Sebastjan Leban: In your text Live and Let Die: Colonial Sovereignties and the Death Worlds of necrocapitalism you discuss the practices of necrocapitalism, coloniality, War on Terror, the role of PMFs in the contemporary colonialization and how the contemporary neoliberal capitalist practice through political, cultural and economic control continues to exercise colonialism. From your analyses, it could be drawn that since the establishment of the first colonies in the 15^th and 16^th century exploitation and dispossession have never really ended and that we are today witnessing not only the continuation of colonialism but as well new forms of its development.
Can we say that the lust for power and control is not only inherent to capital (power of sovereignty over the lives and deaths – identification with God), but that from a historical point of view, colonialism is in an intrinsic relation with western Christian doctrine as well?

Bobby Banerjee: Yes, historically colonialism’s “civilizing” mission has gone hand in hand with its “christianizing” mission. The interesting question is if contemporary forms of colonialism are inflected with missionary zeal and if so how does it operate? While the West is fond of accusing many Third World regimes of religious fundamentalism the so-called separation of religion from politics is not at all clear in both domestic and foreign policies of the US for example. The religious right has always been a potent political force in that country and shows no signs of losing its influence. “Secularism” in modern liberal democracies is a moving target whereas western discourses tend to “fix” other cultures in their representation of the “evils of religious fundamentalism.”

S. L.: In your text you draw on Mbembe’s definition of necropolitics and Agamben’s notion of homo sacer, and you mention Baghdad as an example of the contemporary state of exception. What is your opinion about the fact that the American administration soon after World War II came to realize that only through the logic of “war without end” America could obtain and maintain the leading role in the world and thus accumulate capital which is dependent on the depreciation of life (as it was the logic used by the mercantile capitalism)?

B. B.: Yes, that is the main point I was trying to make in my paper. The “military industry complex” of the 1950s has morphed into more complicated networks that are less transparent and less accountable. To make a crude distinction, if the Clinton administration in the US deployed economics as war then the Bush administration added the military to support its economic conquests. I don’t want to make an essentialist Marxian argument that all capital is by definition created by depreciating life – rather as I argue in the paper life is allowed to depreciate in certain contexts by creating neoliberal states of exception. And these states of exception are not confined by the rule of law just as the practices employed by the US and other western governments in the so-called war on terror.

S. L.: In an interview entitled What is Postcolonial Thinking, Achille Mbembe states “that our epoch is marked by globalization, that is the generalized expansion of trade and its grip on the totality of natural resources, of human production, in a word of living in its entirety.” He also argues that “the ‘plantation’, the ‘‘factory’ and the ‘colony’ were the principal laboratories in which experiments were conducted into the authoritarian destiny of the world that we see today.” Are not the contemporary states of exception, as you define them, the fourth example of that same laboratories described by Mbembe?

B. B.: Yes, they are. Although we need to retheorize and reimagine how resistance can emerge from these new laboratories. The political economy that governed the plantation and the colony has changed in so many ways – Aihwa Ong’s excellent analysis of the neoliberal states of exception (and exceptions to neoliberalism) supports Mbembe’s argument.

S. L.: During the riots in 2005, a state of exception was established in France. It is a matter of fact that the key to understanding these riots is the French colonialist history.
Can we say that the riots of 2005 are just the beginning of a series of similar events that will occur in Europe in the near future?

B. B.: Resistance is as old as oppression and has taken and will continue to take many forms – violent, non-violent, passive, active. As Foucault has taught us where there is power there is resistance, Causes of civil unrest cannot be categorized into discrete boxes of social, economic, environmental cultural, or political repression. Global climate change is a case in point – when the homes and livelihoods of millions of people literally go under, their “rioting; is really a matter of survival.”

S. L: In your new book Corporate Social Responsibility: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly you critically analyse the contemporary discourses of corporate social responsibility, sustainability and corporate citizenship. You draw the genealogical line of the development of corporative structures, how these were supported by the state and how they were initially supposed to be beneficiary to all society. We know that this has changed fundamentally. What can you tell about it?

B. B.: The boundaries between market, state and civil society in today’s neoliberal economy are constantly shifting and in a state of flux. The state protects its citizens by introducing and maintaining economy into the polity. Sovereignty of state and citizens is a moving target – what Aihwa Ong calls “graduated sovereignty” depending on particular configurations of state and market power. Many theories of globalization are problematic because they construct a false opposition between globalization and the territorial State. The globalization of capital and labor and the structure of territorial states are not oppositional but are predicated on a system of states. Globalization in such a reading is characterized not by the vanishing nation state but on the contrary, by the central implication of the territorial state in the production of a globalized world. It is the structured permanence that provides the organization of space, and the control of its networks. The State controls the flows and stocks, assuring their coordination and serves as a social architecture that is constantly engaged in the production of matrices of global social relations. The past two centuries have culminated in the rationalization of the State mode of production where the state as a unit is central to a whole array of global networks and flows and practices of managing space. In this reading, globalization is the marker for the final hegemonic triumph of the State mode of production. The nation state then is a fundamental building block of globalization, in the working of multinational corporations, in the setting-up of a global financial system, in the institution of policies that determine the mobility of labour, and in the creation of the multi-state institutions such as the UN, IMF, World Bank, NAFTA and WTO.

S. L.: Obviously, today we have to deal with the corporative power that has developed through the centuries from local systems of power with the cooperation of the state, into international systems of power that through the production of death have established their own strategy of exercising control over human lives? In this perspective, what are the alternatives to such systems of power?

B. B.: Alternatives to current systems of power involve other systems of power. One would expect and hope these will be less repressive than the current system! Global governance of economic institutions that run our lives is required but because of the way these institutions are structured it is not possible to reform them. Only by destroying them and building new ones globally, locally, regionally, nationally, internationally can we hope to recover human dignity from human capital.

S. L.: Could the social self-organizational structures on the local, national and international levels be seen as an alternative to the corporative structures? Do you think such structures could possibly challenge the existing systems of power?

B. B.: Im not sure what you mean by “self-organizational structures”. If you mean social movements like the World Social Forum or the thousand of social and environmental movements across the world then the answer is yes: alternatives to the current system must always be examined even with the dangers of cooptation, negotiation, and compromise. Whether these movements can challenge existing systems of power is of course the key question and challenge facing all activists. They certainly cannot be “empowered” in the current system. Power cannot be given it must be taken and the current structures and discursive mechanisms of power make it quite difficult. Perhaps, and this is me being cynical, it will take a major environmental catastrophe for dramatic structural changes to occur. And we aren’t too far away from that!

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