The Liberal Virus. Samir Amin
politics is undone, begins to drift and loses its potential power to give meaning and coherence to alternative societal projects.
Is not the bourgeoisie itself, as the structured dominant class, on the way to “changing its look”? All during the ascendant phase of its history, the bourgeoisie was formed as the principal determinant of “civil society.” That did not imply a relative stability of men (only a few women in that era) or at least of family dynasties of capitalist-entrepreneurs (competition always implying a certain mobility in the membership of this class, bankruptcies occurring in conjunction with the rise of nouveaux riches) so much as the strong structuring of the class around systems of values and behaviors. The dominant class could then assert that the respectability of its members established the legitimacy of its privileges. This is less and less the case. A model close to that of the mafia seems to be the one taking over in the business world as much as in politics. Moreover, the separation between these two worlds—which, though it was not watertight, nevertheless characterized the systems that preceded historical capitalism—is in the process of disappearing. This model is not characteristic only of Third World countries or of the former so-called socialist countries of the East: it is tending to become the rule even at the heart of central capitalism. How else to characterize persons like Berlusconi in Italy, Bush (implicated in the Enron scandal) in the United States, and many others elsewhere?
But a senile system is not one that shuffles peacefully through its last days. On the contrary, senility summons an increase in violence.
The world system has not entered into a new “non-imperialist” phase that is sometimes characterized as “post-imperialist.” On the contrary, it is by nature an imperialist system exacerbated to the extreme (extracting resources without effective opposition). The analysis that Negri and Hardt propose of an “Empire” (without imperialism), in fact an Empire limited to the Triad—that is, the three major regions of capitalism, the United States, Europe, and Japan—with the rest of the world being ignored, is unfortunately inscribed both in the tradition of Occidentalism and in the currently fashionable intellectual discourse. The differences between the new imperialism and the preceding one are found elsewhere. Imperialism in the past was multiple (“imperialisms” in conflict), while the new one is collective (the Triad, even if this be in the wake of United States hegemony). From this fact, the “conflicts” among the partners of the Triad are only minor, while the conflict between the Triad and the rest of the world is clearly the major one. The disappearance of the European project in the face of American hegemonism finds its explanation here. Furthermore, accumulation in the prior imperialist stage was based on the binary relation between the industrialized centers and the non-industrialized peripheries, while in the new conditions of the system’s evolution the opposition is between the beneficiaries of the centers’ new monopolies (technology, access to natural resources, communications, weapons of mass destruction) and peripheries that are industrialized, but still subordinated by means of these monopolies. In order to justify their thesis, Negri and Hardt need to give a strictly political definition of the imperialist phenomenon (“the projection of national power beyond its frontiers”), without any relation to the requirements for the accumulation and reproduction of capital. This definition, which stems from vulgar university political science, particularly of the North American variety, eliminates from the start the true questions. Their discourse deals with a category “empire” placed outside of history and thus happily makes no distinction among the Roman, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, British colonial, and French colonial empires. No care is taken to consider the specificities of these historical constructions without reducing them to one another.
In fact, the global expansion of capitalism, because it is polarizing, always implies the political intervention of the dominant powers, that is, the states of the system’s center, in the societies of the dominated periphery. This expansion cannot occur by the force of economic laws alone; it is necessary to complement that with political support (and military, if necessary) from states in the service of dominant capital. In this sense, the expansion is always entirely imperialist even in the meaning that Negri gives to the term (“the projection of national power beyond its frontiers,” on condition of specifying that this power belongs to capital). In this sense, the contemporary intervention of the United States is no less imperialist than were the colonial conquests of the nineteenth century. Washington’s objective in Iraq, for example, (and tomorrow elsewhere) is to put in place a dictatorship in the service of American capital (and not a “democracy”), enabling the pillage of the country’s natural resources, and nothing more. The globalized “liberal” economic order requires permanent war—military interventions endlessly succeeding one another—as the only means to submit the peoples of the periphery to its demands.
The new-style Empire, on the contrary, is defined naively as a “network of powers” whose center is everywhere and nowhere, which thus dilutes the importance of the national state. This transformation moreover is essentially attributed to the development of the productive forces (the technological revolution). This is a shallow and simplistic analysis that isolates the power of technology from the framework of social relations within which it operates. Once again we recognize here the propositions of the dominant discourse vulgarized by Rawls, Castells, Touraine, Rifkin and others, in the tradition of North American liberal political thought.
The true questions that are posed by the articulation between the political instance (the state) and the reality of globalization, which should be at the center of the analysis of what is possibly “new” in the evolution of the capitalist system, are thus simply evaded by the gratuitous affirmation that the state has almost ceased to exist. In fact, even in the prior stages of an always globalized capitalism, the state was never omnipotent. Its power was always limited by the logic which governed the globalizations of the epoch. Wallerstein has even, in this spirit, gone so far as to give the global determinations a decisive power over the destiny of the states. The situation is no different today, since the difference between the globalization (imperialism) of the present and that of the past is found elsewhere.
The new imperialism truly has a center—the Triad—and a center of the center aspiring to exercise its hegemony—the United States. The Triad exercises its collective domination over the whole of the planet’s peripheries (three-quarters of humanity) by means of institutions put into place and under its management for that purpose. Some institutions are in charge of the economic management of the world imperialist system. Foremost among these are the World Trade Organization (WTO) whose real function is not to guarantee “freedom of markets” as it pretends but, on the contrary, to super-protect the monopolies (of the center) and to form systems of production for the peripheries as a function of this requirement; the IMF, which does not trouble itself with the relationships among the three major currencies (the dollar, the Euro, the yen), fulfills the functions of a collective colonial monetary authority (for the Triad); the World Bank, which is a sort of Ministry of Propaganda for the G7. Other institutions have charge of the political management of the system; here it is a question in the first place of NATO, which has replaced the UN in speaking on behalf of the world collectivity. The systematic implementation of military control over the planet by the United States expresses quite brutally this imperialist reality. Negri and Hardt’s work does not discuss questions relating to the functions of these institutions, no more than it mentions the multiplicity of facts which inconvenience the naive thesis of a “network of power”: military bases, powerful interventions, the role of the CIA, etc. The brutality of the U.S. intervention in Iraq makes the whole discourse on “capitalism as a gentle Empire” ridiculous.
In the same manner, the true questions that the technological revolution poses for the system’s class structure are evaded in favor of the vague category of the “multitude,” the analogue of “the people” of vulgar sociology. The true questions lie elsewhere: how does the technological revolution in progress (whose reality cannot be doubted), like every technological revolution, violently break up the old forms of the organization of work and of the class structure, while the new forms of their recomposition have not yet visibly crystallized?
To crown the whole thing and give a semblance of legitimacy to the imperialist practices of the Triad and the hegemonism of the United States, the system has produced its own ideological discourse, adapted to the new aggressive tasks. The discourse on the “clash of civilizations”