstrument that
i m plies even a m i n i mal reduction of i ts sovereignty. Recently,
Washington has delibera tely delayed agreeing to the constitu tion
of an I n ternational Criminal Court sited i n Rome - with special
competence to ju dge war crimes, c ri mes agai nst humanity and
genocide - because this would mean a t ransference of sovereignty
to an i n te rnational organ whose control could escape from their
hands. The U n ited States actively panicipated i n all the previous
delibera tions abou t se tti ng u p the cou rt, it discussed criteria, it
vetoed norms and co-authored various drafts of the const itution.
Bu t when the time came to approve the constitu tion of the cou n
i n Rome, it decided to wa lk away.
This should come as no surprise to students of imperialism,
thoug-h it seems to have con fused the authors of Empire. Appar­
ently, they have ignored the fact that the Uni ted States has one of
the worst world records regard i ng the rat ification of i nternational
conventions and agreements, precisely because WaShington con­
siders tha t these would be detrime ntal to American national

75
 sovereignty and its interests as a superpower. Recently, the USA
�
ii: refused to sign the Kyoto Agreement to preserve the environment,
using the argument that i t would hann the profits of American
compa n ies. In the case of the Ince rnational Convention on the
Rights of the Child, only two countries i n the whole world re­

fused to sign the protocol: Somalia and the U nited States_ But as
poi nted out by Noam Chomsky, actually the U n i ted States 'have
not ra tified a single convention, because even in the very few
cases i n which they did so, the American government managed to
introduce a reserve cla use that says the fol lowing: "not appl icable
to the U n i ted States without the consensus of the U n i ted States"'
(Chomsky 200 1 : 63).
In the neo-conse l"Jative ze nith of the 1 960s, the U n i ted S ta tes
refused (and in some cases is sti l l refusing) to pay i ts fees to
some of the main agencies of the U nited Nations, accusing them
of having defied American sovereignty. Why pay membership
fees to an institution that Washington ca nnot control a t will? A
simi lar attitud e is obsel"Jed in relation to another US creation,
the wro, and its preced ing agreement, the GATT. The European
U nion aCCll sed the American government of damaging European
companies because the embargo against Cuba violated the com­
mercial ru les previollsly agt"eed. Besides, the E u ropean U n io n
s a i d , the e m bargo w a s i m mora l , i t had been unanimously con­
demned and children and the elderly were i ts main victims_ The
embargo's u n favourable i m pact on heal th and nutrition policies
as wel l as other similar co nsiderations were also h ighl ighte d . The
response from Washi ngton was that these were not commercial
or hu manitarian issues but, i nstea d , they we re matters rel ated
to American national security a n d , therefore, t hey wou ld not
be t ra nsferred to a ny other i n ternational agency or institution
but would be exclusively managed by the d i fferent branches of
the American government without allowing any, even m i nimal,
foreign i mel"Jention (ibid.: 64-6).
A final exa m ple will be useful to conclude this d iscu ssion.

76
D uring the offensive of the N icaraguan Contras - i l l egal ly armed,
t rained. financed and organized by t he United States - the govern·
ment of Managua fi led a demand i n 1985 to the I n ternational
Court of J ustice accusing t he A merican government of wa r crimes
against the Nicaraguan civil population. The response from Wash­
i ngton was to d is regard the cou rt ' s j u risd iction. The p rocess
con t i nued anyway, and the final sentence of the court ordered
Washington to stop i ts m i l i tary opera tions, retire the merce nary
forces stationed in N icaragua and pay substa ntial reparations
[0 compensate for the damage inflicted on the civil society. The
government of the U n i ted States simply disrega rded the sente nce,
continued the war, whose results are well known, and not even
when it managed to i nstal a new 'friendly' government in Nicar·
agua d id it dare to sit down to talk about the reparations of war,
let alone payi ng them. The same occurred with Vietnam. These
are good examples of what Hardt and Negri unde rsta nd as the
i mperial creation of 'global rights' and t he empire of un iversal
ju stice (ibid.: 69-70).
It seems clear t h a t the authors have not ma naged to appreciate
the co ntinuous relevance of national sovereignty, t he national
i nterest and national powe r in all its magn i tude, all of wh ich
i ncurably weakens t h e central hypothesis of their argument that
i nsists t here is a global and a bstract logic that presides over t he
functioning of the empi re . Rega rd i ng what occurred with t he
capitalist state in its cu rrent phase, i t seems that the m istakes
cited before become even more serious. First of all, there is an
i m portant i n itial problem that is not margi nal at all, with res·
pect to the proclaimed final and irreversible decadence of the
state: all the avai lable quantitative information with regard to
pu bljc expenditure and the size of the state apparatus moves i n
t he opposite d i rection of t h e o n e i magi ned by Hardt a n d N egri.
If somet h i ng has occurred in metropolitan capitalisms in the
last twen ty years, it has been precisely the noticeable i ncrease
of the sizc of the state, measured as the proportion of p u blic

77
expenditu res to GOP. The i n format ion p rovidcd by a l l types of
sou rces, from national governments to the U n i ted Nations De­

ve lopmen t. Program me (UNOP). and from the World Ban k to the

I M F and the OECO, speak with a single voice: all the states of the

metropolitan capital isms were strengthened i n the last twe nty

years, despite the fact that many of the governments in those

states have been veritable champions of the a n t i-state rhetoric

t hat was lau nched with fury at the begi nning of the 1 980s. What
happened after the c risis of Keynesian capitalism i n the middle
of the 1 970S was a relative decrease i n the growth rate of public
expend i tu re. Fiscal budgets cont i n ued to grow u n i nterru ptedly.
althou gh at more modest l evels than before. Th at is why a special

report on t h i s topic in the con se rvative British magazi ne The

Economist ( 1 99 7 ) is e n titled ' Big Gove rnment is Still in Charge'.

The writer of this article cannot hide his d i sappointment at t he

slates' tenacious resistance to becoming smaHer as manda ted

by the neolibera l catechism. (Hardt and Negri seem not to have

examined this work because t he last section of Chapter 3-6 i n
t heir book i s ent itled ' B ig Gove rnmen t i s Over!', a h ead ing that
clearly reflects the ext e n t of their misunderstanding of a theme so
crucial to their theoretical argument.) I n any case, after a ca refu l
analysi s of recent d a t a on public expenditure i n fourteen i n d us­
trialized cou nt ries of the OECO, The Economist concludes t hat,
despite the neoliberal reforms i n i tiated after the proclaimed new
goals of fiscal austerity and public expenditure reduction between
1 9 80 and 1 996, public expenditure in the selected cou ntries grew
from 43-3 per ce nt of the GOP to 4 7 . 1 pe r cen t, while in cou n tries
such as Sweden th i s figure passes the 50 per cen t t h reshold:
'in the last forty years the growth of public expend iture i n the
d eveloped economies has been persistent, universal and coun ter­
productive ', and the objective so strongly p roclai med of beco ming
a 'small govern men t ' apparently has been more a weapon of
electoral rhero ric than a true objective of economic policy. Not
even the strongest defende rs of the famous 'state reform' and
the shrinking of public expenditure, such as Ronald Reagan and
Margaret Thatcher, managed to achieve any significa n t p rogress
in this terra i n .
Th us, if th i s strengthening of state orga n izations is verified i n
the hea rt of developed capitalis ms, t h e h is tory of the periphery
is com pletely d i fferen t . In the i n ternational reorganization of

the i m perialist system under the ideological shield of neol iberal­

ism, states were radically weakened and the economies of (he

periphery were su bdued to become more and more ope n , and

almost with ou t any state med iation, (0 the i n flux of the great

transnational companies and to the policies of the developed

coun tries, mai nly the U nited States. This process was in no way

a natu ral one, but ins tead was the result of initiatives adopted at
the cen t re of the empire : the governme n t of the U n ited Sta tes,
in its role as ruler, accompanied by its loya l guard dogs (the

IMF, the World Bank, the wro, e tc.) and su pported by the active
compl icity of the cou n t rie s of the G- 7. This coalition forced ( i n

many cases bru ta l ly) t h e i ndebted cou ntries of t h e Third World to

apply the policies k nown as the 'Washi ngton Consensus' a n d to

tra nsform t heir economies in accordance with the interests of the

dom inant coalition and, espec ia l ly, of the primus inter pares, the
U nited States. These pol icies favou red the practically u n l i mited
penetration of American and European corporate i n terests into
the domestic markets of the southern nations. For that to take
004
place, it was necessary to d ismantle the public sector in those '7
CD
cou n t ries, produce a real deconstruction of the state and, with :::s
a
::r.
the a i m of generating surplus for the payment of these cou n t ries' o
:::s.
III
foreign debt, to reduce public expenditure to the m i nimum, sacri­
a
ficing i n this way vital and impossible-to-postpone expenditure if
a
on h �a l th , housing and educat ion . State-owned com panies were :::I
a.
III
first fi nancially drained and then sold at ridiculous prices to the o
big corporations of the central count ries, thereby creating a space �
;;
fo r the maximum exercise of ' p rivate in itiative' . (Despite that, in ca-
:::I
many cases, the buyers were state-owned compan ies from the -<

79
 i ndustria lized cou ntries.) Another policy imposed on these coun-
�
� tries was the u n ilateral open ing up of the economy, faci l i tating
an i nvasion of imported goods produced in other countries wh i le
the u nemployment rates i ncreased exponentially. It is pertinent
to state that while the pe riphery was forced to open u p commer­
cially, p rotectionism in the N orth became more sophisticated.
The d eregulation of markets, especially the fi nancial one, was
another of the objectives of the 'capita list revolution' in t he 1 980s.
All together, t hese policies had the result of d ramatically weaken­
ing the states of the peri phery, while fu I fil ling the capitalist dream
of having markets operating without state regulation, as a result
of which the strongest corporate conglomerates actually took
charge of 'regu lati ng' the market, obviously in their own i nterests.
As I said before, these policies were not fortuitous or accidental,
given that the d ismantling of t.he states increased s ignificantly
the ability of i mperialism and foreign companies and nations
to control not only the economic life but a lso t he pol i t ical life
of the cou nt ries of the periphery. Of course, we find nothing of
this in Empire. What we do find, instead, are reiterative passages
clai m i ng that i mperialist relat.ionships have ended, despite the
fact that the visi bility they have acq u i red in recent decades is so
striking that even the least rad ical sectors of our societies have
no trouble in recognizing them.
A concrete example of the conseque nces of this acute weaken­
i ng of the state in the capitalisms of the periphery has been
stressed by Hond u ran h i storian Ramon Oqueli. Referring to his
cou ntry i n the m id-1 980s, wit.h its well-established democrat ic
regi me, Oq ueJi observed:

The importance of the presiden t ial elections, wi th or without

fraud, is relative. The decisions that affect Honduras are first
made in Washington; then in t.he American mil itary com-
mand in Panama ( the Sout hern Command); afterwards in the
American base command of Palmerola, Honduras; immediately

80
 after in the American Embassy in Tegucigalpa; in the fifth place
comes the commander-i n-chief of the Honduran armed forces;
and the president of the Republic only appears in sixth place.
We vote, then, for a Sixth-category official in tenns of decision
capacity. The president's functions are limited to managing
m isery and obtaining American loans_ (Cueva 1 986: 50)

Replace Honduras with almost any other Lati n America n cou n ­

t l)' a n d a similar picture wi l l emerge. Obviously, t h e predominant
milita ry situation i n t hose years assigned the a rmed forces a very
special role_ For the cou n tries t h a t do not face a seriou s military
crisis, that central role today fa lls i nto the hands of the Treasury
and the I M F, and the president can, in such a case, move up
the decision ladder to the th i rd or fou rt h rung, but no further
than that. Regarding t he president's main functions - managi ng
m i sery and obta i n i ng American loans - th i ngs have not change d .
The Argenti n e case is a s h i n i ng example of a l l t h i s .
Continu i ng with t h e probJemalique o f the state, our authors
do not seem able to d istinguish between s tate forms and func­
tions a nd the tasks of states. There is no doubt that the form
of the capitalist state has changed in the last quarter of a cen­
tury. Si nce the state is not a meta physical entity bu t a historical
c reature, continually formed a nd reform ed by class struggles,
its forms can hardly be i nterpreted as immanent essences float­
ing above the h istorical p rocess. Consequently, the forms of
the democratic state i n the developed capitalist countries have
changed. How? There has been real democratic degeneration:
a progressive loss of power forme rly i n the hands of congresses
a nd parliaments; the growing u naccountability of governments,
whicl;l goes hand-in-hand with the i ncreasing concentra tion of
power i n t he hands of executives; the proliferation of secret areas
of decision-making (see, for example, the aborted negotiations
of the MAl , the accelerated approval of the NAITA, the current
negotiations behind closed doors to create the Free Trade Area of

8t
 the Americas); decli ning levels of governmental response to rhe
�
i&: claims and demands of civil society; a drastic reduction of com­
petit ion among pOlitical parties because of increasing simi larities
between the majori[)' pol it ical parties, following the bipart isan
American model; the tyranny of the markets - in fact, of the
oligopolies that control them - that vote every day and capture the
permanent artention of the governments while the public votes
every two or three years; related to the aforemcntioned, logical
trends towards pOlitical apathy and individualist ret raction; the
growing predomi nance of the big oligopol ies in the mass media
and the cultural in dustry; and, lastly, an increasing transference
of the right to make decisions from popular sovereign[), to the
admin istrative and political agencies of the empire, a process that
exists both in the empire's 'exterior provinces' and in its centre.
In the Latin American case this means that popular sovereign [)'
has been deprived of almost all its attributes, and that no strat­
egic decision on economic or social mat ters is adopted in these
cou ntries without previous consultation with, and the approval of,
the relevant agency in Washington. As we can sec, a situation like
this cannot but contradict the essence of the democratic order,
and popular sovereign[)' is reduced to a mere dead letter.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos has examined the changes experi­
enced by states under neoliberal globalization and his analysis
confirms that ' there is by no means an overall crisis of the state,
let alone a terminal crisis of the state, such as suggested by the
mOSI extreme theses of globalizatjon scholars' (de Sousa Santos
1999: 64). The Hobbesian repressive fu nctions of the slate e njoy
thei r vigour both in the periphery and i n the centre of the sysrem.
I n the former, because the implementation of strongly repressive
policies has become necessary to prop up an increaSingly unjust
and unequal capitalist organization, where the numbers of the
exploited and the excluded increase incessantly. In the centre,
on the other hand, because this occurs especially i n the U nited
States, a Significant proportion of their social problems is dealt

82
with by channell i ng people towards the prison syste m, though

this situation also occurs, but less acutely, in other countries. I t

is estimated t h a t today the total n u m ber o f p ri soners i n A merica

a moun t s to a figure only surpassed by the populations of the

three major cities of that country, New York, Chicago and Los

A ngeles, and that the ove rw h e l m i n g majority of the convicts

are black or Latino_ As de Sousa Sa ntos correctly notes, i n the

social apartheid of contem porary capitalism t h e state conti nues

to pe rform a crucial role: it is the Hobbesian Leviathan in the

gheuos a n d the margi nal neigh bou rhoods while it guarantees

t he benefits of the social Lockean contract for those who inhabit

the opulent suburbs. Consequently, this state supposedly on the

way to becoming extinct, according to the obfuscated vision of

Hardt and Negri, continues on its way as a divided s tate, almost

schizophre nic: for the poor and the excluded, a fascist state; fo r

the rich, a democratic state. But the vitality of the nation-state is

not measured o n ly in t hese temls; it can also be proved by the role

it plays i n several other fields, such as supranational un ification,

the l iberalization of t he economy, the commercial open ing u p,

the deregulation of the fi nancial system and the elaboration of

an i n stitu tional-j u rid ical fra mework adequate for the protection

of private companies and the new economic model inspired by

the 'Washi ngton Consensus' . 'What is i n c risis i s the function of

pro moting non-merca ntile exchanges among citizens,' concludes

de Sousa San tos (ibid_: 64).

As Ellen Meiskins Wood ( 2000: 1 1 6) d e monstrates, the nation­

s t a te con t inues to be the main agent o f globa lization. I n the

global m a rkets, the need that capital has for the state is even

more pronounced than before. A recen t analysis shows that i n

t h e processes o f economic restructuri ng, the national states of

metropOl i ta n capitalisms, fa r from being the 'victims' of global­

ization, were its m a i n promoters. The i nternational expansion

of the fi na ncial, industrial and commercial capital of the U n i ted

States, the European countries, Ja pan , South Korea, S i ngapore

 a n d Taiwan 'was not a macroeconomic phenome non born inside
�
� the compan ies' but, instead, was the product of a political strategy
d i rected at i mprovi ng the relative position of those cou nt ries
i n the changing i nternational econom ic scene. In this strategy,
ac tors such as the US Treasu ry, the M ITI of J apa n, t h e E u ropean
Commission and a group of na tional state agencies played a
central role (We iss 1997: 23). This is why Pe ter Drucker, one of
the most prestigious US gurus, calls our a ttention to the amaz·
i ng persistence of states despite the great changes t hat occu rred
i n the world economy and he concludes that they will, for sure,
survive the globalization of the economy and the i nformation
technology revolution ( Drucker 1 997: 1 60).
It seems appropriate to quote what one of the major advocates
of US imperialism has written on these issues, ratifying the key
role played by the capitalist states, and very especially the Ameri­
can state, in globaJization. 'As the country that benefits most from
global economic i ntegration, we have the responsi bility of making
sure that this new system is sustaina ble [ ... ] Sustaining globaliza·
t ion is our overarching national i n terest,' says Thomas Fried man.
And the implications of the fact that 'globa l ization·is·US' the New
York Times columnist does not fa il to notice that 'because we
are the biggest beneficiaries and d rivers of global ization, we are
unwitti ngly putting enormous pressure on the rest of the world'
( Fried man 1 999).
To sum up: the global markets strengthen competi tion be·
tween the giant corporations that dominate the global economy.
S i nce these companies are transna tional i n t heir reach and the
range of their operations while still possessing a national base,
in order to succeed i n this relentless battle they requ ire the sup·
port of 'their governments' to keep their commercial rivals i n
line. Aware o f t h i s , the national states offe r ' thei r companies' a
menu of alternatives which i nclude the following: the concession
of d i rect subsidies for na tional companies; the giga n tic rescue
opera t i ons of banks and com pa n ies, paid i n many cases through
taxes applied to workers and consumers; the i m position of fiscal
austerity policies and structural adjustment programmes d i rected
towa rds guaranteeing greater profit rates for the companies; t he
devaluation or a ppreciation of t he local cu rrency, in order to
favour some fractions of capital while placing the bu rden of the
crisis on other sectors and soc i a l groups; the deregulation of
markets; the i mplementatio n o f 'labour reform s' i ntended to
accen tuate the subm ission of workers, weake n ing both the ir
capacity to negot iate their wages and their labour u n ions; the
enforce ment of the inte rnational i m mob i l i ty of workers while
faci l i tating the i nternational mobility of capital; the guarantee
of 'law and order' in societies that experience regressive social
processes of wealth and i ncome re-concen tration and mass ive
processes of pauperization; t he c reat ion o f a legal framework cap­
able of ratifying favou rable terms and opportunities that compa­
nies have enjoyed in the current phase; and the establishment of
a legislation that 'legalizes', in the cou ntries of the periphery, the
im perialist suction of surplus-va l ue and that al lows for the great
profits of the t ransnational compa n ie s to be freely remitted to
their headquarters . These a re some of the tasks that the national
states perform and tha t the 'global logic of the Empire', so exalted
in Hardt and Negri'S analysis, can guaran tee only t hrough the
still ind ispensable med iation of the nation-state (Meiskins Wood
2000: 1 1 6- 1 7). That the most prominent and i nfl uential members
of the capitaJist class a re actively working to d estroy such a useful
and formidable instrument as the nation-state can be understood
only by assuming that the capi talist class is made up of id iots
(I m ust state right away, to clear up possible doubts, that the
ca pitalist sta te is not only a n i nstrument of the bourgeoisie but
also m � ny other things, which do not prevent i t from also being
an i ndispensable i nstrument in the process of capital accumula­
tion).· In l ight o f this, Ellen Mei skins Wood concludes:

1 I have examined [ his issue i n detail i n Boron ( 1995).

85
• Of course, it is possible for the state to chan ge its form, and
.�
� for the t raditional nation-state to give room, on the one hand,

to most strictly local states and, on the other hand, to wider

reg ional political authorities. But regardless of its shape, the

state will still be crucial, and i t is likely that for a long time even

the old nation-state will continue to play its dominant role.

( Meiski n s wood 2000: 1 1 7 )

6 The unsolved mystery of the
multitude

Obsessive denial of the realities of the nation-state lead s Hardt

and Negri to a political dead-end. Let uS review, therefore, a pas­
sage from Empire that ' analysed from another perspec tive in
Chapter 5. In t ha t chapter I said that, together w i th the term inal
crisis of the state, Hardt and Negri a lso observed 'the decline
] of any i ndependent space where revolut ion cou ld emerge
i n the national political regi me, or where social space cou ld be
t ransformed using the instrumen ts of t he s tate' (pp. 307-8).
Consequently, withou t the oxygen provided by that space, the
name of revolu tion i s extingui shed. I f th is is t rue, how can one
break t he iro n cage of the em pire? The a nswer offered by the
authors is s ilence. The word ' revolution' is mentioned only five
or six ti mes in the thick volume u nder a nalysis, and the subject
occu pies a lot less s pace than th e ten pages assigned to the study
of population mobility or the eleven pages devoted to a discussion
of republ ican ism. How ca n such noisy silence be u nderstood?
The vague refe rences to 'the m u lt i t u de' in the fi nal chapter
of Empire do not offer any clues as to how t h is oppressive world
order - much more oppressive than the preceding one, it should
be remembered - may some day be transcended. The problem is
not o n ly that the references to the multitude are vague. M ichael
Hard t ack nowledged in a recent i nterview t hat, 'in our book the
concept of m u l t i tude works as a poetic concept rather tha n as a
factual
,
one' (Cangi 2002: 3). Hard t is right about that , because
such a notion i s, sociologi cally speaking, em pty, t hough it is
necessary to recognize that i t h as a considerable poetic force
wh ich makes it extremely attractive. We are told t h a t the m u lt i ­
tude i s the totality o f the creative and productive subject ivities
that 'express, nourish, a n d develop positively t heir own constitu­

ent projects' and t h a t they 'work toward the l iberation of living

labor, creating constel lations o f powerful singularities' (p. 61).

Thus, with a stroke of the pen, social classes disappear from

the scene a nd the d istinction between exp loite rs and exploited

and between the weak a n d the powerfu l evaporates. What is left

after this shadowy operation is an a m o rp hous mass of h ighly

creative s i ngu l a rities t h a t , i f existe n t , would put t he t hesis of

the a lienat i ng character of labour and da i ly l i fe i n capitalist

societies i n serious t rouble. If we appl ied Hardt and Negri's

work to the p rosaic rea lity of contem porary Lat i n America, we

should ask o u rselves if the para m i l i ta ries a n d death squads that

razed C h iapas and a good part of Centra l A merica , sowing ter­

ror a n d death, are i nc l u ded in the m u l t i t ude; or the landowners

who orga n ize and fi nance a great pa rt o f the private repreSSion

exened in those countries aga i nst peasa n ts and aborigi n a l com­

mu n ities; or the financial speculators and t he bou rgeoisie who

s upponed m i l itary regimes i n the past and who today undermine

the l a ngui s h i ng democracies. Does t h is category i n c l ude those

who, i n the name of capital, control the cul tural ind ustry of Lat i n

America at t h e i r pleasure? D o h um i l iated and exploited peasan ts,

blacks, I nd ians, cholos and mestizos form pa n of the m u l t itude

too? A nd what a bout the urban 'proletaria t ' s u n k i n excl usion

a nd m isery, the workers and the u ne mployed, the single mothers

and overexploi ted women, the sexual minorities, the ch ildren

o f the streets, the paupe rized elde rly, public employees and the

i m poverished m id d le classes? If t hey are not i n t h is ca tegory,

where can this vast conglomerate be placed socially? And if they

indeed share their place in the m u l t itude with the social agents

of exploita tion and repression, wh at sense is there in using such

a category? What is i t t hat i t describes, to say nothing of what

i t could exp l a i n ? Empire does not offe r any such expla nations.

I t is, as Hard t said i n the i n terview mentioned above, a poetic

concept. But poetry is not always useful for explain i ng reality, or

88
for cha nging i t . Some t i mes, good poetry m a kes bad sociology,

and this seems to be the case here.

Leaving aside these disagreeable observations, the progra mme

proposed for the m u l ti tude is explai ned in t h e fi na l chapter of t h e

book. The combi nation of t h e basic precepts o f the neoliberal

theory of globa lization and a sociologically amorphou s concept

such as that o f the 'm uhitude' results in a cautiously reform·

ist poli tical p rogram m e a n d , to make things worse, not a very

realistic one. An 'abs t ract i n ternationalism' permeates it and t h i s

resu l ts i n what t he a uthors c a l l t h c ' fi rst element o f a poli tica l

program for the global m u l t i t ude, a first political demand: global

citizenship ' (p. 400, emphasis in original). I ca n not d isagree with

t h i s claim, an old aspi rat ion a l ready proposed by Kant a n d that

Marx a nd Engels recovered a nd redefined w i t h i n the framework

of the i nternationalism proclaimed with so m uch vigour in the

Manifesto. B u t C i t izensh i p has a lways i nvolved a set of rights and

prerogatives as well as req u iring t h e creation of adequate chan·

nels of political participation that, to be effect ive and not i l l u sory,

must be realized wit h i n a legal and i nstitutional framework such

as, in recent h istory, was provided by the nation·state. Whoever

speaks of citizenship, speaks of power, relationshi ps of force, a nd

t h e state as the basic framework within which a j u ridical order i s

elaborated a n d su pponed. S i nce, accordi ng to Hard t a n d Negri,

t he state faces an irreversible decl ine, with i n what fra mework is

the emancipa t i ng and panicipa t ive poten tial of the citizenshi p to

be realized? 'Abstract internationalism' believes that the solution

for most of o u r problems l ies i n the empowerment of civil society

and the construction of a global and cosmopol itan ci tizenship.

The problem is t h a t , in its a rroga nt a bs t raction, t h i s i nterna·

tionalism rel ies on 'an abstract and little real istic notion of an
,

i nternational civil society or global citizenship' and on t h e i l l usion

that the world can be cha nged if t he representation of the l e ft a nd

the popular movements - let us say for a moment, the m u l t i t ude

- are s t rengthened wit h i n the la rge transnational organ izations

89
such as the I M F (Meiskins wood 2000: u8). Though the argu·
ment developed in Empire is not ve ry c lear about this, it seems,
however, to be in l i ne with a certain type of reason ing that in
recent years has aeq uired great popularity thanks to the efforts of
a wide range of intell ectuals and ·experts' connected to the World
Ban k and other international financial i nstilutions. The proposals
out l ine, especially i n the framework of national societies, t he
begi n n i ng of a process of 'devolution' to civil soeiety functions
that had been improperly appropriated by the state. Obviously.
these pol icies a re · the other side of the coi n ' of the privatizations
a nd the dismantling of the public sector that the i n terna tional
financial i nstitu t ions have promoted over the last twenty years.
Such changes seek to provide a solution to the crisis triggered
by the state's desertion of its responsibil ities in the provision of
public welfare - providing social assistance, ed ucation, heal thcare
and so on - transferring to civil society the task of dea l i ng with
these issues whiJe incidenta l ly preserving a balanced fiscal budget
and, eventually, guara nteeing the existence of a surplus in the
fiscal aceounts i n order to fu nd the foreign debt. I f this pol icy of
empowerment of civil society is u nreal istic a t the national level,
its transference to the international level deepens the cracks ap­
parent in its own foundations. The so-cal led global civil society,
far from bei ng li berated from class l i mi tations that ma ke i m pos­
si ble the fu l l expansion of ci tizens' rights in national societ ies,
suffers from these same l imitations even more acutely, riddled
as it is by a bysmal economic and soc ial inequalities and by the
oppressivc features inscribed in its structures, norms and ru les of
operation. If democracy and c i ti zenship have proved to be such
elusive and praetica l ly u ngraspable objectives in the capitalisms
of the periphery, why shou ld we expect them to be obtainable in
the even less u n favou rable terra i n of the i nternat ional system?
The price that Hardt and Negri pay for ignoring this i s the
extreme naivety of their proposal, closer to a religious exhor­
tation than to a rea l istic socia l-democra tic demand . According

90
[0 i t , capi talists should acknowledge that capital is c reated by
rhe workers a n d , therefore, accept 'in postmode rn i ty [ ] the

fu ndamental modem const i t u tional principle that links right and

labor, a n d thus rewards with citizenship t h e worker who creates

capital' (p. 400). The mult itude's emaneiparion, conseq uently,

seems to ru n along t he following course: ' I f in a first moment

the m u lt itude demands t h a I each state recogn ize j u ri diea l ly the

m igrations that a re necessary to capita l , in a second moment i t

m u s t d e m a n d control over t h e movements themselves' ( p . 400).

Conseq uently, our a uthors conclude: 'The general right to control

its own movement is tile multitude 's ultimate demand for global
citizenship' (p. 400, emphasis in original). It is of no use to search

the book for a d i scussion of the reasons why large n umbers o f our

people have to e m igrate, desperately seeking to be exploited i n the

metropolitan c a pitalisms, s i n ce the des t ru ction - sometimes the

silent genocide - practised in the periphery a nd the deterioration

of every form of civil ized life under the rise of neoliberalism a re

completely a bsent from the pages of Empire. Sim ila rly useless

would be the search for a serious d iscussion about the reach and

l i mi t a tions t h a t migntion and a nomad ic way of l i fe would have

in a (revolut ionary?) project t h a t wou ld al low the m u l t i tudes to

take control of t h e i r lives; putting an end to the slave ry of waged

labour and of nom i ma l ly 'free' subjects throughout the world.

Because of t h is, the equation between migrat ion/nomad i s m and

li berat ion/revo l u tion acqu i res i l l u sory characteristics.

The second component of t h e supposedly emancipa t i ng pro­

gra mme of the m u ltitude in its e ffon to defeat the empire is t he

right to a soc ial wage and a guara nteed m i n i m u m income for

everybody. This demand goes one step beyond t h e fa mily wage,

puttipg an end to the unpaid labour of workers' wives a nd fam i ly

m em bers. The distinct ion betwecn productive and reprod uctive

la bour fades in t he biopo l i t ical context of t h e empire, si nce it is

the m ul titude in i t s totaliry that produces and reproduces the

social l ife. Th us, 'The demand for a social wage extends to t h e

91
entire population the demand that a l l activity necessary for the
prod uction of capital be recognized with an eq ual compensation
such that a social wage i s real ly a guaranteed income' (p. 403).
Once aga i n , fine intentions with which everybody can agree. But it
i s pert inent to formulate some questions: fi rst, i s not t h is second
component of the ema nCipating programme extremely similar
to the 'citizens' wage' that, with some restrictions i t is true, has
been conceded i n some of the m ost adva nced industri a l ized
democracies of the North? Is i t so d i fferen t from the moderate
social-democrat reformism in place i n some of the Sca ndi navian
count ries, especially Sweden? It does n ot seem so. I nstead, i t
appears t h a t th is would b e the deepening of a tre nd going back
a lmost half a century wi thout, at least a s seen fTom here, having
checkmated the capitalists or neutral ized the exploitative charac­
ter of the bourgeois relationShips of p roduction. Authors such as
Samuel Bowles and Herbert G i ntis, for example, thoroughly ex­
a m ined different i ntemational experiences with what they called
'the citizens' wage' without being able to i n fer from their a na lysis
a conclusion that al lows us to support the thesis that in states i n
which such a wage h a s been established - wit h greater o r lesser
rad i ca l i sm - the m ultitude has been emancipated ( Bowles and
Gintis 1 982, 1 986). Second: how would the capitalist class respond
to the i mplementat ion of a measure sllch as the a foremen tioned,
which, desp ite its l i m i ta t ions, has an enormous distributive cost?
Wou ld they accept it without fe rocious resistance? This leads,
obviously, to a discussion that postmodern thinkers abhor but
which i m poses itself with the same u navoidable power as the
un iversal law ofgravity. We are talking, with Machiave l l i , about the
problematic of power and how i t i s obta ine d , exerted a nd lost.
The third political demand of the m u l t i tude is the right to
reappropriation. I t i s a right that conta i ns diverse d i mensions,
from language, commun ication and knowledge to machi nes,
and from biopolitics to the conscience. This last component is
partieu la rly problematic because i t 'dea ls d i rectly with the con-

92
stituent powe r of the multi tude - or really with the prod uct of
the creative i m agination of the mu ltitude that con figures i ts own
constitution' (p. 406). On this point, which covers as we know a
cruc ial topic i n Negri 's t hought, such as the co nstituent power,
the authors i ncessa ntly t ravel between t he constitution of (he
m ul t i tude as a social actor - and here a wide space opens i n which
to discuss to what exten t this process can be i n terpreted a s the
only resul t of its 'creative i magination' - and the consti tution of
the U nited States as it appears, in a particu larly ideal ized fash­
ion and , for a moment, naively interp reted , by the au thors. This
becomes evident when, for example, they say: 'the postmodern
multitude takes away from the US Constitution what allowed it
to become, above and against a l l other constitutions, a n i mperial
const itution : its notion of a bound less frontier of freedom a nd
its defini tion of a n open spatiality a n d temporality celebrated i n
a const i tuent power' (p. 406).
There are a few l i ttle problems with this inte rpretation. First,
the belief that the so-ca lled postmodern mu ltitude knows the
American constitution or someth i ng l i ke it, its deba tes and its
lessons; in the best of all possible worlds th is is still a remote pos­
sibility. If u nder the label of ' m u l titude' Ha rdt and N egri i nclude
the more tha n two billion people who barely su rvive on one or
two dollars a day and without access to potable water, sewerage
systems, electricity and telephones, without food or housing, i t
i s somewhat h a rd to understand how they manage to i mbibe the
marvello us ema ncipating teachi ngs of the US constitution . If, on
the cont ra ry, t he authors are referring to the graduate students
of Duke or Pa ris, then the chances improve, though not greatly.
But these are minor d eta i ls. The serious issue is their idealization
of the America n const itution . Noam Chomsky has a rgued repeat·
I

edly that this d ocument, so a d m i red by the aut hors of Empire,

was conceived 'to keep the ra bble in l i ne ' a nd to preven t them
from, even by accident o r by mistake, having the idea (let a lone
the p ractical poss i b i l i ty) that they m ight wa n t to rule the destiny

93
of the U nited States or even govern themselves. The American
const itution is decisively and consciously a nt i·democratic and
anti-popular, in accordance with what its most i m portant original
a rchitects repeatedly declared. For James Madison, the main task
of the constitution was that of 'assuring the supremacy of the
pe rmanent in terests of the cou n t ry, that are no others than the
property rights'. This opinion from one of its wri ters probably
went un noticed by Hardt a n d Negri, but i ts force obl iges us seri­
ously to redefine the role that they assign to the US constitu­
tion, especially when we consider that Madison's words were
pronounced in a country that at the time had a great part of its
territory organ ized as a slave economy, a nd tha t the idea of the
incipient constitution becoming a beacon for the emancipation of
the multitude of the day, mainly slaves, apparen tly d id not enter
his thoughts_ M oreover, to avoid attacks on the righ ts of property,
Ma dison shrewdly designed a pol itical system that d iscouraged
popu lar pa rticipation (something that persists today, with a very
low t um-out for e lections wh ich, on top of eve l)1 h i ng else, are
held on working days), and fragme nted the process of decision­
making, while he reaffirmed the i nstitutional balances tha t would
guarantee that power would re main fi rm ly i n the hands of those
who controlled the wealth of the cou ntry. As C homsky obsclVes,
these opinions of Madison in t he cons titu t ional debate of Phila·
delphia are less well known than those expressed in the famous
Federalist Papers, but they m ay be more revealing of the t rue
spi rit of the constitution than the formal decla rations voiced to
the general public. It is no coincidence that, as the brilliant M IT
lingu ist remarks, i n a cou n t ry where the publish i ng i ndustry is
so dynamic, t he most recent edi tion of those debates dates from
1 838. The American people was not supposed to know about

the ideas t hese gen tlemen di scussed in the convention ( Boron

20oob: 2 28). In short, the constitu tion of the U n i ted States cou ld

hardly be an i nvitation 10 travel through 'the i n fi n i te front iers

of freedom', as the authors nai\'eiy proclaim, since still today,

94
and despite successive reforms (one of which prohi bi ted the con­

sum ption of a lco holic beverages), it prevents t.he American multi­

tude from d i rectly electing their president. Thanks to the norms
and procedures established in t h i s much-adm i red co nstitu t i on ,

during t h e last presidential elect ion t he candidate who came sec­

ond in terms of the n u m ber of votes cast by the citizenship cou l d

lega l ly become president. Apparently, the authors h a d n o t noticed

the da ngers lurking with i n the co nstitutional text . Malcolm B u l l

( 2003: 85) is surely right when he assens t h a t : 'Although h a i led by
Slavoj Zizck as "the Commun ist Manifesto for our t i m e " , Empire
is more Jeffersonian than MaIXist.' I would add that the book i s
much more Jeffersonian than Marxist.
Another serious problem emerging from the issue of the rights
of approp riat ion is the fol lowing: Hardt and Negri stand o n solid
ground when they write: 'Th e righ t to reappropriation i s fi rs t of
a l l the right to the reappropriation of the means of production'
(p. 406). The old social ists and com m u n i sts, they say, demanded
that the proletariat should have free access to the mach ines and
materials needed in the production process. But s i nce one of
the d is t i nctive signs of post modern i ty i s the com i ng of what
Hardt and Negri ca l l 'the i m material and biopolitical produc­
tion', the concrete contents of the old left and the labour u n i ons'
demands have been tra nsformed . Now the m u l ti t ude not only
uses machines for production but, accord i ng to the authors, i t
'also becomes i ncreasingly machinic itself, a s the means o f pro­
duction are in creasi ngly inregrated into the m inds and bod ies of
the multitude' (p. 406). The consequence of t h i s mutat ion is that
a ge nuine reappropri ation req uires free access and control over
not only machines and equ ipment but also over ' knowledge, in­
forrQation, com mu n ications, and a ffects - because these are some
of the pri m a ry means of biopo l i t ical product ion' (p- 407). Now,
let us analyse two not very t rivial inconven iencies that emerge
from th e precedi ng argument. Fi rst, how do th e knowledge, the
information, the commun ication and the a ffects relate to the

95
.!! 'classic' material means of product ion and the materials tha t a re
VI
still requ i red to produce most of the goods necessary to sustain
life on t h i s planet? Or are we i n the presence of autonomized
segm ents of the postmodem b iopol itical production? Are those
segments or i nstruments avai la ble fo r anyone? Are the know­
l edge, the i n formation and the com m u n ication capable of circu­
lating freely through all classes, social strata and groups of the
em pire'? How can the growing monopolistic features acq u i red by
the i n format ion and mass commu nication i ndu st ries all over t h e
world b e explained? And regard ing knowledge, w h a t c a n b e said
about patents and the crucial i ssue of i n tellectual property rights,
a new method of pi llage in the hands of the main transnational
companies of the indu strialized countries that are looting entire
conti nents with the active su pport of their gove rnments?
Second, do we have to assume that the owners and/or those
who control these new and very complex and expensive means
of prod uction will peacefu l ly and gently yield their property and
i ts control , t hrowing ove rboard the basis of their wealth and
poli tical dom ination itsel f? Why wou l d they act i n such a way,
unprecedented in the m i l lenary history of class struggl es? Wou ld
they be led to do th is because the i r hearts woul d become ten­
der before the s h i n i ng vision of the self-constitu ted mu ltitude
marching jubilantly towards i ts l i beration? I f this is not the case,
wh ich reco mmendation wou l d our authors make regarding the
u navoidable i n tensificat ion of class st ruggles and the poli t ical
repression tha t wou ld surely fol low as a response to the emanci­
pating i n i tiatives of the multi tude?
The fo urth d i mension of the poli tical programme of the m u l ti­
tude is the orga n i zation of the multitude as a pol i tical subject, as
posse. The au thors i ntroduce h e re the Latin word posse to refer to
power as a verb, a n activity. Th us, posse 'is what a body and what
a m i nd ca n do' (p. 408). In the postmodern society, the constitu­
ent power of labo u r can be expressed as the ega l itarian righ t of
citizensh ip in the world or as the righ t to commun icate, construct

96
languages and con trol the com m u n ication networks; a nd also as a

political power, which is to say, 'as the constitution of a society i n

w h i c h the basis of power is defined by t h e expression of the needs

of a l l ' (p. 4 10). Due to the latter, Hardt and Negri conclude wit h

a s u rp risi ngly triumphant tone, 'The capacity t o constru ct places,

temporalit ies, migra tions, and new bodies a l ready affirms its

hegemony t h rough the actions of the multitu d e aga i n st Empire'

( p . 4 1 1). They wa rn, though, that a small d i fficu lty still persists:

'The only eve n t that we are still awaiting is the construction, or

rather the i nsu rgence, of a powerful organization' (p. 4 1 1). Sens­

i bly t hey recognize that t h ey have no model to offer regard i ng this

organiza tion, but they are confident t h a t ' t h e m u l t i tude t h rough

i ts practical experimentation wi ll offer th e models and determi ne

when a n d how t h e possible becomes real ' (p. 4 11). Some clues,

however, were provided in an earlier chapter where we read that

'The real heroes of the liberation of t h e Third world today may

really have been the em igrants and the flows of population that

have dest royed old and new bou ndaries. I ndeed, the postcolonial

h ero is the one who con tinually t ra nsgresses territorial a n d racial

bou ndaries, who destroys part icu l a ri sms and points toward a

common civilization' (pp. 362-3). Th is is an enigmatic statement

because it obl i q uely i nd uces u s to t hink, fi rst, that t he Third

World h as already ach ieved its liberation; seco n d , that t h e m u l ·

titudes of the Third world have also succeeded i n t h e i r attempt

to l iberate themselves (an amazing revelation for four- fi ft h s of

the world popu lation); th ird, tha t the hero of such a great deed

is the migra nt who abandons his native land to e nter Europe or

the Uni ted S tates, in most cases illegally, in search of a better l i fe .

The a lchemy of theory h a s converted e m igra t ion t o revol u tion.

97
7 Notes for a sociology of revolutionary
thinking i n times of defeat

Empire concludes with a political programme for the multitude,

whose most i m portant fea t u res h ave bee n outlined i n the previ­

ous chapter. Once aga i n , the fragi l i ty of the a nalysis m anages to

debunk both t h e i r very good i nten tions and their noble goals. The

appendix at the end of the last chapter is extraord i narily eloquent,

since it d iscusses the issue of political act.ivism a n d fin ishes wit h

a h a l l uci nat ory reference to St Fra n c i s .

This brief eXClirsus begi ns very nicely, wi t h the a ssert i o n that

today's pol itical act ivist is in no way s i m i l a r to the 'sad, ascetic

agc n t of the Third I n terna t ional whose soul was deeply penneated

by Soviet state reason' (p. 4 1 1 ). On the contrary, today's activi s t is

i n spired by the i m agc of the 'com m u n i st and li bera tory co m bat­

a n ts of the twentie th-ce n tury revol utions' (p. 4 1 2), a mong whom

we must include those i n t eUectuals who were persecuted a nd

exiled during t h e fascist e ra , the rep u bl icans of the S pa n i s h civil

war, t h e mem bers of the a n t i - fascist res ista n ce, a nd those who

fough t for freedom i n the a n t i-colo n ia l ist and a n t i- i mperia l i s t

wars. T h e mission of t h e poli tical activist has always bee n , and

today more t h a n ever, to orga n ize and act, and n ot to represen t . I t

is precisely t h e i r co nstitu tive act ivity a n d n o t t h e i r represen tat ive

act ivity t h a t characte rizes t hem. ' M i l i ta n cy today is a positive,

constmctive, and i n novative a (; livi�' ( ] M i l itants re sist imp erial

command in a creative way' ( p . 4 1 3). The c u l m i n a t i o n of this

l i ne o f reasoni ng, nevertheless, d oes n o t lead the reader to Che

Guevara o r Fidel Cast ro, nor to Nelson Ma ndela . Ho C h i M i n h ,

M a o Zedong o r Den Bel la, b u t t o S [ Fra ncis o f Assisi . Accord i ng

to H ardt and Negr i , St Fra ncis denounced the poverty that was

stri k i ng the multitude of his timc, and h e adopted it as one of the

rules of the begging o rd e r thai he would later fou nd , d i scovering

in poverty

the ontological power of a nt.'w society. The commu n ist militant

does the same, ident ifying in the common cond ition of the

muitilllde its enormous wealth. Francis in opposition to nascent

capitalism refused evet}' type of instru mental discipline. and i n

opposition t o the mortification of t h e flesh ( i n poverty a n d in the

constituted o rder) he posed a joyous l i fe, includ i ng all of being

and nature, the animals. sister moon, brother sun, the birds of

the field, the poor and exploited humans. together aga inst the

will of power and corruption . (p. 4 1 3 )

I n t he post modern world . H ardt and Negri co n t i n ue. 'we fi n d

o urselves i n Fra ncis's s i t u a t i o n , p os i ng aga i n st t he m i s e ry o f

power t h e joy of bei ng' (ibid.). T h e outcome of t h i s m isplaced,

and dangerous, analogy can o n ly be a very pecu l i a r u ndersta nding

o f t he meaning o f revolution in o u r time, 'a revo l u t i o n t hat no

power wi l l conrrol - because biopower and c o m m u n i sm , coopera­

tion and revol u t i o n remai n together, in love, s i m p l i city, a nd a lso

i nnocence. This is the i rrepressi b l e l igh tness and joy of being

c o m m u n ist' (ibid.).

So wha t is i t that H ardt a n d Negri suggest? That the multitude

w i t h i n the e m pi re, i nsp i red by the example set by 5t Francis,

should play gen t l e melodies on the i r viol i n s to pacify the Levia ·

t h a n s of neoli bera l globa lization, j u s t as St fra ncis d i d w i t h the

wild a n i m als i n t he woods? O r t h a t the i n noce n t songs to l i fe

s u ng by the p roduct ive m u lt itude will convi n ce the masters of

t he world of their u nwort h i ness a n d gu ilt, a n d henee they will

give u p t h e i r p rerogat ives, wea l t h a n d p rivilege? For t h e sake of

h u m.a n i ty, we can o n ly hope that these new postmodern com­

m u ni st activists will be somewha t m o re successful i n d e fea t i ng

capitalism t h a n t h e fra nciscan order, a n d t h a t t he outcome of

t h e i r activism will be more productive both in terms of the eradi­

cation o f pove rty a n d of the ema ncipation of m a n k ind than that

99
c obtai n ed long ago by the prayers a nd sacrifices of 5t Francis.

j A carefu l reading of Empire allows us to conclude that the

au thors' goal of displaying a sophist i cated analysis of the world
order ends in fai l u re. H ow can we explain the b l i nd ness of

these [\Yo co m m u n i s t academ ics to the i n herently i mperialist

nature of the intemationaJ system? Throughout th is book, I have
mentioned some factors that I feel need to be taken i nto account
i n order to explain the authors' fa il ure to achieve t he i r goal: the
extremely fo rmalist and legalistic point of departure; the weak·
n ess of the instru ments used to analyse polit ical economy; t he

lack of ve ry basic economic data; t he naive acceptance of several

neoliberal and postmodern axioms; the con fusing heritage of
struct u ralism and its visceral rejection of the subj ect; and, last
but not least, the unset tling effects o f a radically mista ke n theory
of the state.
Given the formidable i n tellectual calibre of H ardt and Negri,
especi a l ly in the case of the Italian academic wi th his strong
experience i n the fields of Marxist social and political philosophy,
how can we explain such d isappointing results? In an o utstand i ng

piece of work, Terry Eagleton provides some hints that m ight

help us solve the puzzle. In order to faci l i tate comprehension of
his a rgument. Eagleton invites u s to i magine the i mpact that an
overwhelming defeat wo uld have on a radical d issident move'
ment. assum ing that t h i s defeat seems to erase from the public
agenda the topics a n d proposals of the movement not only for
the l i fetime o f its members but probably for ever. As time goes

by, the movement's central theses become more cha racterized

by their i rrelevance than by their falseness. The movement's op'
ponents no longer bother to debate or refute the m , but i nstead
they contemplate these t heses with a stra nge combination of
indifferen t cu riosity, 'of the same type that one can have towards
t he cosmology of Ptolemy or the scholastics of Thomas Aq u i nas'
(Eagleton 1 997: 17)·
What a re the pract ica l alternatives that these antagonists face,

100
given t h e a foremen tioned political a n d ideological catastrophe,

i n which a world of seemi ngly u nmoving and obj ective certain­

ties, of determ i n a n t structures, o f 'laws of motion' a n d efficient

causes, has suddenly van ished l i ke morn i ng fog, giving place to

a colourful galaxy o f social fragments, hazardous con t ingencies

and brief circumsta nces whose endless com bi nations have led

to t he bankru ptcy not only of Marxism but a l so of the whole

theoretical heritage of the E n l ightenment? Eagleton asserts t hat,

for a 'post modern sensibility', the central M a rxist ideas a re more

often ignored than fough t agai nst: it is no longer about their

wro ngness, b u t i nstead, i t is a bout t he i r i rreleva nce. The Berl i n

Wall has already fallen; the Soviet Union has su ffe red a gigantic

i m plosion, and for many today it is a blu rred memory; capital ism,

markets and liberal democracy seem to wi n everywhere, accord i ng

to Francis Fukuyamaj the old work i ng class has been a tomized by

post-fordism ; t he nation-states seem to be undergoing a messy

withd rawal, kneeling l i ke serfs i n front of the strength of global

markets; the Warsaw Pact has been d issolved in embarrassm ent j

social democracies s h amelessly embrace neoliberalism; C h i na

opens up to fo reign capital a n d becomes part of the wro; and

the forme r 'socia list camp' disappears from the i nternational

arena. What should we do?

Eagleton proposes some i n teres t i ng alternatives that i l l u m i ·

,.
nate not o n ly the rou tes probably walked by the au thors, but ..
o
"
also the i t i neraries covered by many o f those who, i n the La tin o·
American context of the 1960s and 1970s, extolled the im m i ne nce

of the revolution and awaited wi th their arms ready the arrival

{
o
-
of t he 'decisive day'. We can fi n d , on the one hand, t hose who
�
o
either cynica l ly or sincerely moved to t h e right. On the other C
�.
hand there a re those who stayed o n t he left, but who did so wi th o
:::I
D
resignation a nd nostalgi a , given t h e i nexorable d issolution of
�
their identity. There are still others who have closed their eyes ;.
5·
i n delusional triumphalism, recognizing in the weakest traces lIr"
!i"
of a street demonstration or a strike clear signs of t h e i m m i n e n t ca

101
c outbreak of revolution. Finally, there a re those who keep their

j radical i m pu lse al ive, but who have had to red i rect it to regions
other tha n the pol itica l a rena ( i bid.).
Hard t and N egri lind themselves, we cou l d argue, wi t h i n the
complex field that defines t h i s fou rth a lternative. They have n ot
moved to the righ t, as Regis Debray or ( i n Latin America) M ario
Vargas L10sa have done. Nor have they re ma ined in the deep and
pai n fu l perception of the defeat of a set of ideas in wh ich they
s t i l l be l ieve, nor have they b l i nd folded t hemselves by pretending
that nothing has occu rred and search the planet for signs that
forecas t t h e retu rn of the revo l u tion. Their a ttitude has been
healthier: open ing, sea rch ing, reconst ruction . N eedless to say, a
process of t his type carries with it the inevitable risk of invol untar·
i1y accepting a prem ise that, i n the long run, can frustrate the
renovating project: the idea 'that the system is, at least for the time
being, u n beatable' (ibid .). From here, a series o f theoretical and
practical conseq uen ccs e merge that, as r will explai n below, a re
neatly reflected in t h e postmodem agenda. On the one hand , an
almost obsessive i n rerest i n the exami na tion of the social forms
that grow in the margins or in the i n terst ices of the syste m ; on
the other hand, the search for those social forces that at least for
now could commit some sort of t ransgression against the system,
or coul d promote some type o f l i m ited and ephemeral subversion
against it. The celebration of the marginal and the ephemera l , the
prejud ice that 'minori ty' i s a synonym for l i be ration (bl urring the
role pl ayed by a vel)' special m inority, namely the bourgeoi sie),
wh i le the mass ive a nd cen t ra l , the non-margi na l , i s demonized ,
has become pa rt of t h is new poli t ical and cultural e t hos. I f the
system appears to be not only i nexpugn i b le but a lso oppressive,
the abandonment of a ' modern' t heorization such as the Ma rxist
one leaves no escape other than its purely imaginary neg-a tion.
I n this way ' the oth e r' , the d i fferent, ari ses as the supposed an·
tagon ist of the existing order, And it is precisely its 'otherness'
t h a t guaran tees the ra d ical ism of i ts a n tagon ism, when it lurn�

102
it i n to someth ing i m possible to a s s i milate a n d therefore i n to t.he

o n ly ( i l lusory) al te rn ative to the system.

The ou tcome of a product ion that is consistent with its poi nt

of d e pa rt u re, the i nvinci b i l ity of the syste m , is what Eagleton

ca lls ' l i be rta r i a n pessim i s m ' ( i b i d . : 1 9). Pess i m ism, because the

system prese nts itself as o m n ipotent and ove rbeari ng; l i bertari a n ,

because i t al lows u S t o dream about m u l t iple s u bversions a nd the

overcom i ng of the system, withou t i m plying the ide n t i fication

of flesh and blood agents ca pable of turning those drea m s i n to

reality. The system is everywhere a n d it cancels the d i s t i nction

between 'inside' a n d ·outside': wha tever is i n side is part of its

machi n e ry a n d is there fo re an accom p l ice; whatever is o u tside

is u n a b le to d e feat it. This is the main source of the rad ical

pessimism tha t permeates this line of thought, regard less of i ts

proc l a i med revolutionary i ntentjons.

Eagleton ' s work is extraord i n a ri ly suggestive a n d - written a t

the same ti me that Hardt and Negri were working on the writing

of Empire - i t a n t ic ipates with outsta n d ing sharpness some of the

general fea t ures prese n t i n that theorization. Like t he system, the

e mpire is o m n i present, a n d although the authors by no means as­

sert that the empire is invincible, the tonc used i n the i r argu ment

c u l m i nates with a pessim istic re mark t h a t st.rongly resem b les

capi t u la t io n . Throughout the book , t.he conserva tive forces of

order are i n fi n itely m ore powerful and e ffective than t hose al­

legedly called upon to destroy the empire. Aga i nst the powers

of the bom b , t he money, langu a ge a n d i mages, there a rises a

Th ird World 'hero' wh o i nstead of em bracing rcvolution selects

e m igra t ion . Moreover, l he e m p i re recognizes no 'outside' and

' inside'; we a re a l l ' inside' and, even though t h is is not expl icitly

menSioned, we a re a l l s u bjected to its a rbitrary modes a n d its

oppression. The one thing that can brea k i t down is the u n foresee­

a ble act jon of the ideal ized 'other', the m ul t i tude, marked as it

is by an in fi n i t e com b i n a t ion of i n exha usti ble singu l a ri ties. The

classes and the people, categories of i nclusion at a time when

1 03
c there were still 'n ational' capital ism a n d nation-states, become

j volatile in the work of Hard t a n d Negri and they leave space for the
hopeful negativity of the multitude. And some featu res that the
authors identify as carrying a radical answer to the system - ' d i f·
fe rence', 'hybridation', heterogeneity a nd inexhausti ble mobility
- are, as specified once again by Eagleton, 'native to the capitalist
mode of production and therefore t hey are i n n o way inherently
rad ical phenomena' (ibid.: 2 1 ).
In a ny case, this syndrome is far from being u n i que i n the
history of Marxism and revolutionaty thought. Perry Anderson
detected this with his habitual shrewdness in a releva nt piece
of scholars hip published at a very special poi n t in t i me, 1 976,
when Keynesian capitalism a n d the social-democratic strategy
(fol lowed by both socialist and co m m u n ist parties, especia l ly
in Italy, France a n d Spain) were dec l i n i ng a n d when the first
s igns of the neolibera.l coun ter-revolu tion were starting to show.
I a m referri ng, of course, to Considerations on Western Marxism, a
book that was conceived to examine a d i fferent h istorical process,
that of the 1920S and early 1 930s, a period that was a lso deeply
characterized by defeat. H owever, it is not my purpose here to
try to reconstruct an imaginary dia logne between Eagleton a n d
Anderson, though I believe it would b e very enlighteni ng. given
the chal lenge that u nderstand i ng the theoretical mess presemed
in Empire e n ta i ls.
Defeat d u ri ng t he 1920S, defeat once again during the 1980s;
a l i ne of thought characteristic of that wh ich H a n nah Arendt
would portray with extraord inary s u btlety i n her revision of the
hard times u ndergone by the brigh t men and women who lived
during the t i mes that Bertolt Brecht called t he 'da rk ages'. A
look at the l ives of Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benj a m i n or Bertoli
Brecht h imself, just to mention some of t hose who ded icated
their l ives to socialist ideals, reveals some extremely i n teresting
teachings_ For exa mple, the fact that u n t i l the moment at which
the ca tastrophe took place, the truth was h idden beh ind a thick

104
fog of d iscourses, double d iscou rses a n d various mechanisms
that effectively concealed the ugly facts and d issipated the most
reasonable doubts. Such concea lment was possible thanks to
the work of both public servants and good·hearted i ntellectuals.
Then , all of a sudden , tragedy emerged (Arendt 1 968: viiil. Isn't
it possible, then, that Hard t and Negri have become victims of
[he way in which i n tellectual product ion is undertaken by those
who live during dark ages? There is no way for us to know. [n a ny
event, Eagleton has pro\'ided us with some clues that will help u s
understand t h e difficulties faced by left·wing intellectuals t rying
to explain the most abom inable aspects of our time. Anderson
adds some other clues that mesh very smoothly with those sug·
gested by Eagleton. Th i s Marxism of defeat ' has paradoxically
reversed the trajectory of Marx's own i n tellectual development'
(Anderson 1 976: 52). If the founder of historical materialism
turned from philosophy to politics and from poli t ics to pol itical
economy, the 'Western Marxist' t radition reversed this path and
quickly searched for a place to h ide - both from revolutionary
defeat at the hands of fascism and from the frustration a riSing
from i ts 'triumph' and consolidation i n the USSR - i n the most
abstruse areas of philosophy. The path of the young Marx from
philosophy to pol i t ics was based on the conviction t h a t 'the
radical character of social criticism requires for us to go to a
deeper level of analysis than tha t of the abs tract man, and that
in order to u nderstand the man i n context we need to delve into
the anatomy of the civil society' (Boron 2oooa: 302). In walking
bac kwards in Marx's steps i nstead of goi ng forwards, phi losophi'
cal and epistemological thought have once agai n been put at the
centre of the scene, overshadowing the pol itical, economic and
historical worries of the founder. Th i s reorientation towards the
,

ph ilosoph ical and the metaphysical, clearly reflected i n Empire,

goes hand·in·hand wilh a second fea ture recognized by Anderson
as one of the d istinctive marks of West em Marxism in the period
between the two world wars (Anderson 1976: 5). As he explains,

105
c this brand of Marxism was characteri2ed by its esoteric language
� and its inaccessi bility to a nyone not already immersed i n the
JI
field: 'The excess above and beyond the necessary verbal com­
plexity was a sign of its d ivorce from any popular pract ice: This
conceptual pro l i ferat ion becomes ma n i fest i n some sym ptoms
that are also apparent in Hard t and Negri 's work: the language
is unnecessarily d ifficult; the syn tax is, at times, impe netrable,
and there is a needless lise of neologisms that only contribu tes
to a more hermetic work. Finally, t here is one last element t.hat
chara(·teri2es this theoretical regress ion : 'Due to the lack of mag­
netism that the existence of a class-based social movement can
provide, t he Marxist tradition has leaned more and more towards
the contemporary bourgeois culture: And, Anderson suggests,
'the original relationship berween M arxist t heory and proletari an
practice was swiftly but fi rmly su bsti t u ted by a new relationship
between Marxist theory and bourgeois t heory' (ibid_: 55). The
t ruthfulness of this assertion can be confirmed rat her easi ly, j ust
by ta ki ng a look at the list of aut hors discussed by Hardt and
Negri. very few of whom have had a ny sort of pa rt icipat ion in
a ny of the big fights led by the classes a nd the popular sectors
of society in t he last twenty years.
In an i nterview that took place recently, M ichael H ard t offe red
some i nteresting clues rega rding the reasons for the astonishing
theoretieal involution that beeomes apparent throughout Empire.
During the interview, he observed that, i n Marx's t i me, revol ution­
ary t hought recognized three main sources of i nspiration: Ger­
man phi losophy, British political economy and French pol itics:
' Nowadays [ ... ) the orientations have changed and revol utionary
t hought is guided by French phi losophy, North Ameriean eco­
nom ic science, and I talian polities' (Hard t 2001)_ Hardt is right,
as long as he is referring to the orientation that guided h is own
work and not to the sources that inspire revolutionary t hought.
I n fact. both French philosophy and the economie theories that
are t aught in most busi ness schools t.hroughout the U n ited States

106
play a p redomi na n t role i n Empire. Of course, not h i ng al lows us
to assume that these new theoretical avenues wil l either represent
a step fo rwards in terms o f i m proving and developing a theo ry of
capital i s m 's i m peri a l i st stage, or, even less, that they wi ll cont ri­
bute to the elaboration of a 'guide for action' that will i l l u m i nate
for us the path that the social forces of transformation and change
should fol low. ConlTiuy to Hegelian dialectics, with its empha·
s i s o n the h i storic and transi tory character of all i nstitutions
and socia l practices, and the con tradictory cha racter of social
existence, contemporary protest seeks to u pdate i ts theoretical
a rsenal i n such u n reliable sources a s structuralism and post·
s t ructu ralism, semiology. laca nian psychoa nalysis, and a whole
series o f philosophical currents characterized by their adherence
to post modernism. O n the other hand, it is i m possible to view
the crowd i ng·out of political economy a nd i ts replace ment by
North Am e rican economic science - whose narrowness, pseudo·
mathematic formalism and superficia l i ty are tod ay u n iversally
recogn ized - as a step forwards towards a better understanding of
the econom ic rea l i t i es of our t i me. To suggest that the d isplace­
ment of figures of the stature of Ada m Smith or David Ricardo
by pygmies such as Mi lton Fried man or Rud iger Dorn busch can
be a n e ncouraging sign in the consrruetion of a leftist l i ne of
thought is, to say the least, a m on umental m istake. Lastly, to say
that the Italian pol iti cal system, onee home to t he largest com­
m u nist party in the western hemi sphere a nd nowadays governed
by a repulsive creature, Silvio Berl usconi, is a renewed source of
i n s p i ration that can be compared to n i netee n th-centu ry France,
"",ith its great popular u prisi ngs and the wonderful experience of
the Paris Commune, the fi rst government of the working class i n
world h istory, demonstrates dearly the extent o f t his mistake, that
could have d isast rous consequences for both praetieal pol i tics as
well as in the dom a i n of t heory.
Still taking into acco unt the aforemen tioned considera t ions,
] can not refrain from asking how i t was possible for Antonio

107
Negri , who has written some of the most i m ponant books and
ankles within the Marxist tradition over the last qua rter of a
centu ry, to write a book i n which it appears as if he has forgotten
everyth i ng that he had previously though t. There is no doubt that
Negri has been one of the most i mportant M arxist theorists. I Born
in Padua, ltaly, in 1 933, he graduated in Phi losophy from his natal
city's u niversity, and i n the 1 960s was appoi nted Professor of
Theory of the State in the Polit ical Science department in Padua.
At the same time, his practical i nvolvement in I tal ian pol i tical l ife
tu rned him i nto one of the leaders of the Potere Opcraio and one
of the most outsta n di ng figures of the Italian left, very critical of
the po li tical and theore tical line fostered by t he Italian Commu­
nist Party, PCI. In 1979 Negri was arrested and sent to prison a fter
a faulty legal process. He was accused of being t he intellectual
mentor of the terrorist anions of the Red Brigades, i ncluding
the assassination of Italian Prime M i n ister Aldo Moro. In 1 983
the Italian Rad ical Party, a moderate combi nation of l i be ralism
and social democracy, sponsored h is candidacy to parliament, i n
order t o pressu re the Italian government into reviSing t he legal
sentence. After being elected member of parliament by popular
vote, parliamentary i m m u n ity allowed him to get out of prison.
Shortly a fter, the m l i ng pany wit h a majority in parliament - with
the i n fa mous complicity of PCI MPs, i n a scandalous political
act - revoked his i m m u n i ty, a n d , as many other anti-fascists
had done before, Negri depa rted for exile i n France. The a lready
entirely corrupt Italian judicial system d eclared Negri a rebel and
he was condem ned to t h i rty years in prison, accused of 'armed
insurrection aga i nst the state' with an additional sentence of four
a nd a half years because of h i s 'moral responsibi lity' for violent
confrontations between the police, students and workers that
took place in Milan between 1973 and 1 977.

I A 5ublle analysis or Negri·s i n telleclual and political l rajeelOl)' is to be

ruund in Callin icos (ZOO)).

108
 I m p risonmen t d i d not preve nt Negri from writing; a mong texts
written in prison, La Anomalia Sa/vaje, published in 1 9 8 1 , is worth
mentioning. By this time he had a l ready published some of his
main contributions to Marxist t heory: Opera; e Stato. Fra Rivolu·
zione d'ollobre e New Deal ( 1 97 2), Crisi dello stato'piallo (19 74),
Proletari e Stato ( 1 9 76), L a Forma Stato. Per la Critica deU'Economia
Politica della Constituzione ( 1977), Marx oltre Marx ( 1 979), and a
se minal article a bou t capitalist restructuring after the great de·
pression, ' Keynes and t he Capital ist theory of the State', origi nally
published in Italy and later transla ted into several languages and
reprinted in Labor ofDionysus, a book that Negri wrote years later
wi th M ichael Hardt. Negri remained in France for fou rteen years,
between 1983 and 1 997. Fran�ois M i t terra n d ' s gove rn men t's
protection was decisive i n terms of dissuad ing the I talian secret
service from its origi nal intention of kidnapping Negri. During
his years in France, Negri taught at the famous E cole Norma le
Superieure and at the U n iversity of Paris VI I I a n d , together with
other distinguished 1-'Tench colleagues, he fou nded a new theoret·
ical magazine: FI/Cur Anterieur. It is obvious t hat du ring h is stay
in France Negri shelved his i nterest in Germ a n philosophy a nd
acq u i red a great fa m i liarity with French philosoph ical deba tes
marked by the presence of i ntellectuals such as Louis Althusser,
Alain Badiou, E t ienne Bal iba r, jean lIaudri llard , Gilles Deleuze,
j acques Derrida, M ichel Foucault, Felix Guaua ri, jacq ues Lacan ,
j ean'Fra n�oise Lyotard , jacques Ranciere and many others. His
stay i n France was a period of in tense t heoret ical production and
profound i ntellect ual, a nd to some extent polit ica l , reorientation.
Among rhe most imponant books published d u ring t hat period
it is won h mentioni ng L es nouveaux espaces de liberlfi, in col·
labo �ation with Fel i x Guattari ( 1<)8s); Fabbriche del soggetto ( 1 987);
1'he Politics of Subversion ( 1 989); II potere constituente ( 1 992); a nd
Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the Statclonn, co·authored with
M ichael Hard t ( 1 994). In 1 99 7 , after t he scandalous collapse of
the Italian slate institutions and the crises of Christian Democracy

1 09
c and the I talian Social ist Party, Negri returned to I ta ly where his
� previous sentence had bee n revoked . He spent a short period in
�
the Reb ibbia prison and. afterwards, was perm itted to serve a new,
shorter a nd more benign sentence that entails living at home in
Trastevere during the d ay a n d spending the nights in prison. I t
is i n t h i s context t h a t Negri co-au thored Empire. with M ic hael
H a rdt
8 The persistence of imperialism

'The United States seem t o bc destined by Providence t o plague

the Americas with misery i n the name of freedom' Simon Bolivar

The rad ical goa l repeatedly deela red th roughou t Empire - to con­

t ri b u t e to the c reation of a 'ge nera l theoretical struct u re and for

that stru c t u re to cons t i t u te a set of conceptual tools al lowing u s

to theorize and a c t i n the E m p i re a n d aga i n st i t' - falls t o e a rt h a s

a res u l t of the i nc u rable wea k ness of the a n a lysis. U n fortun ately,

the tool box i s l acking some of the most basic i n struments for

t h eorizi ng a bo u t the e m pire a n d , more seriously, for fight ing

aga i n st i t . Th is fi n a l critique could be su m marized by saying

tha t t he book's most crucial fau l t is its serious d iagnostic m is­

takes. There is no con nection between a t heoretical backgrou n d

that is u narguably conservative i n n a t u re - o r whose n a t u re is a t

best confu s i ng - a n d which d e rives m a i n ly from eonven tional

neol i beral k n owledge that extols globalization and ' n a tu ra lizes'

capitalism on one h a n d , and the b l u rry vision of a new society

and a new i n ternational order to be b u i l t over radica lly d i fferen t

premisses o n the other. I f t he d iagnosis is i naccu ra te, t h e new

social a n d political constru c t ion is doomed to failure. The fragi lity

of the ana lysis is a p pa rent as ea rly as the Preface of the book. The

authority c ited in order to define the fundamenta l concept that

gi ves the book its n a m e is not Len i n or Bukha ri n or Luxe m b u rg

or, more recently, Sa m i r Am i n , A nd re G u n de r Fra n k , I m m a nuel

Wa llerste i n , E ric Hobsbawm, Samuel Eisenstadt, Pa blo Gonza l ez

Casa nova, Agu st i n C ueva, Alonso Agu i la r, H e l i o Jagua ribe, J o h n

Saxe-Ferna ndez, J ames Petras or a ny of the m a ny other scholars

who have contribute d to our u nd e rsta n d i ng of the topic. No.

I n stead, the a u thors mention M a u rice Duverger, a French poli-

.l: t ical scien t ist comforta bly installed in the most conventional
at
iii currents within the discipline and an academic who has never
been associated with any of the cri tical schools of though t. These
l i mitations are even more conspicuous when it becomes clear
how easily the au thors prese n t as their own the conve n tional
definitions used hy business school p rofessors who conceive
globalization as an ' i rresistible and i rreversi ble' p rocess before
wh ich the democratic states should kneel. We can recogn ize i n
this formu lation t he old trap o f t h e bourgeOis ideologists for
whom capital ism is not h i ng but the ' natura l ' manifestation of
ou r human acq u isi tive and egoistic i m pu lses, and every system
other than capitalism is viewed as 'artificial ' or as the i m prudent
product of political will . Hardt and Negri appear to have paid no
attent ion to the sensible com ments made by a genuine American
li beral not too long ago: John K. Galbraith, who sharply argued
that 'global iza tion is not a serious concept. Us, Americans, have
invented it in order to h id e our pol icies of econom ic penetration
in the rest of t.he world ' (Ga lbraith 1997: 2). This a rgument comes
very close to admitt i ng that capita lism's i rresisti bility and i rrevers'
ibil ity leave no alternative options, an argument deeply engrai ned
in the heart of neoliberal thought. Ellen Meiski ns Wood (2003:
63) is right when she observes that if ' t here is no material point
at which the power of capital can be challenged , and wi th all
forms of pol i tical action effectively d i sabled, the ru le of capital
is com plete a nd eternal '.
The clamorous i nconsistency between the au t hors' analysis
and their pol itical goa ls is also revealed when the reader asks
to what extent the system's 'global logic' is overlaid by contra'
dictions that could eventually lead t o its col la pse and t o the
preparation of the material and cultural bases n eeded to build
an alternative system. This is partinllarly serious when we realize
t hat the aut hors seem n ot to be aware of the fu ndamental con­
ti nuity that exi sts between the supposedly 'new' emp i re's global
logic, its fu ndamental actors, its institutions, norms, rules and

11 2
procedures, and the logic that exis ted i n thc al legedly dead phase
of i mperialism. Hard t and Negri seem not to have realized that the
st rategic actors are the same, the large transnational compan ies
but with a national base, on one hand, and the governm en ts of
industrial ized cou ntries, on the other hand; that the decisive insti·
tutions are still those that characterized the i mperialist phase they
cla im is now fi nished, such as the I M F, the World Bank, the WTO,
and other simila r organizations; and t hat t he rules of the game of
the internat ional system are still the ones dictated mainly by the
United States and global neoliberalism , and that were im posed
by force d u ri ng the climax of the neolibe ral cou n ter-revolution
through the 1980s and the begi n n ing of the 1 990S. Given their de·
sign , pu rpose and fu nctions, these rules do nothing hut continuo
ously reproduce and perpetuate the old i mperialist structu re i n a
new guise. We would be much closer to the truth if, paraphrasing
Lenin, we say that the empire is the 'superior stage' of imperial­
ism and nothi ng else. Its fu nctioning logic is the same, a nd so
are the ideology that justifies its existence, the actors that make
its dyna mics, and the unfair results that reveal the persistence of
relations of oppression a nd exploitation. I n Marx's analyses, the
con t radictions in the development of bou rgeois society wou ld
lead it to its own destruction. Th e logic of social devel opment was
presided over by class struggles and contradict ions between the
forces of production a nd the social relations of prod uction, The
problem with H ardt and Negri's a nalyses is that the new global
logic of rule that al legedly prevails in the empire as i magi ned by
�
It
"
the aut hors lacks any struct u ral or inherent con t radictions.' CI
...
III
The only cont radiction that is p resent is that of the potential
t h reat posed by the multitude if it ever a ban doned t he lethargy
j.
:::I
1'1
CI
!1.
I For a penetrating analysis of the shoncomi ngs of the '('(assie thcorics
�"
of i m perial i:;m' a nd the new challenges posed by today's new facets of
1
i m perial ism, see Panitch and G i nd i n (2004) and, in general , the ;\nic1es �"
i ncluded in Socialist Register 2004 (Panitch and Lcys 1004), See also John
2-
iii"
Bellamy Foster (2002), 3

1 13
� in which it is kept by the mass med ia a n d the bourgeois cultural
Q)
iii industry. Even if t h i s happened, t hough, there is noth ing in the
book to convince the reader of the existence of struct u ral - and
hence impossible to overcome - contradictions between the
empi re and the m u l t i tude. On the contra ry, it would be possi ble
to extend the a uthors' a rgu ment (0 say that i f the rulers behave
wisely, they a re in a very good posit ion to absorb the demands
of the mu lti tude by mea n s of relaxing migratory norms or pro·
gressively establ ish i ng a guarantced m i n i m u m i ncome. Episodcs
d ur i ng which the do minant classes have been forced to adopt
progressive policies so as to hold back popular tides or in order
to co-opt potential adversaries have not been infrequent in the
political history of the twentieth cen t u ry, and the two measu res
m entioned above are in no way i ncompatible with the su rvival of
the capitalist relations of prod uction nor a re thcy i ncompatible
\\oi th the con ti n u ity of i m perialism.
Du ring t h e 1 980s, neol i beralism won a st rategic battle fo r
the mean ings of words used in everyday speech, pan ic'ularly i n
t h e public sph ere, Throughout the globe t h e word 'reform' was
successfu l ly used to refer to events that a somewhat rigorous
analysis would have undoubtedly classified as 'counter·reform ',
The aforementioned 'reforms' were material ized i n not too reo
formist policies such as the disman tling of social sec uri ty, the
reduction of social provisions, the c u ts in public spending
on ed ucation, health and hous i ng, and the legalization of the
ol igopol istic control of the econ omy. The word 'deregula t ion'
was actively promoted by the neol iberal and managcrial ideo·
logists c i ted throughou t Empire to refer to a process through
which gove rnmental i n tervention in economic m a t ters was
suppressed in order to restore the ' natural sel f-regulation' of
e('onomic processes. In fact, what 'deregulation' means is that
the previous regulations esta blished by democra t ic' governments
- and which led, i n some way, to a certa i n d egree of popular
sovereignty - were ba nished, and after t h i s happened the capacity

1 14
to regu late the function i ng of markets was left in the hands of
the most powe rfu l actors, the oligopol ies. Governmental capacity
to regu late was privatized and transferred to large companies. As
Samir Amin wrote, 'all the markets are regu lated, and they o n ly
fu nction u nder that cond itio n . The essential thing is to know
who regulates them and how' (A min ZOO l : z6). To conclude: the
commonsense of the last two decades of t he previous century has
been sa tura ted by the contents of neoliberal ideology. Further
proof of this fact is the ready acceptance of the dogma claiming
that state-owned com panies were by definition i nefficient and
p roduced low-q uality goods and services; that the state was a
bad administrator: that private compan ies sat isfy the demands
and requirements of consumerSj t hat ol igopolies promote social
progress through u n restricted market freedomj and, finally, that,
as argued i n the ' t rickle-down' theory, i f the rich get richer, the
wealth concentrated a t the top of the social pyramid soons spills
over to reach the least advan taged sectors of the popula tion.
Nowadays, all those stories face a terminal crisis of c red i bi l i ty.
For a long time, the hegemony of neoli beralism was nOI only
economic and ideologieal but also pol i tica l . I n tha t field too we
observe a backwards movemen t . Economies do not respond as
predicted and, after more than twenty years of painful experi­
ments, the results are dire. Argentina isjust the most recent case,
but in no way the only one, that demonstrates once more the fi nal
result of t he policies promoted by the Washi ngton Consensus.
....
�
The pol i ti ca l formulas of a successful neoliberal ism, whose arche­ II

types are still the sinister figures of Carlos S. Menem in Argentina, 1

...
'"
Carlos Salinas de Gortari in Mexico and Al berto Fuji mori i n Peru, ;'
if
have demonstrated their inabil ity to remain in power and t heir �
"
•
inability to establish a new structure of domina tion in accordance o
, -

with the needs of t he empire's dominant classes. The ideologi- 3'

cal hegemony of neoli beralismj its capacity to ascribe new and 1
:2,
con tradictory mea ni ngs to old words, is be ing rapid ly eroded. e.
iii '
Empire could perfectly be thought of as a late chapter of that :I

1 15
� h istory. The book was published in 2000 and its real fu nction

-r - I concede this was not the inte ntion of the au thors - seems
to have bee n to make a l i t tle bit more palatable the increas­
i ngly atrocious and despicable fea tures of the im perial ism of
the end of the century. Probably noth i ng cou ld haye been more
conven ient for the imperialist powers, gu ided not without fri ction
and contrad ictions by the U n i ted States, than this represe n tation
of the imperialist order metamorphosed i n to a phan tasmagoric
system , wit hout identi fiable dominators and beneficiaries, and,
above all, inspired by the most elevated legal not ions of Kantian
l i neage that only t he enemies of freedom and justice would dare
to criticize. While the authors were giving the last touch to their
metaphysical empire, t he i mperial ists were eager to launch the
Colombia Plan with its declared goa l of stabilizing the polit ical
and m i l i tary situation in that cou n t ry and of control l i ng d rug
t raffic in the area, whose fu nds are carefu l ly lau ndered in fiscal
havens th roughou t the region that survive thanks to Washington's
i ndulgence. Another of the afore mentioned project's objectives is
the establishment of a strategic base in the heart of South America
as a means to monitor the advances of the popular movement i n
Brazil, a cou n try which , by chance, i s the home of two of the most
important popular organ iza tions of the western world, t h e PT and
t he MST. Another important imperi al ist i n i t iative is the Pueblal
Panama Pla n i ntended to 'solve· the (apparently iccommun icable,
accord ing to Hardt and Negri) co nflict in Chiapas and, in addi­
tion, to set u p an establishment in the largest Mexican reservoir of
fresh water in order to provide Southern California with that vital
liqu id . Moreover, it was imperialism that launched a 'humanitar­
ian intervention' in the former Yugoslavia; it constan tly sabotages
the construction of Mercosur so as to facil itate the rapid formal
' i ntegration' of the La t i n American econ omies into American
hegemony through the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA);
and it works witho u t ceasi ng to ensure the collaboration of some
regional governments, such as those of Argentina, Costa Rica

116
and Uruguay, in i m posing sanctions on C u ba for alleged human
rights violations and to make i t pay an exorbitant price for its lack
of docility towards American imperialism. I n other latitudes, its
activism leads it to su pport its allies i n Tu rkey when they com mit
genocide aga i nst the Kurd i sh m i nori ty wi thou t fear, and to sup­
port similar actions by I ndonesia against East Timor, and by the
fascist Israeli government of Ariel Sharon against the PaJestinians.
A few years earlier, the empire, allegedly i n the name of u n iversa l
law, i nvaded Panama, killing t housands of in nocent civilians with
the goa l of capturing Preside n t Noriega, a former collabora tor of
the CIA and the DEA, a nd put in power by Was hington; i t caused
more than )0,000 deaths in its offensive agai nst the Sand inista
government i n Nicaragua; and it started the G u l f War. In the
economic terrain, im perial ism was again active, promoting the
approval of thc M u l tilatera l Agreement on I nvestments, i n order
to legalize the tyra n ny of marke ts, especially i n the Third Wo rld ,
and it made strong efforts to ensure that the I M F and the World
Bank would not lend a n ickel to those cou ntries that d i d not ac­
cept the 'conditionalities' imposed by the ma rket's international
fi nancial i nstitutions. In this way, a recent loan to Ecuador in­
cluded arou nd a h u ndred and forty req u i rements of this type
- among them, massive d i smissals of public servants, cuts in
public social spending, an end to su bsid ies - and more than
two h u n d red 'conditionali ties ' were reported i n several loa ns to
su b-Saharan Africa, a l l of which were oriented to consol idate the
p resence of 'market forces' i n the economy. On the o ther hand,
i m perialism has bee n con stantly imposing economic pol i cies
that severely u ndermine the economic sovereign ty of cou n tries
in the periphery and dimi nish their li kel ihood of be i ng able to
devel9P their eco no m ies, consol idate their d emocracies, a nd
respond posit ively to t heir popu lations' expectations of material
and spiritual progress (Stigl itz 2000)_ Leo Pa n i tch clai ms, wit h
regard t o t h i s issue, t h a t a report by the World B a n k demonstrates
that on the sa me year in wh ich the M lA was aborted 'there were

\17
 at least as many as 1 5 1 changes in the regulations that govern
�
: direct foreign i nvestments in 76 cou n t ries, and 89% of them

were favorable to fore ign capital' ( Pan i tch 2000: 1 6)_ Meanwh ile,

Pablo Gonzalez Casanova has developed a methodology for the

study of the surplus l Tansferences from the Th ird World towa rds

metropoli tan capita lism. In the twenty-t h ree years from 1972 to

1 995, the vol u me of those transfers hoovered u p by the e m p i re's

dom inant classes reached the astonishi ng amount of$4.5 trill ion;

the calc ulatio ns made using t h i s same methodology excl usiYely

for La tin America by Saxe-Fern andez and N unes show that the

figure ' s u rpasses the 2 t ri l lion dol lar threshold paid in two dec­

ades of globalizing neo-I iberalism, a magn i tude that is eq ual to

the combined GDPs of all the countries in Latin America and the
Caribbean i n 1997' (Gonzalez Casanova 1998; Saxe Fernandez et

al. 2001: 105, 1 1 1).

I n a word, i m perialist oppression contin ues to exist wh ile a lost

patrol of radical scholars proclai m� that the age of i m perialism

has concluded and exalts the figure o f St F rancis as the pa rad igm
of the renovated m i l i tancy aga i nst the spectre of an empi re that

is i m possible to seize, define or fi nd , and hence impossible to

bea t . That which is openly recogn ized by scholars of im perial­

ism such as nrlezinski and H u n tington, magically d isappears

from the ' radical critica l ' vision of rhe e m pire. M eanwhile, a p­

proximately 100,000 people die each day in the periphery d ue

to h u nger, ma l n u tr i t ion and c u rable d iseases, because of the

unin terrupted continuity of the exactions of this 'smooth space

across which subject ivi ties gl ide', which the authors call e m p i re,

a non-i m perialist regi me that day a fter day prod uces a s ilent
bloodbath that the bou rgeois media take pains to concea\. These

people d ie without receiving the most elementary medica l care.

Each year a cou n t ry of the size of Spa i n , Argentina or Colombia

is wi ped off the face o f the ea rth i n the name of the despicable

'new i nternational economic order', an order that, i f we are to

believe in Hard t and Negri , has ceased to be i mperia l i s t .

1 18
 Ha rdt and N egri 's stubborn ness in defe n d i ng their m istaken

concept ions has become st ronger since the fi rs t publication of

t h e i r book, In an i n te rview with Le Monde Diplomatique, Negri

i n s isted on h i s view that t h e em pire lacks any national base and

t h a t i t is the expression of t h e i n ternational order created by

'collective capi ta l ' once it emerged victorious from t h e long civil

war waged aga i n s t the workers throughout the twentieth cen t u l)',

'Contrar), to what t h e last s upporters of n a tional ism susta i n , the

em pire is not NortJ, America n ; i n add ition, th roughout the histol)'

of the U nited States they have been much less i mp e rialist than

the British, t h e French, the Russians, or t he Dutch' (Negri 200 1 :

1 3 ) , According t o N egri, t h e empi re's beneficiaries a r e cena i n ly

American capitalists, but also their European counterpans, those

magnates who b u i l t their fonu nes with i n the Russian M a fia and

all the wealthy in the Arab worl d , Asia, Africa or Latin America,

who send their c h i l d ren t o Harvard and t h e i r money t o Wal l

St reet. Clearly, i n this pseudo-tota l i ty of t h e e m p i re a n d i n i t s

u n bearable e m p t i ness, not only is there no theoret ical space i n

which t o d i s t i nguish between exploiters a n d explOi ted but also

there is no room to conceive the d o m i n a n t coa l i t ion a s anyt h i ng

d i fferent fro m an u n d i fferen tia ted gang of capitalists, I n t h i s

way, a n d d eparti ng from t h i s anal}'lical ster i l ity, 'collect ive cap­

ital ' prod uces the miracle of c o n t ro l l i ng the world economy ( t h e

reader should be reminded that o n ly 200 t ransnational mega­

corpo rations, 96 per c e n t of which have t h e i r headquaners i n

j us t eigh t count ries, have a c o m b i ned v o l u m e of sales that i s

higher than t h e G D P of a l l t h e countries i n t h e globe except t h e

n i n e l a rgest o n es) without st ructu res, orga n izations, i n stit utions,

h ie ra rc h ies, age n t s , rules or norms,l I n addition, if a ny con niet

,
2 We add: the annual i ncome of Exxon is al most equal to Australia'S
GOP; thaI of Ford is s i m i l :l r to De nma rk's GOP; that oftne British' Dutch oil
company Shell is almos! double thc G OP of one of the largest oil producers in
the world. Ve nezuela. General MOlors has an annual i n come thai cxcceds the
combined GOP of Ireland, New Zealand and Hungary (Res!ivo 2002: 24-5).
� lOok place with i n it, such a conflict wou ld be me rely accidental

-! or circu mstantial, a n d i t wou l d be easily solved by a ppea ling to

the good-will o f the parties conce rned. Al l of a sudden the world
order created by North American hegemony d u ri ng the post-war
era disappears in fron t of our eyes, a n d the magnates of t h e
Russ i a n Mafia seem to have the s a m e weight a nd relevance a s
t h e i r N o rt h American cou nterparts. T h e main institutions which
model the i n ternational i mperialist order - the I Mf, t h e World
Bank, the WTO, NATO, the OECD and ot her similar institut ions
- seem to bear no more relation to Washington than they do to
Osama Bin Laden's family or to any other Arab magnate, a l though
the orga nic i ntellectuals of the emp ire i nsist on characteriz i ng
them as an i n formal part of the Nort h American governmen t . I n
this pha ntasmagoric view of the e mpire, the 'conditionalities' o f
the i nternational financial i nstitutions would be dictated b y a n
Arab mil lionaire, a Portuguese banker, a J a panese whaler, a Lati n
American oligarch and, of course, a n American busi nessma n . I n
t he same way, the errat ic movements of the United Nations a re
the result of a fight between the aforementioned subj eets. It is not
necessary to be a n i n ternational relations expert to demonstra te
t he falsehood of th is argument. Rece n t eve nts in Venezuela (the
fai led coup d 'etat agai nst Hugo Chavez in April 2002) d issipate
a ny doubt rega rdi ng the persistent oppressive presence of i m ­
perialism. A coup t h a t the C I A h a d been preparing for more than a
year, and which was blessed , in a sign of arroga nce close to sheer
stupidity, hours after i ts occurrence by thE' presidential spokes­
man at the Wh ite House (violating thc Organ iza t ion of America n
States' resolut ions that Washington had promoted whe n it had
been conven ient for it to do so), and which i m med iately had the
'disinterested' collaboration of the I M F that, surprisingly and
without anybody having to ask for i t , offered its help to the new
government a t a time when it had been recognized only by the
U n i ted Sta tes and its European footman , Jose M . A2:nar, the situ­
ation still not having been resolvE'd. This behaviour by the I M F

1 20
proves once again that thi s 'mu lti lateml orga nization' is, in reality,
a m i no r department inside the Wh i te House.
This record completely i nval i d a tes Negri's state ment made
d u ri ng a rece nt i nte rview i n which he expanded on the issues
developed in Empire: 'We think t hat there is no centra lization
place within the empire. and that it is necessary to speak of a
non-place. We are nOI claiming that Washington is nol impor­
tant: Washington has the bo mb. New York has the dollar. Los
Angeles has the language and the means of commu nication'
(A1biac 2002: 2).
No fu rther comment.

...
7
It

1..
�,
'"
,
:::I
"
•
So
�'
1
�,
!.
iii'
3

121
Epilogue

Fame and celebrity have rarely gone hand-in -ha nd with critical

thinking. The h i story of political p h ilosophy teaches us that

adversarial spirits have usually been persecuted and silenced by

the dominant classes. In most cases, this has been ach ieved by

means of more or l ess brutal coercion. Antonio Negri has been,

for almost thirty years, a victim of this methodology: his m ilitancy

in Italian social struggles, as well as his signi ficant contributions

to both political theory and political philosophy - two fields also

marked by the ups and downs of class struggles - brought down

on him the fury of the Italian bourgeoisie and its political rep­

resentatives, and it also brought persecution, incarceration and

exile. On other, less frequent, occasions, those who contest the

existing social order are faced only with the i ndifference of the

powerfu l . This occurs when the dominant groups find themselves

in such a safe position a nd are so confident of the stability of

their own supremacy that they allow the mselves the luxury of

practising the an of tolerance. Needless to say, this exercise is

practised only on condition that the dissident voices can be heard

only by a small circle of harmless followers who lack any organic

l ink with civil sociery, and who, for that reason, are incapabl e of

becoming a serious threat to the dominant classes. Given this,

how can we explain the ' u n l i m ited pra ise' that, according 10

John Bellamy Foster, was heaped on two leftist scholars - namely

M ichael Hardt and Antonio Negri - in some of the most select

intellectual bastions of the bou rgeoisie, such as the New York

Times, Time magazine and the Observer or London, to which I

could add a newspaper l i n ked to the most reactionary fat·tions of

Argentine capitalism, La Nacion (Bellamy Foster 2001).

I n co ncluding this examination the answer seems to be clear:

the favourable reception give n by the esta blishment's mandarins

to Empire shows that they read the book carefully, that they cor­

rectly understood its most profound message, and that they ac­

cu rately concluded that there was nothing within the book that

could be considered incompatible with the dominant ideology or

with the self-image that the powerful like to exhibit. Although the

metaphysical rad icalism of its narrative and its abstruse allusions

to the contrad ictions of capitalism d id not cease to i rritate the

most intolerant and na rrow-minded intellectuaJs of the empire,

the main argu m ent shows a surprising and welcome similarity to

the main thesis that the ideologists of 'globalization ' have been

promoting around the world since the 1 980s, namely: that the

nation-state is practically dead, that a global logic rules the world,

a nd that defyi ng this abominable structure, whose concrete

bene ficiaries as well as its victims and oppressed are lost in the

shadows, there is a new and amorphous entity, the ' multitude',

no longer the people, let alone the workers or the proletariat. Re­

gardless of the repeated invocations to co mmunism and the good

society that make the i mperial energumens shiver, Empire leaves

the reader without answers as to why the men and women of the

empire should rebel, agai nst whom, and how to create a new type

of society. Although Empire formally criticizes capital ism as an

inhuman, oppressive, exploitative and u n fair mode of production,

it vanishes in the translucent air of postmodernity. It becomes, in

a manner of speaki ng, invisible, just like American i m perialism,

and in this way both are ' natu ralized '. H u nger, poveny, death,

wars, diseases and the whole catalogue of hu man miseries that

were observed throughout the twentieth century are rhetorically

transformed in d u l l and almost i m penetrable phraseolOgy that,

i n spite of the manifest intentions of its creators, hides the most

,

despicable features of neoliberal globalization and or contem-

III
porary capitalism.
'E.
For the reasons displayed throughout my book, I find it highly
I
u n l ikely that the anti-imperialist fighters of the world will find !i

1 23
• in Empire any realistic and persuasive argument to illu minate
:t

J their path or to help them understand what is happening in the

1- world. More l i kely, a 'counsel of surrender would be the message

of a manifesto on behalf of global capital. Jt is also, l i ke it or

not, the message of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Empire'

(Meiskins Wood 2003: 63). Given its mista kes and confusions,

it is easy to u nderstand why the book was acclaimed as a true

revelation by some of the world 's most i mponant mass media

tightly associated with the imperialist structure that overwhelms

us. In any case, it is good to know that, as Hannah Arendt re­

minded us, 'even in the da rkest n ight we still have the right to

wait for some illumination', and that this will probably come not

from a colou rful conceptual and theoretical apparatus but from

the smaJl lights that will ema nate from the i n itiatives that men

and women adopt in order to put an end to, in Marx's words,

this pai nful and barbarian 'pre-history' of humanity finally to

e nter a superior stage of civilization (Arendt 1968: ix). I want to

believe, going back to Hardt and Negri's work, that (he mistakes

that we have ide ntified in Empire will be rectified in a new study

u ndenaken by these authors. I n N egri's case I am inclined to

think that the mistakes detected in this book could be due to

distortions produced by a long exile, even if it is i n Paris; to the

lack of abili ty to travel around the world and to confirm, with his

own eyes, the sinister realities of imperialism; and fi nally, to the

rarefied intellectual Parisian atmosphere, whose provincialism

and splendid self-reference were repeatedly underlined by notable

French intellectuals such a s J ean-Paul Sartre, or others residing

i n France l i ke N icos Poulantzas. Negri's contributions to the de­

velopment of social and political Marxist theory do not deserve

such a disappointing ending. I hope with all my heart to have,

in the short term, the satisfaction of commenting, in completely

d i ffere nt terms, on a new book in which Negri's extraordinary

talent meets again with his own h i story.

12. 4
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1 19
Index of proper names

A ccumulation on a World Scale; 1 5 Boron, Atllio A . ; 1 8 , 46. 54. 57, 58. 67,
AfghaniSlan; 1 1, So, 51 , 63 8 5 , 94, 105
Afriea; lJ, J8, 45, 1 1 9 Bosch. juan; 2 8
After Liberalism; 1 5 Bosnia; 67
Aguilar, Alonso; 1 1 1 Bowles, Samuel; 92
Ahmad, Aijaz; 56 Brazil: 1 9. 20, J 5 , 36. 37, 1 1 6
Alabama; 4J Brechl. Benoll; 104
Albright, Madeleine; 56 Brilain: 1 7. J7. 55
A1thusser, Louis; 1 09 B russels; 45
Altvater, Elmar; 13 Bn.ezinski, Zbigniew; 1 1 . 68 , 69. 70,
Amin, Samir; 15, 1 1 1, 1 1 5 72. 1 1 8
Amnesty; 65 Bukharin, Nikolai; 2 , 1 3 . 23, 1 1 1
Anderson, Peny; 9, 104, 105, 106 Bull, Malcolm; 95
Annan, Kofi; 45 Bush, George Sr.; 1 1. 74
Aquinas, Thomas; 100 Bush, George W. ; 9, 1 1 . 1 2 , I J, 1 8 ,
Arendt, Hannah; 104, 1 05, 1 24 17. 6J
Argenlina; 20, J6, 74, l l 5, 1 1 6, I 1 R
Arrighi, Giova n n i ; 25 California; 43, 1 1 6
Asia; 1 5, 38, 45, 5 1 , 69 , 1 1 9 Capitalism in the Age of
Australia; I S, l l 9 Globaliwtion; 25
Austro-Hungarian Empire; J9 Cardoso, Oscar Raul; 10, 1 1
Aznar,jose Maria; 8 , 1 7, 1 8 , 1 20 Cari bbean; 5 1 . l l 8
Carthage; 33
Badiou, Alain; 1 09 Castro, fidel: 98
Balibar, Etienne; 109 Central Intelligence Agency (elA);
Bangladesh; 37, 45, 48 1 1 7 , 1 10
B a ra n , Paul: 2J Charles. Gerard·Pierre; 28
Baudrillard, jean; 109 Chavt'"Z, Hugo; 1 20
Uclgium; 5 1 Chiapas; 34, ]6, 8R, 1 16
Ilen Bella , Ahmed; 98 Chicago; 5 1 , 8J
Benjamin, Waller; 104 Chile; 74
nerlin Wall; 4J, 1 0 1 China; 1 5 , 69, 70, 1 0 1
Berluseon i , Si lvio; 107 Chiquita Banana; 66
'Big Government is St ill in Charge ' ; Chirac, jacques; 1 4
78 Chomsky, Noam: 1 1 , I J , 1 7, 1 8 . 25,
Bin Laden, Osama; I I , 6 J , 1 20 40, 46, 4 9 , 62, 67. 76, 93, 94
Bismarck. Olto von; 5.1 Christian Democracy Pany (CUP);
Bobbio, Norbeno; 7 109
Boeing Corporalion; 45 Clan"n; 20
Iloiivar, Sim6n; III Clausewitz. Carl von; J I
Climon. Bill; 56 1 06. 1 07, 1 10, I ll. 1 1 4, l l 5. 1 2 1 ,
Colombia; 1 18 1 23, 1 24
Colombia Plan; 1 1 6 Engtls, Friedrich: 2. 7. 28, 89
Common Market or the South Eu ropean Union: 45. 76
l M E RCOSUR)j 1 1 6 Europe: 18, 38, 43. 45, 68, 69, 97
Comnlllnisl Manifesto; 2 , 5 , 28. 89, 95 ElU(on; 1 19
Considerations on Western Marrism;
104 Fabbriche del soggetto; 109
Copernican; 2 Federalist papers; 94
Costa Rica; 1 1 6 Feuerbach, Ludwig; 2
COlt. Roben; 25, 60 First World War: 3, 10, 5 2
Crisi dello slato-pinno; 109 Ford; 4 5 , 1 1 9
Cuba: 76, 1 1 7 Fortunej 46
Cueva, Agustin; 28, 8 1 , 1 1 1 Foucault, Michael; 24, 29. 30, 1 09
Czechoslovakia: 2 1 France ; 9, 37, 43, 5 1 , 55, 68, 104, 1 07 .
108, 109, 1 24
Dahl, Robert A.; 48 Free Trade Area of the Americas
Davos; 23 (FTAA): 8 1 . 1 1 6
Debray, Regis; 102 Friedman, M illon; 1 07
DeleuU", Gilles: 1 09 F ried man, Thomas: 15, 1 6, 62. 84
Denmark; 1 1 9 Fujimori. Albeno: 1 1 5
Derrida. Jaeques: 109 Fukuya ma. Francis: 16, 1 0 1
Deutsche Bank; 45 FulUr AlIlerieur; 109
oabb, Maurice; 2 3
Dominican Republic; 1 0. 74 Gabon: 2 7
Don QULrOle: 20. 3 I Galbraith.John K . ; 1 1 2
Dornbusch, Rudiger; 1 07 Galeano, Eduardo; 28
Dos Santos, Theolonio; 28 Gates, Bill; 50, 5 1
Drucker. Peter; 84 General Agreemem on Tariffs and
Drug Enforcement Administration Trade (GATT): 56, 76
(O EA); 1 1 7 General Motors: 1 1 , 1 1 9
Duke U n iversity; 93 Gennan)'; 9, 37, 45. 5 1 , 55
Duverger, Maurice: 1 1 1 Gindin, Sam: 10, I I 3
Gi ntis. Herbert; 92
Eagleton, Terry; 100, 101, 103. 104, Gonzalez Casanova , Pablo; 28, I l l.

105 1 18
East Timor; 1 1 7 Gortari, Carlos Salinas de; 1 1 5
Economist. The: 78 Gramsci, Amonioj 6. 5 1 , 52
Ecuador; 66. 1 1 7 Greece; 29
Eisenstadt, Samuel: I I I Greenpeaee; 65
EI SaiYador; 43 G reenwich Village; 29
Empire o/Chaos; 25 Group of Seven (G-7); 79
Empire: 1 . 4, 5, 6. 8, 1 0, 1 1 . 1 3. 14. Guatemala: 66
16, 1 8. 2J. 24. 25. 26. 35. 39, 47, Guattari, Felilt: 109
59. 60. 6 1 , 75. 80, 87, 88, 90, 9 1 • Guevara. Emesto 'Che': 98
93. 95. 98, 100. 1 03. 1 04, 105. Gulf War; 1 2, 6 1 . 62, 63. 74, 1 1 7

131
Habermas, Ji.lrgen; 34 Jaguaribe, Hclio; 28, III
Haiti; 37, 43, 67 japan ; 37, 69. 83 , 84
H ardt, Michael and Antonio Negri; jericho; 4
1 , 2, 4, 6, 8, 1 1 , 1 2, 1 3 , 1 4 , 1 5, 1 7,
19, 20, 23, 2 5, 26, 29, 30, 3 1 , 3 2 , Kagan, Robert; 1 2
3 3 , 34 , 3 5 , 36, 37, 38, 39, 40 , 4 1 , Ka nt. Im manuel; 10, 89
42 , 43, 44, 45 , 4 6, 47, 4 8, 50, 5 1 , Kapstein, Ethan; 46
5 2 , 5 3 , 54 , 5 7, 5 8, 59, 60, 62 , 64 , Kaulsky, Karl; 23
6 5 , 66, 67, 68, 6g, 70, 7 1 , 72, 73, Kelsen, Hans; 26, 27
74 , 7 5 , 77, 78, 83, 8 5 , 87, 88, 89, Keynes, john Maynard; 10, 109
90, 93, 94, 95 , 97, 98, 99, 1 00, K irkpatrick,jeane; 74
101, 103, 104, 1 0 5 , 106, 1 10, I l l, Kissinger, Henry; 38, 39
1 1 3, 1 1 6, 1 1 8, 1 1 9, 1 22, 1 24 Kosovo; 2 7 , 62
Hardt, M ichael; 87, 88, 106. l og, 1 10 Krauthammer, C harles; 1 2
Harlem; 48 Kyoto Agreemen l j 76
Hegel. Georg Wilhel m Fried rich ; 30
Hi lferding. Rudolf; 2, 23 La Anomalia Saillaje; log
Ho Chi Minh; 98 La Forma Stalo. Per la Critica
Hobbesian; 82, 83 dell 'Economia Polilico della
Hobsbawm, Eric; 1 1 1 ConslilUzionej log
Holland; 5 1 La Nacion; 1 22
Honduras; 39, So, 8 1 Labor ofDionysus. A Critique of Ihe
Hoselitz, Bert; 3 7 Slole-form; 109
H ungal)'; 2 1 . 1 1 9 Lacan,jacques; log
H u nlington. Samuel P. ; 1 2, 70, 7 1 , Lacandonajungle; 3 5
1 18 Landless Workers' Movement, Brazil
Hussein, Saddam; 1 1 , 16, 63 (MST); 36, 1 16
Latin America; 23 . 37, 38, 4 5 , 5 1 , 68,
11 potere consliluente; log 69, 88, 1 02, 1 1 8, 1 19
India; 23 , 37 Lenin, Vladimir Jl ich; 2, 1 3 , 23, 3 1 ,
International Convention on the 1 1 1, 1 13
Rights of the Child; 76 Les noulleoux espaces de liberte; 1 09
I nternational Coun ofjustice; 77 Lockean; 83
International Criminal coun; 7 5 Lang Twentiet/l Century, The; 2 5
International Labor Organization Los Angeles; 33, 83, 1 2 1
(JLO); 43 Luhmann, Niklas; 26. 3 4
International MonetaI)' Fund ( J M F); Lukacs, Gyorg; 54
2, 2 4 , 56. 59, 6 5, 7 1 , 72 , 78, 79, 8 1 , Luxemburg, Rosa; 1, 13, 23, 1 04 , 1 1 1
go, 1 1 3. 1 1 7. 1 20 Lyotard, Jean·Fran'iOise; 109
Iraq; 6, 7, 8, 9. 10, 1 1 , 1 3 , 1 4, 1 6, 1 7 ,
20, 17, 6 1 Machiavelli, Niccolo; 33, 60, 92
Italian Communist Party (PC)); 108 Madison, james; 94
Ita l ian Radical Party; 108 Magdoff, Hany; 23
Italian Socialist Party; 1 10 Maldonado Denis, Manuel; 28
Italy; 68, 104, 108, log, 1 1 0 Managua; 77
Mandel, Ernst; 23

132
Mandela, Nclson; 98 North Atlantic Treaty Organi2:3tion
Mao Zedong; 3 1 . 98 (NATO); 9. 1 20
Marini, Ruy Mauro; 28 North Atlantic; 9. 24
Marx olrre Marx; 109 Nuftez. Omar; 2 8
Marx, Karl; 2. 7. 24. 28. 2 9. 30, 3 1 . 33.
35 . 49, 58 , 89. 105. 106. 1 1 3, 1 24 O'Connor, James; 2 3
Marxism; 23. 54. 70. 10 1 . 104. lOS, Obsenler; 1 2 2
106 Opera; e Stalo. Fra Rilloluzione
Massachusetts Institute or d'ottobre e New Deal; 109
Technology ( M IT); 94 Oqueli. Ramon; 80
Matlick, Paul; 23 O rganization ror Economk Co­
May 1 , 1886 Haymarket Square. operation and Development
Chkago; 5 1 (OECD); 65, 78, 1 20
McDonald's; 45 Organization or American States
Medherranean; 64 (OAS); 1 2 0
Meiskins Wood. Ellen; 54. 83. 85, 86.
90. 1 1 2. 1 24 Palestinian Intifada; 3 3
Menem. Carlos Saul; 1 1 5 Palmerola; 80
Mexico; 43. 1 1 5 Panama; 80. 1 1 7
Microsoft; 15. 45 Panitch. Leo; 10. 67, 68. 69. 1 1 3. 1 1 7.
Middle East; 69 1 18
Milan; 1 08 Paris Commune; 107
M i nisuy of Intcrnational Trade and Paris Peace Confe�nce; 10
IndusUY. Japan (Min); 84 Paris; 34. 93 , 1 24
Modem World System, The; 25 Peloponnesian war; 33
Monde Diplomat;que, Le; 1 1 9 Pentagon; 4. 9
Moro, Aldo; 1 08 Persian Gulf; 67
M ultilateral Agree ment on Peru; l i S
Investments (MAl): 59, 65, 66. 67, Petras.James; 28, 1 1 1
81, 1 17 Philadelphia; 94
Pinochet, Augusto; 74
National se-c:urity Council; 38, 69 Plato; 29
Negri, Antonio; 9. 19, 20. 42. 93. 108, Polirics ofSubllersiOIl. The; 1 09
log, t lO. 1 1 9. 1 2 1 , 1 2 2. 1 24 Popular Pa rry , Spain (PP); 1 1 8
New EllglandJournal ofMedicine; 48 Pono Alegre; 35
NfilJ Left Revir.w; I Poulant7.as, Nicos; 1 24
New York Times; 1 5. 62 . 84. 1 2 2 Production. POUler, and World Order;
New York; 6, 1 5 . 1 6. 29, 3 6 , 8 3 , 1 2 1 25
New Zealand; 1 1 9 Proletar; e Scato; 109
N icaragua; 10. 74. 77, 1 1 7 Ptolemy; 1 00

Nicaraguan Contras; 7 7 PueblaJPanama Plan; 1 16

Nixon, Richard; 3 8 Punic war; 33
Noriega. Manuel Antonio; 1 1 7
Nonh America; 1 19 Quademi del carcere; 52
North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA); 8 1 Ranciere. Jacques; log

1 33
Rawls,john; 26 Sub-saharan Africa; 5 1 , 1 1 7
Reaga n , Ronald; 75. 79 Sweden; 78, 92
Red Brigades; l oB Sweezy, Pa u l ; 23
Red Cross; 65
Reich. Roben; 42, 43. 44 Tajwan; 84
Restivo, Nestor; 1 1 9 Teguciga lpa; 8 1
Ricardo, David; 107 Thatcher, Ma rgaret; 79
Rome; ]3, 69. 75 Third International; 98
Rosto\\,. Walte r W.; 37 Third Reich; 54
Rousseau, jean jacques; 29, 33 Third World; 18, 23, 37, 39, 44, 69,
Russia; 6<), 70 79. 97, 103, 1 1 7, 1 1 8
Tinnanmen Square; 33
Sachs, [gnney; 23 Time Magazine; 1 22
Sandinista; 1 1 7 Tocqueville, Ale)[is de; 29, 30
Sastre, A l fonso; 7 Trujillo, Rafael Leonidas; 74
Saxe· Fernandez, joh n; 2B. 39, 1 1 1 , Tu rkey; 1 1 7
l iB Tw i n Towers; 6
Schmin, Carl; 26, 3 1 . 54
Seattlr; 4, 40 Uililever; 45
Seiser, G regorio; 2B U n ited Fruit; 66
Seoul; 34 United Ki ngdom; 8. 27, 45, 5 1 , 65
September 1 1 ; 6, 7, 36 United Nations (UN); 8 , 9. 1 5. 26, 27,
Service of Peace and justice; 65 60, 62, 64, 65, 7 5 . 76, 1 20
Sharon, Ariel; 1 1 7 United Nations Development
Shell; 45, 1 1 9 Programme (UN DP); 37, 43, 78
Shonfie[d, Andrew; 2J United State Treasury; 8 1 , 84
Siemens; 45 Un.ited States; 9. 1 1 , 1 2 , lJ, 18, 20,
Sierra Leone; 27 2 1 , 27, 3 7 , 38, 39, 43, 45, 5 1 , 60 ,
Singapore; 83 6 1 , 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70,
Smith, Adam; 107 7 1 , 73 , 75, 76, 77. 79, 82, 83, 84 ,
Socialist Register 2004; 1 1 3 93, 94, 97, 1 06, 1 1 1. 1 1 3, 1 1 6,
Somalia; 67, 76 1 1 9. 1 20
Som01.a, Anastasio; 74 University of Paris VI I I ; 109
Soros, George; 1 6 Upper West Side; 43
Sousa Samos. Boaven tu ra de; 82. 8 3 Uruguay; 1 1 7
South America; 1 16
South Korea; 3 3 , 3 5 , B3 Vargas Llosa, Mario; 102
Soulhern Command; Bo Veltmeyer, Henry; 28
Soviet Union; B, 32, 68, 101, 105 Venezuela; 1 19, 1 20
Spain; 17, 68. 1 8 , 104, l I B Veracruz; 10
Spi noza. Baruch; 24 Vida.!, Gorc; 6, I B, 39
St Francis of As�isi; 20, 9B. 99, 1 00, vidrla, jorge Rafael ; 74
l l8 Vietnam War; 1 7, 77
Stiglitz, Joseph; 1 17
Strange, Susan; 14, 69, 70 Wallerstein, Imma nuel; 25, 1 1 1
Sub-commander Marcos; 34 WarSaw Pact; 101

134
Washi ngton Consensus; 59 , 79. 83, World Ordtr$, Old and New; "1 5
1 15 World Trade Center; 4
Wash ington; 6, 7 , 8, 9. 10, 1 1 . 2 7 . World Trade Organization (W1'O);
3 6. 6 1 . 62, 63 , 65, 66, 69, 7 0, 7 1 , 45 , 56, 59. 65 , 7 2, 76. 7 9, 1 0 1 ,
7 5, 76, 77, 80, 82, 1 16, 1 1 7. 1 20, 1 1 3. 1 10
III WreSl'h, William; 5 1
While House; 4 . 9, 1 3, 1 6, 1 8, 45. 65,
1 20. 1 2 1 Year 501. The Conquest Continues; 15
Wilson, Woodrow; 10 Yugoslavia; 28. 1 1 6
Workers' Pany, Bra2 i l (Pl1; 1 1 6
World Bank (WB); 2, 24. 56, 59, 65 , Zapat islas; 34. 35, 36
7 1 , 7 2, 7 8, 79, 9°, 1 1 3 . 1 1 7, 120 Zi2l'k, Slavoj ; 95

13 5
General index

aboriginal communities; 88 18, 19. 2 1 • 25. ]0. J l , J2. 3 3 . 4 1 ,

aboriginal organizations; 1 7 42. 46. 5 1 . 55. 58, 59. 67. 77. 78,
accumulation; 3. 85 79. 80. 83. 90, 9 1 , 99. 1 0 1 . 1 04,
actOr\S); 1 1 . 1 2 . 1 8 , 84, 93 . 1 1 2 , 1 1 3, 1 07, 1 1 1 . 1 12 . 1 1 8 , 1 22. 1 2 J
115 capilalist accumulation; 5 1
alliancelsl; 4 1 • 5 1 . 54 capilalist class; 8 5 , 92
anarchisl(s); 16. 25 capitalist e)(ploit�tion; 3 3
anti- socialist; 5 1 capitalist relations o f production;
a nti-capitalism(s): 19 1 14
ami-capitalist(s); 1 5 . 35. 4 1 capitalist revolution; 80
anti-colonialist(s); 14, 98 capitalist society (ies); J, 54. 59. 60 .
anti-democratic; 65. 94 88
ami-fascist resistance; 9B capitalist stare(s); 7, 56. 77 . 8 1 . 84. 85
anti-globalization; 1 6. 34 capitalist(s); 3 , 4. 7 , 1 ]. 14. 1 6. 1 7 . 30,
anti-imperialist; 98. 1 2] 3 1 , 33. 36. 47, 5 1 . 52. 54. 56. 59.
anti-popular; 94 60. 8 1 , 82. 9 1 , 92. 104, 109. 1 1 9
ant i-socialist; 5 1 casino capitalism; 1 4
anti-Slate; 53. 78 centre; 4, 1 1 . 36. 37. J 9, 40, 73, 75.
apartheid; 32, ]3. 83 79. 82, 105
aristocracy; 53 cholos; 88
anned forces; 1 2. 70, 8 1 citizen(s); 44. 69. 83. 90
au th o ri ty; 9. 26, 27 , 5]. 73 , 74. 86, 1 1 1 dt izens rights; 90
autonomy; 53. 54 citi:.:ens wage; 92
citizenship; 69. 89. 90. 9 1 , 9 5. 96
banks; 46, 56, 84 civil society; 52. 57. 58, 62, 72, 77. 82,
biopolitic; 92 89, 90• 1 2 2
biopolitical; 28 , 9 1 , 95, 96 civilizalion; 1 3. 29 . ]2. 97 . 1 24
biopolitics; 92 class st ruggles; 30, 68, 8 1 , 96, 1 1 3 .
biopower; 29, 99 122
black; 8J class(es); 19. 45. 57. 60. 6 8 . 90 , 96.
bourgeois (bourgeoisie); 1 1 , 22. 29, 10J. 106
]0, 3 2 . 50, 52. 5]. 54, 85, 88. 92• coaJition; 30, 36. 51, 70. 79, 1 19
101. 106, 1 1 1, I I J . 1 1 4. 1 1 8. 1 2 2 roerciOOj 27. 122
business; 14. 1 6, ]2. 48. 49. 59, 7 0 . collect.ive subjects; 19
106. 1 1 2 colonialism; 30
colonies; 15
capilal; 3, 7 . 13, 30, 35. 47. 48 . 49. coloni7-3tlon; 2 1
52 . 53, 69, 83. 85, 88, 9 1 . 92, 1 0 1 . commun ication(s); 33, 34, 92, 95 . 96,
1 1 2. 1 1 8. 1 1 9 97. 1 2 1
capilalism(s); 1 . 2 . 3 . 4, 1 0, 1 3 , 14, 1 7 , communist society: 25
com muniSI(s); 1 6, 15, 49. 68, 95. 98.
99. 1 00. 104. 1 07
company(ie s); 14. 1 5. 1 6. 44. 45. 46.
48 . 49. 65. 66, 67. 69. 76. 79. 80.
84, 85, 1 1 3, 1 1 5, 1 1 9
complcxity(ies); 8, 19. 55. 74 . 106
concentration camps; 32
conflict(s); 27. 29. 3 5. 4 1 , 67. 73. 1 1 6 •
1 19. 1 20
confrontation; 1 9. 62
conquest; 7, 1 1 . 1 2 . 2 1 . 33
consensuS; 9, 2 8 . 53, 54. 55. 68 . 76
conservative; 1 5. 62, 78, 103, 1 1 1
constituent power; 40• 93, 96
consume r(s); 85, 1 1 5
contract(s); 27. 66. 83
corporation(s); 1 1 . 13. 14. IS, 16, 1 7.
24 , 4 '1 , 46. 47. 48, 49. 50. 5 1 . 53.
56. 62. 79 , 84
counter-power; 40. 55
counter-revolution; 1 04. 1 1 3
countries colonized; 1 3
coup d'�tat; 10. 120
coyote; 43
cuhural; 19. 55. 8 2 . 88. 101, 1 1 2. 1 1 4
debate(s); 5. 6, 37. 38, 4 1 . 48 . 93. 94,
100, 109
decentred; 1 0
democracy; 7. 1 6 . 1 7. 1 8, 2 1 . 3 2 . 66.
7 1 . 88. 90. 92. 1 0 1 . 1 1 7
democralic order; 14, 8 2
democratic slate; 8 1 . 8 3
democraLic; 4. 7 . 8. 9. 1 4 . 1 7 . 1 8 , 2 1 .
80. 8 1
demonSl'ralion(sl; 1 7 . 18, 35, 101
dcpendenCY; 4, 3 8. 39, 68
deregulation of market(s); 80. 85
despotism; 29. 4 8
delerriloria lized; 10
developlll c nt; 3 , 32, 3 3 , 35. 37, 38.
44 . 46. 47. 5 1 . 54. 59. 1 05, 1 1 3.
1 14
dialectic; 40, 53. 107
dictatorship; 2 1 . 3 5
d isciplinary sociery; ;1o
137
doclrine(s); 1 2 , 5 1
dominant class(es); 7. 1 1 . 14. 68.
1 14, 1 1 5, 1 1 8, 1 22
domination; 4, 1 1 , 20. 29. 30, 31, 36.
6 1 . 72. 73. 96. 1 1 5
drug(s); 7 1 . 1 1 6
ecologists; 1 6
economy(ies); 3 . 1 4 . 15. 23 . 24 . 36.
39. 42. 45. 46, 47. 59 , 70, 78 . 79.
80, 83 , 84, 94, 1 00, 105. 106, 1 07,
1 1 4, l i S, 1 1 6. 1 1 7 , 1 1 9
education; 32, 79. 90. 1 1 4
emanCipation; 9 1 • 94. 99
emancipat o ry; 20, 2 1 . 56, 68
empire; 1 , 4. 8, 1 1 , 1 2 , 1 3 . 15. 1 6. 18.
1 9. 20, 23. 26. 27, 28. 30. 3 1 , 31 ,
34. 36. 3 7 . 39 . 40, 4 7 . 50 .58. 59.
60 .6 1 . 62. 63, 64. 66• 67. 68. 69,
70 . 7 1 , 73. 75, 77. 79. 8 2 , 8 7. 91 •
96. 97, 99. 103. I l l ! 1 1 3. 1 14.
1 1 6, 1 1 7, 1 1 8. 1 1 9, 1 20, 1 2 1 . 1 23
empowerment; 89. 90
enem)iies); 19. 20. 3 1 , 3 5 . 40. 4 1 , 48.
7 1 . 75. 1 1 6
equal ity; 32
cstabl ishment; 10, 24. 62, 65. 85. 1 1 6
exploitalion; 20, 30, 47. 49. 88. 1 1 3
exploited; 29. 3 1 , 48. 82. 88. 9 1 , 99.
1 19
feminists; 1 7
feudalism; 3 1
finance; 14, 46. 88
financial; 3 . 72. 80. 8] , 88. 90, 1 1 7.
1 20
financ:ialization: 3
forces of production; 1 1 3
forces; 1 2. 1 7, 28. 3 6. 4 1 , 6]. 68 , 77,
103. 107, 1 1 7
rree markets. 42. 48
freedom; 7. 1 2, 1 6, 7 1 . 73, 93 . 94.
98, 1 1 1
ghettos; 83
global market(s); 45, 69, 83. 84. 101
 global; 3. I I . 1 3 . 1 5 . 24. 26. 3°. 3 1 .
:
.,. 13 , 34. 36. 4 °. 4 1 . 45 . 46. 47 . 48 •
oS 49, 55 , 56 . 60. 6 1 . 62. 63. 64. 67.
68 , 69, 7 1 . 72. 73. 75. 7 7 . 84. 85.
89. 90. 9 1 , 1 1 2. 1 1 3 . 1 23. 1 24
globa l ization ; 1 . 2 . 3. 4. 5. 14. 1 5. 1 6.
1 7. 1 9. 3 1 . 3 5. 4°. 44 . 46. 56 . 59.
73. 82. 83. 84 . 89. 99. I I I . 1 1 2 .
1 23
'globalphobics'; 5
goods and services; 4. 1 1 5
health; 14. 48. 76. 79. 1 1 4
hegemon; 64
hegemony; 1 1 . 3° . 60. 7 1 . 7 2. 97 . 1 1 5 .
1 1 6. 1 20
historical materia lism; 25. 26. 59.
70, 105
h isLOry; 1 . 4, 7. 8 . 16. 1 7 . 19. 23. 43,
52. 53, 55. 63. 66. 79, 89. 96. 104.
107. 1 14. 1 1 6. 1 1 9. 1 22 . 1 24
housing; 79. 93. 1 1 4
human rights; 16. 7 1 , 1 1 7
humanitarian; 6 , 2 7 . 28. 56. 64, 65.
66. 76, 1 1 6
human ity; 20. 75. 99. 1 24
identity; 3. 35. 73. 10 I
ideologist(s); 46. 48. 6 1 . I 1 2. I 14.
1 23
ideology; 30. 43. 53. 59. 60. 1 1 0. 1 1 3 ,
1 1 5. 123
imm igrants; 19. 43
imperialism: 2 . 3 . 40. 5. 7. 10. 1 3. 14.
19. 2 1 . 24. 23. 26. 3 °. 38 . 39. 59.
60 .64. 65 . 67, 68. 69. 7 1 . 73. 75.
80. 84. 1 1 2. 1 1 3. 1 14. 1 1 6. 1 1 7.
J J 8. 1 20. 1 23. 1 24
imperia.l ist(s); I. 3. 4. 6, 8. 9. 1 1 . 1 2 .
1 3. 1 6. 1 7 . 1 9. 27. 32. 36. 59 , 6 1 .
63. 64. 6 8. 7°. 73. 74 . 7 9. 80. 85.
100. 107. 1 13 . J l 6. 1 1 8. 1 1 9. 1 20.
1 24
i mperialistic; 2 7 . 28. 63. 64
income; 1 5. 43. 46. 85. 9 1 . 92 . 1 1 4 .
1 19
1 38
Indians; 88
individual consciences; 2 9
individual libenies; 3 2
individualist; 8 2
industrialized count ries; 78. 80. 96.
1 13
i n formation; 50. 77. 78. 84, 95, 96
insurgence; 97
insurgent forces; 36
i ntellectuals; 7, 20, 50, 54. 67. 7 1 , 90,
98. 105, 1 09, 1 20, 1 23, 1 24
im er-imperial rivalry; 14
international; 3, 8. 9. 1 1 • 1 2• 1 3 , 1 4 ,
1 9. 23, 26. 27, 28. 33. 35. 36. 37.
38. 39. 4 1 . 55, 56. 58. 59, 60. 6 1 ,
62, 64. 65, 69. 70, 72, 75, 76. 79.
83, 84. 89, 90. 925. LOO. 101. 1 1 1,
1 1 3, 1 1 7 , 1 1 8, J l 9. 1 20
internationalism; 33, 40. 89
i nternationalist ideology; 1 0
justice; 1 2, 1 3. 28, 6 1 , 63. 64, 65 . 66,
77. 1 1 6
labour foree; 4J. 49
labour legislation; 43, 49
labour reforms; 85
labour u n ions; 1 9 , 4 1 . 49. 85, 95
labour; 4 1 . 49, 88. 9 1 . 96
laiss�-fa i re; 5 2
landowners; 88
latina; 47. 83
legality; J 2
Leviathans; 1 5 . 46. 83, 99
liberal(s}; 5 1 , 52. 70. 1 0 1 , 1 1 1
l iberalism; 52, 108
l i benarian pessimism; 103
mafia; 1 6. 1 1 9. 1 20
mandarins; 68, 1 2 3
market freedom; 1 1 5
market(s); 1 6, 26. 38. 42. 45 , 46, 47,
50, 57, 67. 69. 7 1 . 79. 80, 82. 8 3 .
84, 85. 1 0 1 . J l 5. J l 7
markets' tyranny; 4. 1 7 , 82. 1 1 7
Marxist tradition; 1 05, 106. 108
mass m�dia; 7 , 70. 72. 8 2 . 1 1 4. 1 24 non-cit izens; 69
material conditions; 28 non-global(s); 16, 1 7 . 19
means of production; 9 5. 96 non-i m perialist; 1 1 8
mest izos; 88 non-national; 46
metropolis; 1 5 non-place: 24 , 1 2 1
metropolitan capitalism; 1 8 , 4 6 . 77, non-territorial; 69
78 , 8], 9 1 , 1 1 8 nuch:ar weapons; 32
midd le classes; 88
migrants; 18, 43, 97 oi l : 1 3 , 14, 63 . 1 19
m i l itant(s)j 1 7 . 1 9 , 98, 99 oligopolist ic; 1 1 4
military occupation: 7, 8 , 1 1 , 2 1 ownership; 1 5
m i litary; 1 2 , 1 5. 1 7, 27 , 4 1 , 60, 63 , 67 ,
7 1 , 77, 80, 8 1 . 88, 1 1 6 pacifism; 1 7
mobilization: 1 7 . 19. 4 1 pacifisls; 1 6. 1 7
mode o f p roducrion: 3 . 1 04. 1 23 para militaries; 88
modern; 1 3 , 1 5 , 1 6 , 29. 32. 35. 48. 66 . peace: 6, 1 0. 1 7, 65. 67
9 1 • 102 peasants; 88
modernist; 48 periphery; 4 , 1 1 , 37. 38. 39, 40, 49, 60,
moderniry; 32. 33 62 , 79, 80 , 82, 85, 90. 9 1 , 1 1 7 . 1 1 8
multilatenllism; 8 pickets: 36
m u ltitude(s); 1 8, 1 9. 30 . 32. 40. 4 1 , planet: 64 . 96, 102
87. 88. 89. 9 1 . 92 . 93. 94. 9 5 . 96• policy(ies); 3 , 6. 9, 1 8, 20, 46, 5 1 . 5 2,
9 7. 98 . 99 , 10]. 104, 1 1 3. 1 1 4, 1 23 6 1 . 63. 7 1 . 76. 78, 79. 80, 82, 85,
90. 1 1 2. 1 1 4 . 1 1 5. 1 1 7
nation (s); 3. 26, 38. 39 . 44. 60. 62, polilical: 1 , 2, 5. 9. 1 7, 1 9 . 23, 24. 25,
6 5 . 66, 69, 72, 79. 80 26. 29. 32. 33. 36, 38. 39, 4 1 , 49,
nation building; 20. 2 1 5 2 , 53. 54. 55, 56, 5 8 , 59. 6 1 , 65 ,
national; 9. 10, I I. 1 2 , 1 3 . 1 4, 1 5, 3 1 , 68. 69, 80. 82, 84, 86, 87, 89 , 92•
3 5, 36 . 4 2 , 44 , 45, 46 . 47, 49 , 5 1 , 94 , 96, 97. 98. 100, 10 1 , 102, 1 0 5 .
53 . 54, 55 . 56, 58 , 6 1 , 65, 70. 72• 106, 107, 1 08, 1 1 2. 1 1 4. 1 1 5, 1 1 6.
7 5. 76, 7 7 , 78, 83, 84, 87. 90, 104, 1 2 2, 1 24
1 1 3 , 1 19 politics; 8, 19. 20 , 3 1 , 5 2 . 5 3 . 54, 55 .
nationalism; 1 1 9 7 1 , 1 05. 106, 107
natjonalirYi 56 population(s)j 6. 1 8 . 2 1 , 3 7 . 46. 4 7 .
nation-slatej 10, 1 5, 27, 32. 33 , 42, 5 1 , 64. 69, 7 7, 83, 8 7 . 92. 97 . 1 1 5 .
43, 47, 50. 53. 56, 5 7 . 64 , 73. 8] . 1 17
84, 85. 86. 87, 89. 1 0 1 , 104, 123 post-capitalisl; 2 1
natural resources: 13 post-colonial: 27 , 97
nco-colonialism; 38 posl-ford ism: 1 0 1
neo-conservative: 76 posl-imperiaJisl; 2 1 , 2 7
neo-liberal: 1 . 2 , 3. 5 . 14. 1 6, 19. 20, post-modern society; 96
2 5. 35 , 46, 59, 68. 78 , 82, 89, 99 , posl-modernity; 9 1 . 9 5 , 1 2 3
100, 104, 1 1 1 , 1 1 2 , 1 1 3. 1 14. 1 1 5, post-structuralism: 1 0 7
1 1 8 . 1 23 post-war: 2 3 . 64, 8 9 , 1 20
neo-liberalism: 59. 79, 9 1 . 10 1 , 1 1 3, pOI-banging protesters: 36
1 1 4. 1 1 5 , 1 1 8 poverty; 98, 99, 1 23

1 39
power; 13. 24. 27 . 19. 30. 33. 36. 40.
56, 60. 6 1 . 62. 63. 64. 70. 72. 7 3 .
74. 7 7. 8 1 . 89 . 92. 93. 94. 96. 97.
99. 103. 1 1 2. 1 1 5. 116. 117
privatc companies; 83. 1 1 5
profits; 6. 1 5. 49. 76. 8 5
progress: 1 6. 32. 50. 66. 79. 1 1 5. 1 1 7
progressive policies; 1 1 4
proletariat; 88. 95. 1 23
propeny; 46. 94. 96
public agenda; 100
public em ployees; 88
public expenditure: 77. 78. 79. 1 14.
1 17
public opinion: 16. 1 7
public sector; 79. 90
public sphere; 1 1 4
racism: 48
reaclionary; 19. 33. 1 2 3
reappropriation; 92. 9 5
reform(s); 7 8 . 8 5 . 9 5 . 1 14
regime; 4. 1 1 . 2 1 . 31 . 40. 55. 62. 67.
80. 87. 88. 1 1 8
regulation(s); 5 1 . 80. 1 1 4. 1 1 8
relationships of force; 89
repression: 5 1 . 6 1 . 88. 96
republicanism: 87
republicans; 98
resistance movemenls; 9
revolution; 1. 55. 80. 84, 87. 9 1 • 97.
98. 99. 101. 101. 10]
revolutionary: 4 1 . 9 1 . 98. 103. 104.
105. 106
secularization: 32
semi·cilizens: 69
sexism: 48
sexual m i norities: 88
slavery: 32 . 33. 64, 91
social classes: 88
social democracy; 90. 1 08
social forces; 35. 53, 58. 102. 1 07
social movement(s): 16, 18. 19. 66.
106
social ordeJ{s): 36. 59. 1 23
social relotions of production: 1 1 3
social science: 13. 28. 29. 7 0
social struggles: 4 1 . 12 2
social wage: 9 1 . 91
socialism; 32. 68
socialist(s); 1 6. 95. 1 0 1 . 104
sociery of comrol: 29. 30
sociery: 6. 21 . 15. 30. 31. 4 1 , 52. 59.
97. 99. 106. 1 1 1 . 1 1 3. 1 23
sove reignry (sovereignties): 9. 10. 1 2 ,
13. 53. 56• 66. 67. 7 1 , 73. 74. 75 ,
76. 77. 82. 1 1 4, 1 1 7
state: 3. 7, 10. 26, 42, 49. 50 , 5 1 . 52 •
53. 55, 56. 5;. 60. 65. 66, 67. 70•
7 1 . 73. 77. 78. 79, 80, 8 1 . 82. 83,
84. 85. 86, 87, 89, 90. 9 1 . 92, 98 .
100. 1 09. 1 1 2• 1 1 5. 1 20
state·owned companies: 79. 1 1 5
strike(si: 33. 1 0 I
structuralism: 100
structure; 2, 3 . 8 . 1 1. 1 3 . l B . 19. 39.
56. 57. 58. 69 . 70. 73 , 74. 90. 1 0 1 .
1 1 1 . 1 1 3. 1 1 5. 1 1 9, 1 13. 1 24
subsidies; 44. 84. 1 I 7
subversive: 4 1
superpower: I I, 12, 60. 68. 7 1 . 73.
75. 76
supranational: 1 0. 64. 65. 72. 83
surplus-value; 47, 85
system(s): 1 , 2. 8. 13. 1 4, 1 9, 23, 24,
27. 37. 38. 39, 59 . 6 1 . 64, 72, 79.
82. 83. 84 . 90. 94. 100. 102. 103.
104, 1 07. 108. 1 1 2, 1 13, 1 16
taxes; 1 5. 44, 85
technology: 42. 44. 70, 84
territorial occupation: 1 3, 2 1
territorial; 10, 1 1 , 1 2 , 1 5, 36, 69, 73.
97
territory; 14, 94
terrorism; 7. 7 1
Texas ranchers; 16
theory: 2. 7. 37. 39. 44, 48. 54. 56.
89. 97. 100, 1 06, 107. 109. 1 1 5.
1 22. 1 Z4
tradition: 25. 29. 32, 60. 70
tribes; 1 7
trickle-down theory; 1 1 5
unaccountabilil)'; 8 1
unemployment; 80
unification; 40. 5 1 . 69. 83
unilateralism; 1 2
un iversal community; 10
unsustainable; 9
value; 1 3. 54
victim(s); 8. 10. 33. 56. 63. 76. 8 3 .
105. 1 2 2 . 1 23
waged labour; 43. 9 1
wllr crimes; 7 5 . 77
walis); 6. 7, 10. I I. u. 1 3 , 14. 16 . 1 7 .
1 8. 20. 2 1 , 2 7. 32 . 3 9 . 6 1 , 62, 6] ,
64. 98, 1 05, 1 1 9, 1 23
w8te lis); 2 . 6, 14. 93 , 1 1 6
wealth; 1 1, 43, 46, 62 , 85. 94, 96, 99.
1 15
women; 88, 104 . 123, 1 24
wor kelis ); 43. 49, 5 1 , 85. 88, 9 1 , J 08 ,
J 1 9, 1 23
working class; 1 0 1 , 107
world economy; 3 , 24 , 39, 45. 46 , 47 ,
84, 1 1 9
world order; 8, 1 2, 26, 3 1 , So, 59. 64,
67, 70. 73. 74, 87. JOO. 1 20
world population; 2 1 , 37 . 46, 5 1 , 9 7
world records; 7 5