The Machinery of Empire
Lately, I’ve been grappling with how to shift the discourse around me from lamenting the shifting tides of regime change among elite factions within Empire’s hegemonic nation to the deeper transformations of Empire itself.
The truth is this: Empire compels us to labor in service of sustaining its machinery of survival, even as it destabilizes that very machinery. These opening weeks of the Trump administration strike me as yet another intensification of that dynamic—one in which we are compelled to put even more work into sustaining that machinery at the expense of experimenting with alternatives.
To orient myself to this dynamic, I returned to some notes that never made it into previous AGAPE summaries—notes that speak directly to this tension.
Empire is not a monolithic institution but an assemblage of abstract and concrete machines—some co-opted from pre-colonial social formations, others with distinctly imperial and colonial origins, and still others emerging from decolonial and counter-colonial resistance, only to be captured and perverted into neo-colonial apparatuses. Its continuity depends on the relentless recomposition of these machinic assemblages, adjusting their configurations to absorb crises, neutralize threats, and sustain the dual fracture that underwrites its domination: the fracture that constructs superior and inferior races of man, entrenching Global Apartheid, and the fracture that positions mankind as separate from—and in dominion over—its environment, driving Planetary Ecocide.
Dismantling Empire requires sabotaging and short-circuiting the connections that sustain its machinery, disrupting its operations until the system collapses under its own disarticulation. Yet dismantling alone is insufficient, for too many of us remain entangled in its infrastructures of survival. Alongside disassembly, we must construct alternative life-support systems—assemblages of sustenance, relation, and regeneration—that enable us to endure and thrive amid the ruination of Empire.
This demands not only the reclamation and repair of pre-colonial, decolonial, and counter-colonial machines—those wrested from Empire’s grasp, salvaged from the wreckage it leaves in its wake, or hidden in fugitive refuges beyond its reach—but also the strategic co-optation of imperial and colonial machines, repurposing them to subvert Empire’s genocidal, ethnocidal, and ecocidal logics. At the same time, it requires the invention of new decolonial and counter-colonial machines that connect and coordinate all of the above, forming insurgent, maroon infrastructures capable of sustaining diverse struggles for liberation.
To do so, we must interrogate the vulnerabilities within our own pre-colonial, decolonial, and counter-colonial machines—what weaknesses allowed Empire to co-opt, displace, or destroy them? What faults made them susceptible to capture? At the same time, we must analyze Empire’s machinery: how its ruling powers consolidate authority, how its disciplinary powers regulate bodies, how its normalizing powers manufacture consent, and how its optimizing powers extract and exploit at scale. Our aim is to turn the tables on Empire—to co-opt, displace, and dismantle its apparatuses just as it has done to ours.
This requires tracing how Empire’s machines determine population demographics, enforce separation through geographic bordering regimes, and arrests peoples and places within progressive stages of historiographic development. It means recognizing the layered forms of violence—physical, cultural, institutional, carceral, and behavioral—that sustain these operations and mapping their interrelations so we may skillfully counteract them.
Empire’s machinery operates across multiple scales: sub-molecular, molecular, and molar. The sub-molecular scale is that of the flesh—how Empire weaponizes our own organs against us, conditioning our senses and our brain chemistry to shape perception, desire, and reaction. The molecular scale is that of social bonds—how Empire exploits our relationships, threatening the ties between parents and children, friends, lovers, and co-workers, using fear, dependency, and coercion to enforce conformity. The molar scale is that of populations—how Empire deploys statistics to classify, predict, and manage risk, optimizing the times, places, and bodies upon which it unleashes violence for maximum effect.
At each scale, we must counter Empire’s machinic assemblages. On the sub-molecular scale, how do we deprogram our senses and recalibrate our brain chemistry—shifting the vibe, intensifying our desire for resistance, sharpening our perception of opportunities to defy Empire, and fortifying the courage to seize them? On the molecular scale, how do we form rebellious packs, cultivating relationships sustained by insubordination rather than conformity? On the molar scale, how do we generate noise so that Empire cannot extract the signals it needs to determine risk—disrupting its ability to predict which times, places, and bodies are most critical to target?
To break Empire’s circuits, we must disrupt its ability to perceive, predict, and control—faulting its logics at every level until the system crashes under the weight of its own failures. Yet dismantling Empire’s machinery is only half the work. At each scale, we must also construct alternative life-support systems that sustain and strengthen us against Empire’s violence. At the sub-molecular scale, this means nourishing and protecting our bodies—learning to care for and defend them against the elements. At the molecular scale, it means fostering tonic rather than toxic relations—forming bonds sustained by care rather than coercion or conformity. At the molar scale, it requires reconfiguring how we distribute resources and responsibilities—spreading vulnerabilities across our networks so that no single individual or group can be easily singled out as a weak link or vital node to capture and exploit.
And survival is not enough. We must learn to thrive in ways that Empire cannot capture—sustaining ourselves and one another while rendering Empire increasingly incapable of sustaining itself.
