Empire (43 page)

This historical perspective leads Arrighi to demonstrate how everything
returns, or specifically how capitalism always returns. The crisis of the
1970s, then, is really nothing new. What is happening to the capitalist
system led by the United States today happened to the British one hundred
years ago, to the Dutch before them, and earlier to the Genoese. The crisis
indicated a passage, which is the turning point in every systemic cycle of
accumulation, from a first phase of material expansion (investment in production) to a second phase of financial expansion (including speculation). This
passage toward financial expansion, which Arrighi claims has characterized
the U.S. economy since the early 1980s, always has an autumnal character;
it signals the end of a cycle. It indicates specifically the end of U.S. hegemony
over the world capitalist system, because the end of each long cycle always
indicates a geographical shift of the epicenter of systemic processes of capital
accumulation. ‘‘Shifts of this kind,’’ he writes, ‘‘have occurred in all the
crises and financial expansions that have marked the transition from one
systemic cycle of accumulation to another.’’3 Arrighi claims that the United
States has passed the torch to Japan to lead the next long cycle of capitalist accumulation.

We are not interested in discussing whether or not Arrighi is right to

advance this hypothesis about the decline of the United States and the rise
T H E L I M I T S O F I M P E R I A L I S M

239

of Japan. What concerns us more is that in the context of Arrighi’s cyclical
argument it is impossible to recognize a rupture of the system, a paradigm
shift, an event. Instead, everything must always return, and the history of
capitalism thus becomes the eternal return of the same. In the end, such a
cyclical analysis masks the motor of the process of crisis and restructuring.

Even though Arrighi himself has done extensive research on working-class
conditions and movements throughout the world, in the context of this book,
and under the weight of its historical apparatus, it seems that the crisis of
the 1970s was simply part of the objective and inevitable cycles of capitalist
accumulation, rather than the result of proletarian and anticapitalist attack
both in the dominant and in the subordinated countries. The accumulation
of these struggles was the motor of the crisis, and they determined the terms
and nature of capitalist restructuring. More important than any historical
debate about the crisis of the 1970s, however, are the possibilities of rupture
today. We have to recognize where in the transnational networks of production, the circuits of the world market, and the global structures of capitalist
rule there is the potential for rupture and the motor for a future that is not
simply doomed to repeat the past cycles of capitalism.

3.2

D I S C I P L I N A R Y G O V E R N A B I L I T Y

It seems politically impossible for a capitalist democracy to organize

expenditure on the scale necessary to make the grand experiment

which would prove my case—except in war conditions.

John Maynard Keynes, July 29, 1940

The old imperialism—exploitation for foreign profit—has no place

in our plans.

President Harry S. Truman, January 20, 1949

The first major wave ofMarxist theoretical analyses of

imperialism was clustered around the period ofWorld War I. This

period too was the beginning ofsome profound changes in the

world capitalist system. Coming out ofthe Soviet Revolution of

1917 and the first great interimperialist war, capitalist development,

it was clear, could not proceed as before. There was, as we said, a

clear choice: either world communist revolution or the transforma-

tion ofcapitalist imperialism toward Empire. Capital had to respond

to this challenge, but conditions throughout the world were not

very favorable. In the 1920s the disorder of capitalist development

in the imperialist countries had reached its peak. The growth and

concentration ofindustrial production, which the war had pushed

to an extreme, continued at a rapid pace in the dominant capitalist

countries, and the spread ofTaylorism allowed for increasingly high

levels ofproductivity. This rational organization oflabor, however,

did not lead to the rational organization ofmarkets, but instead only

increased their anarchy. Wage regimes in the dominant countries

became ever stronger and more rigid along the Fordist model. The

D I S C I P L I N A R Y G O V E R N A B I L I T Y

241

fixed regimes ofhigh wages functioned in part as a response to the

threat conjured up by the October Revolution, an inoculation

against the spread ofthe communist disease. Meanwhile, colonial

expansion continued unabated as the spoils ofthe German, Austrian,

and Turkish territories were divided among the victors under the

dirty sheets ofthe League ofNations.

This set off

actors underlay the great economic crisis of

1929—a crisis ofboth capitalist overinvestment and proletarian

underconsumption in the dominant capitalist countries.1 When Wall

Street’s ‘‘Black Friday’’ officially declared the crisis open, the rulers

had to face the general problems of the capitalist system and search

for a solution, if one was still possible. What they should have done

at Versailles during the peace negotiations—deal with the
causes
of the interimperialist war rather than simply punish the losers2—now

had to be done within each individual country. Capitalism had to be

transformed radically. The governments of the primary imperialist

countries, however, were not able to accomplish this. In Great

Britain and France, reform never really took place, and the few

attempts got bogged down in the face of the conservative reaction.

In Italy and Germany, the project to restructure capitalist relations

eventually evolved into Nazism and fascism.3 In Japan, too, capitalist

growth took the form of militarism and imperialism.4 Only in the

United States was capitalist reform put into effect and proposed as

a democratic New Deal. The New Deal constituted a real departure

from the previous forms of the bourgeois regulation of economic

development. For our analysis, the importance ofthe New Deal

should be gauged not only in terms ofits capacity to restructure

the relations ofproduction and power within a single dominant

capitalist country but also, above all, in terms of its effects throughout

the world—effects that were not direct or straightforward but none-

theless profound. With the New Deal the real process of surpassing

imperialism began to take root.

A New Deal for the World

In the United States, the New Deal was supported by a strong

political subjectivity among both popular forces and the elite. The

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P A S S A G E S O F P R O D U C T I O N

continuity ofthe liberal and populist faces ofAmerican progressivism

from the beginning of the century converged in Franklin Delano

Roosevelt’s action program. One could rightly say that FDR re-

solved the contradictions ofAmerican progressivism by forging a

synthesis ofthe American imperialist vocation and reformist capital-

ism, represented by Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.5

This subjectivity was the driving force that transformed U.S. capital-

ism and renewed U.S. society in the process. The state was cele-

brated not only as mediator ofconflicts but also as motor ofsocial

movement. The transformations of the state’s juridical structure set

in motion procedural mechanisms that could allow for the strong

participation and expression ofa broad plurality ofsocial forces.

The state took the central role in economic regulation, too, as

Keynesianism was applied to labor and monetary policies. U.S.

capitalism was spurred forward by these reforms, and it developed

in a regime ofhigh wages, high consumption, and also high conflic-

tuality. Out ofthis development came the trinity that would consti-

tute the modern welfare state: a synthesis of Taylorism in the organi-

zation oflabor, Fordism in the wage regime, and Keynesianism in

the macroeconomic regulation ofsociety.6 It was not a welfare state

that was the product ofeconomic and social policies that mixed

public assistance and imperialist incentives, as had been the case in

Europe, but rather one that invested social relations in their entirety,

imposing a regime ofdiscipline accompanied by greater participation

in the processes ofaccumulation. It was a capitalism that wanted

to be transparent, regulated by a state that exercised liberal planning.

We should make clear that our apologia ofRoosevelt’s welfare

state is somewhat exaggerated here in order to demonstrate our

central thesis: that the New Deal model (responding to the crisis

common to all the dominant capitalist states after the First World

War) was the first instance ofa strong subjectivity that tended in

the direction ofEmpire. The New Deal produced the highest

form of
disciplinary
government. When we speak ofdisciplinary

government, we are not referring simply to the juridical and political

forms that organize it. We are referring primarily to the fact that

D I S C I P L I N A R Y G O V E R N A B I L I T Y

243

in a disciplinary society, the entire society, with all its productive

and reproductive articulations, is subsumed under the command of

capital and the state, and that the society tends, gradually but with

unstoppable continuity, to be ruled solely by criteria ofcapitalist

production.
A disciplinary society is thus a factory-society.
7 Disciplinarity is at once a form of production and a form of government such

that disciplinary production and disciplinary society tend to coincide

completely. In this new factory-society, productive subjectivities

are forged as one-dimensional functions of economic development.

The figures, structures, and hierarchies ofthe division ofsocial labor

become ever more widespread and minutely defined as civil society

is increasingly absorbed into the state: the new rules ofsubordination

and the disciplinary capitalist regimes are extended across the entire

social terrain.8 It is precisely when the disciplinary regime is pushed

to its highest level and most complete application that it is revealed

as the extreme limit ofa social arrangement, a society in the process

ofbeing overcome. This is certainly due in large part to the motor

behind the process, the subjective dynamics ofresistance and revolt,

which we will return to in the next section.

The New Deal model, then, was first ofall a development

proper to U.S. politics, a response to the domestic economic crisis,

but it also became a flag that the U.S. Army raised throughout the

course ofthe Second World War. Several explanations were given

for why the United States entered the war. Roosevelt always claimed

to have been dragged in unwillingly by the dynamics ofinternational

politics. Keynes and the economists thought instead that the needs

ofthe New Deal—confronted as it was in 1937 by a new type of

crisis, challenged by the political pressure ofworkers’ demands—had

obliged the U.S. government to choose the path ofwar. Facing an

international struggle for the new repartition of the world market,

the United States could not avoid the war, in particular because

with the New Deal, the U.S. economy had entered into another

expansive phase. In either case, the U.S. entry into World War II

tied the New Deal indissolubly to the crisis ofEuropean imperialisms

and projected the New Deal on the scene ofworld government as

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an alternative, successor model. From that point on, the effects of

the New Deal reforms would be felt over the entire global terrain.

In the aftermath of the war, many viewed the New Deal

model as the only path to global recovery (under the pacific powers

ofU.S. hegemony). As one U.S. commentator wrote, ‘‘Only a

New Deal for the world, more far reaching and consistent than

our faltering New Deal, can prevent the coming of World War

III.’’9 The economic reconstruction projects launched after the

Second World War did in fact impose on all the dominant capitalist

countries, both the victorious Allies and the defeated powers, adhe-

sion to the expansive model ofdisciplinary society according to the

model constructed by the New Deal. The previous European and

Japanese forms of state-based public assistance and the development

ofthe corporativist state (in both its liberal and national-socialist

forms) were thus substantially transformed. The ‘‘social state’’ was

born, or really the global disciplinary state, which took into account

more widely and deeply the life cycles of populations, ordering

their production and reproduction within a scheme ofcollective

bargaining fixed by a stable monetary regime. With the extension

ofU.S. hegemony, the dollar became king. The initiative ofthe