"One of the functions of struggle is to convert the economy of hatred and the desire for vengeance into a political economy. The aim of the liberation struggle is not to eradicate the drive to murder, the desire to kill, or the thirst for revenge, but to bend this drive, this desire, and this thirst to the commandments of a superego of a political nature, namely the advent of a nation."
- Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics 2019
Death. Fucking Death is what Empire brings. Imperialism. Colonialism. Settler-Colonialism. All fucking Death. Even so-called "soft" imperialism and neo-colonialism bring Death to people far more than they provide anything else. And not just spectacular and violent Death: another hundred dead Palestinian or Iranian children in your news feed today. But also deaths of despair, and of chronic stress. The little Death of every second of your life that gets wasted valorizing a system that's fucking killing us all. Of satisfying the whims of petty little fucking tyrants whose offices range from your shift manager to the president of the united states. This system breathes, eats, and shits DEATH. Worst of all (for you at least, dear reader), is that Empire brings Death so omnipresent and omnipotent that it's even capable of slithering into your chest cavity, making a nest there, of breaking bread with your friends and family, of thinking with your thoughts and speaking with your voice. But let's not get ahead of ourelves, there are other topics at hand that we must cover first.
This article will (again) pull heavily from Achille Mbembe's 2019 book Necropolitics, especially what he calls the Politics of Viscerality. But we will also cover colonialism, imperialism, and Empire from a few other perspectives - the goal being to give you a clearer picture how fucked we currently are, and hopefully some ideas of what to do about it. To better understand Mbembe and the Politics of Viscerality, we're going to combine some older anticolonial theorists with a hefty dollop of Marx. So what do Marxists have to say about Capital and imperialism? In both his Grundrisse and das Kapital, Marx describes the system of Capital as one which by its very definition must continuously expand to function.
In order for the accumulation of Capital to be possible, workers must produce more (often MUCH more) than can be consumed by the proletariat and the bourgeoisie combined. In order for the surplus value of the remaining goods produced to be realized, new markets must be found (or created). "The tendency to create the world market is directly given in the concept of capital itself. Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome." (Marx, Grundrisse). As Lenin describes at length there is more to imperialism than just spectacular violence, behind every imperial aggression is the banal but ever-present compulsion for Capital to expand: specifically for the Capital of the invading nation to be exported into the victims of imperialism, whether to access raw materials there, to "re-develop" war torn infrastructure, or both. As theorists Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt describe in their work, Empire, "the fundamental contradiction of capitalist expansion" is precisely this reliance on its "outside" non-capitalist environment. There must always be new markets to export goods to for surplus value to be realized. But in order for this surplus value to be turned back into new capital, what was previously external to be capital must be internalized. Capital is therefore in a constant process of eating itself to death, of internalizing all that has not yet been made Capital.
Part of what made Negri and Hardt's book Empire novel and interesting (other than foreseeing the US's global war on terror barely a year before the events of 9/11) was their attempt to diagnose the shift from imperialism to Empire. This is not to say that imperialism is going away any time soon, but that Empire will bring new problems. Some of these changes have to do with the increasing strength of multinational corporations and the ever depleting relevance of sovereign nation states, but the most insidious part of the problem is one I think they honestly do a piss-poor job of explaining, and something that anti-colonial theorists have been screaming at us for probably exactly as long as colonialism has existed. In Negri and Hardt's defense, their fumble comes from a place of optimism, from trying to center theories of Capital around not just Capital and its functioning but around the working class as well. Capital, imperialism, and Empire may well have been developing into a global monster, but this was specifically because of its dependence on us, "the real efficient motor that drives capitalist development from its deepest core: the movements and struggle of the proletariat." But what sounds like a rallying cry to Negri and Hardt also sounds like a death knell to others. Faced with the ever-expanding, all-encompassing and all-intersecting maelstrom of Capital, we are more threatened than ever by the Figure or Subject of Empire: by Capital in human form.
"Not every exasperated petty bourgeois could have become Hitler, but a particle of Hitler is lodged in every exasperated petty bourgeois."The Figure of Empire and the Politics of Viscerality
- Trotsky, What Is National Socialism
Marx's undead comparison of choice for Capital was the vampire: "Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks." But if there is an undead metaphor for the Figure of Empire I would argue that none fit better than the ghoul*. While some of its better known associations seem to be inhabiting graveyards (and other places of Death) and eating human flesh: the ghoul, like the vampire, has also been known for having powers of seduction. Part of what I think sets apart the ghoul as a good candidate for the face of Empire is the bipolar nature of its attempts to pass as human. One man's temptress may be viscerally and instantly recognizable to another (most often women) as a monster. It bears repeating that anticolonial theorists have much more to tell us of the Subject of Empire than any analysis of Capital alone can. For who else but those who experienced the maelstrom of Capital from its "Outside" could describe it best? In his book The Invention of Africa, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe describes three components and actions of "what might be called the colonizing structure, which completely embraces the physical, human, and spiritual aspects of the colonizing experience."
These three components/actions are:No longer just an "Outside" or "non-capitalist environment," we know that what Capital has constantly been expanding into and ceaselessly being reproduced within is other peoples' lands, minds, and entire histories and ways of life. "Every limit appears as a barrier to be overcome," and every limit that a people and their culture can place that could prevent the reproduction of Capital will be destroyed to make way for more accumulation (until we get better at killing it). The Subject of Empire was formed through centuries of Europe and its inbred children killing, raping, and enslaving the world. It is no coincidence that the centuries in which Capital widened its grip to envelop the entire planet were (and are) concomitant with the worst patriarchal eliminationist fantasies. Absolutely everything that can or could be used as a tool to continue to reproduce Capital, has been and will be. Capital doesn't give a fuck who dies, and neither does the Subject of Empire. Just like the fucking plastic building up in our lungs, our brain, in every tissue: the Subject of Empire was built up in colonizers as the residue of their domination an subjugation of others. CENTURIES of Trotsky's Hitler Particles being produced and spread down through the generations.
The hope in producing this concept of the Figure of Empire is twofold. First as a way of relating to and understanding Mbembe's Politics of Viscerality, but also out of a much deeper hope that it can be scraped off, to expose the life beneath. For if you the reader are not yourself a Figure of Empire — someone you know is. Very likely it is multiple people in your life, possibly even someone close to you. Hence the metaphor of the ghoul: pleasant or even lovely to some, yet carrying the unmistakable stench of Death to others.
To understand the significance of the Politics of Viscerality, you must know that the Figure of Empire (much like the colonialism and imperialism which created it) is absolutely fucking insufferable. A brick wall. A settler with an opinion. A US military or police bootlicker. But also a “well-intentioned” but still out-of-their-fucking-element liberal. The Figure of Empire may not be the leading edge of any kind of imperialism (only the highest ranking ghouls receive that honor). He is not a gun, a bomb, or a battleship, and more than likely not actively commanding the use of any of these. One of the greatest services the Subject of Empire can offer to his Fatherland is to make you want to kill yourself. He is most often NOT a tool for grasping new power but for holding on to it, and crushing the spirits of colonized peoples is a task he can accomplish as easily as breathing.
In the beginning of a talk at Duke University, Achille Mbembe refers to colonialism as a factory that produces madness. At the time he was working on material that would later be published in the book (Necropolitics, 2019) version of his earlier article by the same name. Drawing relations between colonialism and madness was nothing new to Mbembe, in fact it is something he has built on heavily from the works of Frantz Fanon. Madness is still very much present within Necropolitics, but a greater focus for Mbembe at this point in his career was to rip open the chest cavity of colonialism and begin to describe the organs and their function, to put his finger on how or why they produce madness and really demonstrate to us how the sausage is made.
The Politics of Viscerality "draws its energy and powers from the Visceral: the internal organs of the body, especially those to be found within the large cavity of the trunk." The people with which Mbembe is most concerned here, the Subject of the Politics of Viscerality, are those who have been "rendered physically ill with rage, grief, and fear, none of which seems to have an outlet." The politics of Viscerality must be given special attention because it concerns not only an emotional response but a bodily response - to stimuli and conditions we feel we cannot survive. The Visceral Subject inhabits "a frustrated body which one cannot call home," a body which has been stolen, raped, poisoned, marked by choking/suffocation.
Long before its recognition in the Black Lives Matter movement, “I can’t breathe” was also the rallying cry par excellence of Frantz Fanon and colonized peoples across the world. As Mbembe himself asserts, this cry for help appears everywhere throughout the works of Fanon. The Visceral Subject must be attended to. Without intervention this is a person who will surely die before their time, a person whose very existence is a "petition for an entirely different kind of community."
ConclusionCapital and Empire categorize and discard as “waste” anything that does not serve the continued reproduction of Capital. It will eat, and eat, and eat until there is nothing left to sustain it. Nothing left to sustain us. Wherever Capital and life “co-exist” there will always be life in peril: the Visceral Subject.
What new community does the Subject of Viscerality cry out for? One which will bring about the destruction of both Empire and Capital, of course. But how? For the Figure of Empire, any memory of non-commodified life has long since been wiped out. So maybe Negri and Hardt are right about something. Capital absolutely is dependent on the movement of the Proletariat for its development, and Empire is in fact more dependent on human subjectivity than ever before. Dependent most of all on us doing nothing.
We need a new humanity. A new humanity that isn’t afraid to rip into the belly of a dying Empire, to cut out the cancerous growths of capitalism, of fascism, racism, Whiteness and white supremacy, and to bury them so deep that not even the dogs can reach them.
The humanity of today has still not learned enough from the Black Panther Party. The free breakfast programs were only one of a much larger list (called Survival Programs) of necessities of life that the Black Panthers fought to provide for their communities. And those Survival Programs built the party. Find what people need the most and fight like hell to make sure they get it.
FoodA new humanity will need to be able to access all of these and more, without Capital. And at some point we’re going to need to be willing and able to bash in the brains of Empire when it gets in the way of this. We do not have time to listen to the tired, ghoulish bullshit of the white moderate, who “paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.” A new humanity will have to eat its way out of a ghoul-ridden corpse to survive. Help us build infrastructures of life or get the fuck out of the way. Help us figure out how to turn this dying Empire into something edible enough to sustain life or it might be your ghoulish ass we’re eating next.
*The characterization of ghouls as “undead” is unfortunately an entirely Western creation. Readers will have to forgive me on account of the metaphor simply goes too hard to not use it.