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On Empire:
Revolutionary Communism or “Communism” without Revolution?
Debating Empire Why then the attraction of these books?1 Negri and Hardt claim to have
discovered a fundamental transformation in society, and they draw
on a wide range of examples of different aspects of social life
and human society to make their case. This new stage, which they
call “Empire”, is, they say, a society in transition away from
the imperialist system. In particular, the authors examine the
different aspects of what has come to be called “globalisation”,
which they consider evidence of how the world is advancing to
communism – toward the disappearance of nation-states, when humanity
will be self-organising and self-administrating. The authors give voice to the feelings of millions that conditions exist
for humanity to go forward to somewhere different, where society
need not be organised on the capitalist principles of greed and
piracy. This is captured in the conclusion to Multitude: “We can
already recognise that today time is split between a present that
is already dead and a future that is already living – and the
yawning abyss between them is becoming enormous.” The possibility
of organising human society on a wholly different basis reasserts
itself constantly, and this possibility is expressed not only
in political aspirations and struggles but also in every sphere
of social life (art and culture, methods of scientific inquiry,
philosophy, and so forth). The striving for communism is real,
although it can be more or less conscious. Lenin referred to this
as communism springing from a thousand pores. It is no wonder
that, because Negri and Hardt try to give expression to this tendency,
their work will find a certain echo. The problem with this picture is that society cannot just spontaneously
transform from the class society of today to the communist society
of tomorrow. Those who are currently on top of human society will
do and do do everything in their power, including unleashing massive
bloodshed, to maintain the existing capitalist system. Empire fails to put centre stage the need for that which they say is “already
dead” –imperialism, reaction and its ideological manifestations
– to be definitively destroyed and buried. The authors end up
far too often justifying and extolling the world, not as it can
be, but as it is “already living” – which in reality is still
shackled and scarred by private ownership, class divisions, the
cleavage into oppressor and oppressed countries and all of the
other horrors and injustices of the contemporary social order.
In short, they want communism without the difficulties, sacrifices
and uncertainties of revolution. We will see later that Negri
and Hardt’s vision of communism doesn’t really go beyond the limits
of the present system, which is perhaps why they are ready to
cry victory when the battle has yet to be waged. We will see that, in every sphere, the outlook of Negri and Hardt is the
worship of spontaneity, the belief that social processes will
by themselves lead to favourable results, thus downplaying the
role of people as the conscious factor in reorienting social development.
Indeed, the construction of Negri and Hardt’s theory is itself
a lesson in spontaneity: it represents the tailing after intellectual
currents of the last several decades. In particular, the authors
embrace the writings of various postmodernists and borrow heavily
from their concepts and vocabulary. Negri and Hardt continually
refer to the contemporary world as “postmodern”, but they do not
want to consider themselves “postmodernists”. The authors write
that, “However confusedly or unconsciously, they [the postmodernists]
indicate the passage toward the constitution of Empire.” Negri
and Hardt take what they consider to be the confused or unconscious
work of the postmodernists as the building blocks of their ideological
system. Marxism of the twenty-first century must be attentive to all of the discoveries
and debates of contemporary society (just as Marx and Engels were
in developing the ideology of the proletariat in the nineteenth).
Marxism must engage, dissect, criticise what is wrong and absorb
all aspects of what is correct from the most varied of sources.
But what Negri and Hardt do is something quite different. They
are making the “confusion” of postmodernism more conscious and
systematic and they argue that this new ideology corresponds to
the material changes in the way society is organised – to which
they give the name “Empire”.
The main thesis of Empire is that capitalism has entered a new epoch,
beyond imperialism, in which the basic analysis that Lenin made
of the imperialist epoch no longer applies. In particular, the
role of the nation-state has declined tremendously in importance.
“Empire” is the world after imperialism has, in the authors’ view,
completely imposed capitalist relations throughout the world,
leaving no region or area untouched. The processes of production
and communication have linked together the whole world in a way
unimaginable previously. New forms of labour are emerging, which
result in new class transformations. The countryside of the world
has undergone dramatic changes. Much of the above is, of course, true. The world has undergone tremendous
transformation in the half century since the end of the Second
World War and the three decades since the death of Mao Tsetung.
Since the collapse of the USSR (which we should never forget had
become an imperialist country no less subject to the laws of imperialism
than all others), intra-capitalist rivalry, the push toward war,
has given way to the tendency of the imperialists to form an “operating
fraternity of thieves” (to borrow Marx’s description in Capital)
in which their particular and contradictory interests are at the
present time mainly subordinated to their common need to preserve
and protect the conditions of this thievery.
The authors argue that “what used to be conflict or competition among
several imperialist powers has, in important respects, been replaced
by the idea of a single power that over-determines them all, structures
them in a unitary way, and treats them under one common notion
of right that is decidedly post-colonial and post-imperialist.
This is really the point of departure for our study of Empire:
a new notion of right, or rather, a new inscription of authority
and a new design of production of norms and new instruments of
coercion that guarantee contracts and resolve conflicts”,2 and “Empire is not a weak echo of modern imperialism
but a fundamentally new form of rule.”3 The present imperialist system has no centre or centres, the authors argue.
It is a system that is now engulfing the whole world “seamlessly”
and obliterating all the distinctions in its way. In general,
Empire is considered not only a higher form of capitalism beyond
imperialism, but also a historical advance over the earlier imperialist
epoch: “we judged Empire less bad or better than the previous
paradigm from the standpoint of the multitude”.4 The authors maintain that sovereignty has been “deterritorialised”. By
this they mean that the system of government and control is no
longer linked to a specific national formation or state system.
Here, as elsewhere, they take real phenomena, such as the increased
migration of people, the fluidity of capital, the development
of international institutions such as the United Nations, etc.,
but don’t recognise that these features are growing up within
a world structure dominated by imperialist nation-states. “It
might appear as if the United States were the new Rome…[but] Any
such territorial conception of imperial space, however, is continually
destabilised by the fundamental flexibility, mobility and deterritorialisation
at the core of the imperial apparatus.”5
However, what “appears” is also, in this case at least,
what exists. To quote one reviewer, “The actually existing United
States constantly threatens to emerge from the pages of Empire
like the face in the nightmare, and has to be perpetually repressed.”6
While the authors do not try to make the absurd argument that the US has
been totally free from imperialism, they do argue that imperialism
was an essentially European phenomenon, as opposed to Lenin’s
view that it emerged mainly out of the process of the growth and
concentration of capital into monopoly.7
Lenin, of course, always considered the US an imperialist
country and never fell into the error of arguing that because
the US possessed far fewer colonies it was any less “imperialist”
than Britain or France, for example. Since the Second World War,
the formerly colonial countries were granted formal independence
but remained enslaved to the world imperialist system in the form
of neo-colonialism. Millions of people around the world know very
well that US imperialism is all too real. The driving force behind the United States’ evolution is, in Negri and
Hardt’s eyes, not the logic of capitalism, with its incessant
compulsion to expand and reproduce on an ever-intensifying scale.
Instead, they believe that its dynamics are explained by particular
features of the US, linked to its history as it expanded westward
across the North American continent from its origins on the Atlantic
coast. They argue that this “democratic expansive tendency implicit
in the notion of network power must be distinguished from other,
purely expansionist and imperialist forms of expansion”.8 The authors go on to heap praise on Woodrow Wilson’s “internationalist
ideology of peace as an expansion of the constitutional conception
of network power” and specifically contrast him with the “imperialist”
tendencies represented by Theodore Roosevelt.9 How much importance
should we give to the particular coat of paint with which Wilson
tried to beautify US imperialist interests in entering the First
World War? In fact Negri and Hardt do a lot of fawning over the
United States and attach great importance to what the US rulers
say about themselves. It is perhaps worthwhile to remind Negri
and Hardt that imperialist demagogic justification for their crimes
is as old as imperialism itself. The Belgians tried to justify
their brutal acquisition of the Congo in the late nineteenth century
as a fight against Arab slavery! Japan sought to liberate Asia
from the rule of Europeans under the banner of Asia for Asians,
etc., etc. This reminds us of Marx’s statement that while “every
shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody
professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not
yet won even this trivial insight. They take every epoch at its
word and believe that everything it imagines about itself is true.”10 To Negri and Hardt, the US’s long march to world hegemony is not something
that is inherent in the capitalist system itself, and not essentially
the same as what drove Britain, France, Germany or the USSR, as
each of these states also strove to establish its own imperialist
empire. The authors treat us to a never-never land in which US
imperialism no longer exists, indeed never fully existed, where
the Vietnam War was not the defining event of a whole period of
world relations in the 1960s, but rather an aberration, a “last
gasp” of European-style imperialism, in which somehow the US had
become entangled “when it had strayed the farthest from its original
constitutional project”.11 The conclusion is that “the coming Empire is not American and the United
States is not its centre. The fundamental principle of Empire
as we have described it throughout this book is that its power
has no actual and localisable terrain or centre”.12 At the time
of this review, in 2006, when the US has been on an accelerated
world-wide rampage since 11 September 2001, such a description
seems almost ridiculous. The world system indeed does have a centre,
or actually several centres, but among which the US is overwhelmingly
dominant. Certainly new international institutions have emerged
that, to a certain extent, can provide a kind of “governance”
to the world in which the various imperialist powers co-operate
and to some degree “mediate” the conflicts between the imperialist
states and the local ruling classes of the countries they feed
upon and dominate. But first we should point out that these institutions
in no way represent a passage to a stateless world, rather they
serve to preserve and give order to the existing world system
of states with all of the inequality and relations of dominance
that we see around us. Furthermore, events have underscored the
limitations of any of these institutions to transcend the sovereignty
of the US itself. The United Nations is given great attention by Negri and Hardt. Indeed
they begin their argument with an analysis of the UN “not as an
end in itself but rather as a real historical lever that pushed
forward the transition to a properly global system”.13 Certainly
it can be said that the world needs institutions that can take
into account the needs of humanity as a whole. This can be seen
in the need for a sensible management and protection of natural
resources, such as fisheries, and of bio-diversity or the even
more glaring need for the allocation of human resources on the
basis of needs, such as in response to epidemics or the overcoming
of the gross inequalities between different regions of the world.
But we can see from countless examples that the world has become
more lopsided and unequal, not less, and that the common resources
of mankind are increasingly endangered, such as by the very real
threat of global warming. And the UN’s self-proclaimed central
mission of preventing armed conflicts between states has not slowed
down imperialist aggression and war. Instead of representing “transitions
to a properly global system” of the future, the UN and similar
institutions are important pillars in maintaining the world as
it is, and, in that sense, are not at all transitions to the future
but rather obstacles to reaching it. When we look at the concrete reality of the United Nations we see that
it is not an institution sitting above the actually existing relations
of power between states. When Negri and Hardt discuss the UN as
an institution they leave out its bedrock element, that five countries
have a veto in the Security Council, the only UN body able to
authorise (or legitimise after the fact) the recourse to force
and war. Further, we have seen that even among the five permanent
members of the UN Security Council, all vetoes are not equal.
Even though three of these countries opposed the US war against
Iraq, and even though the Secretary General of the UN Kofi Annan
was to declare (albeit two years later) that the war against Iraq
was “illegal” from the point of view of the UN Charter, France,
China and the USSR could not, and did not, prevent the US and
Britain from going to war essentially alone and against the will
of the great majority of world states (not to mention the overwhelming
opposition of the masses in Britain and a huge opposition movement
in the US itself). The UN is both a vehicle for facilitating the
“operating fraternity of thieves” as well as an arena for dispute
among the thieves themselves. But, as the Iraq war proved, it
can only reflect and cannot in any fundamental way over-rule or
supersede the actual geo-political realities in the contemporary
world. Empire was written in the period between the first Gulf War (1991, when
Bush senior was president of the US) and the Kosovo war that began
in 1998, in other words, during the “Clinton” era. While the main
trends of US imperialism, which would later form the basis of
the Bush II programme, were already beginning to take form during
the Clinton period, they had not yet made the “leap” that took
place after 11 September 2001. Still, even in the rosy years of
the 1990s there exists plenty of evidence (ex-Yugoslavia, Congo,
etc.) to refute Negri and Hardt’s contention that, “the idea of
peace is at the basis of the development and expansion of Empire.”14
Of course, these authors cannot be expected to predict the future,
but any theory that claims to be scientific, which claims to actually
reflect the world as it is and to understand the laws determining
its motion, is obligated to interrogate itself based on how well
the actual unfolding of events validate or call into question
its underlying assumptions. So Negri and Hardt were obligated
in their later work, Multitude, to revisit the thesis of Empire.
True, in Multitude, “a general global civil war”15 has replaced the authors’
earlier claim of peace as the basis of Empire. Unfortunately,
Negri and Hardt avoid any real self-interrogation, especially
on the founding principle of their theory, the surpassing of the
imperialist epoch by something higher. In Multitude the authors argue: “One could say at least since the early
1990s, US foreign policy and military engagement have straddled
imperialist and imperial logics.… The United States acts as a
national power along the lines of the modern European imperialist
states. On the other hand, each US military engagement and the
orientation of its foreign policy in general also carry simultaneously
an imperial logic, which is cast in reference not to any limited
national interest but to all the interests of humanity as a whole…
We should not simply regard, in other words, the humanitarian
and universalistic rhetoric of US diplomacy and military actions
as facades designed to mask the fundamental logic of national
interests. Instead we should also recognise them both as equally
real: two competing logics that run through one single military
political apparatus. In some conflicts, such as Kosovo, the imperial
humanitarian logic may be dominant, and in others such as Afghanistan,
the national, imperialist logic appears primary, while in still
others, such as Iraq, the two are mixed almost indistinguishably.
Both logics, in any case, in different doses and guises, run through
all of these conflicts.”16 “We should not get caught up in the tired debates about globalisation
and nation-states as if the two were necessarily incompatible.
Our argument instead is that national ideologies, functionaries,
and administrators increasingly find that in order to pursue their
strategic objectives they cannot act and think strictly in national
terms without consideration of the rest of the globe. The administration
of Empire does not require the negation of national administrators.
On the other hand, today imperial administration is conducted
largely by the structures and personnel of the dominant nation-states.”17 Thus, we see Negri and Hardt’s concession to reality: the post-11 September
war on the world by the US is at least partially powered by an
“imperialist logic” even if other conflicts, such as Kosovo, are
mainly a reflection of “imperial humanitarian logic”. “Imperial”
administration will be conducted by “structures and personnel
of the dominant nation-states”. And again we see the authors’
undue concern with the US ruling class’ explanation of their actions
rather than really analysing the driving force behind them. Negri and Hardt’s discovery of the common interests of the imperialist
powers is really nothing new at all. Nor has it ever been true
that any major imperialist power could act “without consideration
of the rest of the globe”. They can and do consider the situation
of the whole globe now and in the past, but they continue to do
so through the prism of their own national (imperialist) interests
and not from the abstract level of “Empire” that Negri and Hardt
are postulating. To the extent that the imperialists do act in
concert, for example the European imperialists through the vehicle
of the European Union, they reflect not some global interest standing
above states and classes but rather their common interests both
in their competition with the US and lesser rivals (such as Japan)
and as oppressor nations dominating much of the rest of the world
(the “Third World”). II. What is Capitalism? In order to understand why Negri and Hardt can arrive at such a fundamentally
wrong picture of today’s geo-politics, it is necessary to look
more deeply at how they understand capitalism itself. While Negri
and Hardt offer some useful observations concerning features of
contemporary society, they fail to understand the actual material
underpinnings of capitalism and are, thus, at a loss to explain
how capitalism is developing and what is pushing it forward. First of all, it needs to be reaffirmed that despite the still important
differences that exist between different countries and regions,
there is an imperialist world system, which is indeed capitalist
and as such is still governed by the basic laws that Marx and
Engels discovered. Certainly the world has undergone great changes
since Marx laid out the workings of capitalism so systematically
in Capital. Lenin, in particular, showed how capitalism had entered
a new era of monopoly capitalism, or imperialism, and since Lenin’s
time further great changes have occurred and will continue to
occur. But Lenin’s achievement was to analyse the era of capitalism
on the basis of the laws discovered by Marx. This was not out
of some dogmatic loyalty to Marx’s teachings but rather because
these laws, in a fundamental sense, continued to govern how capitalist
society moves and develops. It is an admirable undertaking to seek to comprehend the contemporary
economic system and if, in the course of these efforts, previous
understandings even by giants like Marx and Engels are proven
to be incomplete or even wrong, those who are fighting to change
the world should unhesitatingly recognise the truth. But we are
not convinced that “the Marx and Engels of the internet age” (as
Negri and Hardt are referred to on the back cover of Empire) have
really succeeded in discovering a more correct explanation for
capitalist society and its development. On the contrary, their
departure from the fundamental framework established by Marx and
Engels has led them into a morass of confusion. Hidden away in Empire is an observation that, were it true, would shake
to its very foundation the Marxist understanding of political
economy and, with it, our understanding of the revolutionary process
through which one social system is replaced by another. Negri
and Hardt write, “Postmodernisation and the passage to Empire
involve a real convergence of the realms that used to be designated
by base and superstructure.… In this context the distinctions
that define the central categories of political economy tend to
blur. Production becomes indistinguishable from reproduction;
the productive forces merge with the relations of production….”18 To understand this we should briefly review what Marxists mean by the
terms forces of production and relations of production. Forces
of production include land, machinery, technology and, most importantly,
the productive classes themselves and their ingenuity and creativity.
The way in which human beings are organised to use these forces
of production and distribute their product is referred to as the
relations of production. Here we are speaking of the system of
ownership of the means of production, the division of labour in
society, and the way in which the products of society are distributed
to its various members. In general, the relations of production
correspond to the level of the forces of production and together
constitute the economic base of society. For example, in medieval
Europe the feudal system based on landlordism and serfdom corresponded
more or less with the capacity to produce – the knowledge, techniques
and instruments of production – which existed at that time. There
was not yet a material basis and a corresponding social need for
the existence of a large class of labourers who were “free” from
a relation to the land and forced to sell their labour power to
the capitalists. Every economic base (that is, the forces and relations of production)
gives rise to a “superstructure” – institutions, culture, ideas
and a state – which corresponds to the given economic base and
enables it to go forward. To return to the example of the European
feudal system, we can see how it gave rise to institutions, such
as the Catholic Church, which corresponded to the feudal economic
base. Generally speaking, productive forces undergo development
both gradually and through spurts, which bring them more and more
sharply into contradiction with the relations of production. It
is this basic contradiction that calls forth revolution. When
tools need to speak, they do so through men, Mao Tsetung wrote.
This revolution will take place necessarily in the superstructure,
and notably through the seizure of political power, which will
enable new relations of production to be developed and the economic
base to leap forward. In very broad strokes this is what the bourgeois
or capitalist revolutions accomplished in the past and what the
communist revolution will do in the future.19 The brilliance of Marx and Engels was to have shown, even at a time when
capitalism was at a considerably lower level of development, that
the forces of production, the growth of modern industry, science
and a proletariat, were being increasingly restrained or “fettered”
by the private ownership of the means of production and the capitalist
commodity system in which the ability of the labourer to produce
is itself turned into a commodity to be bought and sold and “consumed”
(that is, used to create commodities through capitalist production).
Marx and Engels put it this way: “Only then [with the communist revolution] will the separate individuals
be liberated from the various national and local barriers, be
brought into practical connections with the material and intellectual
production of the whole world and be put in a position to acquire
the capacity to enjoy this all-sided production of the whole world
(the creations of man). All-round dependence, this natural form
of the world-historical co-operation of individuals, will be transformed
by the communist revolution into the control and conscious mastery
of these powers, which, born of the action of men on one another,
have till now overawed and governed men as powers completely alien
to them.”20 Thus, we can see two fundamentally opposed visions of how ultimately a
communist society will
be achieved. For Marx and Engels the realisation of human potential
can only come about by revolution, by the transformation of the
existing social conditions. Negri and Hardt argue otherwise, that the relations of production, far
from being a fetter on the further development of the productive
forces, are themselves “fusing” with the productive forces. (This
is linked to the authors’ understanding of “immaterial labour”,
which we return to later.) Negri and Hardt argue that, because
the labour process requires the co-operation of individuals, there
is no longer any useful distinction (or contradiction) between
production itself and the way society is organised to carry out
production. They argue that contemporary society, which they call
“Empire”, is self-organising through networks large and small
in particular countries and on a world scale. But the self-organisation
of society can only exist under communism when humanity really
is in a position to organise itself consciously and collectively.
But there are obstacles to this today, in particular the very
real capitalist relations of production, that production takes
place within a framework of commodity exchange and specifically
the exploitation of the labour power of the producers. Society
is restrained, deformed, and crippled by the existing capitalist
relations. Yes, the potential for a different kind of society
is constantly expressing itself, but it is only potential as long
as capitalism remains intact. While one could applaud Negri and
Hardt for extolling the capacity of human beings, they seem willing
to settle for only the pale shadow of that potential. The conflict
between the tremendous forces of production, which we must remember
includes most importantly the revolutionary class itself, and
an antiquated system based on exploiting the international proletariat,
has in no way disappeared. On the contrary, it is precisely this
contradiction that is crying out to be resolved through proletarian
revolution on a world scale. There has been a phenomenal growth in productive capacities and scientific
knowledge. Marx and Engels’ vision of being able to provide for
the needs of all humanity is clearly vindicated. Yet, at the same
time, the gap between wealth and poverty has increased to a degree
never before seen in human history. If Marx and Engels were only
able to postulate an era of commonly shared abundance, today the
potential to realise it re-emerges from every corner. A shift
of only a few per cent of the world’s food resources would effectively
eliminate starvation and malnutrition. How simple it should be
to put a stop to the deaths of fifty thousand children daily from
preventable diseases, whose main cause is poor drinking water,
or to solve the homelessness that is rampant in the very shadows
of the skyscrapers in New York and London as well as Mumbai and
São Paolo. The inability to solve even such relatively simple
problems is due to the way humanity is organised. In light of
the inability of society to organise itself to meet even these
simple needs, talking about “society as subject” covers over the
task of making revolution. Negri and Hardt’s rejection of Marxist political economy goes hand-in-hand
with Empire’s inability to explain why capitalism is compelled
forward to always produce on a greater and greater scale. In particular,
it is the competition of different capitals that commands them
all to “expand or die”, and this gives rise to a spiral process
through which capital increases its value, concentrates by gobbling
up or merging with its competitors and seeks ever greater sources
of labour to exploit and markets to conquer. None of this occurs
smoothly, of course, and the spiral process of accumulation takes
place through the “anarchy of production” and leads to periodic
disorder, crisis and upheaval. Imperialism or monopoly capitalism
modifies but does not negate these fundamental processes. Indeed,
it actually heightens the competition between capitals in the
form of giant multi-national firms and imperialist powers and
transforms the whole world into their sphere of competition and
makes war, including world war, its ultimate vehicle for destroying
its competitors and creating the conditions for expanded accumulation.22 It is this constant and relentless drive to maximise profit that drives
capitalism to exploit more and more labour power (proletarians)
more and more thoroughly, constantly transforming the whole productive
process and socialising it on a massive scale, and it is this
working of the capitalist system that pushes the proletarians
to resistance and creates the material basis for revolution. This
basic process has always been complex and multi-sided, and is
even more so in the conditions of the twenty-first century. But
Negri and Hardt reverse this dynamic. It is the struggle of the
proletariat, in their view, that has “pushed” the capitalists
to the transformation they call “Empire”. Negri and Hardt argue that, “Theories of the passages to and beyond imperialism
that privilege the pure critique of the dynamics of capital risk
undervaluing the power of the real efficient motor that drives
capitalist development from its deepest core: the movements and
struggles of the proletariat.”23 In fact the danger is not whether
to restrict our analysis to a “pure critique”, since genuine Marxists
have always recognised the importance of studying and understanding
diverse social phenomenon, and certainly the struggle of the proletariat
and the oppressed peoples is most definitely an important factor
in influencing how the dynamics of capital develop. But we do
insist that it is the internal dynamic of capital itself that
is the principal motor pushing it both to expand into new spheres
and to intensify exploitation where it is already present. Negri
and Hardt’s inverted theory even goes so far as to argue that
the maintenance and strengthening of US hegemony in the period
since 1970 “was actually sustained by the antagonistic power of
the US proletariat…. capital had to confront and respond to the
new production of subjectivity of the proletariat.”24 This kind of non-materialist understanding also reflects an inability
to understand capitalist crisis. “Capitalist crisis, as Marx tells
us, is a situation that requires capital to undergo a general
devaluation and a profound rearrangement of the relations of production
as a result of the downward pressure that the proletariat puts
on the rate of profit. In other words, capitalist crisis is not
simply a function of capital’s own dynamic but is caused directly
by proletarian conflict.” In other words, according to Negri and
Hardt, capitalist crisis is mainly a result of the struggles of
the proletariat – which is not at all what Marx “tells us”, although
it must be admitted that this is one misconception that is widely
held among self-professed Marxists. In his great work Anti-Dühring,
Engels went to considerable length to refute the “under-consumptionist”
theory of crisis, pointing out that the under-consumption of the
masses was a feature of all forms of class society, yet, it is
only under capitalism that crisis appears. Engels described a
“crisis of over-production”, in that production would expand at
a faster rate than markets. Engels put it this way: “The enormous expansive force of modern industry, compared with which
that of gases is mere child’s play, appears to us now as a necessity
for expansion, both qualitative and quantitative, that laughs
at all resistance. Such resistance is offered by consumption,
by sales, by the markets for the products of modern industry.
But the capacity for extension, extensive and intensive, of the
markets is primarily governed by quite different laws that work
much less energetically. The extension of the markets cannot keep
pace with the extension of production. The collision becomes inevitable,
and this cannot produce any real solution so long as it does not
break in pieces the capitalist mode of production…”25 It is true that capitalist crisis cannot be reduced to purely economic
factors alone, and in the era of imperialism, when capitalism
mainly is centred in imperialist states, many geo-political considerations
also play their role in the accumulation process, including the
rivalry between imperialist powers, the resistance struggles in
the oppressed nations and the struggle of the proletariat in the
imperialist citadels themselves – all of these factors interact
on each other. But this does not negate the basic materialist
understanding upon which Marx constructed his theory and the laws
he discovered of capitalism, which push it toward over-production,
as the citation from Engels so powerfully presents it.26 While
the actual working out of the different tendencies is complex
and mitigated by many factors, it still holds true today.27 Instead,
Negri and Hardt are arguing in a convoluted way that the proletariat’s
struggles are both the cause of crisis, and, paradoxically, rescue
capitalism (or at least the present centre of the capitalist system,
the US). Luxemburg’s Theory Resuscitated Negri and Hardt resuscitate the theses of Rosa Luxemburg on imperialism.
Luxemburg argued that since the proletariat could never “buy back”
the product of its own labour, the only way the capitalist system
could prosper was through trade with (“outside”) non-capitalist
regions or sectors, which alone could allow the capitalist system
to realise the value (through sale) produced by the exploitation
of the proletariat in the imperialist countries. She postulated
that imperialism would reach an insurmountable crisis when capital
had transformed the whole world. Negri and Hardt are arguing that imperialism has indeed accomplished this
world transformation and the result is a whole new stage of capitalism,
beyond imperialism. They argue that, “Capital no longer looks
outside but rather inside its domain, and its expansion is thus
intensive rather than extensive.”28
And “postmodernisation is the economic process that emerges
when mechanical and industrial technologies have expanded to invest
the entire world, when the modernisation process is complete,
and when the formal subsumption of the non-capitalist environment
has reached its limit.”29 To this we say wrong, and wrong again.
Wrong because capitalism at every stage of its development has expanded
both intensively and extensively, that is to say it continues
to develop in its home base, to exploit the proletariat more completely,
to accumulate more and more capital and it continues to seek new
areas of domination. Further, what is “outside” to one capitalist
(or imperialist power) may well be “inside” to another, such as
when the US pushes into markets and territories in Africa previously
dominated by European imperialist powers. Wrong again because
while capitalism has indeed transformed more and more of the non-capitalist
world in its image, this process is by no means complete. Let’s look a little harder at the thesis of Negri and Hardt. They don’t
literally argue that there are no longer any different states,
but rather that their significance is dying out and that real
sovereignty has passed to the amorphous and “seamless” Empire.
The authors grant the US a special role in this world system,
but they see it as if this is just the shell reflecting the old
imperialist world while real sovereignty (or the capacity to govern)
has shifted to the amorphous “Empire”, which is everywhere and
nowhere in the whole world at once. Here also the descriptions
of Negri and Hardt have some important aspects that “ring true”
to the reader. Some functions previously the sole domain of specific
states have been delegated to international organisations such
as the World Trade Organisation. There is an ever-increasing degree
of interconnection not only in circuits of capitalist production
but also in all spheres of cultural and intellectual life. Certainly
the international nature of the proletarian revolution, while
always fundamental, now screams out more and more loudly and demands
that the revolutionary process in given countries pay full heed
to its imperatives. In these respects the internet world feels
light-years beyond most of the twentieth century, to say nothing
of Marx’s time. Is it possible that the world is now, or could
become, a single feasting ground for a single, non-territorial
capital? No, such a world will not come about (and unlike Negri and Hardt we have
a hard time seeing how such a nightmare would, if it were to come
about, be “not as bad as” the present imperialist system). The
same basic features of capital that push it to expand also mean
that capital can exist only in competition and conflict with other
capitals. As Marx put it, capital can exist only as many capitals.
The tendency for capital to concentrate, to grow larger and larger
and swallow up those capitals which “lose out” in competition
does not eliminate this competition but actually intensifies it
and places it on a higher level where huge capitalist groups compete
with each other and muster whole states in their service. It is
this never-ending war of capitals among themselves that makes
capitalism unable to rest content with its current profits and
drives it to exploit ever more proletarians more and more thoroughly.
Even if by some quirk of history such a single world-wide capital
could, for a moment, come into being, it would surely be flung
apart into disparate pieces.30 A Single Sovereignty? Sovereignty, or the capacity of a state to govern and rule free of external
control, has always been linked to a specific territory and population.
Certainly the imperialist powers continually trample on the sovereignty
of other states and peoples. In the colonial period this was by
brazen annexation and theft. In the more recent period it has
taken many forms of direct and indirect aggression and interference.
International institutions have granted themselves the right to
dictate essential questions of policy that are normally the prerogative
of a sovereign power. For example, the International Monetary
Fund can tell many countries in Africa to drastically slash already
meagre health and education services, the World Trade Organisation
can insist that patent laws be brought into conformity with the
US conception of intellectual property and, thus, outlaw the production
of generic drugs, and a country can be told what kind of weapons
it is allowed to develop. As any observer can easily recognise, the “disappearance of sovereignty”
is a decidedly uneven affair. It is certainly clear that the US
has no intention of losing even one iota of its sovereignty, and
it has consistently fought any and all measures that would restrict
it. One example is its refusal to participate in the Hague’s International
War Crimes Tribunal for fear that one day some of its own torturers
could be tried there. The US has evenly brazenly opposed the Kyoto
treaty aimed at reducing carbon gas emissions, partly because
of US interests in remaining the world’s largest polluter but
also because of the US allergy to anything that even smells like
a restriction on its sovereignty. So while sovereignty of many
countries has been impeded and eroded, this is not true for the
most “sovereign” of all, the US. When we look at the contemporary world what we actually see is not the
disappearance of imperialism or the emergence of a single homogenous
world empire free of conflict and rivalry among sovereign imperialist
states. Rather we see the increased socialisation of production
on a world scale, which is indeed knitting ever closer connections
and ties between all of the different actors in the productive
process and in human society generally. But this very socialisation
stands in sharp and antagonistic conflict with the still existing
capitalist relations of ownership, distribution and organisation
of production, which is reflected by the still central role of
states in enforcing these relations, and most importantly, that
strongest of states, US imperialism. III. National Liberation and the State Negri and Hardt correctly stress the interconnectedness of today’s world,
in the productive process, in the movement of peoples, and the
communication of ideas. They argue against a frozen view of the
world that would deny the transformative power of the capitalist
system. While imperialism most certainly does retard the productive
forces in the countries it dominates, it does so as part of constantly
transforming each society that it touches.
World capitalism must continually expand its markets and transform more
and more human labour into labour power – that specific form of
commodity that can be purchased and sold. But capitalism cannot
and does not do this evenly and certainly not equitably. Capital
can and does make use of, incorporate and strengthen various backward
features of pre-capitalist society, even as it continues its march
to more extensively and more intensively exploit its markets.
Negri and Hardt correctly point out that, “relations of production, which
were developed in the dominant countries, were never realised
in the same form in the subordinated regions of the global economy”,31
but they still grossly under-estimate and even obliterate the
fundamental divide in the world, between oppressor and oppressed
nations. They write: “the classical theories of imperialism and
anti-imperialism lost whatever explanatory powers they had”.32
In fact, Mao Tsetung showed very clearly in his analysis of pre-revolutionary
China that the previous feudal system had been undermined and
transformed by the penetration of imperialism into China, which
is why he called the system “semi-feudal”. He argued, and it has
been shown to be the case, that imperialism does not completely,
thoroughly and “democratically” transform the countries it penetrates.
But what imperialism does do is, in a certain sense, become “internal”
to the countries it dominates.33 They correctly note the tendency
for the interpenetration of the first and third worlds where the
latter “enters into the First, established itself at the heart
as ghetto, favela, always again produced and reproduced. In turn,
the First World is transferred to the Third in the form of stock
exchanges and banks, transnational corporations and icy skyscrapers
of money and command.”34 This reality of an interpenetrating world
is often ignored and sometimes even denied by those who see imperialism
only as an external force blocking the internal development of
the nation. In fact, capital has extremely contradictory effects
on the countries it penetrates – it can and must integrate them
into the overall world circuits of production and exchange, and
by incorporating more and more regions of the world into its dynamic
of expand or die, imperialism does fuel growth and development
in these countries. But again this occurs while it continues and,
in fact, deepens the “divide” in the world between the oppressed
and oppressor countries. Negri and Hardt negate this fundamental truth when they declare, “Through
the decentralisation of production and the consolidation of the
world market, the international divisions and flows of labour
and capital have fractured and multiplied so that it is no longer
possible to demarcate large geographical zones as centre and periphery,
North and South…. This is not to say that the United States and
Brazil, Britain and India are now identical territories in terms
of capitalist production and circulation but that that between
them are no differences of nature, only differences of degree.”35
So here the authors’ correct observations of the interpenetration
of different societies (“they clearly infuse one another”) are
used to wipe out one of the most important “differences of nature”
that exist, precisely the difference between oppressed and oppressor
nations and states. Anticipating objections, the authors argue
against “any nostalgia for the powers of the nation state or resurrect
any politics that celebrates the nation.”36 But the limits of
nation and nationalism must not be used to argue against the still
very real task of liberating nations (and whose basis for exploding
in struggle can be seen to be intensifying, not diminishing, in
the contemporary world).37 Imperialism and Pre-capitalist Negri and Hardt argue that it is impossible for the oppressed nations
to “re-create the conditions of the past and develop as the dominant
capitalist countries once did. Even the dominant countries are
now dependent on the global system; and the interactions of the
world market have resulted in a generalised disarticulation of
all economies. Increasingly, any attempt at isolation or separation
will mean only a more brutal kind of domination by the global
system, a reduction to powerlessness and poverty.”38 Here again Negri and Hardt make some correct observations but then take
them to some incorrect and decidedly non-revolutionary conclusions.
Yes, it is a dangerous delusion (and a not very revolutionary
one at that) to wish to “recreate” the conditions under which
capitalism first developed in the West.39 However, this does not
change the fact that a qualitative difference remains between
the developed capitalist states and the countries of the neo-colonial
world, not only in terms of their relative level of development40
but also specifically in the existence of a national market, linkages
between industry and agriculture and various branches of what
goes into a national economy. Overcoming this giant and growing
gulf in the world between the small number of wealthy states and
the bulk of the world population remains a tremendous task before
human society as a whole. In a world dominated by imperialism, any country or group of countries
that make revolution must of necessity take up the difficult struggle
to “de-link” the country from the world imperialist system. This
is necessary for several reasons: in the case of the oppressed
countries, their development has been stunted, perverted and channelled
to the particular (subordinate) role that each has in the world
imperialist system. The liberation of the people requires that
this form of national bondage be decisively dug up. In this sense,
national liberation does correspond to the interests of the great
majority of the masses in the oppressed countries. Furthermore,
the requirements of aiding the world revolution cannot be fulfilled
if a country is at the mercy of the imperialist powers or their
supranational institutions, such as the International Monetary
Fund (IMF) or the World Bank. It is sufficient to look at how
the imperialists have bullied or overthrown even reactionary regimes
that, for various reasons, have not gone along completely with
the dominant imperialist programme to see what is in store for
a genuine revolutionary regime. In the case of the imperialist
countries as well, a genuine socialist revolution requires a “de-linking”
if these countries are to withstand the sabotage and attack of
remaining imperialist states and also since it is inconceivable
that a genuine socialist society could be built on an edifice
of exploitation and oppression of other nations. Here Negri and Hardt are pointing to a real problem: it will be difficult,
very difficult, for any country, especially one that has been
dominated and oppressed by imperialism, to avoid being reduced
to “powerlessness and poverty” if it embarks on a revolutionary
path. Indeed, overcoming “powerlessness and poverty” will be one
of the great tasks and challenges of the revolution. But what
conclusion can we draw from Empire? Only that the current situation
is inevitable, that it is better not to even attempt national
liberation, and that if there is any future liberation to be had
it can only come when the whole world capitalist system is transformed
(the choice of the word “transformed” is deliberate since the
authors don’t believe it can be or needs to be “overthrown”).
Despite Negri and Hardt’s insistence that Empire can be attacked
from “any point” on the globe, their whole thesis leads right
back to a euro-centric conception in which any real social change
can only take place first and decisively in the advanced countries,
which, despite the authors’ objections, we will continue to call
imperialist. The struggle in the imperialist countries will play a very important role
in the world-wide struggle to move from one epoch of human society
to another. It is neither possible nor liberating to postulate
a world revolutionary process in which revolution is limited to
the Third World and the proletariat and the oppressed masses of
the imperialist citadels are at best relatively passive supporters
of a revolutionary process essentially alien to themselves.41
But the importance of stressing the truly international dimension
of the struggle for world communism and the crucial role that
must be played in both the oppressed and the oppressor countries
must never be distorted to deny the possibility of revolutionary
breakthrough in one or a group of countries, which in turn will
call forward revolutionary struggle in both kinds of countries.
If we are to make revolution it is very likely that that revolution
will be made in one or several countries first. And wherever the
proletarian revolution triumphs it will inevitably face hostility
from that part of the world in which the old system of exploitation
is still dominant. What Negri and Hardt are correctly pointing to are the real limits of
the process of building a parallel economic system in a capitalist
world. The biological reality that human beings are a single species
has, in our epoch, been joined by the social reality that humanity
is a coherent whole even if, at present, it is divided into classes
and nations. It is impossible that production, science and culture
can in any fundamental sense be divided into different camps.42
If it is true that in our historical epoch the existence of socialist
states surrounded by an imperialist world is likely to remain
a feature, this can only be understood as one phase and one form
of the struggle between the world proletariat and world imperialism.
Peaceful coexistence has definite limits: it can never be a fundamental
strategy, and one system will ultimately triumph over the other.43
This is not only because of the aggressive nature of the
imperialists (and certainly not because of the will of the socialist
countries), rather it is a reflection of this very indivisibility
of humanity. If, in addition, this has always been true in a fundamental
sense – and recognised by Marx and Engels with their call for
workers of all countries to unite and fight for a whole new world
– today this “commonness” of humanity is felt much more palpably
by broader sections of the masses the world over. Modern communications,
production methods and migratory flux do, as Empire argues, mean
that, even in the most remote corners of the earth, people are
far more interconnected in a thousand ways. And it is also true
that the existence of modern means of production has created new
needs – people in the remote areas also want access to the products
of modern life, their share in the common product of humanity,
and full access to the world community of men and women. Poverty,
as Marx pointed out, is relative to the existence of socially
and historically determined wants and needs. A revolutionary movement
that is only able to feed the belly of the hungry will ultimately
fail if it is not able to, step-by-step, help fill the desire
of people to learn, communicate, and struggle to transform all
aspects of social life. It is true that the poor peasantry and
others, those most inclined to a revolutionary urge, are often
also the section of the masses most excluded from this global
process. But this exclusion cannot be made a principle, and still
less can ignorance and exclusion be used as a building block of
a new society. First, such an approach would immediately narrow
the base of the supporters of the revolution and drive the middle
classes and the intelligentsia, whose co-operation is needed,
into the enemy camp. Furthermore, such an approach would make
a mockery of the goal of fitting the proletariat to rule the earth
and training the masses of people to increasingly master the affairs
of state. Pol Pot’s Cambodia can serve as a frightening reminder
of where this kind of nationalism leads.44 So there must be a determined fight to “de-link” the oppressed countries
from the world imperialist system (through new-democratic revolution
and socialism), and history has shown that it is possible for
the result of this to be other than “powerlessness and poverty”,
at least in the situation of a large socialist country (or a smaller
country in relation to a larger socialist country or bloc). A
triumphant socialist revolution in an advanced country will also
face just as daunting problems in building an economic system
without the exploitation of the oppressed countries and peoples
and without the economic entanglements with its previous imperialist
trading partners.45 However, the authors are pointing to the real
limits of building a “parallel economy” in a world still dominated
by capitalism. Socialist states must be, in all senses, real “base
areas” of the world proletarian revolution, where the masses are
already transforming society and working to build a communist
future. But they must never lose sight of the fact that the communist
future can exist only on a world scale and that the socialist
states are locked in a fierce and protracted fight with world
imperialism exactly over the future of humanity and the world.
Like any base area in the course of a war, the survival and flourishing
of socialist states is ultimately both dependent on, and subordinate
to, the overall progress of the world-wide struggle against capital.46
The barrier of imperialist relations to progress and development has to
be seen in relation to the potential of the productive forces
that capitalism has brought into being – productive forces that
grew up, it must be stressed, in connection with the plunder of
the oppressed countries. The apologists for imperialism often
argue that the people of the oppressed countries should be thankful
to the West for its civilising and modernising mission. Some reactionary
US political figures have even tried to justify slavery in the
US by this standard! This is to be partly answered, of course,
by pointing out how the development of capitalism in the West,
from its earliest moments right down to today, has always had
as a pillar the looting it could obtain from the less developed
countries and regions of the world. But this is only half the
answer, and the less important half at that. This same process
of accumulation and development to which the oppressed countries
have contributed so dearly, has also created the science, production
techniques, and, increasingly, the proletarian class itself, which
makes a different organisation of society possible and necessary
on the whole planet. It is against this possibility, which is
straining to come into being, that the barriers of capitalism
must be examined. National Liberation – In one of the most insightful passages of Empire, perhaps in anticipation
of the attacks that the negation of “nation” will surely solicit,
the authors argue: “the nation is progressive strictly as a fortified
line of defence against more powerful external forces. As much
as these walls may appear progressive in their protective function
against external domination, they can easily play an inverse role
with respect to the interior they protect.”47 Their discussion of black nationalism in the US points to the positive
role this struggle has played, while also correctly pointing out
that “the progressive elements are accompanied inevitably by their
reactionary shadows... (eclipsing class differences, for example)
or when it designates one segment of the community (such as Afro-American
men) as de facto representatives of the whole…”.48 “With national ‘liberation’ and the construction of the nation-state,
all of the oppressive functions of modern sovereignty inevitably
blossom in full force.” “The revolution (in the colonial countries)
is thus offered up, hand and feet bound to the new bourgeoisie.
It is a February revolution,49 one might say, that should be followed
by an October. But the calendar has gone crazy: October never
comes, the revolutionaries get bogged down in ‘realism’, and modernisation
ends up lost in the hierarchies of the world market…the liberated
countries find themselves subordinated in the international economic
order.” Or, as they put it later, “the state is the poisoned gift
of national liberation”.50 The above passage is accurate as a summation of the course that the great
majority of “national liberation” struggles have travelled, especially
if one is to (mis)understand “national liberation” to consist
principally of the struggle for formal independence. In Africa,
for example, the whole period of de-colonialisation beginning
in the 1950s and really only ending with the replacement of the
apartheid regime in South Africa in 1994, was accompanied by the
ideology of nationalism. In many of these struggles a more radical
current attempted to cast the struggle in Marxist-Leninist (and
even sometimes Maoist) terms, sometimes presenting this kind of
“national liberation” struggle as a prologue to a further socialist
stage. In these countries what became consolidated was a bourgeois
regime, oppressing the masses of people and bound hand-to-foot
to the world imperialist system. Indeed, “October never comes”.
But here again we see the difference between what people may imagine themselves
to be, whatever banner they raise to justify their action, and
what class relations people actually represent. Indeed, a great
problem with many of the variants of revolutionary nationalism
is that they confound Marxism and nationalism and inevitably obscure
the central question in every revolutionary process, specifically
the question of which class is leading and what kind of society
will be brought into being. The Maoist understanding of new-democratic
revolution is of a bourgeois-democratic revolution of a new type,
led by the proletariat and aiming not at the creation of a capitalist
society led by the bourgeoisie but opening the way forward to
a socialist society led by the proletariat. For no struggle for
proletarian revolution can succeed without fighting against every
aspect of inequality and domination. The proletariat takes up
the task of freeing the nation, yet never sees its goal in such
a limited light. Ironically, history has shown that those whose
goal has been limited to the liberation of the nation and whose
ideology has been nationalist are fundamentally unequal to fulfilling
the real tasks of national liberation. For example, be it Cuba’s
dependency first on sugar cane and now on tourism or Mozambique’s
dependency on exporting migrant labour to South Africa, we see
that the task of freeing these societies from the grip of world
imperialism is far from accomplished. This is because any attempt
to preside over a functioning capitalist economy must inevitably
reach an accommodation (the “realism” Negri and Hardt refer to)
with the world imperialist system. This economic dynamic will
create a bourgeoisie even where one does not yet exist, as we
have seen in country after country. It is only when the task of the liberation of the nation and the subsequent
reconstruction of the nation is clearly and decisively subordinated
to the transformation of the whole world that the resolve and
strength to travel a different path can be found. But this different
path also requires a state, the leadership of society and the
material strength to overcome external and internal opposition
to this path. In fact, the liberation of nations, shattering the
grip of imperialism, is just as necessary today as it was forty
years ago. And this struggle will play a very important role,
if and to the extent that it is subordinated to the ideology and
programme of the proletariat and the latter’s world historic emancipatory
task. It is noteworthy that in this section of Empire the authors do not even
mention the outstanding case where national liberation struggle
did indeed lead to “October”, that is to the socialist revolution,
and here we are speaking of the Chinese Revolution where Mao Tsetung
conducted the long struggle against feudalism, imperialism and
bureaucrat capitalism not as an end in itself but as a necessary
prologue to the socialist revolution. The danger that the necessary
task of national liberation will blind the revolutionaries to
the goal of communism (assuming that such a goal was there in
the first place51), that “October will never come”, is real indeed.
But real danger cannot be used as an excuse for failing to undertake
a necessary if perilous journey. The proletariat must dare to
take up the task of leading national liberation, of uniting the
great majority of the population, including the national bourgeois
elements (open and disguised) whose programme is really only to
set up an independent bourgeois system while refusing to relinquish
the leadership of the revolution to such forces and taking the
necessary measures to assure that the masses of people are more
and more involved in carrying out a revolutionary process that
does lead in the direction of socialism and ultimately communism.
Mao did take up the challenge of “de-linking” China from the hostile imperialist
world and actually built a socialist society that was very much
an “autonomous economic structure” not dependent on the imperialist
system or the world market. Elsewhere Empire’s authors refer to
Mao’s China as essentially a “modernisation” project.52 In reality,
the communist revolutionaries in China were indeed building a
whole different kind of society, quite the opposite of the capitalist
system that had emerged in Europe and elsewhere. True, the Chinese
revolution gave an important emphasis to uprooting the pre-capitalist
remnants in the countryside and to building up an industrial base
and other features of modern life. But Mao never lost sight of
the goal of classless society and the dynamic role of people in
the struggle to reach this society, unlike the revisionists, such
as Deng Xiao-peng, in the Communist Party of China who did in
fact see modernisation as an end in itself and who seized power
from the revolutionaries following Mao’s death under the banner
of accomplishing the “four modernisations”.53 The Continuing Importance In Multitude Negri and Hardt take up the question of the transformation
that capitalism has wrought in agriculture in the Third World.
Their subtitle, “Twilight of the Peasant World”, reveals their
basic thesis – the disappearance of the peasantry, which they
define “as those who labour on their own land, produce primarily
for their own consumption, are partially integrated and subordinated
within a larger economic system and either own or have access
to the necessary land and equipment”.54 Of course, with the peasantry
defined in this narrow way, their conclusion is inescapable. The authors correctly refer to the important analysis Mao made based on
the differentiation of the peasantry, specifically into poor,
middle and rich peasants. In the course of the polarisation of
the peasantry between the poor and landless on one side and the
rich peasants who employ others on the other, the middle peasants,
who alone really meet Negri and Hardt’s definition of the peasantry
as self-sufficient producers, “all but vanish in the process”.55
The authors point out that “Mao’s political focus turned toward
the peasantry – not toward the peasants as they were but toward
the peasants as they could be.”56 Mao had indeed analysed that the workings of imperialism had forever changed
the Chinese countryside and, in particular, the class differentiation
among the peasantry. But he also understood that this process
was taking place within a context in which foreign imperialism
was hampering China from emerging as a full-scale capitalist society,
hence the need for China to undergo a bourgeois-democratic revolution,
but of a new type, led by the proletariat and opening the pathway
to socialism. Mao was certainly not a “peasant revolutionary”,
as the modern Soviet revisionists or Enver Hoxha portrayed him.
As Negri and Hardt correctly point out, “the final victory of
the peasant revolution is the end of the peasantry”.57 Mao did,
of course, embark on a process of collectivisation of agriculture
in China with the long-term perspective of reducing step-by-step
the differences between worker and peasant and town and countryside
as part of the overall progression of the socialist revolution.
But the authors lose sight of the extremely important – and revolutionary
– step that was taken in China with the redistribution of the
land. Yes, the goal was the socialist transformation of China’s
countryside, but this would not be developed in a straight path
out of the differentiation (or the partial proletarianisation)
of large sections of the peasantry in the old society. To go forward
to the socialist future, it was first necessary to resolve the
“old” land problem in a revolutionary way by giving land title
to the peasantry. In this way the enthusiasm of the peasantry
was unleashed to tear up the reactionary system, which had been
enslaving them for centuries, and so the old feudal relations
in the countryside were decisively shattered. But this revolutionary
measure was a doubled-edged sword, for it also opened the door
for capitalism and the process of differentiation of the peasantry,
into rich and poor, with the inevitable result of land becoming
concentrated in the hands of a rich peasantry or capitalist farmers
and the majority being reduced to landlessness. (And indeed in
the first years after land reform it was possible to see such
a capitalist or rich peasant economy rapidly developing in China.)
For Mao, giving “land to the tiller” was not an end in itself, rather
it was the necessary step to lead to the voluntary co-operation
of the peasantry. Only in this way could the enthusiasm of the
masses for collectivisation be fully unleashed and could its voluntary
nature be assured. This differed greatly, for example, from the
revisionist model of Cuba in which the old sugar estates were
simply transformed into new revisionist state capitalist farms
where, while the conditions of the agricultural workers certainly
improved, there was ultimately no fundamental change in their
relations of wage slavery. Negri and Hardt are correct when they say that the traditional peasantry
is being transformed, but they are wrong when they write as if
the need for agrarian revolution has disappeared in a great number
of countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. It is certainly
true that, in the period since Mao’s analysis of the Chinese countryside,
the penetration of imperialism has continued to transform the
rural class relations in many Third World countries.58 But it
should be understood that this does not happen in a one-dimensional
way: while capitalism is dissolving some aspects of pre-capitalist
relations it can also incorporate and reinforce other aspects.
In India, for example, in some aspects the caste system is as strong in
Punjab, one of the most capitalistically developed agricultural
areas in the country, as in much more backward areas. And, in
fact, modern capitalist agriculture can and does profit from medieval
practices such as caste. The fact that capitalism tends toward
the dissolution of the peasantry is not the same thing as saying
that it has eliminated the peasantry or the striving of the poor
and landless peasants (the “semi-proletarians”) for a bourgeois
solution, that is, becoming small landholders. There are many
tendencies of capitalism that are held in check by other, countervailing
tendencies and geo-political realities. For example, capital also
has a tendency to support and rely on existing reactionary authority,
as we see in imperialism’s support for feudal sheikhs in the Gulf
as long as oil flows freely, and this runs contrary to capitalism’s
other tendencies to remake the world in its image. Generally speaking,
in the Third World it is only on the basis of a bourgeois-democratic
solution to the land question (“land to the tiller”) that it is
possible to advance toward the truly proletarian-socialist future,
which will, indeed, mean the gradual elimination of the peasantry
as a class. But to act as if capitalism has already eliminated
the peasantry and peasant aspirations would be to try to build
a new society on a foundation of sand. In Brazil, today, as few as 20 per cent of the people make their livelihood
through agriculture. But it can also be seen that the movement
of the landless is the most important struggle in that country
against the reactionary regime and has drawn widespread support
from the masses in the urban areas as well. Negri and Hardt explain
this support by saying that the particularities of the peasantry
have been dissolved into the general mass or “multitude” of the
Brazilian producers. But there is another, more correct explanation:
the agrarian question in Brazil still concentrates and typifies
to a large degree the “new-democratic revolution” against imperialism
and feudalism, which is still to be accomplished in that country,
involving the vast majority of the population as well as the landless.
IV. Law of Value and Central to the thesis of Empire, and a subject that is returned to in
more length in Multitude, is the argument that “immaterial labour”
is now the determining form of labour on the earth. The authors
see this as a question of quality, not quantity, proposing a parallel
to the role of industrial labour in the nineteenth century, which,
although dwarfed quantitatively by agricultural labour, came to
characterise the whole epoch and transform the way other forms
of labour, such as agriculture and artisan labour, took place.
They argue that today immaterial labour, in other words, labour
that is not producing material objects, is dominating and colouring
other forms of labour that continue to exist (industrial and agricultural).
Here again, there is a reason why the observations and arguments of Negri
and Hardt “ring true” to many people. It is indeed a fact that
an important, and rapidly increasing, sphere of production comprises
various forms of “immaterial labour”, such as creating computer
software. Not only is this sphere itself very important to contemporary
capitalism (and we know that a number of the largest and most
dynamic corporations today are in this sphere, Microsoft being
the archetypical example), but the advance of computerisation
does affect the quality of work in many spheres and the way in
which people interact in the productive process. This also has
an effect on class relations. For example, journalists generally
turn in their stories on computer files, thus eliminating the
need for traditional typesetters of a previous generation. The
authors also argue that computerisation and the advance in communications
(internet, etc.) have led to production being carried out in “networks”
– relatively flexible and loose linkages between people that do
not require a rigid hierarchical control. The problem is that Negri and Hardt try to use their understanding of
“immaterial labour” to argue that the very concept of “exchange
value” no longer has any meaning. Marx and Engels formulated the
“labour theory of value” to explain how different commodities
are exchanged – why an ounce of gold is worth more than a litre
of milk, for example. In brief, they demonstrated that, on the
whole, the price for any given commodity will tend to revolve
around its exchange value, which represents the “socially necessary
labour time” that went into producing that commodity. Negri and
Hardt argue that immaterial labour has eliminated the concept
of exchange value as representing congealed labour time. Indeed,
their understanding of immaterial labour leads them to cast out
other pillars of Marxist political economy as well, which are
vital to an understanding of capitalism today. Negri and Hardt argue that many spheres of immaterial production can only
take place as part of a collective process that cannot be reduced
to simply the activity of exploiting labour power. Negri and Hardt
argue that Marx’s conception of variable capital
is outmoded, because the labour process does not require
capital to “orchestrate production”: “Today productivity, wealth,
and the creation of social surplus take the form of co-operative
interactivity through linguistic, communicational, and affective
networks. In the expression of its own creative energies, immaterial
labour thus seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous
and elementary communism.”60 They go on to say, “The foundation
of the classic modern conception of private property is thus to
a certain extent dissolved in the postmodern mode of production.”61
Or as they state in Multitude, “Our innovative and creative capacities
are always greater than our productive labour – productive, that
is, of capital. At this point we can recognise that this bio-political
production is on the one hand immeasurable, because it cannot
be quantified in fixed units of time; and, on, the other hand,
always excessive with respect to the value that capital can extract
from it because capital can never capture all of life. This is
why we have to revise Marx’s notion of the relation between labour
and value in capitalist production.”62 Let’s look again at the question of language to shed light on what Negri
and Hardt are arguing. It is true that the development of language
involves all of society and that this cannot be reduced to a product
that is a direct application of labour power purchased and organised
by the capitalist class. For Negri and Hardt, “immaterial production”,
such as the creation of language, is exploited by the capitalist
class, not through the buying and selling of commodities and labour
power, but by “the expropriation of the common”.63 Language itself
is not a commodity, it has no “value” in a Marxist sense, or more
precisely, it has no “exchange value”. Of course, language is
one of the most important and constantly developing assets of
society but, as these writers correctly recognise, it does not
develop mainly through commodity relations, through the purchase
and sale of commodities, including labour power itself. Language
has existed as long as human beings have existed, and long after
commodity production and exchange value are buried people will
continue to develop language and literature. But when the development
of language takes place within capitalist society, this central
feature of human society cannot escape from the whole social environment
of commodity production that permeates all of society. When language
is transformed into a commodity – for example, when the ability
to speak English raises the level of the exchange value of a person’s
labour power (that is to say, their salary), when English medium
schools thrive both as a source of profit and a means of class
differentiation in many countries, when dictionaries or works
of culture and art that codify the developments of language that
the masses have produced are exchanged on the market place, these
social products do indeed become commodities that are privately
appropriated, that are bought and sold, and that are subject to
the law of value. The mechanism through which capitalism exploits
is none other than the system of commodity production; outside
of this framework of buying and selling, to speak of capitalist
exploitation has no real scientific meaning. The great concern of the imperialists for “intellectual property rights” shows that the “shell” of bourgeois relations has to be shattered by the conscious and forceful act of the proletariat and that these relations will not just spontaneously disso |