From: "cwright" <cwright-AT-21stcentury.net>
Subject: AUT: Re: Imperialism (Explications of The Savage Anomaly)
Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2002 23:22:38 -0500


Wow.  Good stuff.

I think that alessandro's point about 'inside' and 'outside' is pretty
critical.  One way to say it is that Imperialism was capital's 'project' of
subordinating the whole world, where capital was only expanding and was in
fact not the dominant organization of social relations across the majority
of the planet.  Empire is the situation where there is no longer the need to
impose the capital-labor relation over and against pre-capitalist class
social formations, that is to say, what is left is too weak to present any
kind of threat except as in tandem with labor (proletariat), and the toatliy
of these forces might be understood as Multitude.

This goes along with, but cannot be reduced to, Negri's particular
understanding of the implication of the transition from formal to real
subsumption.  In light of this, one might say that capital has largely
effected the real subsumption of the world to the capital-labor relation,
and that what is left is certainly at the least formally subsumed, leaving
nothing one could reasonably describe as 'pre-capitalist.'  The reduction
would involve losing sight of Negri's discussion of sovereignty because,
IMO, he actually conceives of the predominance of national sovereignty as a
kind of vestigial organ of the transition to capitalism.

None of this has to mean that the nation state is ceasing to exist, but that
sovereignty in the international arena has moved up into a space reflecting
in some sense the seamlessness of the world market (abscence of an outside.)
This also results in an abscence of a hegemonic state because I see this
argument as in part a critique of Gramscian notions of the place of the
hegemonic state wthin the state system.  This is how I understand the idea
of decentering, the abscence not only of a hegemonic power, but of the
possibility of a hegemonic nation state.  The hierarchy of state powers is
not thereby done away with, but no one state is the keystone to the
arrangement, the hegemon.

This is a very off the cuff attempt to say what I think Negri is getting at,
and it prolly doesn't do the full argument justice.

As I see it, in so far as the central issue is 'inside' and 'outside', Negri
and Hardt are saying something obviously important and which strikes a
chord.

My main objection is only that they do not go far enough in some respects.
As I see it, and this is just a rehash of other people, Negri has a
fundamentally mistaken notion of the state, allowing for a discussion of
sovereignty and the national state which seems to treat them as largely
disconnected from each other and from capital.  I also feel that the
discussion lacks coherence in so far as it is paradigmatic in nature, a
point raised by John Holloway in his critique in Historical Materialism.
Paradigmatic approaches have this tendency to assume the success of what is
in fact only a tendency or a possibility.  Crisis as perpetual, a system of
constant crisis, which Negri makes an argument for, seems rather closer to
crisis as capital's continuous process of creative destruction.  What crisis
means in any revolutionary sense at this point is not clear.  Crisis seems
stripped of its revolutionary implications.  There are other issues, but I
want to deal with Imperialism for a moment.

Thomas said that Lenin only borrowed his theory of imperialism, but in one
sense this is not true.  He critiques both Hilferding and Bukharin and has
subtle, but substantive, differences.  There are two aspects of the notion
associated with Lenin, Hilferding, and Bukharin, however, which are
immediately problematic.  First, they start from the idea of nation states
in competition, they start from national capitals, not from capital.  They,
and especially Lenin and Bukharin, start from the idea that imperialism
involves the subjection of non-capitalist states to capitalist states.  It
assumes and takes for granted the nation state as the locus of struggle.  In
one very crucial sense, the class struggle is not really present at all.
This is deepened by the second aspect, the reason why capital goes from the
export of commodities to the export of capital (what Lenin and Bukharin are
really emphasizing is the form of the capital exported, consumer goods
versus means of production.)  Each of the three theorists has a slightly
different take on crisis, but all agree that it is part of why certain
nations turn towards the export of capital.  Lenin (and partially Bukharin)
basically ascribes to a notion of crisis which stems from a theory of
disproportionality between Department 1 and Department 2 from Marx's famous
schemas in Vol. 2 of Capital.  This is obviously radically different from
Luxemburg's analysis and the source of their fights (the clearest defense of
Luxemburg and rebuttal comes in the form of Luxemburg's book The
Accumulation of Capital: An Anti-Critique and Bukharin's rebuttal
Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital.)

Again, in this instance there is little or nothing of a notion of class
struggle as the motor of development.  The crisis is always at the level of
capital, of the relation between capital and capital.  Between
disproportionality and the competition between capitals (first resulting in
monoploization, but which becomes a competition between nation states
representing national capitals), we have the grounds for the Leninist notion
of imperialism.

Luxemburg's proposition is different and the reason she is referred to an an
underconsumptionist is because Luxemburg posits that capital cannot
effectively valorize itself without expanding into and subsuming
non-capitalist territories.  She also bases her notion of imperialism on a
certain reading of Vol. 2 of Capital and the relation between departments
one and two.  Whatever its problems, it is different from
Lenin-Bukharin-Hilferding for sure.

In a way I feel that Negri has a kind of Luxemburgian stance in relation to
imperialism.  The idea of Empire as a state of perpetual crisis is
homologous in some ways to Luxemburg's prediction that with the end of an
'outisde'-'inside' relationship would result in 'barbarism', in decadence
and collapse.

Aufheben ran a series with a very useful discussion of these theories and it
is far more in depth than anyone can really be here, but the focus is on the
fact that all of them share a notion of capitalist decadence, that capital
could reach a highest stage from which it would collapse in on itself
(socialism or barbarism; the highest stage of capitalism; moribund
capitalism.)

The commonalities between these theories of imperialism involve the abscence
of class struggle (which neither Grossman nor Pannekoek nor Mattick overcome
either) as the motor of crisis.  The Leninist thesis ultimately fetishizes
the nation state.  Neither of them sees this fundamentally as the extension
of the capital-labor relation, though it is implicit in each in some way,
maybe even more strongly in the 'Leninist' theory if only because of the
export of means of production is one way of talking indirectly, at some
remove, about the export of the capital-labor relation, but understood quite
crassly and only economistically.

Empire has the advantage of trying to understand this all in part in terms
of the processes of real and formal subsumption and of class struggle.  This
is a major advance theoretically over Lenin, et al and Luxemburg.  It is
therefore suprising that Negri could say that imperialism once applied and
does not now.  What notion of imperialism?  Lenin's?  Luxemburg's?  Since
none of them worked from the capital-labor relation but only at the level of
appearances (yes, the Nietzscheans can all tell me that that is all there is
anyway, so we can all be Leninists in a past life then I suppose), of
fetishized concepts, imperialism in either form (and most others are in fact
derivative and/or even more deeply flawed, including Sweezy-Baran-Magdoff
and Amin's Third Worldism) is a bad way to construe the process.

So if I say that Negri does not go far enough, it is in part because he does
not say what is really the case: imperialism was always mistaken in the
first place.  This is where John Holloway's critique of paradigmatic theory
comes into force on all counts.  What are we left with?

We know that capital has always expanded as part of the process of fleeing
insubordinate labor in search of other labor which was more tractable, which
took a number of forms, and in this Lenin, Luxemburg, Amin and Baran do say
some interesting things, though they mistake the forms for the relations
themselves (they are in this sense utterly uncritical theories.)  In other
words, class struggle, not disproportionality, underconsumption, or the
anarchy of the market, drive the expansion of capital. One succinct
counter-formulation of this process is 'the tendential fall in the rate of
profit', which expresses the conflict between necessary and surplus labor,
ie the class struggle, and that this expresses itself in crises of
overaccumulation (see Bonefeld/Holloway Global Capital, National State and
the Politics of Money.)  I think that the national state was always about
the domination of labor, which included managing the movement and 'rights'
of labor and the designation of legal status and therefore ingraining
certain intra-class hierarchies and that the nation state developed,
contradictorily and non-fucntionalistically, as the means of imposing
capital's continued social domination and absorbing/recuperating labor's
insurgency.  But then I would also say that the state (not simply
soveriegnty) has to be dealt with as a specific form of the capital-labor
relation, as a historically particularized result of struggle shaped by the
separation of production from exchange, the separation of production also
from social control, resulting in the separation of the political and the
economic as distinct moments of the same relation.  In other words, the
state is not a structure in the base-superstructure sense, but a form, a
mode of existence, which is neither functional/instrumental nor possessing
'relative autonomy.'  In that sense, what appears as national capitals are
only moments of gloabl(izing) capital in the process of fleeing
(insubordinate) and seeking (tractable, not-yet-insubordinate or
subordinatable [ewww, that's ugly]) labor, but coming (and in this Negri is
on to something) out of a specific history which involves capital's
geographical/spacial determination as limited, whereas now we could say that
capital's spatial determination is unlimited.

This points towards an understanding of the development of global capital, a
process which simply did not have to succeed because each crisis meant the
possibility of irreparable rupture, of communism.  It also takes us away
from a fetishization of the nation state and of crisis as a capital-capital
phenomenon.  It restores, in effect, the revolutionary meaning of crisis.

IMO, Negri is not so much wrong in these observations, as at times ambiguous
and contradictory theoretically.  I feel in Negri a certain attachment to
the nation state-centric approach in the critique of it as 'no longer
applicable', rather than critiquing it outright (ok, I have said that like 3
times now in different ways.)  Maybe we could refer to Hardt's disseration
where he discusses the problem of Deleuze's position that Nietzsche is in
fact attempting to critique Hegel.  If Hardt is right that to posit
Nietzsche's work as mere critique would bind it to the dialectic in a back
handed way, then we might accuse Negri and Hardt in Empire of doing the same
thing, unless Lowe is of course correct that Empire is less an
anti-imperialism and more a difference in kind, an attempt at enrichment.
Negri also, continuing his work from the 1970's (even prior to Marx Beyond
Marx) in seeing real subsumption as meaning the creation of a society where
mechanization and the transformation of technology leads to the end of value
in the sense used by Marx, makes a mistake which Marx, in Capital, esp.
Volume 3, does not remain tied to.  This to me is a huge error, in part
simply from my personal experience as an IT worker whose work time has been
measured in ways that would boggle a factory worker.  My value production is
watched with an accountant's eye, my time charted and measured, my
productivity quantified beyond reason, in part with the help of the machines
I am subordinate to.  But the critiques levelled by Caffentzis and other
autonomists also develop at exactly this point.  The critique of Negri as
Eurocentric invlolves specifically his failure to recognize the
counter-tendencies Marx develops in Vol. 3, which involves, a propos of
Luxemburg, a furious new wave of enclosures in 'the hinterlands' and the
commodification of aspects of social life hitherto un- or under-commodified
as a means of expanding surplus value production.

All said and done, Empire offers up some phenomenally suggestive insights
that call the whole old theorization of capital's expansion into question.
Though I disagree with the reasons, Lowe's point that this is a difference
in kind is apropos and alessandro's point, to return to the beginning, is
key to rethinking this whole thing.  Imperialism is, and always was, a dead
dog for anyone not fetishizing the nation state and adhering to notions of
capital as 'national.'

The political implications are not simple and self-evident to me, however,
as Scott seems to see them.

For example, this does not, for me, involve a simplistic rejection of
so-called 'national liberation' struggles, though I cannot say that I find
the term 'national liberation' useful.  Rather, I see the possibilities of
struggle against the imposition of either the formal or real subsumption to
capital, which involves struggle against the capitalist state, but both
against an incipient capitalist state within the struggle (the 'national
liberators', who always seem organized as an already-always state in the
form of their armies a la Mao) and the external capitalist state.  This also
relates to Marx's late work around the possible linking of such struggles
with communistic social formations in pre-capitalist societies, such as the
mir or the attempts at creating an African socialism which drew on the
ujaama.  But as those spaces close, there is increasingly little to defend
in what truly are national liberation struggles: the struggle to liberate
the nation state, ie national capitalists, from the pressure of the world
market and of more powerful states, as well as from local labor.

I don't think it means taking sides with 'progressive' capital against
'reactionary' capital, of pop front alliances, either with 'national
liberation' capitalists or Imperial reformist aristocracies against
imperialists.

It doesn't contravene the position of NWBTCW ideas, even if those ideas
accept imperialism.  Actually, it strengthens them and sets them on a firmer
basis, but with a greater nuance as well.

And it challenges the ideological tendency to see the next
paradigm/stage/organization of capital as always-already implicit in each
crisis.  That involves rejecting theory as a means of discovering new ways
of understanding the world, which contravenes theory as a means of
participating in changing the world.

It does not mean the phasing out of the nation state, IMO, but it does mean
the movement of some aspects of sovereignty to the international plane
(obviously Negri and Hardt understand this better than the imperialist
theorists who insist that there is nothing new under the sun), the lessening
of the likelihood of World War-type wars, the traditional inter-imperialist
wars, but also an increased tension between international institutions,
which have as yet no real means of imposing themselves on the biggest powers
other than financially, and the nation states which retain the instruments
of violence and the maintenance of borders by which labor is controlled and
internationally hierarchized.  In that, I agree with Tahir's point, if not
the conlucion that imperialism is (or ever was) an appropriate way to think
this through.  We are not yet facing a world state and the transposition of
soveriegnty upwards, and in a decentering motion, is not yet a fixed or
finished process.

Maybe in the end, we do not disagree so much, Tahir, in so far as we both
reject the nonsense of stages/paradigm shifts.

In that sense, I object to empire as much as to imperialism as a theory of
both decadence and as what John Holloway and Richard Gunn would call a
'theory of', but if we refuse to engage with Empire's rich range of
questions, we risk something far worse: irrelevance.

Cheers,
Chris

ps Capital can never complete the real subsumption, not because it would
collapse, but because the working class always creates through its struggles
spaces, times and artifacts which negate and resist complete
commodification.  In a way the worst thing for capital would be the end of
resistance, for without resistance, without the possibility that we might
refuse our labor, there is no value to speak of in Marx's sense.  Then
again, since that will never happen, the worst that could happen would be
the abolition of the capital-labor relation.



----- Original Message -----
From: "Tahir Wood" <twood-AT-uwc.ac.za>
To: <aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Sent: Thursday, October 17, 2002 5:23 AM
Subject: AUT: Imperialism (Explications of The Savage Anomaly)


Chris

I do not find any of the arguments for empire that I have seen very
convincing. I must admit to only having read the first 100 pages or so of
Empire before getting bored with it. But I see no sign of the nation state
as capital's locus of power diminishing in importance. I don't believe that
this can happen either short of worldwide revolution. If anything, recent
events have reinforced this view.

So I stick with a version of imperialism. My version is both similar and
different to the Leninist one. It is similar in certain respects (e.g. the
centrality of export of capital). But where I differ most fundamentally is
on the question of the "highest stage". It is impossible to say that
capitalism has reached its highest stage or even to definitively separate
one stage from another. The debate going on as to whether the stage of real
domination was completed in Marx's time or whether it is still not completed
now(my view) should demonstrate this problem of stages. I see imperialism as
an inherent aspect of capitalism and - this is crucial - one that cannot be
eradicated without eradicating capital itself. If you see it as an aspect
rather than a stage then you reject the nonsense that about 90% of the left
(including me) bought into in the 20thC, namely that you could aim as an
interim stage for a non-imperialist but capitalist world, Samir Amin's
'polycentric world', for example. It seems to me that this whole notion of
imperialism was more of a strategy than a true theory, i.e. to forge an
alliance with nationalist movements, and especially to rationalise the
semi-autarkic development model of the SU and China.

BTW has anyone tried to prove that there was ever a stage of capitalism that
did not involve export of capital? I would find such a capitalism very hard
to imagine, especially in the light of the importance of colonial regions
such as Africa, America and India in the very earliest stages of capitalism.
It seems to me that the best thing that you could show is that this tendency
of capital to circulate globally in search of valorisation opportunities is
one that surges at certain points in history, but that it is always there.
It is very easy I suppose to take one of these surges as a 'stage',
especially if you are mechanistic and scientistic thinker like Lenin.

Tahir





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