On November 11, 2008, within the framework of Operation “TAIGA” [1], one hundred and fifty police encircled the small village of Tarnac, in Corrèze (southwest France). Simultaneously, evidence was seized in Rouen, Paris, Limoges, and Metz. An arrest of young people was made, above all as a spectacle to incite fear. Their arrest was said to be in connection with the sabotage of the train lines of the SNCF [2], which on November 8 caused delays for certain TGVs on the Paris-Lille line [3]. These malevolent acts, which knocked down several overhead wires, were characterized as terrorist in nature, despite the fact that they never, at any moment, put human lives in danger. The prosecution, which says it possesses several clues, recognizes that it has no material evidence or proof.
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As in the case of the agreement between the European Union and the United States on screening European passengers, signed in June 2007, this new agreement on screening financial transactions gives legitimacy to a de facto situation that the US created. In both cases, the US administration illegally seized European citizens’ personal data before the EU sanctioned this right of intrusion and changed the law accordingly. The Concept of Empire The fundamental problem is to construct the concept of Empire as a specific form of State and to place it in relation to the concept of “imperialism” or the “monopoly” stage of capitalist society. Two possibilities present themselves: Either Empire corresponds to a new organization of the social relations of production that is qualitatively distinct; it is the State-form corresponding to a new “stage” of the development of capital. Or Empire corresponds to a particular period of the development of the imperialist stage, the result of the tendency exhibited by this structure, the organization of a super-imperialism. With Negri, Empire corresponds to a new mode of the accumulation of capital based on “immaterial labor.” The approach is tainted by technicism, expressing the primacy of the productive forces over the social relations of production. It is all the more puzzling since he himself fully criticized this conception during the 1970s. Any research in this sense must study the labor process through the forms of the new relations of production and new property relations of labor power. The second option, Empire as a specific period of the imperialist stage, is more complex. It is thus necessary to break up the imperialist stage into two distinct periods. The first period is characterized by the mass presence of labor power in the social relations of production. This directly political existence requires a reorganization of the State to manage the balance of power. This is what the Bourdieu school has taken note of, in a purely formal manner, under the name of “social State.” The second period corresponds to the ongoing deconstruction of this balance of power. One can distinguish two moments. The first, mainly economic, is the dismantling of the labor structure through relocations, by the capability of multinational capital to put labor powers of different values into competition. The second phase corresponds to the current state of affairs, to setting up the conditions necessary for overturning property relations on the basis of criminal law. This whole process can be perceived and theorized as a permanent state of exception insofar as the virtual war against terrorism makes possible an ever more intense offensive against freedoms. However, the overturning is such that it leads to the establishment of a “new order,” of a psychotic political structure where the word of power is substituted for the facts themselves (the government thesis on the September 11 attacks is exemplary in this regard). It is a question of a legal order set up where the law is formed by the word of the executive power. François Debrix should be thanked for the scope and quality of his work. His stimulating reading of the theses supported in Global War on Liberty brings them into sharp relief and encourages a critical development of them and thus of those contained in his own reading. Debrix asserts that the book does not contain the concept of the modern form of the State. I agree with this observation. Moreover, this was not the objective of Global War on Liberty. The study is situated on a prior level. It is, first of all, a phenomenology of the transformations of the political. It aims at bringing together what is generally apprehended separately, event by event and without any interconnection at the national and international levels. We live in a globalized world, a world-system, and yet observations on political reforms are fragmented. The primary object of the book is to collect the components of knowledge and bring out their coherence, the tendency that is implicit in them. Obviously, the search for and handling of data are based on a set of hypotheses that are constructed at the same time as the research is devised. However, the elaboration of this research is situated entirely at the level of the political. But we know that the political does not possess its essence in itself. Carl Schmitt asserts the phenomenological character of his approach. That is not our point of view. Phenomenological study is only a moment of a broader approach. The political cannot be studied as a separate level, but in relation to what founds it: the organization of the social relations of production. One cannot conceptualize the form of the State in itself, separately from its substance and its content, that is, from the mode of production, the organization of property relations and the society. To establish the concept of the modern form of the State supposes that one is producing, in the same movement, the form and its content in their interrelations. [1] Now available! The war on terrorism feeds a paradoxical form of discourse: an emergency demands urgent and compelling measures, yet these are part of a long-term, indeed endless, confrontation. The state of emergency becomes a lasting form of government. It comes to be seen as a new political regime that is called upon to stand firm for democracy and Human Rights. In other words, citizens must be ready to give up immediate rights and a well-defined freedom for the sake of an abstract and self-proclaimed democratic order, not only today and tomorrow, but for an indefinite period. As it suspends law and inscribes such suspension into a new legal order, war on terrorism gives legitimacy to a change in the political regime. The war against terrorism allows power to be reorganized at the world level. The procedures of exception set up in its name become the basis of a new legal order that gives judicial powers to administrative authorities. Thus the war against terrorism is constitutive. It alters the exercise of internal and external sovereignty. It leads to an organic solidarity among various governments in the surveillance and repression of their populations. The boundary between the maintenance of order and war is blurred. Real wars are presented as police operations and control over citizens is carried out by procedures that belong to counter-espionage. In this globalized process, the United States occupies an exceptional place. It rules an imperial political structure in which the American administration has the privilege of determining the exception and inscribing it into law. |
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