Economic Empire: The Inevitable Imperial Power by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri: Book Review

The American Heritage Dictionary describes empire as "1.a. A political unit having an extensive territory or comprising a number of territories or nations and ruled by a single supreme authority. b. The territory included in such a unit." This historical definition of empire is radically reconceptualized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire (Cambridge: Harvard, 2003), a study that conceives a postmodern Empire of global capital that defies the customary notion of empire as a territorial unit or units that are governed by a central political entity.

The postmodern Empire, by contrast, is a fluid, hybrid system of monetary and communication networks that subverts any system of localized, state-centered control. In the passage to Empire, according to Hardt and Negri, the nation-state system of sovereignty is in decline, and in its place a new type of sovereignty has emerged. "Our basic hypothesis is that sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire." (xii) The sovereign of the new Empire is therefore comprised of multiple groups united in a quest for capital accumulation, and this form of rule was constituted after the Second World War through the establishment of the United Nations, the World Bank, the IMF, and the US Federal Reserve. These institutions, along with the US military when force is necessary, guarantee these organisms access to capital markets globally, and as a result this new form of sovereignty is an all-enveloping system in which the distinction between inside and outside the capitalist system of accumulation and production has disappeared.

Hardt and Negri's unique contribution to a post-Marxian theory of capital and empire draws on Michel Foucault's concept of bio-politics, theories of the crisis of modernity, Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben's notion of a state of exception, and, of course, Marx's theory of capital to arrive at a universal order of postmodern Empire.

Hardt and Negri begin by demonstrating that the passage to Empire marks a specific paradigm shift (8) in which "Empire not only manages a territory and a population but also creates the very world it inhabits. It not only regulates human interactions but also seeks directly to rule over human nature. The object of its rule is social life in its entirety, and thus Empire presents the paradigmatic form of biopower." (xv) The Foucauldian notion of bio-power is essential for understanding the passage to Empire, for it is a system that is diffuse, hybrid, and systemic, and which admits no "outside." The disciplinary aspect of bio-power, which subjugated bodies through population control, the army, schools, prisons, etc., was an essential component of capitalist production and expansion.

It is through bio-power that Hardt and Negri locate the nascent structure of Empire. Similarly, in contrast to earlier periods of imperial rule, Empire effaces any attempt to distinguish between center and periphery; inside and outside; First, Second, or Third World. Rather, capital is concentrated not in specific regions or zones, but in concentrated pockets of global centers of the global market, such as New York, Tokyo, and London. Most important, however, is the fact that in Empire, all social, biological, political, and juridical life is subsumed within Empire; there is literally nothing that exists outside of the various networks that constitute Empire. Yet, it is precisely within this virtual state of exception, in which the exception has become the rule, that resistance is possible, and Hardt and Negri attempt to trace the evolution of imperial rule to Empire, and to document the possibilities for resistance by the multitude.

In order to understand the complex historical process that engendered the passage to Empire, Hardt and Negri, after defining how the new world order functions, delineate the passages of sovereignty as well as various passages of production, locating European ideas of the sovereignty of the state as the focal point for the modern age. The authors identify three moments in European modernity that elucidate the modern concept of sovereignty: "first, the revolutionary discovery of the plane of immanence; second, the reaction against these immanent forces and the crisis in the form of authority; and third, the partial and temporary resolution of this crisis in the formation of the modern state as a locus of sovereignty that transcends and mediates the plane of immanent forces." (70)

The revolutionary plane of immanence is located in the European Renaissance, when knowledge-art, science, politics and philosophy-shifted from the transcendent plane to the immanent, and humanity in this world was conceived as the center of existence. An ontological revolution had appeared through human ingenuity and creativity.

The second mode of modernity, however, was a reactionary force against the plane of immanence. "It arose within the Renaissance revolution to divert its direction, transplant the new image of humanity to a transcendent plane, relativize the capacities of science to transform the world, and above oppose the reappropriation of power on the part of the multitude. The second mode of modernity poses a transcendent constituted power against an immanent constituent power, order against desire." (74) Thus modernity is defined by the crisis between the transcendent and the immanent, order and desire. Out of this crisis emerges what Hardt and Negri term the "Transcendental Apparatus," which reconciles and mediates this crisis through the creation of the modern state. The mediation between the transcendent and the immanent was also crucial in the formation of the type of Eurocentrism that was constituted by this crisis; the passage to imperialism followed in order to quell class conflict within the state, which also was a result of the crisis between the immanent desire of the multitude and the transcendent power of the state.

Through this apparatus modern sovereignty was founded, and the mediation between the plane of immanence and the transcendental was directly related to modes of production; indeed, European modern sovereignty is, for Hardt and Negri, inseparable from capitalism. "What is needed is for the state, which is minimal but effective, to make the well-being of private individuals coincide with the public interest, reducing all social functions and laboring activities to one measure of value. That this state intervenes or not is secondary, what matters is that it give content to the mediation of interests and represent the axis of rationality of that mediation." (86) Here Foucault's conception of bio-politics is linked to the apparatus of the modern state, and all human activities-from the most private to the most public-are reducible to one single unit of value, that of exchange. Therefore the apparently liberatory and revolutionary foundation for the modern nation-state, in which sovereignty was to belong to the immanence and singularity of the multitude, was in actuality a mere alteration in the form of domination through a matrix of regulatory and productive processes.

While numerous theorists have noted capitalism's ineluctable tendency toward expansion irrespective of state sovereignty-and hence of imperialism, which sublimates class conflict in the nation-state-it is at this point of expansion that Hardt and Negri locate the passage to Empire, in which the dichotomy between inside and outside is forever abolished, and this is what earlier theorists failed to perceive. "In the process of capitalization the outside is internalized" (226) and the result is the capitalization of the world; in Empire the world "outside" of capitalism noted by Marx and Rosa Luxemburg ceases to exist.

This concept is key to Hardt and Negri's thesis concerning the passage to Empire, in which distinctions between "inside" and "outside" the capitalist mode of production, or a closed system of production within a territorially bounded state is erased. The internalization of the outside implicitly corresponds to Giorgio Agamben's assertion in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life that "the decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life-which is originally situated at the margins of the political order-gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoē, right and fact, enter a zone of irreducible indistinction." Empire, in this sense, ushers in a period of a "permanent state of exception," in which the normal juridical order is suspended. Modern society is marked by this passage to Empire; the entire world has been enveloped within a system in which it has become impossible to distinguish between order in the normal sense and a state of emergency.

Bio-politics, in conjunction with the rise of non-territorially defined entities not subject to any state or regulatory power, have delegitimized the sovereignty of the state while inscribing in the very existence of its subjects the self-regulatory disciplinary mechanisms through which an apparatus of control functions. Yet what is truly unique about Empire is that it is through supposed "humanitarian" institutions such as the United Nations that Empire and exception and emergency is constituted. "What stands behind this [UN and supranational organization] intervention is not just a permanent state of exception, but a permanent state of emergency and exception justified by the appeal to essential values of justice." (18) Empire, unlike previous imperial movements, ostensibly acts solely in the interest of the subjugated, generally impoverished states in order to help such states "rise" to the level of the "developed" nations. Imposing neo-liberal policies that, in reality, allow multinational capitalist organizations access to new markets and cheap labor is disguised as "modernization" through humanitarian aid and "development."

At this point a problem would appear to arise: How is it possible for non-territorial, hybrid, and fluid capitalist organisms to exercise sovereignty? After all, the fundamental definition of sovereignty according to Carl Schmitt (upon whom Agamben draws) is the ability to decide. It would appear counter intuitive that a power structure-and one that may change daily according to the whims of the global market, for that matter-could administer sovereignty, even in a society of control. Hardt and Negri assert that fear of poverty maintains conflict among the global proletariat, and financial and monetary flows that follow similar global patterns as labor power guarantee the hegemony of capital:

On the one hand, speculative and finance capital goes where the price of labor power is lowest and where the administrative force to guarantee exploitation is the highest. On the other hand, the countries that still maintain the rigidities of labor and oppose its full flexibility and mobility are punished, tormented, and finally destroyed by global monetary mechanisms.

The stock market drops when the unemployment rate goes down, or really when the percentage of workers who are not immediately flexible and mobile rises. The same happens when social policies in a country do not completely accommodate that imperial mandate of flexibility and mobility-or better, when some elements of the welfare state are preserved as a sign of the persistence of the nation-state. Monetary policies enforce the segmentation dictated by labor policies. (338)

Thus powerful financial institutions, seeking low labor costs in order to achieve the highest possible returns on investment, through punitive trade policies and the fear of poverty, impose labor practices that guarantee finance capital's free and fluid access to any and all markets. The sovereignty of Empire acts through coercive financial mechanisms-fear of poverty, unemployment, and violence are the primary forces that maintain the global proletariat's segmentation and antipathy toward one another.

While Hardt and Negri skillfully articulate Empire as a global network of financial and monetary institutions that transcend the declining system of nation-states, they under emphasize the importance of nation-states in maintaining that very system. Nation-states, in Empire, are largely tangential to the exploitative nature of Empire, primarily acting at the behest of powerful capitalist corporations in order to secure access to markets and labor. The state, in Empire, is largely an extension of capital, providing force when necessary only when nations attempt to enact laws or labor practices inimical to finance.

What Hardt and Negri neglect (while admitting such institutions can be national or supranational) is the close link between states' military and monetary policies. Similarly, the regional importance of maintaining certain nations' economic supremacy over others goes unexamined in Empire.

Illustrative of this is Hardt and Negri's evaluation of the United States' role in Empire. While the authors claim that the United States are an imperial power-indeed, the contemporary idea of Empire is an implicit project of the US Constitution (183)-the constitutive power of Empire resides in the formation of the United Nations, while with the end of the cold war "the United States was called to serve the role of guaranteeing and adding juridical efficacy to this complex process of the formation of a new supranational right." (181)

This role of the US as global police, while certainly true, suggests that the dominant global military power primarily acts on behalf of the United Nations and other supranational institutions in order to ensure profit and production in the guise of humanitarianism. This assertion significantly underestimates the full range of motives for maintaining US military dominance; it also fails to explain the often conflicting positions taken by various international bodies and the US government. It would be safe to say that Hardt and Negri overstate the importance of the UN as an international policy-maker, while understating powerful states' role in maintaining the global system.

In Empire, Hardt and Negri offer an original, post-Marxian evaluation of globalization, empire, and capitalism by locating the seeds of Empire in the "crisis of modernity," during which the liberatory plane of immanence conflicted with the traditional form of sovereignty in the plane of transcendence. The hybrid result-the nation-state-through processes of bio-politics and capitalist production would produce Empire today. Capital's inevitable tendency toward expansion, coupled with the bio-political production and regulation would develop into Empire's entire subsumption of social, economic, and political life. The state of exception created by Empire was unique in that the system of domination (primarily the UN) resides in a guise of humanitarianism. It is only when force is absolutely necessary that military power (primarily the US) comes to the fore and exposes Empire.

While Empire overstates the importance of institutions such as the United Nations, while understating the importance of military force, it convincingly exposes how monetary and communication networks have truly become global; capitalism's envelopment of the globe is demonstrated as the ultimate form of Empire through fear. Though a sobering and sometimes chilling book, Hardt and Negri stress that Empire contains its own destructive potential, for capitalism crisis is intrinsic to its nature, and it is within the very communication networks that the multitude can liberate itself. How this precisely will happen is not revealed, yet the call is made for global citizenship, the right to a social wage, and the right to reappropriation.

Though these relatively modest demands from a rather radical book reveal the limitations of attempting to construct a normative plan of action, Hardt and Negri demonstrate that resistance is possible and, since there is no outside, the tools of the master must be employed to attack the system.