Abstract
Scott Timcke’s Capital, State, Empire: The New American Way of Digital Warfare is a prodigious deployment of classical Marxism to examine the machinations of contemporary American empire (yes, all of them). While he ranges far, his central theme is the relationship of capital to forms of constraint: the ways that human labour is increasingly ‘unfree’ (although he fails to build from Sen’s (2001), seminal concept of ‘unfreedom’). In its most extreme, contemporary capitalism thrives on the sweatshops of Southeast Asia or suicide-inducing technology factories of China, while across the world those same capitalist enterprises suppress and confound the possibility of proletariat class consciousness. A free labour – where people have choice and a possibility of wealth accumulation – inexorably shifts towards unfree forms. He points to the new billionaire classes of Internet entrepreneurs who ‘seek to induce disruptions and efficiencies with little regard for anything other than profit’. Echoing Fuchs’ (2009) theorization of the ‘Internet gift economy’, he continues, Developing online platform services that profit from uncompensated digital work, this ruling class is an unaccountable centre of power notorious for absconding tax obligations, and who employ relatively few people in their companies. Structurally, the result is a rapid transfer of wealth from the many to the few (p. 13).
The author takes on the challenge of evidencing and explaining the multifaceted manifestations of the communication technologies which power the machinery of global oppression and exploitation; falling between international politics and critical communications studies, it is a difficult book to categorise. Other notable attempts have been made – one thinks of Edward Herman, writing both with Chomsky (1988) and with McChesney (2001), or of Herbert Schiller’s classic treatise (1991). To range as widely as Timcke does, across drone warfare, 19th-century race relations in the United States, and the proliferation of US military bases, dilutes his arguments, but the power of his evidence and strength of those arguments prevail in the end.
After introducing his radical political economy approach, Timcke digs into the role of class struggle in the formation of the American state, attending especially to how violence ‘supports the accumulation and dispossession process’ (p. xvi). His third chapter dissects the calamity of the contemporary US security state, providing a useful complement to Der Derian’s ‘Virtuous War’ (2009). He explores the complexities of subjugation in modern America in chapter four, with a focus on Black Lives Matter. His fifth chapter zooms out to the international stage, with a materialist review of the imperial processes of (purposefully) uneven development, arguing that conflict is the inevitable result. His final chapter puts the focus on how ‘digital technologies of governance and control are used to further capitalist state rule’ (p. xvii).
Timcke pulls together the strands of his thesis in his conclusion, arguing that, as the capitalist state metamorphosizes into the security state, a ‘security surplus’ is deployed to enforce the capitalist global order. ‘Politically’, he writes, it is a system that no longer seeks the basic pretence of governing with public accountability in mind. Militarily, it is a system with capacity to deploy force against internal dissidents and rivals at will. Internationally, it is a system of indirect rule on a global scale (p. 146).
It is the combined manifestations of ‘digital coercion’ which make these processes more efficient and sinister than they have ever been. They are the processes through which the American security state accumulates value for and secures the dominance of the ruling classes: the 1%. He rightly laments that the security state and its exploitation of the digital is the pressing blind spot of communication scholarship (this has been an aspect of this reviewer’s (Paterson, 2014) writing on American anti-press violence).
Despite worthy aims, the book struggles with clarity of focus. While subtitled The New American Way of Digital Warfare, both ideas sometimes become lost in a rich – if occasionally jargony – materialist critique of, well, everything. Capital is indicted for most ills and, while sometimes the charge is well evidenced, at other times it isn’t. Do vast numbers of the American working class reject climate change solely because of the deceit of capital (p. xiii)? Of course, other forces are at play (and yes, capital probably has something to do with those too, like the marketization and subsequent erosion of US education). He develops the concept of a ‘new American way of war’ to address the myriad digital tentacles which manipulate and limit us; they include ‘the quest for minimal democratic oversight, computationally aided global dragnet surveillance, automated attempts to avert internal dissent, internal repression of vulnerable populations, and protracted conflicts abroad’ (p. xv) but, inevitably, some readers will see unsubstantiated conspiracy theory in this. The lack of engagement with communicative capitalism – especially as elaborated by Dean (2009) – is an oversight. Why do our moments of rebellion (Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring) feel mostly successful when they are mostly failures?
The reader who perseveres through Timcke’s onslaught won’t be rewarded by practical solutions; finding only the valid – but nonetheless improbable – concluding call for demilitarisation ‘to reduce the power of fully functioning capitalism’ (p. 148). While Timcke posits that his aim is merely to demonstrate ‘how a capitalist state created structural injustices, stratifications, and inequalities’ (he does so well), the routes to his conclusions are complex and work is needed from the reader to fit the pieces together. The arguments are powerful but not always accessible, and I wonder if they would find a wider audience if the detail of the radical political economy critique (which might be more appropriate to a doctoral thesis) had been condensed – letting evidence, rather than theory, do the persuading.
As grand narratives go, Timcke’s is very good, and few contemporary writers have as effectively illuminated through radical political economy the interconnections between so many of the social and political crises of our age. But this book will win few converts from those who buy heartily into the capitalist model, treat American exceptionalism as a harmless quirk, and subscribe to the notion of a basic American decency; as Timcke posits from the outset, there has historically been little taste in the American academy for sweeping materialist critiques of empire. While Timcke’s authoritative synthesis will surely be appreciated by critics of the overreach of American capitalism and imperialism around the world, my greatest hope is that US educators find the courage to put Timcke on their international affairs and global communications reading lists, and offer a new generation this powerful example of a resolute Marxist dissection of American empire.