Empire and class analysis

RETHINKING MARXISM Volume 13, Number 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2001) Empire and Class Analysis Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff Starting with V. I. Lenin’s remarkable Imperialism, Marxists have extended and re- formulated Marxism to understand the ever changing forms of international capital- ism. In addition to Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Paul Baran, Andre Gunder Frank, Samir Amin, Harry Magdoff, and Immanuel Wallerstein are among those who have shown how international capitalism is connected to world wars, global monopoly power, colonialism, underdevelopment of the third world, and international business cycles. Now add Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri to this proud tradition. Loaded with insight and brimming with novel ideas, their conception of Empire enables one to see much that is new in the world of international capitalism today. Like other such jumbo ontology, theirs, too, is often maddeningly short of the ana- lytical detail needed to make Empire concrete. This absence does not trouble us. The power of their vision is far more important. Yet we nonetheless are troubled by a different kind of absence, one that for us signals a deeper, more theoretical problem. Empire contains no mention of the singular contribution by Marx that inaugurated a new political economy. Sporadically but not systematically developed after Marx, his theory of surplus holds that all societies contain particular organizations of sur- plus labor that distinctively influence their economies, politics, and culture. By or- ganization of surplus labor Marx meant, first, who was socially assigned to labor producing a surplus beyond what they consumed, who appropriated that surplus, and to whom did such appropriators distribute the portions of that surplus. Second, Marx developed the notion that the production, appropriation, and distribution of surpluses occurred in a variety of basic forms: communist, capitalist, feudal, and so on. For Marx, how each society organizes and connects the forms of the surpluses emerging 62 Resnick and Wolff at its diverse sites of production (its enterprises, states, and households) reveals im- portant components of that society’s history that other theories miss. By direct ex- tension, Marx’s surplus theory would also apply to and yield unique insights into the global society that is Empire’s object. The political punch of Marx’s theory lay in his variously elaborated demonstra- tions that the horrors of his society—its injustices, waste of human and natural re- sources, and lack of real democracy—emerged in part from precisely the capitalist class structures that were then becoming dominant. Capital stresses how the produc- tion, appropriation, and distribution of surplus-value contributed to those horrors. A Marxist politics would henceforth aim to place a change in the social organization of surplus labor onto the agenda for progressive social change. While Marx acknowl- edged that the contemporary distributions of property, power, and culture played their roles, too, in generating those horrors—and so belonged on that agenda as well—he credited other writers with already having shown that. What others had missed that Marx sought to add was this insight: to build a just, democratic, and humane society requires, among and together with other changes, displacing capitalism with com- munism. This meant for Marx then, and for us now, directly confronting a capitalist class structure that requires the mass of workers to produce or facilitate the produc- tion of surplus by their labor, but rigidly excludes them from appropriating those surpluses and distributing them socially. The Marxist analytical quest is to expose how this capitalist organization of the surplus—what he defined as the capitalist exploitation of labor—contributes to the miseries and lost opportunities of the masses it subordinates. The Marxist political quest remains to struggle for an alternative class structure, one in which the producers are also the collective appropriators of their surpluses. The specifically Marxist focus on class is, we would argue, a necessary component of an effectively progressive social movement comprising both Marxists and others focused on other aspects of needed social change. Hardt and Negri certainly follow and develop Marx’s insights on the social organi- zation of power and property, but power and property are aspects of society different from and not deterministically related to its organization of surplus (Resnick and Wolff 1986). Yet Hardt and Negri do not build on Marx in seeking to show the complex, nondeterminist linkages between the social distributions of power and property, on the one hand, and the organization of surplus, on the other. While they do reject the deter- minist logics epitomized by modernism, they explore neither the specific social orga- nization of the surplus in the contemporary Empire nor how it participates in over- determining (not determining in a modernistic way) that Empire’s dynamic. In this review, we would like to suggest how adding the class dimension in this surplus sense— and in an overdeterminist manner—can enrich the impressive work they have achieved. One of several ways into the Marxian class analysis we propose is to locate spa- tially the production and appropriation of surplus labor.1 We may illustrate the point 1. The arguments summarized in our text emerged from collaboration with David Ruccio and from ex- tensions of the class analyses developed in Resnick and Wolff (1987) and Fraad, Resnick and Wolff (1994).  Empire and Class Analysis 63 by focusing on the surplus-value form that surplus labor takes inside capitalist in- dustrial enterprises. Subscripts and superscripts can denote, respectively, places where surplus-value is produced and appropriated: SVji. Such a denotation underscores that while the production and appropriation of capitalist surplus-value always occur si- multaneously, they need not do so at the same location. Introducing this locational difference creates a range of possibilities. Surplus ap- propriation may occur only locally, only on an international scale, or in varying com- binations of local and international appropriation. For example, capitalist factories in any location may have only local exploitation—that is, only local surplus appro- priators. 2 This would be an example of what we may call national surplus-value ap- propriation. At the other end of the range would be only international surplus appro- priation. Thus, a purely foreign exploitation would occur if SV is produced in one country (subscript i) and appropriated only in another (superscript j). We may begin to define the class structure of Empire by noting that it interweaves both national and international forms of capitalist surplus-value appropriation. To develop this definition further, consider that in Empire, for each j, i occurs in particular locations across the globe (usually including j itself). For example, if SV is appropriated in the United Kingdom, then it can potentially be produced there as well as anywhere else across the globe. In this case, we can write SVUK = SSV iUK where the total surplus-value is appropriated in the United Kingdom and each i refers to the particular national locations where the components of that SV are produced. Sum- ming up those different global locations of capitalist class exploitation yields SVUK. Generalizing this we can say that Empire encompasses a capitalism in which surplus- value is more widely produced and appropriated globally than ever before. The re- spective sites of surplus-value production and appropriation are not only dispersed to an historically unprecedented degree, but these sites continually shift in response to local and global changes in cultural, political, and economic conditions. The list of such changes would include political risks, infrastructure requirements, national- ism, market reorganizations, and religious movements, among many others. In other words, social changes fluidly overdetermine the specific, different national sites in which capitalist surpluses are produced and appropriated. In contrast to today’s Empire, classical capitalist imperialism more narrowly lim- ited international surplus-value appropriation in two particular ways. First, it tended to tie a particular subset of locations of SV production to a given place of SV appro- priation. Thus, each colonizer concentrated over time on a specific subset of colo- nized (de facto or de jure) locations. For the United Kingdom, i = India, Nigeria, 2. Even local (national) appropriation could be broken down further by geographical locations within that national space. For example, one group of surplus appropriators located within the United King- dom could appropriate surpluses produced in branch factories located across different regions within the United Kingdom. A second possibility would be that each of these factories within the United King- dom has its own appropriators located at that factory site. And intermediate cases would arise when appropriators located in the United Kingdom received surpluses aggregated across and produced in a specific subset of factories there (for example, a geographical subset such as particular regions or a commodity subset such as passenger cars). 64 Resnick and Wolff Malaya, Australia, and so on; for France, i = Vietnam, Algeria, Madagascar, and so on; for the United States, i = Philippines, Cuba, Hawaii, and so forth. Imperialism was a form of international capitalism in which the superscript j determined the surplus-producing locations i. Second, in classical capitalist imperialism, foreign exploitation occurred only in one direction. The colonized location rarely if ever functioned also as the site of the appropriation of surplus-value produced inside the colonizer. Empire breaks from both these constraints. The productions and appropriations of capitalist surplus-value refuse classical imperialism’s restricted pattern of loca- tions. Following Hardt and Negri, we can say there is no inside and outside to global capitalist exploitation; it no longer displays a fixed spatiality. The passing of classi- cal capitalist imperialism spread the cancer of capitalist exploitation more globally. Where Hardt and Negri focus on the changing distributions of power involved in this globalization, we propose to rewrite their poetic sentence to include the new class terrain of Empire: “In this smooth space of Empire, there is no place of [surplus exploitation]—it is both everywhere and nowhere” (190; our words in brackets). The production and appropriation of capitalist surplus-value take place everywhere in the world and neither the one nor the other is situated in one particular place. In that sense and again modifying their sentence: “there is no outside to [world exploitation]: the entire globe is its domain” (190; our words in brackets). Not only is there no fixed place of capitalist surplus-value appropriation in Em- pire, but the capitalist appropriators themselves decreasingly display any necessary citizenship, race, ethnicity, or gender. In classical capitalist imperialism, by contrast, the location of appropriators often correlated perfectly with their citizenship, race, and gender. White, male, British citizens, for example, appropriated surplus-value produced in India largely by their “others.” Empire marks a phase in which capitalist surplus-value produced in India is appropriated in many countries, including India, by myriad combinations of different nations’ citizens displaying multiple colors or genders. Indeed, foreign exploitation (of India) would occur even if all appropria- tors located in the United Kingdom happened to be Indian citizens. The Marxian class analysis we propose to add to Hardt and Negri’s work focuses not only on the global production and appropriation of capitalist surplus-value but also on where and to whom that appropriated surplus-value is distributed. As Marx stresses so provocatively in volume 3 of Capital, capitalists distribute appropriated surpluses (as profits, interest, managers’ budgets, rents, merchants’ and licensing fees, taxes, advertising costs, and so on) to secure the conditions enabling them to con- tinue to appropriate surplus-value. It follows that how capitalist surpluses are dis- tributed (to whom, where, and for what) impacts Empire as profoundly, albeit dif- ferently, as do the productions and appropriations of surplus. Thus, the surplus produced in the ith and appropriated in the jth location is then distributed from j to specific recipients in varying (k) locations: SVji = SSSCPjk. Since we call the distri- bution of surplus the subsumed class process, each recipient of a portion of that sur- plus is said to receive a subsumed class payment or SSCP. The point is to distinguish  Empire and Class Analysis 65 the distribution of the surplus from the production and appropriation of that surplus which we call the fundamental class process (see Resnick and Wolff 1987 for the Marxian origins, logic, and analytical implications of the fundamental and subsumed class processes). Now, the superscript k indexes the various global locations of recipients of sub- sumed class payments (SSCP). For example, consider surplus-value produced in a factory located in India, appropriated by a board of directors sitting in the United Kingdom, and then distributed by that board. The various recipients of such distri- butions are located both in the United Kingdom and elsewhere. For example, corpo- rate managers and state officials, likely located both in India and the United King- dom, would receive subsumed class payments, respectively, as managerial salaries and budgets and as corporate taxes. The United Kingdom board of directors would additionally make subsumed class payments in the forms of interest, dividends, and advertising outlays to lenders, shareowners, and advertising agencies located any- where on the globe including, of course, in the United Kingdom and India. Once again, the citizenship, race, and gender of these variously located subsumed class recipi- ents are different matters from their global location. This contemporary global and fluid complexity of surplus-value flows among—and the identities of—their produc- ers, appropriators, and receivers make it increasingly murky to seek “to demarcate large geographic zones as center and periphery” (335). Situating the now globally interdependent producers, appropriators, and receiv- ers of distributed shares of capitalist surplus-value in these ways suggests how de- pendent they are upon new forms of communication, control, and corporate organi- zation. While Hardt and Negri provide rich detail and original analysis in regard to the latter, they unfortunately explore neither their effectivity or fragility for—nor their contradictions with—capitalist surplus-value production, appropriation, or distribu- tion. Provocative ideas about Empire’s “immaterial labor” (290), production of “sub- jectivity” (331), “postmodern management” (153), rise of new “cities of control” (297), development of the “informational economy” (285), and use of “fear” as a medium of control (339) remain unconnected to surplus-value—that is, to the capi- talist class processes. This lack of connection to class is not only analytically unnec- essary and unjustified. It also detracts from the greater power and persuasiveness they might have achieved. It misses the opportunity to draw Empire’s readers into a rec- ognition of the contradictory interdependence of class (qua surplus organization) with power, property, and culture. In its current forms, that interdependence both sustains yet also undermines the global capitalism Hardt and Negri oppose. To expose the class contradictions that undermine global capitalism renders a crucial service to political strategy. In thinking and planning for the better world Hardt and Negri cham- pion, the necessary change to a nonexploitative organization of the surplus deserves inclusion in their analytic framework—an inclusion that they do not provide. We may conclude with some illustrations of how considerations of class in its surplus labor sense might enrich the analytics of Empire. The contemporary multi- national corporation (MNC) in many ways exemplifies Empire. Its sites of commodity 66 Resnick and Wolff production are decentralized globally and shift from one to another location. It pro- duces heterogeneous commodities for sale in diverse markets around the globe. These commodities are increasingly hybrid in the sense that they combine material and immaterial use values.3 It seeks to control its workers, social environment, and mar- kets in new, global ways. Let us now add the class complexities to this theory of MNCs. A representative MNC’s revenues derive not only from the surplus-value it appropriates from its employees, but will typically also include revenues that are (1) distributions to it from other enterprises out of their appropriated surpluses and/or (2) flows of values from sources other than surpluses (see Resnick and Wolff 1987). For example, a given MNC may lend money to other capitalists and so secure interest revenues from them; it may lease land to them and allow their use of patents, thereby securing rent and licensing fees as additional revenues that comprise distributions from the surpluses appropriated by those capitalists. Our MNC may also lend money to workers and so obtain revenues that do not derive from any surplus. If the MNC’s board of directors is located in, say, New York City, it develops different expenditure strategies to gen- erate these diverse revenues from locations dispersed globally. In the value terms that highlight the class dimensions of corporate accounts, a MNC’s complex reve- nues and expenditures look like this: SV iUS + SSCR iUS + NCRiUS = SSCP kUS + XkUS + YkUS where the subscript i indexes the various global locations where our MNC appropri- ates surplus-value (SV iUS), from where it receives distributions of other capitalists’ appropriated surpluses (SSCR iUS), and from where it draws nonsurplus revenues (NCRiUS).4 On the right-hand side of the equation, the superscript k indexes the vari- ous global locations of recipients of subsumed class payments (SSCPkUS) our MNC must make to secure its ability to appropriate surplus from its own workers; expen- ditures (XkUS) needed to secure its SSCR; and expenditures (YkUS) needed to secure its NCR (see Resnick and Wolff 1987 for a full explanation of such enterprises’ rev- enues and expenditures precisely in terms of their class/nonclass dimensions). Following Hardt and Negri, such corporations are indeed “postmodern” in the sense that no singular revenue or expenditure flow centers their economic life. Put differ- ently, their revenues cannot be reduced merely to the surplus-value they exploit from 3. For a discussion and examples of these “product-service hybrids,” see Davis and Meyer (1998, 20– 9). The examples they provide nicely illustrate the increasing difficulty today of distinguishing clearly between the material and the immaterial in a commodity. One example also portends the future of many new commodities. Tomorrow, Davis and Meyer explain, Mercedes may be able to interconnect a car’s computer to a service center’s computer such that a potential problem can be detected and possibly repaired without that car ever seeing a repair garage (20). 4. We designate such revenues “nonclass revenues” to stress that they are neither a directly appropri- ated surplus nor a distribution from someone who has directly appropriated a surplus. As revenues a corporation derives from economic processes other than class—other than the appropriation or distri- bution of surplus—they are “nonclass” revenues.  Empire and Class Analysis 67 their workers nor can their expenditures be reduced merely to any capital they may accumulate. They are globally and functionally decentered capitalist corporations. In class terms, this means that they will shift from reliance on exploiting their own workers in various global locations (SV iUS) to reliance on alternative revenues gen- erated in various locations (SSCR iUS + NCRiUS) as opportunities arise. Such MNC shifts profoundly affect both the societies in which they exploit and those to/from which they move values. So, too, will MNC shifts from reliance on capitalist to reli- ance on noncapitalist class structures for their revenues as opportunities arise or can be induced. The point is that the complex class dimensions, connections, and im- pacts of global MNCs are socially consequential and belong in Empire’s analyses, especially given its goal of a “postmodern revolution against Empire” (65). We may add that while sites of surplus-value production and the other sources of corporate revenues are decentralized across the globe in these ways, the receipt of those revenues and the expenditures deployed to generate them typically occur in key global cities (297). From there corporate strategies can radiate effectively be- cause of the computer and telecommunications revolution. “Network production” and “information highways” not only allow Empire’s decentralized production, cir- culation, and control to be managed from these “cities of control” but also enable Empire’s decentralized class (SV + SSCR) and nonclass (NCR) revenues to occur along with them. Yet, the computer revolution also has other different class consequences which a class analysis can pinpoint. That revolution facilitates the dramatic growth of a noncapitalist class structure in many localities, a phenomenon marginalized by Hardt and Negri’s disinterest in the organization of surplus and its forms. Some forms of “immaterial labor” (e.g., computer programming, accounting, scientific research, editing, reviewing, consulting, design, translation, systems analysis, and so forth) can be and increasingly are done in the home by individuals without employees. The availability and relative cheapness of computers and high-speed printers, e-mail, and the fax machine—fruits of capitalist enterprises—have enabled many households to become sites of a noncapitalist production of commodities and hence of a surplus embodied in those commodities. Because this is a surplus produced and also appro- priated by the same individual, it is a noncapitalist class structure variously labeled by Marx “ancient” or “simple commodity.” The computer revolution has enabled small partnerships and collectives of such individuals likewise to prosper in enter- prises displaying noncapitalist class structures.5 The international capitalism of Empire has thus produced spreading, decentralized, noncapitalist class structures in various 5. In Marx’s terms, when groups of workers arrange collectively to produce and appropriate their own surpluses in the course of producing use-values, this constitutes the particular communist class pro- cess. We are indebted to Kenneth Levin for pointing out that the computer revolution has spawned large numbers of economically successful refugees from capitalist enterprises who establish instead small collectives devoted to avoiding anything like the employer-employee (i.e., class) divisions typi- cal of capitalism. That such refugees do not understand their behavior in class terms does not change the class dimension of their actions. It does, however, underscore the need to bring class analysis ex- plicitly into the public consciousness . 68 Resnick and Wolff locations. They generate an array of (noncapitalist) service commodities for a global market in which capitalist corporations are the major buyers. Yet the past histories of the interactions between capitalist and such noncapitalist class structures show them to be ripe with contradictions. Sometimes the two different class structures work symbiotically, while at other times they clash. May this be a source of conflicts, ten- sions, and ruptures important for opponents of Empire to expose? We think so, but that would require precisely the sort of inclusion of the class dimensions of Empire that we wish to advocate in relation to Hardt and Negri. Another aspect of Empire where the exclusion of class in its surplus labor sense strikes us as weakening an otherwise powerful argument concerns the concept of “the multitude.” We have no quarrel with Hardt and Negri seeking to underscore the multidimensional, amorphous, ever changing subjectivities produced by Empire; we have no desire to reduce those complexities to any simplicity. We do, however, pro- test against the omission of the class differences that deserve inclusion in the analy- sis of the multitude and its capacities for effective unity in opposition to Empire. In the contemporary world, some people produce surplus that is appropriated by oth- ers—that is, they are exploited. However, the form (social organization) of this ex- ploitation can and does vary: it takes capitalist but also feudal and slave forms. Still other people work individually and appropriate surplus from themselves, while still others collectively produce and appropriate their own surpluses. Each of these groups participates in and experiences social life differently. Organizing them into an effec- tive force against Empire requires respecting, analyzing, and accommodating their differences. To approach this issue from another angle, Marx went to considerable pains to distinguish within capitalism between productive and unproductive laborers (in ways pointedly different from how his predecessors had made such distinctions).6 He did this not to rank their importance—neither to capitalism nor to an anticapitalist work- ers’ movement. Rather his purpose, as we understand it, was to show how and why these two different kinds of workers related to the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus in different ways and, therefore, presented differences that the organization of an anticapitalist workers’ movement would have to recognize and 6. Marx held that the productive workers were those who actually produced the surplus while the unproductive workers provided the conditions of existence for the appropriation of the surplus. For example, the workers who make and serve the restaurant meal are productive (generate the restaurant corporation’s surplus and profit) whereas the cashier, who keeps records needed for the restaurant to continue to exploit the productive workers, is unproductive. As Marx insisted, both workers are needed to reproduce the restaurant as a capitalist corporation, but they relate differently to that reproduction, precisely to the production, appropriation, and distribution of the restaurant surplus. The productive worker gets a wage for producing the surplus while the unproductive worker’s wage is a distribution of the surplus from the capitalist appropriator. Hence, it is no surprise that these two kinds of workers experience life differently, become attached to conceptions like “white collar/blue collar” in different ways, and take on different ideological colors. Marx exposed this class difference among the aggre- gate of “wage-earners ” to improve the success of those seeking to ally both kinds of workers in an anticapitalist struggle. The same logic and purpose argues for the inclusion of such class differences in the kind of argument being advanced in Empire.  Empire and Class Analysis 69 accommodate. Empire’s theorization of “the multitude” aggregates so as to minimize or marginalize the issue of class differences within such multitudes.7 Yet a respect for the diversity of subjectivities within the multitude need not and should not entail neglecting how people diversely participate in the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus. Different class participations have their distinctive roles to play in shaping the subjectivities, contradictions, and revolutionary possibilities of Empire and of “the multitude.” Finally, class analysis focused on surplus now has developed to the point where Marxists can and must attend to class structures located not only within business enterprises but also elsewhere in society where surpluses are also produced, appro- priated, and distributed. Residential households, for example, are sites of class struc- tures (involved in the production of household use-values) and class struggles quite different from those encountered inside enterprises (Fraad, Resnick, and Wolff 1994). Most members of Hardt and Negri’s multitude spend enormous time, energy, and reflection as they negotiate their days between the class structures of residential house- hold and enterprise. In short, they participate in multiple, different class structures that shape their lives, including their attitudes toward Empire and towards its revo- lutionary opposition. The emergence of Empire has altered the class structures in- side enterprises and households and also the complex dialectic between them in ways crucial to understanding our epoch’s actuality and potentiality. The understanding of those alterations and that dialectic—precisely the strength of Marx’s class theory— needs also to be addressed and added to what this book has begun. We hope that it is hardly necessary to affirm our appreciation of and our indebt- edness to what we have learned from Empire. Our criticisms are driven by the desire to add to Hardt and Negri, as allies in the struggle, what we have also learned from mining Marx’s rich innovations in class analysis. References Davis, S., and C. Meyer. 1998. Blur: The speed of change in the connected economy. Read- ing, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. Fraad, H., S. Resnick, and R. Wolff. 1994. Bringing it all back home: Class, gender and power in the modern household. London: Pluto Press. Resnick, S., and R. Wolff. 1986. What are class analyses? In Research in Political Economy, vol. 9, ed. P. Zarembka, 1–32. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press. ———. 1987. Knowledge and class: A Marxian critique of political economy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 7. This minimalization occurs as well in such conceptual shifts as “directly and indirectly productive labor” (261), which collapses a distinction that needs to be recognized and deployed in Marxist analy- sis and practice.