Antonio Negri on "Empire"

(in: Antonio Negri: Negri on Negri, see Bibliography below)

"Our work has been chiefly one of linguistic clarification. In fact, there is a certain lingering ambiguity about the term 'Empire' itself, which entered almost at once into the political and journalistic lexicon and rapidly becams static. By 'Empire' we mean something very precise: the transfer of sovereignty of nation-states to a higher entity. But this transfer has almost invariably been interpreted in terms of an 'internal analogy' - as if Empire were implicitly a nation-state on a world scale. One consequence of this trivialization has been the rather sloppy inference that Empire corresponds to the United States. We insist, to the contrary, that the great transfers of sovereignty that are now taking place - in the military sphere, in the monetary sphere, and in the cultural, political, and linguistic spheres - cannot be reduced to any such internal analogy. This amounts to saying that the structure of Empire is radically different from that of nation-states.
The process that led to Empire grew out of several contradictory phenomena: the struggles of the working classes in the developed countries against capital, which have rendered the reproduction of the capitalist system impossible on the national scale; the anticolonial wars and Vietnam, which gave rise to very considerable anti-imperialist pressures that left their mark on capital at its highest and most central levels; and, finally, the crisis of socialist countries, where the socialist management of capital failed to develop in the face of ever greater demands for liberty. Together these things caused imbalances at a global level, with the result that the passage to Empire was punctuated by many extremely violent conflicts. The imperial process that we describe is therefore contradictory both in its origin and its development. Today we have a world governance that seeks to impose forms of government that extend to the whole biopolitical issue of planetary citizenship. What we tried to do in writing this book was to begin to define the fields of struggle and the forces of opposition within the very heart of Empire." (p. 59-60)