Empire (82 page)

11. On Eurodollar finance as an element of the crisis, see Jeffry Frieden,

Banking on the World: The Politics of American International Finance
(New York: Harper and Row, 1987), pp. 79–122.

12. On the convertibility ofthe dollar and the Nixon maneuver in 1971, see

David Calleo and Benjamin Rowland,
America and the World Political

Economy: Atlantic Dreams and National Realities
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973), pp. 87–117; and Coffey,
The World Monetary

Crisis,
pp. 25–42.

13. On the limits ofFordism and the need for capital to find a post-Fordist schema ofproduction and accumulaton, see Benjamin Coriat,
L’atelier et

458

N O T E S T O P A G E S 2 6 9 – 2 7 2

le robot: essai sur le fordisme et la production de masse à l’aˆge de l’eĺectronique
(Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1990).

14. Fredric Jameson argues that the social struggles ofthe 1960s in the First World, particularly in the United States and France, follow in the line

of (and even derive from) the powerful decolonization and liberation

movements in the Third World during the 1950s and 1960s. See Fredric

Jameson, ‘‘Periodizing the 60s,’’ in
Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971–1986

(Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1988), 2:178–208, espe-

cially pp. 180–186.

15. See Giovanni Arrighi, ‘‘Marxist Century, American Century: The Making

and Remaking ofthe World Labor Movement,’’ in Samir Amin, Gio-

vanni Arrighi, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein,
Trans-

forming the Revolution: Social Movements and the World System
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), 54–95.

16. Robin Kelley provides an exemplary account ofthe dynamics ofproletar-

ian refusal and the creation of alternative forms of life in his wonderful

U.S. black working-class history,
Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the
Black Working Class
(New York: Free Press, 1994).

17. In ecological thought, too, at least in its most productive paradigms, we can see clearly that the ‘‘nature’’ in question is equally human and nonhuman; ecology involves not just the preservation ofthings, but the produc-

tion ofrelationships and the production ofsubjectivity as well. See Feĺix

Guattari,
Les trois ećologies
(Paris: Galileé, 1989); and Verena Andermatt Conley,
Ecopolitics: The Environment in Poststructuralist Thought
(London: Routledge, 1997). Franco Piperno continues this ‘‘ecological’’ line of

thought, albeit in a different register, in
Elogio dello spirito pubblico meridio-nale
(Rome: Manifestolibri, 1997).

18. In her effort to think the importance and real limits of the ‘‘outside,’’

Rosa Luxemburg may have been the first great ecological thinker ofthe

twentieth century. The best examples ofMarxist ecological thought in

authors such as Andre´ Gorz and James O’Connor adopt a form of argu-

ment similar to Luxemburg’s anti-imperialist position (although their

work does not derive directly from hers): capitalist production necessarily implies an expansion into and destruction ofnature, which not only has

tragic consequences for life on the planet but also undermines the future

viability ofcapitalism itself. For Andre´ Gorz, see
Ecology as Politics,
trans.

Patsy Vigderman and Jonathan Cloud (Boston: South End Press, 1980);

for James O’Connor, see ‘‘Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical

Introduction,’’
Capitalism, Nature, Socialism,
1, no. 1 (1989), 11–38.

19. ‘‘Late capitalism thus appears as the period in which all branches ofthe economy are fully industrialized for the first time; to which one could

N O T E S T O P A G E S 2 7 2 – 2 7 8

459

further add . . . the increasing mechanization of the superstructure.’’

Ernest Mandel,
Late Capitalism,
trans. Joris De Bres (London: Verso, 1978), pp. 190–191.

20. ‘‘This purer capitalism ofour own time thus eliminated the enclaves of

precapitalist organization it had hitherto tolerated and exploited in a

tributary way.’’ Fredric Jameson,
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), p. 36.

21. We do not mean to suggest that capital can perpetually through techno-

logical advances reconcile its destructive relationship with its (human and nonhuman) environment. What technological advance can do is shift the

terrain ofconflict and defer the crisis, but limits and antagonisms remain.

22. Stanley Aronowitz offers a useful reassessment of the panoply of U.S.

social movements in the 1960s in
The Death and Rebirth of American

Radicalism
(London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 57–90.

23. Again see Kelley,
Race Rebels,
especially pp. 17–100 on the hidden histories ofresistance.

24. On the history of the refusals posed by U.S. feminist movements in the

1960s and 1970s, see Alice Echols,
Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in
America, 1967–1975
(Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1989).

25. See, for example, Judith Butler, ‘‘Merely Cultural,’’
New Left Review,
no.

227 ( January–February 1998), 33–44. The most influential text for the

political interpretation of‘‘new social movements’’ along these lines is

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe,
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: To-

wards a Radical Democratic Politics
(London: Verso, 1985).

26. See Antonio Negri,
The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-first Century,
trans. James Newell (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989).

27. Fredric Jameson, for example, argues that the collapse of the Soviet Union was ‘‘due, not to its failure, but to its success, at least as far as modernization is concerned.’’ See his ‘‘Actually Existing Marxism,’’ in Saree Makdisi,

Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca Karl, eds.,
Marxism Beyond Marxism
(London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 14–54; quotation p. 43. More generally on

how cold war propaganda (from both sides) blinded us to the real move-

ments ofsocial history within the Soviet regime, see Moshe Lewin,
The

Making of the Soviet System
(New York: Pantheon, 1985).

28. See Leon Trotsky,
The Revolution Betrayed,
trans. Max Eastman (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1937); and Cornelius Castoriadis,
Devant la guerre
(Paris: Fayard, 1981). See also a series ofarticle by Denis Berger on

the collapse ofthe Soviet Union, ‘‘Perestroı¨ka: la re´volution reéllement

existante?’’
Futur anteŕieur,
no. 1 (1990), 53–62; ‘‘Que reste-t-il de la perestroı¨ka?’’
Futur anteŕieur,
no. 6 (1991), 15–20; and ‘‘L’Unione Sovie´tique à l’heure du vide,’’
Futur anteŕieur,
no. 8 (1991), 5–12.

460

N O T E S T O P A G E S 2 7 8 – 2 8 5

29. It seems to us that one could make a parallel argument about the changing social practices ofthe Chinese proletariat in the post-Mao era leading up

to the ‘‘Cultural Fever’’ movement in the 1980s. See Xudong Zhang,

Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). Zhang makes clear the fabulous creativity released during this

period.

3 . 4 P O S T M O D E R N I Z A T I O N

1. The texts that set the terms for an enormous literature that debates the periodization ofthe phases ofmodern production are Daniel Bell,
Coming

of Post-industrial Society
(New York: Basic Books, 1973); and Alain Toura-ine,
Post-industrial Society,
trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York: Random House, 1971).

2. See Manuel Castells and Yuko Aoyama, ‘‘Paths towards the Informational

Society: Employment Structure in G-7 Countries, 1920–90,’’
International
Labour Review,
133, no. 1 (1994), 5–33; quotation p. 13.

3. On the false historical analogies that contributed to the debt crisis of Third World countries, see Cheryl Payer,
Lent and Lost: Foreign Credit

and Third World Development
(London: Zed Books, 1991).

4. The classic presentations ofthe theories ofunderdevelopment and depen-

dency are Andre Gunder Frank,
Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin

America
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967); and Fernando En-

rique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto,
Dependency and Development in Latin

America,
trans. Marjory Mattingly Urquidi (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1979). For a very concise critique ofstages ofdevelopment

arguments, see Immanuel Wallerstein,
The Capitalist World-Economy

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 3–5.

5. The discourse ofdevelopment was an illusion, but it was a real and

effective illusion that established its own structures and institutions of

power throughout the ‘‘developing’’ world. On the institutionalization

ofdevelopment, see Arturo Escobar,
Encountering Development: The Mak-

ing and Unmaking of the Third World
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 73–101.

6. For a critique ofthe developmentalist ideology ofdependency theories,

see ibid., pp. 80–81.

7. See, for example, Claude Ake,
A Political Economy of Africa
(Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1981), p. 136. This is also the general framework presented in

the work ofAndre Gunder Frank and Samir Amin.

8. Robert Musil,
The Man without Qualities,
trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Knopf, 1995), 2:367.

N O T E S T O P A G E S 2 8 6 – 2 9 1

461

9. Franc¸ois Bar, ‘‘Information Infrastructure and the Transformation of Manufacturing,’’ in William Drake, ed.,
The New Information Infrastructure:
Strategies for U.S. Policy
(New York: Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995), pp. 55–74; quotation p. 56.

10. See Robert Chase and David Garvin, ‘‘The Service Factory,’’ in Gary

Pisano and Robert Hayes, eds.,
Manufacturing Renaissance
(Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1995), pp. 35–45.

11. See Castells and Aoyama, ‘‘Paths towards the Informational Society,’’

pp. 19–28.

12. Manuel Castells describes the most subordinated regions ofthe global

economy as a ‘‘Fourth World.’’ See his essay ‘‘The Informational Economy

and the New International Division ofLabor,’’ in Martin Carnoy, Manuel

Castells, Stephen Cohen, and Fernando Enrique Cardoso,
The New Global

Economy in the Information Age
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), pp. 15–43.

13. Castells and Aoyama, ‘‘Paths towards the Informational Society,’’ p. 27.

14. Pierre Levy,
Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace
(New York: Plenum Press, 1997).

15. On the comparison between the Fordist and Toyotist models, see Benja-

min Coriat,
Penser à l’envers: travail et organisation dans l’entreprise japonaise
(Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1994). For a briefhistory ofthe early developments ofToyota production methods, see Kazuo Wada, ‘‘The Emergence

ofthe ‘Flow Production’ Method in Japan,’’ in Haruhito Shiomi and

Kazuo Wada, eds.,
Fordism Transformed: The Development of Production

Methods in the Automobile Industry
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 11–27.

16. We are thinking primarily ofJu¨rgen Habermas’s conceptual division be-

tween communicative and instrumental action in works such as
The

Theory of Communicative Action,
trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). For an excellent critique ofthis Habermasian division, see

Christian Marazzi,
Il posto dei calzini: la svolta linguistica dell’economia e i suoi
effetti nella politica
(Bellinzona, Switzerland: Casagrande, 1995), pp. 29–34.

17. For a definition and analysis ofimmaterial labor, see Maurizio Lazzarato,

‘‘Immaterial Labor,’’ in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds.,
Radical

Thought in Italy
(Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1996), pp. 133–147. See also the glossary entry on immaterial labor at the end

ofthe same collection, p. 262.

18. Peter Drucker understands the passage toward immaterial production in

extreme terms. ‘‘The basic economic resource—‘the means ofproduc-

tion,’ to use the economist’s term—is no longer capital, nor natural

462

N O T E S T O P A G E S 2 9 1 – 2 9 9

resources (the economist’s ‘land’), nor ‘labor.’
It is and will be knowledge.
’

Peter Drucker,
Post-capitalist Society
(New York: Harper, 1993), p. 8.

What Drucker does not understand is that knowledge is not given but

produced and that its production involves new kinds ofmeans ofproduc-

tion and labor.

19. Robert Reich,
The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st-Century
Capitalism
(New York: Knopf, 1991), p. 177. What is most important to Reich is in fact that advantage—and finally national dominance—will

be won in the global economy along the lines ofthese new divisions,

through the geographical distribution ofthese high- and low-value tasks.

20. See Karl Marx,
Capital,
vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1976), pp. 131–137.

21. See Dorothy Smith,
The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), especially pp. 78–88.

22. Marx in his time conceived cooperation as the result ofthe actions of