Hardt Michael, Negri Antonio. Empire

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DISCIPLINARY GOVERNABILITY 243

in a disciplinary society, the entire society, with all its productive

and reproductive articulations, is subsumed under the command of

capital and the state, and that the society tends, gradually but with

unstoppable continuity, to be ruled solely by criteria of capitalist

production. A disciplinary society is thus a factory-society.

Disciplinarity

is at once a form of production and a form of government such

that disciplinary production and disciplinary society tend to coincide

completely. In this new factory-society, productive subjectivities

are forged as one-dimensional functions of economic development.

The ﬁgures, structures, and hierarchies of the division of social labor

become ever more widespread and minutely deﬁned as civil society

is increasingly absorbed into the state: the new rules of subordination

and the disciplinary capitalist regimes are extended across the entire

social terrain.

It is precisely when the disciplinary regime is pushed

to its highest level and most complete application that it is revealed

as the extreme limit of a social arrangement, a society in the process

of being overcome. This is certainly due in large part to the motor

behind the process, the subjective dynamics of resistance and revolt,

which we will return to in the next section.

The New Deal model, then, was ﬁrst of all a development

proper to U.S. politics, a response to the domestic economic crisis,

but it also became a ﬂag that the U.S. Army raised throughout the

course of the Second World War. Several explanations were given

for why the United States entered the war. Roosevelt always claimed

to have been dragged in unwillingly by the dynamics of international

politics. Keynes and the economists thought instead that the needs

of the New Deal—confronted as it was in 1937 by a new type of

crisis, challenged by the political pressure of workers’ demands—had

obliged the U.S. government to choose the path of war. Facing an

international struggle for the new repartition of the world market,

the United States could not avoid the war, in particular because

with the New Deal, the U.S. economy had entered into another

expansive phase. In either case, the U.S. entry into World War II

tied the New Deal indissolubly to the crisis of European imperialisms

and projected the New Deal on the scene of world government as

244 PASSAGES OF PRODUCTION

an alternative, successor model. From that point on, the effects of

the New Deal reforms would be felt over the entire global terrain.

In the aftermath of the war, many viewed the New Deal

model as the only path to global recovery (under the paciﬁc powers

of U.S. hegemony). As one U.S. commentator wrote, ‘‘Only a

New Deal for the world, more far reaching and consistent than

our faltering New Deal, can prevent the coming of World War

III.’’

The economic reconstruction projects launched after the

Second World War did in fact impose on all the dominant capitalist

countries, both the victorious Allies and the defeated powers, adhe-

sion to the expansive model of disciplinary society according to the

model constructed by the New Deal. The previous European and

Japanese forms of state-based public assistance and the development

of the corporativist state (in both its liberal and national-socialist

forms) were thus substantially transformed. The ‘‘social state’’ was

born, or really the global disciplinary state, which took into account

more widely and deeply the life cycles of populations, ordering

their production and reproduction within a scheme of collective

bargaining ﬁxed by a stable monetary regime. With the extension

of U.S. hegemony, the dollar became king. The initiative of the

dollar (through the Marshall Plan in Europe and the economic

reconstruction in Japan) was the ineluctable path to postwar recon-

struction; the establishment of the dollar’s hegemony (through the

Bretton Woods accords) was tied to the stability of all the standards

of value; and U.S. military power determined the ultimate exercise

of sovereignty with respect to each of the dominant and subordinate

capitalist countries. All the way up to the 1960s this model was

expanded and perfected. It was the Golden Age of the New Deal

reform of capitalism on the world stage.

Decolonization, Decentering, and Discipline

As a result of the project of economic and social reform under

U.S. hegemony, the imperialist politics of the dominant capitalist

countries was transformed in the postwar period. The new global

scene was deﬁned and organized primarily around three mechanisms

DISCIPLINARY GOVERNABILITY 245

or apparatuses: (1) the process of decolonization that gradually re-

composed the world market along hierarchical lines branching out

from the United States; (2) the gradual decentralization of produc-

tion; and (3) the construction of a framework of international rela-

tions that spread across the globe the disciplinary productive regime

and disciplinary society in its successive evolutions. Each of these

aspects constitutes a step in the evolution from imperialism to-

ward Empire.

Decolonization, the ﬁrst mechanism, was certainly a bitter and

ferocious process. We have already dealt with it brieﬂy in Section

2.3, and we have seen its convulsive movements from the point

of view of the colonized in struggle. Here we must historicize the

process from the standpoint of the dominant powers. The colonial

territories of defeated Germany, Italy, and Japan, of course, were

completely dissolved or absorbed by the other powers. By this time,

however, the colonial projects of the victors, too (Britain, France,

Belgium, and Holland), had come to a standstill.

In addition to

facing growing liberation movements in the colonies, they also

found themselves stymied by the bipolar divide between the United

States and the Soviet Union. The decolonization movements too

were seized immediately in the jaws of this cold war vise, and the

movements that had been focused on their independence were

forced to negotiate between the two camps.

What Truman said

in 1947 during the Greek crisis remained true for the decolonizing

and postcolonial forces throughout the cold war: ‘‘At the present

moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between

alternative ways of life.’’

The linear trajectory of decolonization was thus interrupted

by the necessity of selecting a global adversary and lining up behind

one of the two models of international order. The United States,

which was by and large favorable to decolonization, was forced by

the necessities of the cold war and the defeat of the old imperialisms

to assume the primary role as international guardian of capitalism

and hence ambiguous heir of the old colonizers. From both the

side of the anticolonial subjects and the side of the United States,

246 PASSAGES OF PRODUCTION

decolonization was thus distorted and diverted. The United States

inherited a global order, but one whose forms of rule conﬂicted

with its own constitutional project, its imperial form of sovereignty.

The Vietnam War was the ﬁnal episode of the United States’

ambiguous inheritance of the old imperialist mantle, and it ran the

risk of blocking any possible opening of an imperial ‘‘new frontier’’

(see Section 2.5). This phase was the ﬁnal obstacle to the maturation

of the new imperial design, which would eventually be built on

the ashes of the old imperialisms. Little by little, after the Vietnam

War the new world market was organized: a world market that

destroyed the ﬁxed boundaries and hierarchical procedures of Euro-

pean imperialisms. In other words, the completion of the decoloni-

zation process signaled the point of arrival of a new world hierarchi-

zation of the relations of domination—and the keys were ﬁrmly

in the hands of the United States. The bitter and ferocious history

of the ﬁrst period of decolonization opened onto a second phase

in which the army of command wielded its power less through

military hardware and more through the dollar. This was an enor-

mous step forward toward the construction of Empire.

The second mechanism is deﬁned by a process of decentering

the sites and ﬂows of production.

Here, as in decolonization, two

phases divide the postwar period. A ﬁrst, neocolonial phase involved

the continuity of the old hierarchical imperialist procedures and

the maintenance if not deepening of the mechanisms of unequal

exchange between subordinated regions and dominant nation-states.

This ﬁrst period, however, was a brief transitional phase, and, in

effect, in the arc of twenty years the scene changed radically. By

the end of the 1970s, or really by the end of the Vietnam War,

transnational corporations began to establish their activities ﬁrmly

across the globe, in every corner of the planet. The transnationals

became the fundamental motor of the economic and political trans-

formation of postcolonial countries and subordinated regions. In

the ﬁrst place, they served to transfer the technology that was

essential for constructing the new productive axis of the subordinate

countries; second, they mobilized the labor force and local produc-

DISCIPLINARY GOVERNABILITY 247

tive capacities in these countries; and ﬁnally, the transnationals

collected the ﬂows of wealth that began to circulate on an enlarged

base across the globe. These multiple ﬂows began to converge

essentially toward the United States, which guaranteed and coordi-

nated, when it did not directly command, the movement and

operation of the transnationals. This was a decisive constituent phase

of Empire. Through the activities of the transnational corporations,

the mediation and equalization of the rates of proﬁt were unhinged

from the power of the dominant nation-states. Furthermore, the

constitution of capitalist interests tied to the new postcolonial

nation-states, far from opposing the intervention of transnationals,

developed on the terrain of the transnationals themselves and tended

to be formed under their control. Through the decentering of

productive ﬂows, new regional economies and a new global division

of labor began to be determined.

There was no global order yet,

but an order was being formed.

Along with the decolonization process and the decentering

of ﬂows, a third mechanism involved the spread of disciplinary

forms of production and government across the world. This process

was highly ambiguous. In the postcolonial countries, discipline

required ﬁrst of all transforming the massive popular mobilization

for liberation into a mobilization for production. Peasants through-

out the world were uprooted from their ﬁelds and villages and

thrown into the burning forge of world production.

The ideologi-

cal model that was projected from the dominant countries (particu-

larly from the United States) consisted of Fordist wage regimes,

Taylorist methods of the organization of labor, and a welfare state

that would be modernizing, paternalistic, and protective. From the

standpoint of capital, the dream of this model was that eventually

every worker in the world, sufﬁciently disciplined, would be inter-

changeable in the global productive process—a global factory-

society and a global Fordism. The high wages of a Fordist regime

and the accompanying state assistance were posed as the workers’

rewards for accepting disciplinarity, for entering the global factory.

We should be careful to point out, however, that these speciﬁc

248 PASSAGES OF PRODUCTION

relations of production, which were developed in the dominant

countries, were never realized in the same forms in the subordinated

regions of the global economy. The regime of high wages that

characterizes Fordism and the broad social assistance that character-

izes the welfare state were realized only in fragmentary forms and

for limited populations in the subordinated capitalist countries. All

this, however, did not really have to be realized; its promise served

rather as the ideological carrot to ensure sufﬁcient consensus for

the modernizing project. The real substance of the effort, the real

take-off toward modernity, which was in fact achieved, was the

spread of the disciplinary regime throughout the social spheres of

production and reproduction.

The leaders of the socialist states agreed in substance on this

disciplinary project. Lenin’s renowned enthusiasm for Taylorism

was later outdone by Mao’s modernization projects.

The ofﬁcial

socialist recipe for decolonization also followed the essential logic

dictated by the capitalist transnationals and the international agen-

cies: each postcolonial government had to create a labor force

adequate to the disciplinary regime. Numerous socialist economists

(especially those who were in the position to plan the economies

of countries recently liberated from colonialism) claimed that indus-

trialization was the ineluctable path to development

and enumer-

ated the beneﬁts of the extension of ‘‘peripheral Fordist’’ econo-

mies.

The beneﬁts were really an illusion, and the illusion did not

last long, but that could not signiﬁcantly alter the course of these

postcolonial countries along the path of modernization and discipli-

narization. This seemed to be the only path open to them.

Disci-

plinarity was everywhere the rule.

These three mechanisms—decolonization, decentering of

production, and disciplinarity—characterize the imperial power of

the New Deal, and demonstrate how far it moved beyond the old

practices of imperialism. Certainly the original formulators of the

New Deal policies in the United States in the 1930s never imagined

such a wide application of their ideas, but already in the 1940s, in

the midst of war, world leaders began to recognize its role and

DISCIPLINARY GOVERNABILITY 249

power in the establishment of global economic and political order.

By the time of Harry Truman’s inauguration, he understood that

ﬁnally the old European-style imperialism could have no part in

their plans. No, the new era had something new in store.

Into and Out of Modernity

The cold war was the dominant ﬁgure on the global scene during

the period of decolonization and decentralization, but from today’s

vantage point we have the impression that its role was really second-

ary. Although the specular oppositions of the cold war strangled

both the U.S. imperial project and the Stalinist project of socialist

modernization, these were really minor elements of the entire pro-

cess. The truly important element, whose signiﬁcance goes well

beyond the history of the cold war, was the gigantic postcolonial

transformation of the Third World under the guise of modernization

and development. In the ﬁnal analysis, that project was relatively

independent of the dynamics and constraints of the cold war, and

one could almost claim, post factum, that in the Third World the

competition between the two world power blocs merely accelerated

the processes of liberation.

It is certainly true that the Third World elites who led the

anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles during this period were

ideologically tied to one or the other side of the cold war divide,

and in both cases they deﬁned the mass project of liberation in

terms of modernization and development. For us, however, poised

as we are at the far border of modernity, it is not difﬁcult to

recognize the tragic lack of perspective involved in the translation

of liberation into modernization. The myth of modernity—and

thus of sovereignty, the nation, the disciplinary model, and so

forth—was virtually the exclusive ideology of the elites, but this is

not the most important factor here.

The revolutionary processes of liberation determined by the

multitude actually pushed beyond the ideology of modernization,

and in the process revealed an enormous new production of subjec-

tivity. This subjectivity could not be contained in the bipolar U.S.-

250 PASSAGES OF PRODUCTION

USSR relationship, nor in the two competing regimes, which both

merely reproduced modernity’s modalities of domination. When

Nehru, Sukarno, and Chou En-lai came together at the Bandung

Conference in 1955 or when the nonalignment movement ﬁrst

formed in the 1960s, what was expressed was not so much the

enormity of their nations’ misery nor the hope of repeating the

glories of modernity but rather the enormous potential for liberation

that the subaltern populations themselves produced.

This non-

aligned perspective gave a ﬁrst glimpse of a new and generalized

desire.

The question what to do after liberation so as not to fall under

the domination of one camp or the other remained unanswered.

What were clear and full of potential, by contrast, were the subjectiv-

ities that pushed beyond modernity. The utopian image of the

Soviet and Chinese revolutions as alternatives for development

vanished when those revolutions could no longer go forward, or

rather when they failed to ﬁnd a way to go beyond modernity.

The U.S. model of development appeared equally closed, since

throughout the postwar period the United States presented itself

more as the police force of the old imperialisms than the agent of

a new hope. The struggle of subaltern populations for their liberation

remained an explosive and uncontainable mixture. By the end of

the 1960s the liberation struggles, whose inﬂuence had come to be

felt in every interstice of world space, assumed a force, a mobility,

and a plasticity of form that drove the project of capitalist moderniza-

tion (in both its liberal and its socialist guises) out into an open sea,

where it lost its bearings. Behind the fac

ade of the bipolar U.S.-

Soviet divide they could discern a single disciplinary model, and

against this model the enormous movements struggled, in forms

that were more or less ambiguous, more or less mystiﬁed, but

nonetheless real. This enormous new subjectivity alluded to and

made necessary a paradigm shift.

The inadequacy of the theory and practice of modern sover-

eignty became evident at this point. By the 1960s and 1970s, even

though the model of disciplinary modernization had been imposed

DISCIPLINARY GOVERNABILITY 251

across the world, even though the welfarist policies set in motion by

the dominant countries had become unstoppable and were naively

championed by leaders in the subordinated countries, and even

in this new world of communicative media and networks, the

mechanisms of modern sovereignty were no longer sufﬁcient to

rule the new subjectivities. We should point out here that as the

paradigm of modern sovereignty lost its effectiveness, so too the

classical theories of imperialism and anti-imperialism lost whatever

explanatory powers they had. In general, when these theories con-

ceived the surpassing of imperialism, they saw it as a process that

would be in perfect continuity with the paradigm of modernization

and modern sovereignty. What happened, however, was exactly

the opposite. Massiﬁed subjectivities, populations, oppressed classes,

in the very moment when they entered the processes of moderniza-

tion, began to transform them and go beyond them. The struggles

for liberation, in the very moment when they were situated and

subordinated in the world market, recognized insufﬁcient and tragic

keystone of modern sovereignty. Exploitation and domination

could no longer be imposed in their modern forms. As these enor-

mous new subjective forces emerged from colonization and reached

modernity, they recognized that the primary task is not getting into

but getting out of modernity.

Toward a New Global Paradigm

A paradigm shift in the world economic and political order was

taking place. One important element of this passage was the fact

that the world market as a structure of hierarchy and command

became more important and decisive in all the zones and regions

in which the old imperialisms had previously operated. The world

market began to appear as the centerpiece of an apparatus that could

regulate global networks of circulation. This uniﬁcation was still

posed only at a formal level. The processes that arose on the conﬂic-

tual terrain of liberation struggles and expanding capitalist circulation

were not necessarily or immediately compatible with the new struc-

tures of the world market. Integration proceeded unevenly and at

252 PASSAGES OF PRODUCTION

different speeds. In different regions and often within the same

region, diverse forms of labor and production coexisted, as did also

different regimes of social reproduction. What might have seemed

like a coherent central axis of the restructuring of global production

was shattered into a thousand particular fragments and the unifying

process was experienced everywhere singularly. Far from being

unidimensional, the process of restructuring and unifying command

over production was actually an explosion of innumerable different

productive systems. The processes of the uniﬁcation of the world

market operated paradoxically through diversity and diversiﬁcation,

but its tendency was nonetheless real.

Several important effects follow from the tendency toward

the uniﬁcation of the world market. On the one hand, the wide

spread of the disciplinary model of the organization of labor and

society outward from the dominant regions produced in the rest

of the world a strange effect of proximity, simultaneously pulling

it closer and isolating it away in a ghetto. That is, liberation struggles

found themselves ‘‘victorious’’ but nonetheless consigned to the

ghetto of the world market—a vast ghetto with indeterminate

borders, a shantytown, a favela. On the other hand, huge populations

underwent what might be called wage emancipation as a result of

these processes. Wage emancipation meant the entrance of great

masses of workers into the disciplinary regime of modern capitalist

production, whether it be in the factory, the ﬁelds, or some other

site of social production, and hence these populations were liberated

from the semi-servitude that imperialism had perpetuated. Entry

into the wage system can be bloody (and it has been); it can repro-

duce systems of ferocious repression (and it has done so); but even

in the shacks of the new shantytowns and favelas, the wage relation

does determine the constitution of new needs, desires, and demands.

For example, the peasants who become wage workers and who are

subjected to the discipline of the new organization of labor in many

cases suffer worse living conditions, and one cannot say that they

are more free than the traditional territorialized laborer, but they

do become infused with a new desire for liberation. When the new