Colleen LYE is currently an assistant professor of Department of English, University of California, Berkeley.

Amidst today's near-universal and affirmative rhetoric of globalization, it is useful to revisit the category of "imperialism" which first entered Marxist vocabulary between 1900 and 1920 in the writings of Rudolf Hilferding, N. Bukharin and V. I. Lenin. In contrast to the category of "colonialism," whose career in contemporary cultural studies has led to some overly protracted skirmishes around the prefixes "post-" and "neo," the term "imperialism" foregrounds aspects of a regime of accumulation which resonate provocatively with our situation today. According to these classical theorists, imperialism - or the militarist and expansionist tendencies characterizing the advanced industrialized countries at the end of the nineteenth century - is a policy and an ideology of finance capital, a stage of capitalism that succeeds competitive capitalism and that is marked by the fusion of industrial and financial capitals. Finance capital has a direct interest in maximizing the extent of the protected national economic territory, and is driven by oversurplus to search for exclusive fields for capital export. In the early twentieth century and on the eve of the First World War, imperialism was defined by rivalry between advanced capitalist countries, tending ultimately to inter-imperialist war; today in the early twenty-first century, we live in a world that is unipolar but is even more characterized by the domination of finance and monopoly capital.

Yet it is not just with the passing of the Cold War that we seem to be missing a vision of the crisis that can bring about change. Since the rise of U.S. global hegemony in the postwar period, and even after the collapse of Bretton Woods in the 1970s, the U.S. regime of accumulation has been accompanied by a powerful ideology of post-history. The course of Marxist debate in the twentieth century has reflected the partial absorption of this belief in the present's ability to abolish the laws of history. In this ideology, there is a close identity between the U.S. nation-form and the nature of twentieth-century global capitalism. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's Empire (2000), for example, issues from just such a perspective of exceptionalism, rupture and apotheosis. The papers appearing in this issue from Part I of the panel on "Western Imperialism, Japanese Colonialism" presented in Fukuoka, December 1-3, 2000 - Chris Connery's "On the Continuing Necessity of Anti-Americanism" and Rebecca McLennan's "The New Penal State: Globalization, History and American Criminal Justice, c. 2000" - make use of Empire as a touchstone for their arguments but also depart from its suppositions in significant ways. Negri and Hardt's proclamation that globalization must be met with a counter-globalization cues Connery's register of argument on behalf of anti-Americanism as a risky but necessary counter-hegemonic form; their observation of the reduction of war to the exclusive domain of administrative and police power is taken up and reversed in McLennan's study of the U.S. global prison. Before commenting on the ways in which Connery and McLennan, as well as the other panelists Neferti Tadiar and Francoise Verges, represent a counter-tendency in a critical analysis of imperialism, I will first provide a brief sketch of the intellectual history within which Empire, on the one hand, and the papers comprising our panel investigation of "Western Imperialism," on the other, can be situated.

After 1945, rivalry between the U.S.S.R and the U.S. over the process of decolonization provided the context for a break in Marxist theory from the Leninist model of imperialism to world systems-oriented analyses that emphasized the longstanding domination of some geographical regions over others. Writers such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Andr?Gunder Frank, Samir Amin and others criticized the Eurocentric tendencies of classical Marxist theories whose internalist accounts of national economic developments failed to explain the persistence of underdevelopment in the periphery. Whereas Lenin and his contemporaries saw imperialism as accompanying the latest stage of capitalism since the late nineteenth century, for Wallerstein, Frank, Amin and others capitalism comprises a hierarchical world system in which some areas have been exploited by others since the sixteenth century. While the failure of industrialization in the periphery certainly posed a challenge to the assumed teleologies of the classical theories of capitalist development, the postwar theoretical substitution of class analysis by geographical determinism also surrendered the capacity to account for historical change.

In a sense, the intellectual break from classical Marxism enacted by the theory of underdevelopment is itself Third Worldist in perspective, viewing the fundamental social contradiction of the times to be between the U.S. bourgeoisie and Third World masses. In the waning years of the Cold War and after the demise of the Soviet Union, the impact of Third Worldist Marxism can also be seen in the diverse trajectories of David Harvey, Andr?Gunder Frank, and Giovanni Arrighi. Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity (1989) shared the underdevelopment theorists' sense of the continuing robustness of capitalism, but instead of rigid hierarchies between First World and Third, the post-1972 regime of flexible accumulation he describes compresses the distance between First World and Third; instead of the First World expanding into the Third, the populations and practices of the Third are injected into the First. Flexible accumulation, insofar as it often involves the revival of archaic labor arrangements - common in Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong before they were introduced in the U.S. - implied the Asianization of the U.S. With the publication of ReOrient in 1998, Frank seems to have responded to the challenge posed by the "East Asian economic miracle" to his theory of perpetual systemic subordination by revising his story of four centuries of European domination into a narrative of original Oriental agency: until 1800 Asia, it turns out, was the true center of the world economy. From Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1969) to ReOrient (1998), Frank's view of the locations of center and periphery have radically shifted, but his habit of discovering in the past a polemical confirmation of the present remains the same.

More historically contextualized and theoretically rigorous than Harvey or Frank, Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century (1994) manages to overcome the impasse between Eurocentrism and ahistoricism in Marxist debates on development by offering a dynamic account of historical capitalism on a world scale. Describing four cycles of accumulation centered in Genoa, the Netherlands, Britain and the U.S., Arrighi provides a framework for appreciating the indeterminacy of our contemporary conjuncture marked most glaringly by the contradiction between evidence of financial expansion - typically the sign of cyclical decline - and relations of capital flow between Japan and the U.S. that fail to conform to earlier patterns of hegemonic transition. At stake in whether we are witnessing an imminent changing of the guard at the commanding heights of the capitalist world economy is the question of whether historical capitalism as we know it is coming to an end: Arrighi suggests that this may be so regardless of whether the U.S. retains hegemony and establishes a truly global world empire through the appropriation of surplus capital by force, cunning or persuasion, or whether East Asian capital comes to occupy a leading position in the systemic processes of capital accumulation, but in terms that radically depart from our modern inter-state system's articulation of financial power with state- and war-making capabilities. In the case of Harvey, Frank and Arrighi, East Asian economic distinction - precisely the phenomenon that can be said to have problematized the theory of underdevelopment - is central to these expansions of Marxist theory to account for the uniqueness of late twentieth century world capitalism and the projected duration of its historical life.

Written after the 1997 Asian economic crisis, Negri and Hardt's Empire notably departs from this perspective of East Asian economic emergence and prolepsis, and even suggests that East Asian modes of modern discipline are being superceded by a new mode of control accompanying a different figure of labor power - one that is immaterial, cooperative, communicative and affective. As a theorization of late capitalism or of postmodernity Empire is not especially innovative, but it is interesting for its rejection of Third Worldism. Where Harvey, Frank and Arrighi each represent a different effort to integrate a critique of Eurocentrism into Marxism theory - by, alternatively, dialectizing the relations between metropolis and periphery, decentering Europe, or finding structural homologies that allow us to put different historical cycles of accumulation into perspective - Hardt and Negri adopt an implicit discourse of U.S. exceptionalism. What is described as universally true the world over seems to be an implicit generalization of metropolitan conditions of postmodernity. If Hardt and Negri are to be taken at all seriously, the significance of their work lies in its break with Marxism's self-conscious if not always successful attempts since 1945 to undo Eurocentric precepts.

By contrast, three of the four papers presented in Fukuoka on the topic of "Western Imperialism" reflect varieties of Third Worldist Marxism. In a presentation on the transcultural connections that criss-cross the world of the Indian Ocean, Francoise Verges is interested in a genealogy of Afro-Asian solidarity that would provide a thick description for what is arguably only an optative concept ventured at the Bandung Conference in 1955. In "Anti-Imperialist, Revolutionary Imagination and the Masses," Neferti Tadiar returns us to the Philippine communist movement of the 1960s and 70s in order to recuperate a reading of revolutionary poetic practice that evades totalitarian logic as well as liberal individualist alternatives. Whereas Negri and Hardt claim the demise of a U.S.-centered world but in fact construct a model of Empire by universalizing the U.S., Connery explores the nuanced relation between the historical rhetoric of Manifest Destiny that posits the U.S. as the universal nation-form and the contemporary, de-nationalized rhetoric of globalization. Though anti-Americanism can take reactionary forms, especially in forging individuals' identification with the state, it can operate as an effective medium of anti-capitalism because of its negative and uncontainable character. Privileging cultural forms of counter-hegemony (which Connery believes to reflect the global era's conflation of the cultural and the economic), Connery's and Tadiar's arguments are inflected by the conjuncture of 1960s French post-structuralism with Maoist Cultural Revolution. Verges proceeds through the work of historical reconstruction (narratological and psychoanalytic), Tadiar through literary rereading of revolution, and Connery tarries with the negative. Though their central terms differ, all three seek to challenge contemporary neo-liberal globalization discourse via Third World(ist) Marxist vocabularies. Finally, McLennan explores the meaning of globalization within the U.S. by taking us to the scene of the American prison which is increasingly functioning as an internal colony of superexploited, disenfranchised and racialized labor. If McLennan seems to agree with Empire that globalization entails the demise of the national form, her focus on this arm of the repressive state apparatus places a question mark over the extent of the labor power's paradigmatic newness as described by Negri and Hardt and, on the other side, also entertains the implied transformation in the nature of the contemporary state. Together, the papers reflect a practice of historical materialism that is summoned by the situation of a forgetful American world.