I should say at the start that the title of this post is a little misleading. I’m currently reading the influential book “Empire” by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri which theorises a shift from a 20th century ‘modern’ world built on sovereign nations to a ‘postmodern’ world of a transnational global order, which they refer to as Empire.
Hardt and Negri describe the prior regime of ‘modern’ capitalism as structured around physical industry as the dominant form of production. It therefore has a close relation to geographic location, with production based on factories and a physical relationship between raw material, production, circulation and consumption. This physical nature of production means that capitalism throughout the 19th and most of the 20th century was best served by nation states with clear boundaries.
In a similar argument to that put forward by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities, Hardt and Negri see the modern nation state as a constructed entity, influenced by this geographic nature of industrial capital. Capitalism during this period is best served by a nations with physical boundaries within which capital accumulation can take, and outside which is a space for new markets and expansion. The creation of these nations leads to the idea of a ‘people’ on which that nation is founded, and idea that is created, not an inherent part of nature. The people does not exist first and build a nation around itself. Rather the nation defines its people, and creates a founding myth to go with it.
This geographical structure of ‘modern’ capital leads then to late 19th and 20th century imperialism, where sovereign nations compete for control of those parts of the globe ‘outside’ developed capitalism both grab control of raw materials for production and to support expansion through new markets. In many ways this is building on Rosa Luxemburg’s thesis in “The Accumulation of Capital” where she develops the idea that capitalism needs a space ‘outside’ itself to expand into to remain stable (or even viable over the long term).
The concepts of nation and people are therefore inherently exclusionary requiring an ‘other’ to define themselves against. In a world dominated by developed western European states where the rest of the world is colonised and exploited this division is inherently built on a concept of race. As Hardt and Negri say “the concepts of nation, people, and race are never very far apart” (Hardt and Negri 2001 p. 103). Further:
“despite the persistent nostalgia of some, European societies and peoples were never really pure and uniform. The identity of the people was constructed on an imaginary plane that hid and/or eliminated differences, and this corresponded on the practical plane to racial subordination and social purification.”
(Hardt and Negri 2001 p.103)
In other words, the nation state is a creation of industrial capitalism, not an eternal part of nature, and was built on racism from the very start. I’ll come back to the idea of nostalgia for this world in a moment.
“An originary notion of the people poses an identity that homogenizes and purifies the image of the population while blocking the constructive interactions of differences within the multitude.”
(Hardt and Negri 2001 p.113)
‘Post-modern’ capitalism though is different. Information and the shared exchange of data has become the defining nature of production in the postmodern world. This informational nature of commodity production (either through highly developed and technology driven physical production, or through the production of immaterial commodities) depends less on fixed geography of places and more on communication. Capitalism no longer needs fixed borders, instead it needs to remove barriers to people interacting with each other, because it is this interaction that drives the new production forward.
Hardt and Negri are hugely optimistic about what this means for the future. In an echo of Marx’s view that the development of capitalism would lead naturally towards socialism, they see postmodern production driven by collective information sharing as presaging the end of the need for private property. The controlling power of capital becomes an unnecessary fetter on the free sharing of information which is the key feature of the postmodern world – and this opens the possibility of a future without capital in control. What they sketch out seems like a utopia of people sharing information, facilitating production with the need for an owner of the information to mediate between them.
But in truth it’s not that simple. Capital cannot simply wipe away the structures (or perhaps that should be ‘superstructures’) that it has created. There remain people and companies whose livelihoods depend on the old ‘modern’ economy creating a tension between the interests of the old and the new.
What’s more the link between the economy and the rest of society is not (and never was) the sort of structure-superstructure fantasy imagined by some twentieth century marxists. What Brexit demonstrated is that the construction of the identity of the nation through some imagined uniformity imposed on heterogeneous reality has seeped deeply into the culture. For some the new postmodern world has created a strong sense of nostalgia for that lost uniformity, driving the desire to reassert ‘our’ culture through exclusion. This is why the vote for Brexit seems so both so reactionary, and a basically racist endeavour. These are the people who don’t feel part of the new postmodern world. Egged on by those parts of capital with a vested interest in fostering the tension between old and new, either as a means of making short term profit (for example hedge funds betting on the fluctuations created in the stock market) or as a means of preventing the sort of utopian future without capital sketched out by Hardt and Negri, enough momentum was created to get the Brexit referendum passed – and subsequently to maintain a core level of support for the Conservative party who have sought electoral advantage from this sentiment.
Hardt and Negri’s analysis therefore helps us make sense of the trends that led up to the Leave vote in the Brexit referendum, but also exposes their overly optimistic approach to that analysis. To understand how things seem likely to play out we need to keep in view the sources of tension and conflict too.
Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio Empire (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2001)
Luxemburg, Rosa The Complete Works of Rosa Luxemburg Volume 2: Economic Writings 2 (Verso, London, 2016)
Anderson, Benedict Imagined Communities (Verso, London, 2016)
A Very Marx Adventure 