Empire (47 page)

waged directly against capitalist command. The refusal of work and

the social unification ofthe proletariat came together in a frontal

attack against the coercive organization ofsocial labor and the

disciplinary structures ofcommand. This worker attack was com-

pletely political—even when many mass practices, particularly of

youth, seemed decidedly apolitical—insofar as it exposed and struck

the political nerve centers ofthe economic organization ofcapital.

The peasant and proletarian struggles in the subordinate coun-

tries also imposed reform on local and international political regimes.

Decades ofrevolutionary struggle—from the Chinese Revolution

to Vietnam and from the Cuban Revolution to the numerous

liberation struggles throughout Latin America, Africa, and the Arab

world—had pushed forward a proletarian wage demand that various

socialist and/or nationalist reformist regimes had to satisfy and that

directly destabilized the international economic system. The ideol-

ogy ofmodernization, even when it did not bring ‘‘development,’’

created new desires that exceeded the established relations ofpro-

duction and reproduction. The sudden increase in the costs ofraw

materials, energy, and certain agricultural commodities in the 1960s

and 1970s was a symptom ofthese new desires and the rising pressure

of the international proletariat on the wage. The effects of these

struggles not only were a quantitative matter but also determined

a qualitatively new element that profoundly marked the intensity

ofthe crisis. For more than one hundred years the practices of

imperialism had worked to subsume all forms of production

throughout the world under the command ofcapital, and that

tendency was only intensified in this period oftransition. The

tendency created necessarily a potential or virtual unity ofthe

international proletariat. This
virtual unity
was never fully actualized R E S I S T A N C E , C R I S I S , T R A N S F O R M A T I O N

263

as a
global political unity,
but it nonetheless had substantial effects.

In other words, the few instances of the actual and conscious interna-

tional organization oflabor are not what seem most important here,

but rather the
objective
coincidence ofstruggles that overlap precisely because, despite their radical diversity, they were all directed against

the international disciplinary regime ofcapital. The growing coinci-

dence determined what we call an accumulation ofstruggles.

This accumulation ofstruggles undermined the capitalist strat-

egy that had long relied on the hierarchies ofthe international

divisions oflabor to block any global unity among workers. Already

in the nineteenth century, before European imperialism had fully

bloomed, Engels was bemoaning the fact that the English proletariat

was put in the position ofa ‘‘labor aristocracy’’ because its interests

lay with the project ofBritish imperialism rather than with the

ranks ofcolonial labor power. In the period ofthe decline of

imperialisms, strong international divisions oflabor certainly re-

mained, but the imperialist advantages ofany national working class

had begun to wither away. The common struggles ofthe proletariat

in the subordinate countries took away the possibility ofthe old

imperialist strategy of transferring the crisis from the metropolitan

terrain to its subordinate territories. It was no longer feasible to rely

on Cecil Rhodes’s old strategy ofplacating the domestic dangers

ofclass struggle in Europe by shifting the economic pressures to

the still peaceful order of the dominated imperialist terrain main-

tained with brutally effective techniques. The proletariat formed

on the imperialist terrain was now itselforganized, armed, and

dangerous. There was thus a tendency toward the unity ofthe

international or multinational proletariat in one common attack

against the capitalist disciplinary regime.5 The resistance and initia-

tive ofthe proletariat in the subordinate countries resonated as a

symbol and model both above and within the proletariat ofthe

dominant capitalist countries. By virtue ofthis convergence, the

worker struggles throughout the domain ofinternational capital

already decreed the end ofthe division between First and Third

Worlds and the potential political integration ofthe entire global

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

proletariat. The convergence ofstruggles posed on an international

scale the problem oftransforming laboring cooperation into revolu-

tionary organization and actualizing the virtual political unity.

With this objective convergence and accumulation ofstrug-

gles, Third Worldist perspectives, which may earlier have had a

limited utility, were now completely useless. We understand Third

Worldism to be defined by the notion that the primary contradiction

and antagonism ofthe international capitalist system is between the

capital ofthe First World and the labor ofthe Third.6 The potential

for revolution thus resides squarely and exclusively in the Third

World. This view has been evoked implicitly and explicitly in a

variety ofdependency theories, theories ofunderdevelopment, and

world system perspectives.7 The limited merit ofthe Third Worldist

perspective was that it directly countered the ‘‘First Worldist’’ or

Eurocentric view that innovation and change have always origi-

nated, and can only originate, in Euro-America. Its specular opposi-

tion ofthis false claim, however, leads only to a position that is

equally false. We find this Third Worldist perspective inadequate

because it ignores the innovations and antagonisms oflabor in the

First and Second Worlds. Furthermore, and most important for our

argument here, the Third Worldist perspective is blind to the real

convergence ofstruggles across the world, in the dominant and

subordinate countries alike.

Capitalist Responseto theCrisis

As the global confluence ofstruggles undermined the capitalist and

imperialist capacities ofdiscipline, the economic order that had

dominated the globe for almost thirty years, the Golden Age of

U.S. hegemony and capitalist growth, began to unravel. The form

and substance ofthe capitalist management ofinternational develop-

ment for the postwar period were dictated at the conference at

Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944.8 The Bretton Woods

system was based on three fundamental elements. Its first characteris-

tic was the comprehensive economic hegemony ofthe United

States over all the nonsocialist countries. This hegemony was secured

R E S I S T A N C E , C R I S I S , T R A N S F O R M A T I O N

265

through the strategic choice ofa liberal development based on

relatively free trade and moreover by maintaining gold (of which

the United States possessed about one third ofthe world total) as

the guarantee ofthe power ofthe dollar. The dollar was ‘‘as good

as gold.’’ Second, the system demanded the agreement for monetary

stabilization between the United States and the other dominant

capitalist countries (first Europe then Japan) over the traditional

territories ofEuropean imperialisms, which had been dominated

previously by the British pound and the French franc. Reform in

the dominant capitalist countries could thus be financed by a surplus

ofexports to the United States and guaranteed by the monetary

system ofthe dollar. Finally, Bretton Woods dictated the establish-

ment ofa quasi-imperialist relationship ofthe United States over

all the subordinate nonsocialist countries. Economic development

within the United States and stabilization and reform in Europe

and Japan were all guaranteed by the United States insofar as it

accumulated imperialist superprofits through its relationship to the

subordinate countries.

The system ofU.S. monetary hegemony was a fundamentally

new arrangement because, whereas the control ofprevious interna-

tional monetary systems (notably the British) had been firmly in

the hands ofprivate bankers and financiers, Bretton Woods gave

control to a series ofgovernmental and regulatory organizations,

including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and

ultimately the U.S. Federal Reserve.9 Bretton Woods might thus

be understood as the monetary and financial face of the hegemony

ofthe New Deal model over the global capitalist economy.

The Keynesian and pseudo-imperialist mechanisms ofBretton

Woods eventually went into crisis when the continuity ofthe

workers’ struggles in the United States, Europe, and Japan raised

the costs ofstabilization and reformism, and when anti-imperialist

and anticapitalist struggles in subordinate countries began to under-

mine the extraction ofsuperprofits.10 When the imperialist motor

could no longer move forward and the workers’ struggles become

ever more demanding, the U.S. trade balance began to lean heavily

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

in the direction ofEurope and Japan. A first phase ofcrisis—creeping

rather than rampant—extended from the early to the late 1960s.

Since the controls provided by Bretton Woods made the dollar

de facto inconvertible, the monetary mediation of international

production and trade developed through a phase characterized by

the relatively free circulation ofcapital, the construction ofa strong

Eurodollar market, and the fixing ofpolitical parity more or less

everywhere in the dominant countries.11 The explosion of1968 in

Europe, the United States, and Japan, coupled with the Vietnamese

military victory over the United States, however, completely dis-

solved this provisory stabilization. Stagflation gave way to rampant

inflation. The second phase ofthe crisis might be thought ofas

beginning on August 17, 1971, when President Nixon decoupled

the dollar from the gold standard, making the dollar inconvertible

de jure and adding a 10 percent surcharge to all imports from

Europe to the United States.12 The entire U.S. debt was effectively

pushed onto Europe. This operation was accomplished only by

virtue ofthe economic and political power ofthe United States,

which thus reminded the Europeans ofthe initial terms ofthe

agreement, ofits hegemony as the highest point ofexploitation

and capitalist command.

In the 1970s the crisis became official and structural. The

system ofpolitical and economic equilibria invented at Bretton

Woods had been completely thrown into disarray, and what re-

mained was only the brute fact of U.S. hegemony. The declining

effectiveness of the Bretton Woods mechanisms and the decomposi-

tion ofthe monetary system ofFordism in the dominant countries

made it clear that the reconstruction ofan international system of

capital would have to involve a comprehensive restructuring of

economic relations and a paradigm shift in the definition of world

command. Such a crisis, however, is not always an entirely negative

or unwelcome event from the perspective of capital. Marx claims

that capital does indeed have a fundamental interest in economic

crisis for its transformative power. With respect to the overall system,

individual capitalists are conservative. They are focused primarily

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267

on maximizing their individual profits in the short term even when

this leads down a ruinous path for collective capital in the long term.

Economic crisis can overcome these resistances, destroy unprofitable

sectors, restructure the organization ofproduction, and renew its

technologies. In other words, economic crisis can push forward a

transformation that reestablishes a high general rate of profit, thus

responding effectively on the very terrain defined by the worker

attack. Capital’s general devaluation and its efforts to destroy worker

organization serve to transform the substance of the crisis—the

disequilibria ofcirculation and overproduction—into a reorganized

apparatus ofcommand that rearticulates the relationship between

development and exploitation.

Given the intensity and coherence ofthe struggles ofthe 1960s

and 1970s, two paths were open to capital for accomplishing the

tasks ofplacating the struggles and restructuring command, and it

tried each ofthem in turn. The first path, which had only a limited

effectiveness, was
the repressive option
—a fundamentally conservative operation. Capital’s repressive strategy was aimed at completely

reversing the social process, separating and disaggregating the labor

market, and reestablishing control over the entire cycle ofproduc-

tion. Capital thus privileged the organizations that represented a

guaranteed wage for a limited portion of the work force, fixing that

segment ofthe population within their structures and reinforcing the

separation between those workers and more marginalized popula-

tions. The reconstruction ofa system ofhierarchical compartmental-

ization, both within each nation and internationally, was accom-