HOW do we analyse the major contradictions in the era of globalisation? Those who believe that globalisation amounts to a qualitatively new system or order, locate the main contradiction between the global economy and nation-states. And they see the resolution of this contradiction in the development of a global society and a corresponding system of global governance to match the development of the global economy. For some, this entails a veritable world revolution, while many liberals believe this to be achievable through democratisation of the existing multilateral institutions and effective containment or engagement of US within an effective international framework. Friedman and Co. of course believe that such a global society must necessarily be led by the US and the US alone.

A significant and most sensational recent addition to this literature has been a book called “Empire”, which has been advertised as the new Communist Manifesto for the new millennium. Let us take a brief look at the basic ideas enunciated in this new book by American literary theorist Michel Hardt and Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri, who have been acclaimed as the Marx and Engels of the Internet age! They claim that imperialism is over and the era of Empire has dawned. They argue that while it is certainly true that, “in step with the processes of globalization, the sovereignty of nation-states, while still effective, has progressively declined, the decline in sovereignty of nation-states, however, does not mean that sovereignty as such has declined. Sovereignty, they say, 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 they call Empire.

They describe the emerging global capitalist economy as the economy of postmodernisation in which the role of industrial labour is getting minimised and production is tending ever more toward what they call bio-political production, the production of social life itself, in which the economic, the political, and the cultural increasingly overlap and invest one another.

The Empire does wield enormous powers of oppression and destruction, but these, they insist, are radically different from the old forms of domination. The passage to Empire and its processes of globalization offer new possibilities to the forces of liberation. And hence the political task, they argue, is not simply to resist these processes but to reorganize them and redirect them toward new ends. The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-Empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges. Imperialism in the analysis of Hardt and Negri consists primarily in the act of colonial annexation and with the end of the era of colonial annexation in its direct form they therefore declare that imperialism is over. Lenin had rejected precisely this notion of imperialism-as-policy and established that imperialism was a special stage of capitalism, the stage of monopoly capitalism. The unevenness of capitalist development which both results from and culminates in periodic redivision of the world is substituted in their analysis by what they called spatial totality and interpenetration of First and Third Worlds. In spite of all talks of subversion the authors therefore fail to locate any weak links in the chain of that totality. And the vague concept of the multitude in place of the working class and the oppressed peoples matches perfectly with their decentered notion of Empire.

The best rejoinder to the absurdly Utopian and romantic notions of Empire has been provided by real life itself. The wishful nature of their talk of erosion of American sovereignty in relation to the abstract global sovereignty of capital has been mercilessly exposed in the wake of the unprecedented political and military offensive of US imperialism since the Gulf War, the growing shift of US policy towards unilateralism and the impotence of multilateral institutions and even the UN in the face of this heightened imperialist aggression.