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Features » December 7, 2004

People vs. Empire

Only global resistance from below can counter repressive states

By Arundhati
Roy

A protester confronts Seattle police after they fired tear gas to disperse
demonstrators in downtown Seattle on November 30, 1999.

This article is adapted from Public Power in the Age of Empire (Seven Stories, 2004) which
is based on a speech Roy gave to the American Sociological Association in August
2004.

Tags    activism
economy
international politics
social justice

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THIS ARTICLE |

In India, the word public is now a Hindi word. It means people. In
Hindi, we have sarkar and public, the government and the people.
Inherent in this use is the underlying assumption that the government is quite
separate from “the people.” However, as you make your way up India’s complex
social ladder, the distinction between sarkar and public gets
blurred. The Indian elite, like the elite anywhere in the world, finds it hard
to separate itself from the state.

In the United States, on the other hand, the blurring of this distinction
between sarkar and public has penetrated far deeper into society.
This could be a sign of robust democracy, but unfortunately it’s a little more
complicated and less pretty than that. Among other things, it has to do with the
elaborate web of paranoia generated by the U.S. sarkar and spun out by
the corporate media and Hollywood. Ordinary people in the United States have
been manipulated into imagining they are a people under siege whose sole refuge
and protector is their government. If it isn’t the Communists, it’s al Qaeda. If
it isn’t Cuba, it’s Nicaragua. As a result, the most powerful nation in the
world is peopled by a terrified citizenry jumping at shadows. A people bonded to
the state not by social services, or public health care, or employment
guarantees, but by fear.

This synthetically manufactured fear is used to gain public sanction for
further acts of aggression. And so it goes, building into a spiral of
self-fulfilling hysteria, now formally calibrated by the U.S government’s
Amazing Technicolored Terror Alerts: fuchsia, turquoise, salmon pink.

To outside observers, this merging of sarkar and public in the
United States sometimes makes it hard to separate the actions of the government
from the people. Such confusion fuels anti-Americanism in the
world—anti-Americanism that is seized upon and amplified by the U.S. government
and its faithful media outlets. You know the routine: “Why do they hate us? They
hate our freedoms,” et cetera. This enhances the U.S. people’s sense of
isolation, making the embrace between sarkar and public even more
intimate.

Over the last few years, the “war on terrorism” has mutated into the more
generic “war on terror.” Using the threat of an external enemy to rally people
behind you is a tired old horse that politicians have ridden into power for
centuries. But could it be that ordinary people, fed up with that poor old
horse, are looking for something different? Before Washington’s illegal invasion
of Iraq, a Gallup International poll showed that in no European country was
support for a unilateral war higher than 11 percent. On February 15, 2003, weeks
before the invasion, more than 10 million people marched against the war on
different continents, including North America. And yet the governments of many
supposedly democratic countries still went to war.

We must question then: Is “democracy” still democratic? Are democratic
governments accountable to the people who elected them? And, critically, is the
public in democratic countries responsible for the actions of its sarkar?

If you think about it, the logic that underlies the war on terror and the
logic that underlies terrorism are exactly the same. Both make ordinary citizens
pay for the actions of their government. Al Qaeda made the people of the United
States pay with their lives for the actions of their government in Palestine,
Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. government has made the people of
Afghanistan pay in the thousands for the actions of the Taliban and the people
of Iraq pay in the hundreds of thousands for the actions of Saddam Hussein.
Whose God decides which is a “just war” and which isn’t? George Bush senior once
said: “I will never apologize for the United States. I don’t care what the facts
are.” When the president of the most powerful country in the world doesn’t
need to care what the facts are, then we can be sure we have entered the
Age of Empire.

Real choices

So what does public power mean in the Age of Empire? Does it mean anything at
all? Does it actually exist? In these allegedly democratic times, conventional
political thought holds that public power is exercised through the ballot.
People in scores of countries around the world will go to the polls this year.
Most (not all) of them will get the governments they vote for. But will they get
the governments they want?

In India this year, we voted the Hindu nationalists of the BJP out of office.
But even as we celebrated, we knew that on nuclear bombs, neoliberalism,
privatization, censorship, big dams—on every major issue other than overt Hindu
nationalism—the Congress and the BJP have no major ideological differences. We
know that it is the 50-year legacy of the Congress Party that prepared the
ground culturally and politically for the far right.

And what of the U.S. elections? Did U.S. voters have a real choice? The U.S.
political system has been carefully crafted to ensure that no one who questions
the natural goodness of the military-industrial corporate structure will be
allowed through the portals of power. Given this, it’s no surprise that in this
election you had two Yale University graduates, both members of Skull and Bones,
the same secret society, both millionaires, both playing at soldier-solider,
both talking up war, and arguing almost childishly about who would lead the war
on terror more effectively. It’s not a real choice. It’s an apparent
choice. Like choosing a brand of detergent. Whether you buy Ivory Snow or Tide,
they’re both owned by Procter & Gamble. The fact is that electoral democracy
has become a process of cynical manipulation. It offers us a very reduced
political space today. To believe that this space constitutes real choice would
be naive. The crisis of modern democracy is a profound one. Free elections, a
free press and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has
reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder.

On the global stage, beyond the jurisdiction of sovereign governments,
international instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex web of
multilateral laws and agreements that have entrenched a system of appropriation
that puts colonialism to shame. This system allows the unrestricted entry and
exit of massive amounts of speculative capital into and out of Third World
countries, which then effectively dictates their economic policy. Using the
threat of capital flight as a lever, international capital insinuates itself
deeper and deeper into these economies. Giant transnational corporations are
taking control of their essential infrastructure and natural resources, their
minerals, their water, their electricity. The World Trade Organization, the
World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other financial institutions,
like the Asian Development Bank, virtually write economic policy and
parliamentary legislation. With a deadly combination of arrogance and
ruthlessness, they take their sledgehammers to fragile, interdependent,
historically complex societies, and devastate them, all under the fluttering
banner of “reform.” As a consequence of such reform, thousands of small
enterprises and industries have closed; millions of workers and farmers have
lost their jobs and land.

Once the free market controls the economies of the Third World they become
enmeshed in an elaborate, carefully calibrated system of economic inequality.
Western countries flood the markets of poorer nations with their subsidized
agricultural goods and other products with which local producers cannot possibly
compete. Countries that have been plundered by colonizing regimes are steeped in
debt to these same powers, and have to repay them at the rate of about $382
billion a year. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer—not
accidentally, but by design.

To put a vulgar point on all of this, the combined wealth of the world’s
billionaires in 2004 (587 “individuals and family units”), according to Forbes
magazine, is $1.9 trillion—more than the gross domestic product of the world’s
135 poorest countries combined. The good news is that there are 111 more
billionaires this year than there were in 2003.

Modern democracy is safely premised on an almost religious acceptance of the
nation state. But corporate globalization is not. Liquid capital is not. So even
though capital needs the coercive powers of the nation state to put down revolts
in the servants’ quarters, this setup ensures that no individual nation can
oppose corporate globalization on its own.

Public power

Radical change cannot and will not be negotiated by governments; it can only
be enforced by people. By the public. A public that can link hands
across national borders. A public that disagrees with the very
concept of empire. A public that has set itself against the governments and
institutions that support and service Empire.

Empire has a range of calling cards. It uses different weapons to break open
different markets. There’s no country on God’s earth that isn’t caught in the
crosshairs of the U.S. cruise missile and the IMF checkbook. For poor people in
many countries, Empire does not always appear in the form of cruise missiles and
tanks, as it has in Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam. It appears in their lives in
very local avatars—losing their jobs, being sent unpayable electricity bills,
having their water supply cut, being evicted from their homes and uprooted from
their land. It is a process of relentless impoverishment with which the poor are
historically familiar. What Empire does is further entrench and exacerbate
already existing inequalities.

Until quite recently, it was sometimes difficult for people to see themselves
as victims of Empire. But now, local struggles have begun to see their role with
increasing clarity. However grand it might sound, the fact is, they are
confronting Empire in their own, very different ways. Differently in Iraq, in
South Africa, in India, in Argentina, and differently, for that matter, on the
streets of Europe and the United States.

Mass resistance movements, individual activists, journalists, artists and
film makers have come together to strip Empire of its sheen. They have connected
the dots, turned cash-flow charts and boardroom speeches into real stories about
real people and real despair. They have shown how the neoliberal project has
cost people their homes, their land, their jobs, their liberty, their dignity.
they have made the intangible tangible. The once seemingly incorporeal enemy is
now corporeal.

This is a huge victory. It was forged by the coming together of disparate
political groups, with a variety of stratigies. But they all recognized that the
target of their anger, their activism and their doggedness is the same. This was
the beginning of real globalization. The globalization of dissent.

Meanwhile, the rift between rich and poor is being driven deeper and the
battle to control the world’s resources intensifies. Economic colonialism
through formal military aggression is staging a comeback.

Iraq today is a tragic illustration of this process. The illegal invasion.
The brutal occupation in the name of liberation. The rewriting of laws to allow
the shameless appropriation of the country’s wealth and resources by
corporations allied to the occupation. And now the charade of a sovereign “Iraqi
government.”

The Iraqi resistance is fighting on the frontlines of the battle against
Empire. And therefore that battle is our battle. Before we prescribe how a
pristine Iraqi resistance must conduct a secular, feminist, democratic,
non-violent battle, we should shore up our end of the resistance by forcing the
U.S. government and its allies to withdraw from Iraq.

Resistance across borders

The first militant confrontation in the United States between the global
justice movement and the neoliberal junta took place at the WTO conference in Seattle in December
1999. To many mass movements in developing countries that had long been fighting
lonely, isolated battles, Seattle was the first delightful sign that people in
imperialist countries shared their anger and their vision of another kind of
world. As resistance movements have begun to reach out across national borders
and pose a real threat, governments have developed their own strategies for
dealing with them, ranging from co-optation to repression.

Three contemporary dangers confront resistance movements: the difficult
meeting point between mass movements and the mass media, the hazards of the
NGO-ization of resistance, and the confrontation between resistance movements
and increasingly repressive states.

The place in which the mass media meets mass movements is a complicated one.
Governments have learned that a crisis-driven media cannot afford to hang about
in the same place for too long. Just as a business needs cash turnover, the
media need crisis turnover. Whole countries become old news, and cease to exist,
and the darkness becomes deeper than before the light was briefly shone on
them.

While governments hone the art of waiting out crises, resistance movements
are increasingly ensnared in a vortex of crisis production that seeks to find
ways of manufacturing them in easily consumable, spectator-friendly formats. For
this reason, starvation deaths are more effective at publicizing impoverishment
than malnourished people in the millions.

The disturbing thing nowadays is that resistance as spectacle has cut loose
from its origins in genuine civil disobedience and is becoming more symbolic
than real. Colorful demonstrations and weekend marches are fun and vital, but
alone they are not powerful enough to stop wars. Wars will be stopped only when
soldiers refuse to fight, when workers refuse to load weapons onto ships and
aircraft, when people boycott the economic outposts of Empire that are strung
across the globe.

If we want to reclaim the space for civil disobedience, we must liberate
ourselves from the tyranny of crisis reportage and its fear of the mundane. We
must use our experience, our imagination and our art to interrogate those
instruments of state that ensure “normality” remains what it is: cruel, unjust,
unacceptable. We must expose the policies and processes that make ordinary
things—food, water, shelter and dignity—such a distant dream for ordinary
people. The real preemptive strike is to understand that wars are the end result
of a flawed and unjust peace.

For mass resistance movements, no amount of media coverage can make up for
strength on the ground. There is no alternative, really, to old-fashioned,
back-breaking political mobilization.

NGO-ization

A second hazard facing mass movements is the NGO-ization of resistance. Some
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) of course do valuable work, but it’s
important to consider the NGO phenomenon in a broader political context.

Most large, well-funded NGOs are financed and patronized by aid and
development agencies, which are in turn funded by Western governments, the World
Bank, the United Nations and some multinational corporations. Though they may
not be the very same agencies, they are certainly part of the same loose
political formation that oversees the neoliberal project and demands the slash
in government spending in the first place.

Why should these agencies fund NGOs? Could it be just old-fashioned
missionary zeal? NGOs give the impression that they are filling the
vacuum created by a retreating state. And they are, but in a materially
inconsequential way. Their real contribution is that they defuse
political anger and dole out as aid or benevolence what people ought to have by
right. They alter the public psyche, they turn people into dependent victims and
they blunt the edges of political resistance. NGOs form a sort of buffer between
the sarkar and public. Between Empire and its subjects. They have
become the arbitrators, the interpreters, the facilitators of the discourse—the
secular missionaries of the modern world.

Eventually—on a smaller scale, but more insidiously—the capital available to
NGOs plays the same role in alternative politics as the speculative capital that
flows in and out of the economies of poor countries. It begins to dictate the
agenda, turning confrontation into negotiation and depoliticizing resistance.

The cost of violence

This brings us to a third danger: the deadly nature of the actual
confrontation between resistance movements and increasingly repressive states.
Between public power and the agents of Empire.

Whenever civil resistance has shown the slightest signs of evolving from
symbolic action into anything remotely threatening, the crackdown is merciless.
We’ve seen what happened to the demonstrators in Seattle, in Miami, in
Gothenburg, in Genoa.

In the United States, you have the USA PATRIOT Act, which has become a
blueprint for antiterrorism laws passed by governments around the world.
Freedoms are being curbed in the name of protecting freedom. And once we
surrender our freedoms, to win them back will take a revolution.

One does not endorse the violence of militant groups. Neither morally nor
strategically. But to condemn it without first denouncing the much greater
violence perpetrated by the state would be to deny the people of these regions
not just their basic human rights, but even the right to a fair hearing. People
who have lived in situations of conflict know that militancy and armed struggle
provokes a massive escalation of violence from the state. But living as they do,
in situations of unbearable injustice, can they remain silent forever?

No discussion taking place in the world today is more crucial than the debate
about strategies of resistance. And the choice of strategy is not entirely in
the hands of the public. It is also in the hands of sarkar.

In this restive, despairing time, if governments do not do all they can to
honor nonviolent resistance, then by default they privilege those who turn to
violence. No government’s condemnation of terrorism is credible if it cannot
show itself to be open to change by nonviolent dissent. Instead, today,
nonviolent resistance movements are being crushed, bought off or simply
ignored.

Meanwhile, governments and the corporate media (and let’s not forget the film
industry) lavish their time, attention, funds, technology and research on war
and terrorism. Violence has been deified. The message this sends is disturbing
and dangerous: If you seek to air a public grievance, violence is more effective
than nonviolence.

The U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq—mostly volunteers in a poverty draft from
small towns and poor urban neighborhoods—are victims, just as much as the
Iraqis, of the same horrendous process that asks them to die for a victory that
will never be theirs.

The mandarins of the corporate world, the CEOs, the bankers, the politicians,
the judges and generals look down on us from on high and shake their heads
sternly. “There’s no alternative,” they say, and let slip the dogs of war.

Then, from the ruins of Afghanistan, from the rubble of Iraq and Chechnya,
from the streets of occupied Palestine and the mountains of Kashmir, from the
hills and plains of Colombia, and the forests of Andhra Pradesh and Assam, comes
the chilling reply: “There’s no alternative but terrorism.” Terrorism. Armed
struggle. Insurgency. Call it what you want.

Terrorism is vicious, ugly and dehumanizing for its perpetrators as well as
its victims. But so is war. You could say that terrorism is the privatization of
war. Terrorists are the free marketers of war. They are people who don’t believe
that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.

Of course, there is an alternative to terrorism. It’s called justice. It’s
time to recognize that no amount of nuclear weapons, or full-spectrum dominance,
or “daisy cutters” or spurious governing councils and loya girgas can buy
peace at the cost of justice.

The urge for hegemony and preponderance by some will be matched with greater
intensity by the longing for dignity and justice by others. Exactly what form
that battle takes, whether it’s beautiful or bloodthirsty, depends on us.

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Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small
Things, a novel for which she won the Booker Prize in 1997. She is also a
tireless activist for social causes, particularly around issues of international
peace, poverty, and empire building.

More information about
Arundhati Roy

Tags    activism
economy
international politics
social justice

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Reader Comments

Does anyone here know anyone “terrified” of terrorism? I have yet to meet a
tgerrified American! Sure there are some that (foolishly) are afraid to fly,
but i doubt the numbers are much larger now that pre-911. . .

Posted by hmmm on Dec 7, 2004 at 11:14 AM

“The Iraqi resistance is fighting on the frontlines of the battle against
Empire.”

Yeah indiscriminate killing is good. And that nasty ole US trying to build
up infrastrcuture is so very naughty! Shame on the US!!

Posted by howNutty on Dec 7, 2004 at 11:20 AM

Yeah, look at all that “infrastructure” we built up in Fallujah.
Indiscriminate killing sucks, unless you do it in the name of “freedom”.
You can’t even write two sentences without contradicting yourself.  How
nutty is that?

Posted by Mattdog on Dec 7, 2004 at 12:42 PM

“Indiscriminate killing sucks”

Yeah, i am against the crazy insurgents too! They will kill anyone,
anytime. But perhaps we should just let them be - they are probably
misuderstood.  . . :)

Posted by goodPoint on Dec 7, 2004 at 1:13 PM

Only a person from a country other than the U.S. could write such
truth.  Violence is no answer, but understanding motives for violence is
a step to finding answers. Can the evil “Empire” even be resisted? Perhaps rot
from within will eventually dislodge the immense power being hoarded by the
few.
There are some beginnings of dissent within the military, but who
will lay down their arms to face prison time?  Who will follow their
conscience when it conflicts with the demands of an amoral authority?
Who will dole out justice?

Posted by pick of the litter on Dec 7, 2004 at 1:32
PM

extended
discussion >>>Continued...

Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special
discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are
currently 77 posts.

Appeared in the January 3, 2005 Issue

Also featured Cutting
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To justify a land grab, Delhi has a new enemy—the
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Arundhati Roy charts a strategy against empire morePosted
on June 6, 2003

The
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Mesopotamia. Babylon. The Tigris and
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have hang-glided… morePosted
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War is peace. Now we know. morePosted
on November 26, 2001

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