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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

understanding empire « Previous | |Next »
July 14, 2005

There are lots of individual sovereign states in the world of nations. Only one, the United States of America, has both the will and the capacity to back international armed intervention and help deliver it, and talks about its international mission. After 9/11 the US neocons (ie., a Max Boot or a Robert Kagan) consistently said it was a choice between imperialism and barbarism.

What they did not say was that for an empire to be born, a republic has to die and that imperialism can become a barbarism.

How then, do we understand empire in the new world order of the post-cold war world? Consider this claim about empire made by Stan Goff:

"...the war in Iraq is symptomatic of a much deeper global crisis, and that it foreshadows a period in which that crisis, a crisis of global capitalism, will manifest itself not only in war but in rapidly widening social destabilization, the further militarization of the world system, and simultaneous economic and environmental collapse."

Okay. We can and should talk in terms of capitalism as a triumphant world system and a crisis of global capitalism, due to the failure to achieve self-regulating equilibrium and stability. The latter is what the G8 was meant to be talking about and addressing. But the global economic system we are a part of is not an empire, as that can be seen as self-regulating system with minimal governance, whilst empire would involve the military in some sense.

The global power for the US requires the US Department of Defense to currently maintain 725 official US military bases outside the country; to spend more on "defense" than all the rest of the world put together; and to do so even though the US has no present or likely enemies of the kind who could be intimidated or defeated by "star wars" missile defense or bunker-busting "nukes." It is a country obsessed with war: rumors of war, images of war, "preemptive" war, "preventive" war, "surgical" war, "prophylactic" war, "permanent" war. The US is a global power that is on the offensive and it stays on the offensive. As Thomas Friedman put it:

"For globalization to work, America can't be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is. The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell-Douglas. The hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technology is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps." (T. Friedman, NY Times Magazine, 3/28, 1999).

Goff continues:

"Present-day imperialism is a real system, and itis currently directed by the American state. The war in Iraq was probably the inevitable action of this state in response to an impending and inexorable erosion of the very basis of American global power. The war in Iraq, while deeply morally repugnant, is not a failure of morality, but the action of a system that can't help it, because like the scorpion, it is that system's nature."

If system means empire, then the US is involved in a contest for supremacy in strategic, energy-rich regions like the Middle East and Central Asia.

But the US is not in Iraq just to get its hands on the oil so as to control the fuel supply to run its industrial machinery. Empire also involves the reshaping of the US. The signs are the corruption and abuses of power, unchecked executive power, the veneration of the presidential leader, Guantanamo, a domestic media that has become supine and subservient,and a Democrat opposition that is frightened of transgressing the consensus on "order" and "security".

Something has shifted. Are we seeing the transformation of the American democratic republic to something else? Is not empire in the process of being constructed before our very eyes by the Bush Republicans? A shift from republic to a militarized imperial power, to a self-tranforming empire?

If so, then the US as empire is not simply an expansion of late 19th century imperialism. This imperial machine is something quite different. It speaks in terms of order and peace as the old international order dies away and confronts its enemies--currently Islamic neofascism. Empire presents force as being in the service of freedom and democracy that gives order and peace.

Nor is scorpion the right metaphor for empire. Could not empire be better than what went before, in similar sense to capitalism being better than feudalism? Should we not try to see in negative and positive terms.

Goff continues:

"What is being sought is a new foundation, a military one, upon which to base US global supremacy as the current one is beginning to crumble. And reliance on direct military violence to achieve one's national aims is not a sign of strength, but a sign of weakness, a sign that there is a fundamental failure of hegemony. Hegemony is not direct control, but internalization of control by those who are dominated."

Does that mean that the economic foundation of empire is being undermined by the Chinese economic power? Is that the way to understand how US global supremacy is beginning to crumble? Goff says yes.
"The neoliberalism that underwrote the bacchanalia of the 90's is reaching its endgame and...we are witnessing right now is the particular neocon version of how that global architecture will be rebuilt---by dint of arms."

Yes, we are. But is the current rebuilding and use of U.S. power designed to advance a specifically U.S. national capitalism? Or,as Don Hammerquist, argues it is about using that military power to defend empire in the sense of the system of world capitalism as a global economy, political system and as a "civilization"?

I swing between the two. But I'm inclined to follow Hammerquist's argument that the neocon's understanding is that U.S. power should serve global capitalism, not the reverse.I stand with Hammerquist but then I look back to Goff and say yes. As I say I swing between the two.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:49 AM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (1)
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Comments

Comments

Gary, I liked Hammerquist's argument more than Goffs. Hammerquist argued that neo-con philosophy sees bubbles, failed states, political violence etc as a failing of lasse-faire - not capitalism. He argues that neo-cons see capitalism as dominant, just that it is not a self-regulatory system. Hence the use of US military and economic might in a paternal authoritarian manner.

Part of Europe's peace dividend with the fall of the Soviet Union was eastern Europe democratising, a process which is continuing. The Middle East and Asia didnt realise that benefit. Indonesia democratising came from an odd event though, with contagion being the irritant cause. That sounds like a complex system self-regulating.

Neo-cons, amongst other failings, are guilty of impatience. The world will democratise, just not on their timetable.

Cameron,
yes I also prefer Hammerquist's argument more than Goffs that U.S. power should serve global capitalism, not the reverse. It gives us a handle on empire, as distinct from the US being the bullyboy in the schoolyard, or the top nation-state in the world of nations.I do have some doubts.

First, though I need to say that I'm not persuaded by your argument.

Hammerquist says:

"Capitalism is a triumphant world system exactly because it has dealt with these past points of contradiction more or less successfully. But this triumph exposes a new reality with new problems."

That is true. The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990's showed that. And then he says:
"It took a few years for this hidden hand to develop severe arthritis. On the economic side: the end of the Asian "boom"; the stagnation of the EU; the collapse of the equities bubble, and the exposure of generalized corporate corruption, could not be ignored. On the political side; the problem of "failed states"; the proliferation of genocidal conflicts; the intractability of public health issues; the problem of Palestine, the persistence of underclasses in the core, undermined any notion of long term self-regulating equilibrium and stability."

Two things. He identifies a problems with global capitalism as a system. He does not say that it does not solve the problems.There is no argument here that it is not self-regulating in some rough sense. The issue is not whether or not capitalism is self-regulating it is that no argument is presented.

Secondly, the failed states refer to the political world of nation states and not the global economy. They are separate things even though interlinked --eg., the Palestinian Israeli conflict is a political one even though controlof resources is involved. So was the conflict around Serbia and Rwanda in the 1990s.

My doubts about Hammerquist's understanding of empire relate to this paragraph:

"It is the development of a militarized and aggressive capitalist internationalism that is militarily centered in the U.S. This ruling class internationalism, as advanced by the neocons, finds the existing nation/state institutional framework – the very framework which has contained popular reform movements, including both the economic class struggle and the national liberation movement - to be a source of dangerous inertia, not to mention an expense that might be politically unnecessary."

Now you get utopian globalists going about abolishing the nation-state and letting the world market rule in its place. Let's put that that liberal dreaming to one side.

What comes out of the Bush administration is national self-interest: an attack on the UN and Europe as competing sources of power, protectionism of US farmers and agribusiness; US patriotism; running the world economy to suit American capital.

Hammerquist is too much your old Marxist internationalist. he does snot see thast we are on the cusp of empire and US as a hegemonic power. Empire is forming out of the old world of nation states. So we see both the old and the new.

I really like this line. It helped me to see hegemony in a new way:

"Hegemony is not direct control, but internalization of control by those who are dominated."

Hegemony not in crushing dissent through force, but by removing the concepts of dissent in the controlled, through getting them to internalise the powerfuls agenda.

I think it is insightful.