An Empire of Indifference American War and the Financial Logic of Risk Management

In this significant Marxist critique of contemporary American imperialism, the cultural theorist Randy Martin argues that a finance-based logic of risk control has come to dominate Americansâ?? everyday lives as well as U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Risk managementâ??the ability to adjust for risk and to leverage it for financial gainâ??is the key to personal finance as well as the defining element of the massive global market in financial derivatives. The United States wages its amorphous war on terror by leveraging particular interventions (such as Iraq) to much larger ends (winning the war on terror) and by deploying small numbers of troops and targeted weaponry to achieve broad effects. Both in global financial markets and on far-flung battlegrounds, the multiplier effects are difficult to foresee or control.

Drawing on theorists including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Achille Mbembe, Martin illuminates a frightening financial logic that must be understood in order to be countered. Martin maintains that finance divides the world between those able to avail themselves of wealth opportunities through risk taking (investors) and those who cannot do so, who are considered â??at risk.â?? He contends that modern-day American imperialism differs from previous models of imperialism, in which the occupiers engaged with the occupied to â??civilizeâ?? them, siphon off wealth, or both. American imperialism, by contrast, is an empire of indifference: a massive flight from engagement. The United States urges an embrace of risk and self-management on the occupied and then ignores or dispossesses those who cannot make the grade.

â??An Empire of Indifference is a brilliant study, both theoretically profound and politically compelling.â??â?? Michael J. Shapiro, author of Methods and Nations: Cultural Governance and the Indigenous Subject

â??An Empire of Indifference is the perfect answer to Thomas Friedmanâ??s The World Is Flat. Randy Martin well understands that finance capital flattens and gouges at the same time. This book is the anti-Friedman.â??â??Neil Smith, author of The Endgame of Globalization

â??While a great deal has been written about globalization, empire, and international finance, I know of no other work besides this one that looks at their intersection through the rhetorical and conceptual lens of finance. An Empire of Indifference is a strong piece of original scholarship on a very important topic.â??â??Chris Hables Gray, author of Peace, War, and Computers

Randy Martin is Professor of Art and Public Policy at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. His books include Financialization of Daily Life, On Your Marx: Relinking Socialism and the Left, and Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics, also published by Duke University Press. He is a former editor of the journal Social Text.