The Really, Really Short Twenty-First Century

A few months ago, my partner and I met a liberal, fortysomething history professor who told us that for his next book he’d been reading up on late-1990s alter-globalization movements. As the millennium neared, global capitalism seemingly stood unchallenged. Social democrats and ex-communists praised the free market, and groupings like the World Trade Organization (WTO) integrated Russian and Chinese leaders. Yet this, he had discovered, wasn’t the whole story. It turned out that each of these elite conferences had been confronted by mass protests calling for an alternative global com-munity. This rainbow coalition hadn’t detailed exactly what it wanted. But it had, he said, a world-changing ambition hard to find on today’s Left.

It was odd to hear him discuss this period like a lost Atlantis. When I moved into an East London squat in the late 2000s, it wasn’t even clearly in the past; its activists, its media, and its meetups were still with us, shaping the mass opposition to the ongoing war in Iraq. People still derided the practice of “summit hopping” from city to city to protest the gatherings of statesmen; some activists ironically identified with the term. These had, for many, been inspiring mobilizations. When the G8 met in Genoa in 2001, the repression culminated in the police shooting dead the young activist Carlo Giuliani. When we protested the G20 in London in 2009, a police officer killed Ian Tomlinson, a newspaper seller wandering through the demonstration, and then the authorities lied about it.

Upon the quarter-century anniversaries of similar summit protests, many accounts have emphasized their uncontrollable energy, with no single strategic leadership. While trade unions did join in, organized labor, political parties, and national governments were hardly center stage. Rather, at these protests and at countersummits like the World Social Forum, there were a variety of forces and personally chosen affinity groups: farmers, indigenous collectives, NGOs, tax-justice campaigns, and masked-up activists dressed in white overalls. If a word like “socialism” had for decades meant different things to different people, even such a vague future ambition had slipped from view. 

For some, this offered a way of moving on from obsolete categories. This same desire at least partly explains the notoriety of the 2000 book Empire, penned by Duke professor of literature Michael Hardt and Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri. Drawing on post-Marxist tools, Empire cast itself as a way of reading a postmodern reality. It spoke of a planet ruled not by the rival projects of the strongest capitalist states but by a more pervasive, many-layered combination of powers. Faced with capital’s apparent triumph and the dissolution of old left-wing parties, it promised a hopeful counternarrative of polyphonic resistance to capitalist coordination. 

Everywhere and Nowhere

Empire print runs repeatedly sold out in the book’s early years. Many observers of this commercial success were suspicious of its reception in mainstream outlets like The New York Times. Left-wing reviewers sniffily mentioned that thepaper had proclaimed the book the “Next Big Idea” and attributed this attention to Negri’s “radical chic” image (at the time, he was jailed in Rome on hyped-up charges of inciting terrorism decades earlier). Marxist critics of the book often recognized the buzz around it within the alter-globalization movement and then sought to gently dissuade readers from Hardt and Negri’s analysis.

Ironically, writing for The New York Times, Emily Eakin adopted a more materialist outlook on Empire than most who name-checked her piece. Her story centered on Harvard University Press’s publishing success, which responded to “the need in fields like English, history and philosophy for a major new theory.” Hardt and Negri were “hot” because they offered a fresh account of why disciplines like literary theory were useful for interpreting globalization. Covering everything from the Roman Empire to Karl Marx, Baruch Spinoza, and Niccolò Machiavelli, explained Eakin, here was a tome with “the formal trappings of a master theory in the old European tradition.”

This was not the only reason for interest. Faced with the epochal turn to the market in the Eastern Bloc and China, even many anti-Stalinist Marxists harked back to earlier, pre-Comintern ideas. What some found compelling about Hardt and Negri’s system was its promise of novelty and engagement with a new, post-1989 world. It claimed to transcend “the first major wave of Marxist theoretical analyses of imperialism” by Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, “clustered around the period of World War I.” Hardt and Negri argued that while Marxist-Leninist anti-imperialism had sought national liberation — that is, inclusion in sovereignty and modernity — this model was now exhausted by its defeats.

But what was Empire? It was a new global sovereign, replacing the old imperialist rivalries between nation-states. It had emerged as a disciplining response to the capitalist crisis of the 1970s and the spontaneous “proletarian internationalism” of working-class insurgency, both Eastern and Western. Rather than just extending US imperialism’s geographic reach, this produced an “international disciplinary order” in which the First, Second, and Third Worlds were now interwoven. Its “hybrid constitution” combined international organizations, states, multinationals, NGOs, and the media. While institutions like the G8 and the WTO helped coordinate this globalized economy, this form of power was deterritorial and pervasive: there was no “outside” space to break away into anymore.

If the United States was near the top of the “imperial pyramid,” there were also signs of collaboration among once hostile states. In particular, the 1990s were a high-water mark for Washington acting in the name of the international community. The United Nations — including the Soviet leadership — gave its backing to George H. W. Bush’s Gulf War in 1991, beating back Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica exposed the UN’s limits as a peacekeeping force. Yet there were other signs of political convergence. In 1997, Russia was welcomed as the Group of Seven’s eighth member (thereby creating the G8), and early in Vladimir Putin’s rule, Western leaders saw him as an ally in the war on terror.

We’re Coloring In Maps Again

Yet Empire was more a work that expounded a philosophical system against past Marxisms than one materially analyzing developments in capitalism. As Samir Amin pointed out, in soft-pedaling the US state’s pivotal role, it showed little interest in what either Democratic or Republican administrations said, for instance, about cornering access to global resources. Faced with the fall of Soviet-style communism and Third World nationalist projects, Hardt and Negri didn’t really examine the new states there either. Yes, they said that “socialist modernization” in China and the USSR ended up preparing a skilled workforce for capital. But what role did these former socialist states play in Empire? The book made only passing reference to their post-1991 histories.

Today the book’s claimed novelty seems ironic. Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and others openly boast of their plans to use the US military to control the resources of Venezuela and Iran — and moan that Europe isn’t helping more. US leaders do not justify this in the name of international peace but at most point out that China wants control of oil and waterways too. In such fields as artificial intelligence, rival nation-states play a key role in defending their own tech firms and regulating others’. For sure, Hardt and Negri’s system has its get-out clauses: the text is so vague and poetic and changes subject so often that it can easily retreat into inscrutable abstractions about contradiction and hybrid structures. Yet this doesn’t make it all that useful for explaining what is happening in the actually existing twenty-first century.

The issue here is not that Trump’s aberrant behavior has upset predictions. Maybe the recent fracas over Greenland really does owe to his childlike desire to recolor a big chunk of the North Atlantic map. But more than that, it’s worth understanding that the globalization of which Hardt and Negri spoke pivoted on the US state specifically; that the authors were correct to see globalization as a response to the profitability crises of the 1970s; and that it was utopian to imagine that fear of proletarian internationalism was producing a unitary imperial order. To understand this, we could look to an excellent recent book by Benjamin Bürbaumer, which, though not claiming the same scope as Empire, illustrates many of its limits.

Bürbaumer’s Chine/États-Unis, le capitalisme contre la mondialisation develops a materialist account of both Washington’s and Beijing’s roles in the age of capitalist globalization. We again start from the understanding that both US and Chinese leaders turned to globalization as a response to crisis and as a strategy for pushing back against working-class economic demands. Unlike Hardt and Negri, Bürbaumer recognizes that these strategies reflect the interests of particular fractions of capital (in the US case, transnationally oriented businesses) and of the states themselves. He thus addresses one of the most fundamental questions of Marxist analysis: How do the ruling classes act in order to protect and promote capital accumulation?

From the 1970s, Bürbaumer explains, US leaders defending transnational capital had an interest in China’s and the Eastern Bloc’s integration into globalization in a subordinate role: as a massive supply of cheaper labor, which also helped to discipline American workers. For a rising pro-market faction in China’s Communist Party, this offered a way of accelerating national development, allowing technology transfer, providing a pressure valve for internal conflicts, and producing new middle-class groups that would support further liberalization. Yet this also produced new tensions, as an ascendant Chinese capitalism met the limits of its subordinate position. Since the 2008 crisis, this conflict has intensified in everything from tech patents to the dominance of the dollar. Now the protection of rival trade routes is matched with a buildup of military hardware.

The success of Bürbaumer’s approach is that, rather than relying on telling us that the system has countless different parts, it is willing to tell us what they are. Going beyond the recognition that everything is somehow interrelated, it allows us to see what power looks like today and helps us imagine what might be done to avoid its worst outcomes. 

Age of Empire

It’s not just that states are directing investment, building infrastructure, and even preparing for war. They also remain key sites of struggle, unreplaced by genuinely global movements. Already in the high phase of the alter-globalization protests, many actors understood that the expansion of capitalism into new spaces helped to undermine national-level legislation (on labor, on environmental standards) and democratic control over them. Far from a reactionary throwback, these areas remain pivotal conquests of the workers’ movement and the focus of many present-day struggles. While historic workers’ parties have wilted, their past gains have not disappeared entirely.

As Empire was being written, in 1994, historian Eric Hobsbawm published The Age of Extremes. It framed the run from World War I to the collapse of the Soviet Union as a “short” twentieth century: a period of disasters and of both hopeful and dreadful struggles to build a new world. Its end did not produce an irenic new order but killed off an antagonist that had long forced liberal capitalism to reform. Of Hobsbawm’s main works, this was the most marked by the failure of the communist movement with which his life was intertwined. Yet he concluded by raising apt questions about how the hollowing out of democracy and dismantling of national-level social protections still threatened liberal capitalism. Empire instead remained coy about the institutional legacy of twentieth-century reformism, while refusing to frankly assess the results of the 1970s autonomist left in which Negri had been active.

To provide a framework to do better than the struggles of the past, Empire counted on a willpower that would spring from life and labor itself. The authors name-checked past anti-colonial wars and antifascist movements to illustrate the unending course of popular revolt, even if dismissing their choices and outcomes. The militants of historical communist parties appeared in the book as “sad, ascetic agent[s],” beholden only to “duty and discipline,” unlike the “irrepressible lightness and joy” with which Negri credited himself. Likewise doomed were all who pinned their desires on national liberation: “The day when the Palestinians are institutionalized, I will no longer be at their side,” declared Jean Genet, quoted in lieu of analysis. With “the construction of the nation-state,” Hardt and Negri explained, “all the oppressive functions of modern sovereignty inevitably blossom in full force.” 

Singing the praises of mobilization within and against Empire, Hardt and Negri’s treatise never engaged with the demands or expectations of the subaltern. The industrial working class appears only as a dying actor; any defense of identity and locality — and, it would seem, also rights won within the state — is cast as backward-looking. Any strategy that seeks an “outside” from capitalist globalization rather than fights within it, we read, “obscures and even negates the real alternatives and the potentials for liberation that exist within Empire.” What does this mean in practice? The authors find it hard to explain. In further works such as Multitude and Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri settle for suggesting that Empire itself prompts myriad forms of resistance and refusal that — perhaps without yet realizing it — may end up marching along parallel paths. 

Appearing after Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes, Empire saw the defeat of the short twentieth century’s illusions as the removal of statist projects that had only gotten in the way. Given the many failings of the socialist and communist parties and their recent epochal defeat, Empire had a captive audience who needed little convincing that the project of reforming the state had hit a dead end. Yet the twenty-first century that Empire heralded, marking the surpassing of imperialism in favor of unified capitalist empire, would itself run aground almost immediately, lurching from crisis to international conflict. The next big idea on campus in 2000 was an artifact of the Left’s defeats and the promised globalization that wouldn’t live up to the billing.