“There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.” —Deleuze

In the book Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri extended an idea that was first articulated by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze in the short essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control”. The idea being that a type of society that dominated life from the end of the 18th century to the end of the 20th century (defined internally by enclosures—the army, the factory, the school, the family, and so on—and externally by radial colonial arrangements), this type of society was in decline and being replaced by a new kind of order, a new kind of power that ruled by removing and smoothing enclosure walls and diffusing capital across the world. In 1990, Deleuze called this new order “control society”; in 1999, Hardt and Negri called it Empire.

In the way Mike Davis’s book City of Quartz explained the LA riots; Empire arrived just in time to explain the WTO riots that erupted in Seattle: Global capitalism was not bringing the world’s poor closer to paradise but, as other forms of power, pushing them deeper into hell. The confrontations between what Hardt and Negri called “multitude” (the global oppressed) and the institutions that organized transnational wealth, escalated. Something big was about to happen—and then the wrong big thing happened, WTC. After that blazing event, Empire was abandoned by its leading member, the US, which reverted to imperialism. “[T]he recent assertion of a ‘robust nationalism’” wrote Philip S Golub’s in an essay, “United States: the slide to disorder,” published last year by Le Monde Dilplomatique:

…has fundamentally altered the grammar and trajectory of world politics: liberal globalisation and interdependence have been superseded by naked imperial power politics. Just as the late 19th-century expansion of the free market was centred in London, underpinned by a political order and held together by transnational networks with a vested interest in peace in Europe, the pursuit of 20th-century globalisation requires the continued commitment of the US to a system of institutionalised interstate cooperation and liberal regimes of global governance.

Yet unlike Britain, which lost control, the US has chosen to wreck the global system. As Stanley Hoffmann puts it: “The US may want to return to pre-1914 conditions … or else, the US, seeing itself as the guardian of world order, would leave restraints on other states standing, and reserve to itself the right to select those restraints of international law and institutions that serve its interests and to reject all the others.” The dramatic implication in both cases is that the US is deconstructing the frameworks of multilateral cooperation that were designed after 1945 to introduce “some order and moderation into the jungle of traditional international conflicts”

While the Clinton administration’s composition and policies reflected, at least in part, the interests of this thin but influential cosmopolitan class, the contemporary right-wing power elite is centred in the military-industrial complex, which is the least autonomous and most nationalist part of the US political economy. The least autonomous because it is fused in the state and the most nationalist because it seeks by nature to maximise national power. These elite formations both call upon broad social bases: as the geographic dispersion of the 2004 elections neatly showed, the social base of the liberal internationalists is concentrated in densely populated, internationalised coastal urban areas, while the primary popular base of nationalism and militarism is found in rural areas, among the white lower, and lower middle, classes in the heartland.

In short, Clinton represented Empire, the society of control, whereas Bush represented an older form of power, one connected with disciplinary society, colonialism—power formations and institutions that began to dissolve after World War II. Hardt and Negri were confused by this regression. Why was American capital dropping the new and improved tools of power and picking up old and blunt ones? And not only that, American capital seemed to have a clear center and a clear national identity. Were Hardt and Negri completely wrong? Was there no such thing as Empire? “What is absolutely new with respect to Empire’s structure,” said Negri in a 2003 interview,

…is the fact that the American reaction is configuring itself as a regressive backlash contrary to the imperial tendency. It is an imperialist backlash within and against Empire that is linked to old structures of power, old methods of command, and a monocratic and substantialist conception of sovereignty that represents a counter tendency with respect to the molecular and relational characters of the imperial bio-power that we had analysed. The gravity of the situation today lies in this contradiciton.

For three years Hardt and Negri scratched their heads and kept relatively silent.

Last week, Hardt ended the silence with a big and loud article in The Nation. In it, he holds up, like a severed head, the grand and undisputed failure of 21st century American imperialism (its failed domestic and international agendas) as proof that that form of power is, as he and Negri had argued, dead. Bush is nothing more than a corpse’s last sign of life. “Some time in the future,” Hardt writes in The Nation

…looking back on our present period of US unilateralism, maybe it will seem like that cliché moment at the end of every teen horror movie when the young survivors gather around the grave of the monster they’ve defeated. As the reassuring music starts and the protagonists are beginning to walk away from the grave, just when we expect the final credits to roll, the monster’s hand shoots up through the dirt and grabs one of them by the ankle, sending one last gasp of fear through the theater. But after that final shock they can cut off the arm, put the monster to rest and walk away. There is no point continuing the fight against the old monster, dead and buried. Its time has passed. But we know there will be a sequel with a new monster that requires new forms of struggle.”

Empire is now correcting itself. The US is still powerful but, as last week’s Time cover made clear, it now knows that its power alone is not enough to rule the world system.

As Empire returns to business as usual, its natural opponent, the multitude, must return to the business of resistance. Welcome back to the party.