Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2003 10:20:46 -0800 (PST)
From: Thomas Seay <entheogens-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: AUT: "The Order of War" -Antonio Negri


                The Order of War

Iran, Iraq, North Korea.  Within the new world order,
roles and pecking orders are being redefined through
conflict with "rogues states".  This is the game in
progress between the United States, China, Europe and
Russia.  By Antonio Negri (First appeared in the
Italian magazine "Global" in November, 2002) 
Translated by Arianna Bove and Thomas Seay

http://www.generation-online.org/t/negriwar.htm


The imperial war is underway, developing and expanding
with continuity and inner consistency.  American
initiative, the driving force behind the war, yields
little by little to the conditions set by other rulers
of the earth.  The very role of the United Nations is
being transformed into that of Imperial Senate(1). 
War, as a global basis of legitimacy and as
pre-eminent display of imperial rule, is manifesting
itself in all its forms, and as it expands, so too
does imperial power.  The new military doctrine, made
public by the American administration on September 20,
2002, completes the strategic design that the Bush
group declared when it first acceded to power, well
before the collapse of the Twin Towers:  the
achievement of superior military power by the United
States, the consequent denunciation of the
Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), and the start of
the unilateral construction of the Missile Defense
System ("Son of Star Wars").  After September 11,
2001, the campaign in Afghanistan, which initiated on
a global level the first phase of the war on
terrorism, put together conventional and
unconventional means of warfare, as well as high and
low intensity police actions.  Today the new military
doctrine couches in terms of common sense and
elementary self-defense Empire's right to intervene
against potential enemies before such threats
materialize.  This is the theory of preventative war.

Preventative war is not only a military doctrine; it
is a constituent strategy of Empire.  The American
administration's September 20th document explicitly
states so: preventative war is a just and necessary
means to defend liberty, justice, democracy and
economic growth against terrorists and tyrants.  It
adds that preventative war should be considered
immediately relevant concerning three "rogue states": 
Iraq, Iran and North Korea.  To certain sectors of
public opinion as well as to diplomats of some
countries it seemed as though the statement about the
"Axis of Evil", along with a succession of angry
unilateralist declarations on the part of White House
representatives and their watchdogs indicated the
suspension or definitive interruption of the nexus
between military doctrine and the constituent strategy
of Empire.  In reality such was not the case.  On the
contrary, these statements represented items on the
agenda [ordine del giorno] around which constituent
discussions between the global powers emerged.  No
sensible person could have ever really thought that
Iraq, Iran and North Korea posed substantial problems
for a power like the USA, which could claim inordinate
military power after its victory against international
communism.

Now American military power, which is absolutely
asymmetric, must also become intransitive; it must
remain an absolute superpower not so much with respect
to the three 'powers of Evil' but rather in respect to
the other world powers: the Axis of evil is a metaphor
for the great problems the monarchic power of the
United States of America faces in three strategic
areas at the end of the cold war.  Europe, Russia and
China represent the problematic poles of the new
global order. Now, Iraq is a further indication of the
European problem (and subordinately, of the Japanese
one) presented under the guise of energy supplies:
without securing them the European economy cannot
exist and whoever controls energy supplies has his
hands on the whole range of biopolitical functions of
power in the old continent. On the other hand, Iran
(the area around the Caspian sea) represents the soft
underbelly of Russian development. North Korea is in
the middle of the China Sea. How is Empire organized
in these three fundamental zones? What is its material
constitution to become, today, in the presence of an
American military superpower? How is the military
supremacy of the monarchic power over the new imperial
order to be preventatively secured? 

It is well known that in Empire the sole exercise of
military power-or rather, of the monarchical function-
is far from being sufficient to secure centrality and
stability for the exercise of global power. Moreover,
S11 has shown  (and with what dreadful evidence!) that
the United States is in no respects an island. The
ensuing economic crisis -not only at the level of
production but also and especially at the financial
and monetary level- has demonstrated that in Empire
monarchy cannot survive unless it is in agreement with
the global aristocracy. Therefore, the war that's
brewing contains within its core a discussion on the
imperial constitution, and particularly, as far as
Europe is concerned, the dimensions and roles of the
European aristocracies in it. Chirac and Schroder are
neither pacifists nor warmongers: they are debating
with Bush on the place of European capitalism in the
imperial constitution. The major decisions are not
being made on the war on terrorism or on the
conventional war against tyrants, but rather on the
forms of hegemony and the relative degrees of power
that American and/or European capitalist elites will
have in the organization of the new world order.
Preventative decisions are not simply to do with war
but more with market predominance in the sub regions
of the imperial organization. 

What should be the multitudes reaction to such a
situation?  How to oppose this imperial game, which
has become totalitarian and warlike, with the force
and desire of democracy?  How to avoid war or, in any
case, fight against it, whilst struggling at the same
time for democracy, the real democracy of the
multitudes, on a global scale?

Two possible suggestions for now.  The first is the
choice of field of struggle.  There is no possibility
of struggling against the constitution of Empire
without acting on a global scale.  Imperial power
extends over the globality of relations between
nation-states and regional systems of capitalist
power.  These subjects take part in - in a way more or
less contradictory, but always, eventually coherent
and in agreement- the system of capitalist
exploitation.  Now resistance to imperial war is
possible only by going beyond the narrow confines of
nation and region; it is possible only on the level of
global networks of resistance.  Nationalisms, even and
especially those advocated by the Left (found
frequently amongst ex-colonial countries or ones that
are extremely dependent as in Latin America) represent
a great danger, giving rise to the illusion that
imperial rule based on capitalist exploitation can be
influenced or even beaten at the nation-state level. 
In reality, all forces that act on a global scale will
be effective only if they act, in a post-modern
manner, transversally and wherever. 

For instance, take the way the two major
fundamentalist forces -the Zionist and the Islamic-
operate: they are networks, certainly present on
specific territories, but especially active in public
opinion and in the electoral bodies of key major
capitalist countries, in the networks of information
and finance and so on. These are not the fields we are
interested in, we are not fundamentalists…

But once we've established that the only adequate
field of struggle and organization is the global
terrain, we have a second line of action: the
anti-capitalist one. Here, social democracy presents
itself as the obstacle and mystification to be
resisted. However, resistance must accompany exodus,
thus, with the view not of participating in the new
imperial constitution (either as subjugated peoples or
as corporatist masses), but rather to oppose the
global constitution of capital and the imperial
constitution founded on preventative war with the
democracy of the multitude (that is based on the
surplus of intellectual and ethical production of the
proletariat). But what is the democracy of the
multitude? What is the force of the new organized
subjectivity? What is the 'council with computers' of
our new productive generations?

(1) Translators' note.  For a definition of the terms
monarchy, aristocracy and democracy as "tripartite
divisions of functions and elements" within Imperial
government see Hardt and Negri's discussion of
"Polybius and Imperial Government" in "Empire" pp.
314-316:  "The Empire we find ourselves faced with
today is also-mutatis mutandis-constituted by a
functional equilibrium among these three forms of
power: the monarchic unity of power and its global
monopoly of force; aristocratic articulations through
transnational corporations and nation-states; and
democratic-representational comitita, presented again
in the form of nation-states along with the various
kinds of NGO's, media organizations, and other
"popular organisms."


====<<Be like me!  The Primal Mother, eternally creative, eternally impelling into life,
    eternally drawing satisfaction from the ceaseless flux of phenomena.>>
    -Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy"

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