The Desertion of Empire

In advance of the relaunch of the AGAPE Seminar & Studio in January 2025, I will be publishing a series of dispatches that re-articulate some of the histories, theories, and proposals discussed over the course of our first series of gatherings.

The dispatch below digs deep into the crucial distinction between empires and Empire that was drawn in several sessions but never fully explicated in any single session. Drawing together threads from a number of earlier dispatches, this text puts this distinction in historical context and remarks upon its significance to the journey ahead.

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To grasp the global system of domination we inhabit today, it is essential to distinguish between empires (lowercase ‘e’) and Empire (uppercase ‘E’).

Individual empires, such as those of Rome, Britain, or the United States, are discrete historical entities—political, military, and economic instruments that wield power at particular times and places.

By contrast, Empire is the underlying system—a transhistorical logic of domination, exploitation, and control that transcends any single empire. Empire evolves by adapting to changing conditions, integrating regional systems of governance and intensifying patriarchal, racial, and capitalist hierarchies to sustain its authority.

Empire is not static. It has grown from pre-modern patriarchal structures that were often localized and relatively “low-intensity,” into a global, systemic force that wields the unspeakable brutalities of capitalist war and racializing rule as accelerants of conquest and exploitation. This transformation—from fragmented patriarchies to the integrated global machinery of Empire—defines the long centuries of domination that have shaped our world.

The Long Sixteenth Century: The Genoese-Iberian Crucible

The origins of modern Empire lie in the sixteenth century, with the Genoese financiers and their Iberian partners. This period established the foundational framework of capitalist imperialism. Financial capitalists through and through, Genoese elites externalized nearly all costs—protection, production, and transaction—onto the Spanish and Portuguese empires. The Iberians, in turn, extracted wealth and labor from colonized territories through brutal systems of slavery, forced labor, and land dispossession.

Empire in this era was upheld by dynastic alliances and the religious authority of the Catholic Church. The ruling logic was clear: Genoese financiers supplied the capital, Iberian aristocrats enforced extraction, and the Church sanctified the entire system. This partnership introduced the racial and environmental fractures that would define modern Empire: humanity racialized and stratified into “superior” and “inferior” breeds, and nature externalized and reduced to a reservoir of exploitable resources.

*Diego Rivera, The Arrival of Cortés* (1951)

The Long Seventeenth Century: Dutch Innovation

The seventeenth century brought a critical transformation in Empire with the rise of Dutch hegemony. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) introduced a new model of capitalist imperialism by internalizing protection costs. Unlike the Genoese, who relied on aristocratic militaries, the VOC maintained its own armed forces, combining financial and military power within a single corporate entity. Protection became a capital asset, a revolutionary shift that redefined how Empire functioned.

This period also saw the institutionalization of state sovereignty through the Treaty of Westphalia (1648). This treaty system allowed competing empires to manage conflicts while preserving the overarching structure of Empire. The ruling logic evolved to integrate corporate executives and state administrators, creating a fusion of private profit and state power.

The Dutch innovation laid the groundwork for Empire’s future developments, demonstrating how costs once externalized could be harnessed to strengthen domination.

The Long Nineteenth Century: British Industrial Consolidation

The industrial revolution of the nineteenth century enabled Britain to internalize production costs, marking another turning point in the evolution of Empire. British imperialists transformed global labor and manufacturing, creating a vast supply chain that extracted raw materials from colonies and exported industrial goods back to them. This model deepened both the racial and environmental fractures of Empire, with colonized peoples enduring exploitation while their lands were ravaged to fuel industrial growth.

Empire during this era was stabilized by the Concert of Europe (1814 to 1914), a diplomatic system that balanced competing European powers while ensuring their collective dominance over colonized territories. The ruling class expanded its power by institutionalizing wage labor, colonial governance, scientific racism, and national financial systems, solidifying a global capitalist order centered on British factories and banks.

*Diego Rivera, Man at the Crossroads* (1933)

The Long Twentieth Century: The United States and the Formal Institution of Empire

The twentieth century marked the ascendancy of the United States as the dominant power within Empire, introducing a significant innovation: the internalization of transaction costs. U.S. hegemony reshaped global capitalism, centering it on marketing, logistics, financial services, undersea networks of fiber-optic cables, orbiting telecommunications satellites, and server farms. Institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) institutionalized Empire and weaponized interdependence, creating a regulatory framework that allowed multinational corporations to convert transaction liabilities into capital assets.

Consumerism emerged as the cornerstone of U.S. hegemony. By promoting mass consumption and financialization, the United States stabilized a consumer society that suppressed dissent while optimizing populations for productivity and consumption. This system also entrenched global racial hierarchies and accelerated planetary ecological destruction, giving rise to the regime of Global Apartheid and Planetary Ecocide that defines the present era.

A Note on “Internalization”

Capitalism, at its core, is financial and parasitic in nature. Like a virus, it hijacks non-capitalist structures within host societies, draining them of vitality and often destroying them in the process. Historically, capitalism may have emerged multiple times, but it typically either killed its host or was itself killed by its host before it could fully entrench itself. The process of internalization, however, allowed capitalism to evolve into a more insidious form—sustaining its hosts in a zombie-like state and enabling the infection to spread further.

At each stage of internalization, capitalism adapts, preserving and repurposing vital systems to ensure its survival while hollowing out society at large. During the Genoese phase, it functioned as a pure parasite, draining the Spanish Empire of resources. In the Dutch phase, it preserved defensive mechanisms, repurposing them to protect its parasitic expansion. The British phase saw the digestive systems of the host—production and consumption—kept alive to drive industrialization and systemic transformation. By the U.S. phase, capitalism had evolved further, sustaining circulatory systems—commercial and monetary infrastructures—to enable global influence and deeper entrenchment.

In the current phase, capitalism is mutating into surveillance capitalism, an even more invasive form that hijacks the sensory nervous systems of its hosts. Through pervasive data capture, digital technologies, and algorithms, it embeds itself in the most intimate realms of life. Human attention, perception, and emotional responses are co-opted, commodified, and manipulated to perpetuate the virus. This phase enables capitalism not only to monitor and predict social behavior but also to shape it, aligning actions and desires within host societies to the imperatives of capital accumulation.

Beyond surveillance capitalism, there are clear signs of capitalism experimenting with the internalization of the costs of social and ecological reproduction. It now seeks to hijack the reproductive systems of its hosts, intensifying its parasitic reach. This is not an entirely new direction; during the slave trade, capitalism tested these strategies on a smaller scale. In the United States, for example, enslaved populations were forced to reproduce under conditions designed to maximize labor extraction while minimizing cost. Today, these experiments are being revived, with the battle for reproductive rights representing one critical front in this ongoing struggle.

While this narrative may appear to describe a linear progression, the reality is far more complex. Capitalism has always experimented along multiple axes, searching for new ways to entrench itself. As seen in early attempts to internalize reproductive costs during the transatlantic slave trade, these experiments often run in parallel. Under specific conditions, one strategy emerges fully successful, and the empires that first master it are propelled to the ranks of hegemons in Empire. This adaptive, opportunistic nature of capitalism ensures its persistence, even as it corrodes the very societies it relies upon for survival.

The Present: Shifting Hegemonies

Today, Empire is in crisis. The rise of China as an economic and military powerhouse challenges the Euro-Atlantic hegemony that has dominated for centuries. However, China’s ascent does not signify a rejection of Empire but a reconfiguration of its analytics. The Chinese ruling elite has adopted and adapted the tools of racial capitalism and patriarchal control developed by Euro-Atlantic powers, forging a new iteration of imperialist racial capitalist patriarchy.

China’s trajectory mirrors a familiar pattern of regional powers assimilating Empire’s structures. In the late 19th century, Japan followed a similar path, modernizing through the selective adoption of Euro-Atlantic technologies of domination. As Mark Driscoll observes, Japanese elites inoculated themselves with the “toxicity” of European racial capitalism to defend their sovereignty and assert regional power. China’s modernization echoes this blueprint, employing capitalist tools while maintaining a centralized, Han-centric nationalist framework. Under this configuration, China is endeavoring to internalize the costs of reproducing labor and resource extraction—pioneering a capitalism that hijacks the reproductive systems of its hosts—while emerging as a global competitor to the United States.This rivalry has intensified Empire’s fractures, driving renewed extractive pressures on indigenous lands and ecosystems and fueling a new Scramble for Africa aimed at exploiting the continent’s resources.

The current crisis of Empire stems from China’s resurgence after centuries of exploitation and exclusion under Euro-Atlantic dominance. While Euro-Atlantic elites accommodated the rise of smaller East Asian client states like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, they now struggle with China’s ascent—a militarily independent nation with nearly a fifth of the world’s population. The Long 20th-century strategy to integrate China into the global capitalist system as “the world’s factory” sought to exploit its vast labor force without the complications of mass migration, relying on containerized logistics and just-in-time production. Extraterritorial Special Economic Zones, reminiscent of 19th century treaty port concessions, were central to this plan. However, this overconfident gambit has backfired, enabling China to emerge as a formidable competitor and shifting economic power from the Euro-Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific.

Despite these upheavals, China’s rise does not dismantle Empire’s exploitative systems; it reshapes and reinforces them. The global order remains anchored in domination, inequality, and exploitation, ensuring that Empire’s destructive logic endures even as hegemonies shift.

The Diffusion of Racial Capitalist Patriarchy

At the heart of Empire’s evolution lies its transformation and diffusion of patriarchal systems. Pre-modern patriarchies were often localized and “low-intensity,” maintaining control through relatively decentralized mechanisms. Empire magnified these structures, integrating racial capitalist techniques and technologies of power to create a global system of domination.

This transformation relied on alliances with regional patriarchal elites. China’s rise, like Japan’s earlier modernization, illustrates how regional powers adopt Empire’s tools, blending them with local hierarchies to create hybrid systems of control. This fusion sustains Empire’s overarching logic while localizing its manifestations.

India offers another example of this adaptation. The rise of an upper-caste Hindu-centric nationalist imperialism reflects the integration of modern capitalist and racialized technologies with pre-modern patriarchal, religious, and caste hierarchies. This pattern demonstrates how regional powers not only adapt to but also contribute to Empire’s evolving system of control, perpetuating domination while reinforcing global inequality.

The Enduring Fractures of Empire

As the current hegemon faces challenges, some suggest the possibility of a multi-polar world where multiple regional powers share influence. While this might redistribute power among individual empires (e.g., a Han-supremacist China, a Hindu-supremacist and caste stratified India, and a white-supremacist Europe and North America), it does not necessarily dismantle Empire’s foundational logic. Instead, such multi-polarity risks producing a meta-stable Empire in which rival powers, despite their competition, collaborate to sustain the fractures of racialized domination and ecological exploitation under new arrangements.

Empire thrives on both continuity and transformation, adapting to power shifts while preserving its core logic of extraction, hierarchy, and control. Its fractures—between humanity and nature, and between so-called “superior” and “inferior” races—remain the bedrock of its dominion. From the Genoese-Iberian alliance to the ascendance of China, Empire’s history is one of relentless adaptation and expansion, ensuring its survival across centuries.

The fractures of Empire—between peoples, and between humanity and nature—are not incidental byproducts but its very foundations. Sustained by a system that extracts, divides, and exploits under the guise of progress, stability, and order, Empire’s logic perpetuates domination. Yet, these same fractures expose its vulnerability. The accelerating crises of ecological collapse, racialized inequality, and geopolitical conflict reveal the fragility of a system that perpetually and purposefully breaks its promises.

To be an anti-imperialist today is to recognize that neither the consolidation of current hegemonies nor the rise of new ones offers a solution. Whether led by NATO's neoliberal globalists or the emergent BRICS coalition (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), Empire’s logic remains rooted in domination—genocidal, ethnocidal, and ecocidal. A multi-polar order is not the antithesis of Empire but a variation of its machinery, ensuring its fractures persist under shifting arrangements of power.

The task, then, is not to steer Empire away from its trajectory of self-destruction but to desert it altogether. To desert Empire is not a retreat into nihilism; it is an active refusal to perpetuate its violence and an embrace of the transformative potential in its unraveling. This involves deconstructing the administrative statements, technical implements, and built environments that sustain Empire’s logic while (re)constructing alternatives that nurture autonomy and conviviality.

*Thomas Cole, “Desolation” from The Course of Empire* (1836)

Petit & Grand Marronage

The desertion of Empire unfolds as a continuum of refusals and (re)creations, encompassing practices of petit and grand marronage. Rooted in the Black radical tradition, marronage embodies a spectrum of escape and resistance that deconstructs systems of domination while reconstructing autonomy and conviviality.

Petit marronage, aligned with what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney term the “general antagonism,” consists of everyday acts of defiance—small, incremental refusals that chip away at systems of exploitation. These include reclaiming time from labor, creating temporary autonomous zones, and subtly subverting oppressive ideologies. Such acts mirror the fluid, dispersed nature of pack formations—small, dynamic groups that evade and disrupt the constraints of larger, hierarchical systems.

Grand marronage, by contrast, represents a radical rupture—a collective and decisive refusal of Empire’s logic through flight and autonomy, reaching its apogee in the “general strike.” Historically, it manifested as enslaved peoples fleeing plantations to establish maroon communities or, in the most profound acts, leaping en masse from slave ships to escape the horrors of bondage. Grand marronage is not merely physical escape but a spiritual and existential leap toward freedom, often at the cost of life. Like the transformative force of mass movements, it embodies collective rupture and creates the space for new forms of sociality to emerge.

Together, petit and grand marronage form a tidalectic of resistance. Incremental acts of petit marronage lay the groundwork for grand gestures of refusal, while the audacity and vision of grand marronage inspire and amplify the quieter, everyday acts of defiance. This interplay offers a dynamic framework for dismantling Empire and imagining life beyond its reach.

Maroon Infrastructures

What would it mean to build infrastructures that enable forms of petit and grand marronage today, that heighten the general antagonism and create the material conditions of possibility for a general strike? How might we design autonomous spaces and systems of survival that sustain incremental acts of defiance while also preparing for collective flight and radical transformation?

Such infrastructures would need to balance practicality with subversion, combining the adaptability of pack formations with the transformative energy of mass movements. Thriving in the margins of Empire, they would rely on this flexibility to evade control while fostering resilience and solidarity. Just as maroon societies flourished in spaces Empire deemed “uninhabitable,” modern maroon infrastructures could carve out possibilities for autonomy and conviviality within the fractures of its decline.