Professor Press

Imperio & imperialismo (2002)

Imperio & Imperialismo: Una lectura crítica de Michael Hardt y Antonio Negri stands as one of Borón’s most consequential theoretical interventions, a rigorous and unsparing Marxist critique of what many in the global left had embraced as a post-Marxist master narrative. Published in 2002, just two years after Hardt and Negri’s Empire appeared and generated enormous excitement across academic and activist circles, Borón’s book arrived as a cold-eyed reckoning with the theoretical promises of the Italian theorists’ work. The timing was not incidental; the early 2000s were a moment when many on the left were seeking alternatives to classical imperialism theory, which seemed to them trapped in Cold War rigidities and unable to account for the apparent deterritorialization of power in the age of globalization and informational capitalism.

Hardt and Negri’s central claim was radical in its implications: sovereignty, they argued, had ceased to be centered in any single nation-state and had instead diffused into a decentered, global “Empire” without a territorial seat of power. The United States, in their account, no longer functioned as imperialism in the old sense —a hegemonic state extracting surplus from peripheries— but rather as one node within a broader apparatus of global governance. This thesis exercised enormous appeal. It seemed to capture something real about the globalization of capital flows, the multiplication of multilateral institutions, the rise of supra-national corporations, and the apparent decline of state capacity in an age of transnational finance. It offered a framework that was simultaneously more sophisticated than simple anti-Americanism and more universalizing than national liberation theory, which had grounded much of the Latin American left’s thinking for decades.

Borón’s refusal was categorical. Against Hardt and Negri’s decentered Empire, he insisted on the continuing centrality and agency of the US state apparatus —its military, its diplomatic corps, its capacity to structure global financial flows through the IMF and World Bank, its power to determine the boundaries of the politically permissible. The error of Empire, in Borón’s reading, was not merely empirical but theoretical: by privileging discourse, flows, and mobility as the constitutive features of contemporary domination, Hardt and Negri obscured the material bases of imperial power. They dissolved the very category of imperialism into a more diffuse set of processes, rendering invisible the concrete mechanisms through which the United States —still a territorial state with nuclear weapons and global military bases— exercises hegemonic control. Borón’s counterargument was that to abandon the concept of imperialism altogether was to disarm critical analysis at precisely the moment when a reconfigured but no less brutal form of American domination required naming and opposition.

Theoretically, Borón grounded his critique in a return to classical Marxist imperialism theory —not as a museum piece but as a productive framework that, properly updated, could account for contemporary realities. He drew principally on Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism and on earlier work by Hobson, recovering the emphasis on monopoly capitalism, the export of capital, and the role of the nation-state in organizing imperial domination. But Borón was no uncritical Leninist; his engagement with classical theory was instead an effort to preserve its analytical power —its insistence on imperialism as a systemic relationship of dominance rooted in the international division of labor— while adapting it to the specifics of twenty-first-century capitalism. The point was not to resurrect Cold War orthodoxies but to demonstrate that the abandonment of imperialism as a conceptual category represented a capitulation to the ideological claims of the powerful, who had every interest in convincing the left that old categories of struggle no longer applied.

Among Borón’s most effective polemical interventions was his trenchant critique of what he called Hardt and Negri’s “post-Marxist optimism.” The Italian theorists’ book contained a utopian element: if power were truly deterritorialized and distributed through networks of immaterial production, then the multitude —the creative, communicative labor force at the heart of informational capitalism— possessed an intrinsic revolutionary potential. Resistance and alternative production seemed immanent to the system itself. Borón found this not merely analytically suspect but politically dangerous. It dissolved the specificity of US state power into a generalized condition of domination, thereby obscuring the asymmetries that actually structured global relations. It suggested that the solution to Empire might emerge organically from the multitude’s own self-organization, evacuating the necessity for organized political struggle against a determinate enemy. Borón’s recovery of classical imperialism theory was thus inseparable from his insistence on the continuing validity of strategic political thought —the notion that opposition to imperialism required not just cultural resistance or the construction of alternative networks but direct confrontation with state power.

Borón devoted considerable analytical energy to demonstrating that Hardt and Negri’s model of decentered sovereignty could not account for the actual mechanisms through which American hegemony was maintained in the period they were writing about. The US military apparatus remained historically unprecedented in its global reach: hundreds of bases across every continent, carrier battle groups projecting power across every ocean, and a military budget that exceeded those of all other nations combined. Financial flows that appeared abstractly “global” in Hardt and Negri’s account were in fact structured through institutions over which the United States exercised overwhelming influence. The dollar’s role as reserve currency, the architecture of the World Bank and IMF, the mechanisms of structural adjustment —all of these bore the fingerprints of American state power, even when their formal governance was multilateral. Far from having entered a post-imperial phase, in Borón’s account, the United States had simply adapted imperialism to the conditions of late-twentieth-century capitalism, deepening its control through financial mechanisms and multilateral institutions rather than through the direct territorial conquest that had characterized earlier phases.

Particularly significant was Borón’s defense of the nation-state as a key terrain of imperial domination and a necessary site of counter-hegemonic struggle. Against the post-Marxist current that celebrated the decline of the nation-state as a form of emancipation, Borón argued that the state remained the arena in which fundamental questions of power were settled. The neoliberal dismantling of state capacity in the Global South had not liberated the multitude; it had rendered peripheral societies naked before the imperatives of capital accumulation, strip-mined for their resources, and exposed to the flood-tides of speculative finance. The struggle for state power —for a state that could impose conditions on capital, that could defend productive capacity, that could assert regional autonomy— remained central to any emancipatory project in Latin America. Borón thus positioned his critique of Hardt and Negri’s post-statal utopianism within a broader argument about the necessity of state-centered political strategy for the oppressed and dominated nations of the world.

Imperio & Imperialismo circulated widely across Latin American academic networks and achieved canonical status within critical circles, particularly in universities allied with CLACSO and among intellectuals sympathetic to the various Latin American left governments of the 2000s. The book arrived at a moment when Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, Bolivia’s indigenous turn, Ecuador’s constitutional process, and other regional developments were generating intense debate about the prospects for twenty-first-century socialism. Borón’s emphasis on the continued reality of US imperialism and the necessity of state-centered counter-hegemonic strategies provided theoretical ballast for these experiments. His book became required reading in graduate seminars across the region, and its arguments circulated in public debate, shaping how intellectuals understood both the achievements and vulnerabilities of the Pink Tide governments. Borón’s refusal to celebrate deterritorialization as liberation, his insistence on naming American power directly, and his recovery of state-centered analysis offered an intellectual framework that aligned with the political trajectory of the regional left during this period.

In the two decades since its publication, the book’s arguments have proven remarkably prescient and durable. The subsequent trajectory of US foreign policy —the military interventions in the Middle East, the pivot to Asia articulated as explicit anti-China strategy, the maintenance of a global military presence incompatible with any notion of deterritorialized power— has vindicated Borón’s insistence on the continuing centrality of the US state apparatus. The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath, the return of great-power competition, and the fragmentation of multilateral institutions have further eroded the credibility of Hardt and Negri’s optimistic vision of decentered Empire. Financial crises and their terrible human costs have revealed the structures of dependency and imperial domination that Hardt and Negri’s language of flows and networks had obscured. Borón’s willingness to insist on older analytical categories —imperialism, state power, structural domination— appears not as a retreat into obsolescence but as a stubborn fidelity to explanatory rigor.

The book’s lasting significance lies ultimately in its exemplification of Borón’s broader intellectual method: a willingness to engage rigorously with the theoretical fashions of the moment while remaining anchored in classical frameworks of analysis. Imperio & Imperialismo is not simply a critique of Hardt and Negri, though it is certainly that; it is an intervention in the politics of knowledge production itself, an insistence that the academy’s tendency to celebrate decentering, deterritorialization, and the autonomy of creative labor represented a form of ideological capture. Against this, Borón urged a return to the difficult work of analyzing power in its concrete particularity: the specific structures through which the United States exercises domination, the specific terrain of the nation-state as a site of struggle for oppressed nations, the specific necessity of organized, state-centered political action. In recovering imperialism as a category of analysis and defending it against post-Marxist dissolution, Borón performed a service to critical thought that extends far beyond the immediate polemical context of the 2000s.

Major Works

Borón’s bibliography is extensive, spanning monographs, edited collections, and essay compilations produced across more than four decades. The following titles represent the core of his scholarly contribution.

• El Estado capitalista en América Latina (1977) —Borón’s foundational theoretical intervention on the nature of the capitalist state in the Latin American context, situating state form within the dynamics of class struggle and dependent capitalism.
• Tras el búho de Minerva: Mercado contra democracia en el capitalismo de fin de siglo (2000) —A sweeping critique of the claim that market liberalization and liberal democracy are naturally compatible, drawing on the Hegelian figure of the owl of Minerva to interrogate what political thought has made of capitalism’s transformations.
• Imperio & Imperialismo: Una lectura crítica de Michael Hardt y Antonio Negri (2002) —A rigorous Marxist critique of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, arguing that their reconceptualization of sovereignty and domination obscures rather than illuminates the continued and intensified reality of US imperial power.
• Socialismo del siglo XXI: ¿Hay vida después del neoliberalismo? (2008) —Borón’s most sustained engagement with the programmatic and theoretical horizons of 21st-century socialism, examining its possibilities and contradictions with characteristic analytical precision.
• América Latina en la geopolítica del imperialismo (2012) —A geopolitical analysis of Latin America’s position within the structures of contemporary imperialism, attentive to the asymmetries of power that shape the region’s options for autonomous development.
• El hechicero de la tribu: Mario Vargas Llosa y el liberalismo en América Latina (2019) —A political-literary critique of the Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, examining how liberalism’s most prominent Latin American literary voice has deployed cultural authority in the service of a particular political project.
• State, Capitalism, and Democracy in Latin America —The English-language edition making Borón’s theoretical framework accessible to Anglophone audiences, consolidating his standing within international political science and sociology.
• Bitácora de un navegante (CLACSO) —A collection of essays spanning Borón’s engagement with the major political and intellectual debates of the Latin American left, valuable both as intellectual history and as a demonstration of his essayistic range.

---

Selected Articles and Essays

Alongside his monographic output, Borón has been a prolific contributor to journals, edited volumes, and the Latin American public press. His essay writing demonstrates a command of multiple registers —from the rigorous argumentation of academic articles to the pointed clarity of political journalism.

• “Latin America: Between Hobbes and Friedman,” New Left Review, No. 130 (1981) —An early and influential analysis of the political conditions under which neoliberal economic shock therapy was imposed in the Southern Cone, framing the relationship between authoritarian coercion and market restructuring.
• “The Truth About Capitalist Democracy,” Socialist Register (2006) —A rigorous interrogation of liberal-democratic theory’s claims about the relationship between capitalism and political freedom, drawing on both classical Marxism and the Latin American experience.
• “Crisis of U.S. Hegemony” —Appearing in various collected volumes, this essay examines the structural and conjunctural dimensions of declining US hegemony and their implications for Latin American sovereignty.
• Regular contributions to Rebelión, ALAI (Agencia Latinoamericana de Información), and the Spanish edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, covering imperialism, Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, and the evolving dynamics of the Latin American left — as well as extensive writing on his own platform, atilioboron.com.ar.