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 | | Empire by Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri ISBN-10: 9780674006713 ISBN-10: 0-674-00671-2 ISBN-13: 9780674006713 ISBN-13: 978-0-674-00671-3 Paperback 2001-09-15 Harvard University Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description Imperialism as we knew it may be no more, but Empire is alive and well. It is, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri demonstrate in this bold work, the new political order of globalization. It is easy to recognize the contemporary economic, cultural, and legal transformations taking place across the globe but difficult to understand them. Hardt and Negri contend that they should be seen in line with our historical understanding of Empire as a universal order that accepts no boundaries or limits. Their book shows how this emerging Empire is fundamentally different from the imperialism of European dominance and capitalist expansion in previous eras. Rather, today's Empire draws on elements of U.S. constitutionalism, with its tradition of hybrid identities and expanding frontiers. Empire identifies a radical shift in concepts that form the philosophical basis of modern politics, concepts such as sovereignty, nation, and people. Hardt and Negri link this philosophical transformation to cultural and economic changes in postmodern society--to new forms of racism, new conceptions of identity and difference, new networks of communication and control, and new paths of migration. They also show how the power of transnational corporations and the increasing predominance of postindustrial forms of labor and production help to define the new imperial global order. More than analysis, Empire is also an unabashedly utopian work of political philosophy, a new Communist Manifesto. Looking beyond the regimes of exploitation and control that characterize today's world order, it seeks an alternative political paradigm--the basis for a truly democratic global society. | ||
Amazon.com Review Empire is a sweeping book with a big-picture vision. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that while classical imperialism has largely disappeared, a new empire is emerging in a diffuse blend of technology, economics, and globalization. The book brings together unlikely bedfellows: Hardt, associate professor in Duke University's literature program, and Negri, among other things a writer and inmate at Rebibbia Prison in Rome. Empire aspires to the same scale of grand political philosophy as Locke or Marx or Fukuyama, but whether Hardt and Negri accomplish this daunting task is debatable. It is, however, an exciting book that is especially timely following the emergence of terrorism as a geopolitical force. Hardt and Negri maintain that empire--traditionally understood as military or capitalist might--has embarked upon a new stage of historical development and is now better understood as a complex web of sociopolitical forces. They argue, with a neo-Marxist bent, that "the multitude" will transcend and defeat the new empire on its own terms. The authors address everything from the works of Deleuze to Jefferson's constitutional democracy to the Chiapas revolution in a far-ranging analysis of our contemporary situation. Unfortunately, their penchant for references and academese sometimes renders the prose unwieldy. But if Hardt and Negri's vision of the world materializes, they will undoubtedly be remembered as prophetic. --Eric de Place | ||
Reviews | ||
Postmodern Empire's Progression Described, However... Empire, as a new postmodern paradigm, differing in form and extent from previous manifestations, is thoroughly described in this work. It is no longer a nation-state project, concerned with individual state centered territorial imperatives; instead Empire has become Global in dimension, infused by technological rapidity, subsuming cultures, supranational, and maintaining and extending geographic perimeter by replicating its values in both the individual person and the multitude. Empire is intolerant of exception, and acts to police exceptional and threatening instances with coalitions of force on the international level, and internal nation-state force at local levels. Nations may be complicit in the new Paradigm of Empire, but they do not control it. In fact, Empire is now decentralized, or one may say the central emmanation of Imperial power modulates as need requires for its maintainence and progression. The values postmodern Empire imposes are plastic, not inherent, in this adaptive manner the imposition of Global value structures can modulate, thereby subsuming further the individual and composit populations of the geography within its project. It is a work in progress, not fully realized, yet stil imposing penalty via exclusion from itself and supranational legal statute. Empire suppresses the individual and unusual, in favor of a flat manageable consistancy. In all this Hardt and Negri are enormously descriptive and highly accurate. However, readers should and will recognize that "Empire" is hampered by the rock solid grounding of its authors in the archaic terminology of Marxism class struggle. A stuggle that is irrelavent in the context of describing a new paradigm of the organization of Global power across human dimensions, a new form of Empire. After all, Marxist theory was a reaction to 19th century industrialization and the factory of production. Economics, productive categories, class distinctions, and methodoligies of management have reorganized themselves since Marx. Even the means, methods, and motivations for Imperical and Capitalist opposition are now extant in forms which find Marx no longer pertinent. This is not to say that "Empire", as an exploration of the new structuring of Global interactions falls short, in fact it is highly useful in its focus, scope, and description of a difficult to define process and the ramifications surrounding Global power and Global Empire. Hardt and Negri display a nostalgia for the Marxism defined working class, the legions of workers who will rise up and defeat the ominous Capitalist. I've seen this sentiment in numbers far less than legion in intellectual realms far removed from the "working class" before. It's simply a quaint antiquity of thought, a sort of marginal delusion. We see this Marxist revolutionary dogma, supposedly discarded by the authors in favor of more descriptive terms, simply restated as Empire and Multidude. Still waiting for the "Workers of the world to rise up". It's been an awfully long wait already, "Waiting for Godot"?, he ain't comming. Reading this book is an intellectually stimualting and enlightening experience, shedding needed clarity on matters of Global significance. Even if you differ with the authors in theory and conclusions, their lucid formulations will provide you with a focus for more clearly formulating your own perspective on what constitutes Global Empire in the world in which we now live. | ||
Absolutely Epic General Summary In Empire political theorists Hardt and Negri describe a new form of global sovereignty called Empire. Unlike the modernist era which privileged the nation-state as the primary site of social organization and command, Empire is distinctly postmodern and ascribes to no central source of power. In replace of central power, rallied around the nation-state, sovereignty has evolved into a diffuse network of decentered nodal points. These nodal points include multinational corporations, nation-states, NGOs, and supranational institutions, all of which simultaneously vie for political and capitalistic hegemony. Empire's evolving political logic, while frightening to the extent that it attempts to reproduce global hierarchy, is, according to Hardt and Negri, a response to a crisis in capitalism that emerged sometime after 1968. While Empire is indicative of a new global order, then, Hardt and Negri view it as "better than the forms of society and modes of production that came before it" (43). Whereas previous historical epochs relied on repressive measures such as the Fordist assembly line to regulate subjectivity and discipline behavior, Empire's modes of subjectification are increasingly decentered and fragmented. This weakness in empire- a shift corresponding with the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism- is ultimately what can allow for the multitude, the locus of all production in late capitalist society, to "enter the terrain of Empire and confront their homogenizing and heterogenizing flows in all their complexity" (46). Hardt and Negri's work, as a result, reads as the "Communist Manifesto" of the 21st century; it takes Marx and Engel's theory of historical materialism and situates it in the radically different contours of late capitalist society. Key concepts Disciplinary societies Hardt and Negri argue that the modernist era was characterized by a typology of social reproduction called disciplinary societies. In disciplinary societies "social command is constructed through a diffuse network of dispositifs or apparatuses that produce and regulate customs, habits, and productive practices" (p. 23). In disciplinary societies, then, power is consolidated in particular material localities such as the factory line, the prison, the school, and the psychiatric ward. This structuralist epistemology-- which views a transcendent outside as subjectifying an immanent inside-- corresponds with the model of ideology theorized by Marx and Engels. In Marxist theory the bourgeois is believed to be coeval with the interests of capitalism. As a result, it uses this mode of production to discipline and reproduce the immanent productive forces of the proletariat. In late capitalism, however, as Hardt and Negri argue, immanence is no longer limited to the category of the proletariat. In the era Empire, a multiplicity of subject positions have all become immanent to capitalism, a consequence that derives from the emergence of immaterial labor and the global division of labor. This new terrain of immanence, then, requires a new conceptual framework, and for this Hardt and Negri turn to the concepts of control societies and biopolitical production. Control societies Societies of control are peculiar to postmodernity and coincide with the transition from capital's formal subsumption of labor to its real subsumption of labor. In this stage of capitalist production- a shift brought about by the multitude- "mechanisms of command become ever more `democratic,' ever more immanent to the social field" (23). In contrast to disciplinary societies, societies of control function immanently. They do not require any disciplinary practices (such as Fordism and Taylorism) to reproduce and expropriate productive social relationships. With the emergence of immaterial labor, life itself has become open to capital's command. As a result, capital can extract surplus value without even intervening politically or ideologically. This decentered form of govermentality, that characterizes societies of control, is ultimately empire's weakness, since its axes of repression are simultaneously its axes of transgression. Biopolitical production Biopower is a concept that originates with Michel Foucault and is used to describe "a form of power that regulates social life from its interior" (23). Foucault developed the concept of biopower as an alternative to the Marxian concept of ideology. Whereas ideology theory is interested in the way mystification takes place at the level of discourse, biopower is concerned with the way discourses and bodies are brought into being simultaneously as a "structure of feeling." The result is that biopower challenges the dual ontology between materiality and discourse, it demonstrates that discourses not only reproduce particular types consciousness (such as the bourgeois ideology) but also produce the corporeal, somatic, and affective properties of individual subjectivity. As a mode of subjectification, biopolitical production could only develop in the modernist era; it could only exist in a time when the life sciences and research on eugenics were accorded fundamental values. Nevertheless, it is only in societies of control (or, in other words, postmodernity) that biopower has become the sole motor of social reproduction. While modernity used biopower as a tool for regulating the subjectivity of particular populations, in postmodernity biopower has subsumed the social bios as a whole. To this end, control societies and biopower (also know as biopolitical production) are one and the same: both autonomously propel the production and reproduction of global capitalist society. Immanence Immanence corresponds with the ideas of control societies and biopolitical production insofar as it views social organization as produced and reproduced prior to any model of human subjectification (e.g., Marx's base/superstructure, Freud's conscious/unconscious, etc.). At the same time, however, immanence is a transcendent concept; it is the Real (in the Lacanian sense) ontological state of being that exists prior to any dualistic human mediation. As a philosophical standpoint immanence reaches its zenith in the work of Baruch Spinoza who argued in the mid 17th century that man, nature, and god were one and the same to the extent that all move evanescently along the same plane of existence. Because of this belief in the immanent power of humanity, Hardt and Negri argue that Spinoza was the first genuine philosopher of modernist thought. Spinoza's locating of the plane of immanence, nevertheless, was quickly undermined by a second set of (enlightenment) modernist thinkers such as Descartes, Hobbes, Hegel, and Marx. In their belief in the power of man to triumph over nature, all of these thinkers posed "a transcendent constituted power against an immanent constituent power, order against desire" (74). It is not until Nietzsche, Bergson, and later Deleuze that Spinoza's ontology of immanence became revitalized as a philosophical vantage point. In fact, it is Deleuze (the thinker which Hardt and Negri are most indebted to) who takes this heretical assemblage of thinkers to their logical conclusion, by developing a whole vocabulary of philosophical concepts centered on the Spinozian ideal of immanence. From an immanentist perspective, then, society always moves forward in a perpetual process of becoming. Its discourses, institutions, and technological processes are lines of flight that propel humanity forward. To this end, an immanent ontology is absolutely materialist (though not dialectical); it views history as the ultimate arbiter of human subjectivity. Postmodernization Hardt and Negri- echoing the thought of social theorists such as David Harvey and Fredric Jameson- "see postmodernity as a new phase of capitalist accumulation and commodification that accompanies the contemporary realization of the world market" (154). Instead of viewing postmodernity as an abstract theoretical framework, or set of ideas, then, postmodernity describes a particular assemblage of historical periodizations that have resulted from a variety of crises (or antagonisms) taking place inside capitalism. The most fundamental of these historical periodizations, according to Hardt and Negri, is the transition from a Fordist to postFordist mode of production. In postFordism "all economic activity tends to come under the dominance of the informational economy and to be qualitatively transformed by it" (p. 288). Productive practices that in the time of Marx were limited to material labor (e.g., mining, agriculture, factory manufacturing) have become transformed, from the ground up, by new informational technologies. This incorporeal transformation means that scholars must understand the new types of immaterial labor being performed in late capitalist society. The rise of immaterial labor, or "labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication" (p. 290), demonstrates that the type of industrial labor that took place during the times of the Fordist assembly line is no longer in a hegemonic position. Although in quantitative terms industrial production appears to be the primary form of capitalist accumulation (that is, the production of surplus value), such an approach "cannot grasp either the qualitative transformation in the progression from one paradigm to another or the hierarchy among the economic sectors" (p. 281). In other words, because in late capitalism all nation-states are linked in a machinic network of power, the modes of production in the most dominant economic regions have a tendency to influence, regulate, and eventually transform the labor practices occurring in subordinate regions. While immaterial production may not be primary in regions such as Africa and Southeast Asia, then, it is the diachronic tendency and not the synchronic state of things that is necessary when theorizing the political action of tomorrow. By understanding immaterial labor as the new hegemonic type of productivity in late capitalist society, Hardt and Negri are able to develop a new theory of antagonism and new theory of value. Because immaterial labor relies on communicatory frameworks to maintain capitalist productivity, agency lies in the constitutive power of communication, a possibility that did not exist in previous eras of production. Nevertheless, to act "as if discovering new forms of productive forces---immaterial labor, massified intellectual labor, the labor of the general intellect ---[is] enough to grasp concretely the dynamic and creative relationship between material reproduction and social reproduction" would be seriously problematic (p. 29). "The productivity of bodies and the value of affect . . . are absolutely central" to immaterial labor (p. 30). Multitude Although the multitude does not get developed in Empire to the extent that it does is their follow up book Mutlitutde: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, this political/social form plays a key role in empire. The multitude is Hardt and Negri's attempt to develop a new theory of class subjectivity, one that corresponds with the variety of changes that have occurred in postmodern capitalism. While the multitude includes those struggling for economic parity, and in fact views such struggles as crucial to its democratic project, it refuses to limit its conception of labor to that of the industrial working class. The industrial working class, while perhaps hegemonic in the time Marx was writing, is no longer the primary productive force in late capitalist society. Instead, a multiplicity of subject positions (centered around affect and immaterial labor) have all become productive of capital. As a result, only the multitude, the inverse of the people, offers an appropriate metaphor for describing this new revolutionary vanguard. As "the lifeblood of Empire," the multitude are necessary for capital's reign and if they were "subtract themselves from the relationship, [Empire] . . . would simply collapse into a lifeless heap" (Hardt and Negri, 2004, p. 335). The conclusion is that prerequisites for communism are already available, it is simply "a matter of recognizing and engaging the imperial [Empire] initiatives and not allowing them continually to reestablish order; it is a matter of gathering together these experiences of resistance and wielding them in concert against the nerve centers of imperial command" (p. 399). Two Critiques of Empire Lacalu Asks whether immanence can explain social struggle. Claims that without the political production of antagonisms revolution happens on autopilot. Response: Hardt and Negri's project of immanence can be defended on the same grounds that traditional Marxists, such as Cloud, have defended their approach toward agency. In Marxist theory, as noted earlier, the proletariat is immanent to the production of capitalism. Their rebellion, while not guaranteed, is a necessary possibility due to their relationship (as opposed to identity) to an a priori mode of production. In the same sense, then, we can view the immanence of the multitude as a radical political possibility. The multitude's relationship to Empire, while not preordained by god, makes it the only class composition that has the potential to overthrow late capitalism (empire). On another level, just as Marxism cannot say what communism looks like because it has yet to happen, Hardt and Negri cannot say what exactly the multitude's political triumph will be like, because it too is currently only a relational possibility in need of practical politics. Nevertheless, instead of focusing on the totalizing power capital and viewing all social movements that do not involve the working class as "fantasy bribes," Hardt and Negri are able to discover a Real project of social transformation that is commensurate with our current historical epoch. Moreover, since Hardt and Negri, like traditional Marxists, have recourse to some a priori social formation (albeit one of immanence) they are able to maintain a commensurability with postmodernity without falling into the relativistic pitfalls of thinker's such as Laclau, Derrida, and Lacan. Cloud, Callinicos, Wood, Zizek: Argue that Hardt and Negri's project is nothing more than "mystical claptrap." Charge Hardt and Negri with being apologists for late capitalism. Associate Hardt and Negri's project with the position taken up in Stephen Spielberg's "The Land Before Time." Response: Cloud and other Marxists ignore the primary axiom of historical materialism, the need to always historicize. One of Negri's greatest contributions as a Marxist scholar, over the past 40 years, has been to demonstrate that there have been multiple antagonisms that have taken place inside capitalism (e.g., Keynesianism, the new deal, the Vietnam war, postFordism, etc.). To limit our understanding of antagonism to contradictions set up by Hegelian (dialectical) Marxism, keeps social transformation in "a permanent state of anxiety" and promotes "hierarchical state thinking" by discursively creating the illusion that one antagonism is superior to all others. Moreover, even if at one time mobilizing the working class was the best option, the hegemonic tendency of immaterial labor, forces scholars to conceptualize a new political vanguard. For this reason, Marxism must recognize that the binary between reform and revolution is untenable. Further, such thinkers must accept that while capitalism can indeed be overthrown the pathway toward this rupture is completely overdetermined. The following quote by Michael Hardt in an interview in Theory, Culture and Society summarizes this position succinctly: Capital is fundamentally anti-democratic. Any project for democracy will have to confront the anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian element of capital production - keeping the rich rich and the poor poor. But not every democratic political project need immediately confront the capitalist order as such. Let me put it this way, I don't think we are faced today with an alternative between reform and revolution. It seems to me that that is what the question brings up - is revolution required? And I don't think we are in a historical situation where the alternative really makes sense. The pathways of revolution and reform today coincide in many ways. When I'm saying this I'm trying to avoid forms of political thinking that say, `Since our objective is revolution we don't want reforms that makes people's lives better.' This was a revolutionary logic that we've seen in the recent past and, I think, among some today - an anti-reformist position in the name of revolution. And I think it is also equally mistaken to ban any talk of revolutionary change because it is unrealistic and insist on only the most immediate and practical reformist discussion. I think that today the two necessarily go hand in hand. One can't, in fact, think about reform without having a revolutionary perspective and visa versa. I am of the view that one is forced, when thinking about global democracy, to take an anti-capitalist perspective and think about and imagine the possibilities of a post-capitalist society, but not that all political actions have to be taken with that immediate overthrow in mind. | ||
Empire: Old or New? It is hard to read through books like Empire and come up with a precise understanding of what the authors had in their minds while writing the book. Empire shares both ambiguity and self-contradiction embedded in most postmodern arguments. Hardt and Negri aim to provide a leftist interpretation of contemporary globalization and suggestions as to how to reduce its malevolent effects on the working class. Personally, I found their interpretations imprecise and their solutions naïve. Hardt and Negri's basic hypothesis is that contemporary sovereignty is different from modern sovereignty and this different form of sovereignty, which they call "Empire", forms the essence of current global system and unites the whole world under a single logic of rule (p. xii). In Hardt and Negri's usage, the concept of Empire first and foremost posits a regime that "effectively encompasses the spatial totality, or really that rules over the entire `civilized' world," (p. xiv). A distinctive feature of Empire is that nation-states are no longer the only or the most powerful actors in it: "the state has been defeated and corporations now rule the earth!" (p. 306). Thus, Hardt and Negri conclude that politics lost its autonomy (p. 307). So far, Hardt and Negri's arguments sound familiar. Indeed, my problem is that they are too familiar. I expect from any definition not only to tell me what something is but also to lay down how it differs from other things. Hardt and Negri actually do that when they contrast modern sovereignty with the "postmodern" sovereignty of Empire. However, I still do not have any clue as to how Empire differs from a world-system. Is Hardt and Negri's Empire simply a world-system with a late starting point? World-system theorists have long argued that, at least for the last two centuries, the whole world has been under a single logic of rule -namely, capital accumulation- and that capital (or Hardt and Negri's "corporations") has been the driving force throughout. In the same vein, since the very beginning of modern eras politics has never been autonomous. Capitalism and the modern nation-states were not two separate historical inventions; rather, nation-states were "constructed in order to clothe, and enclose, the developing political economy of industrial capitalism." According to Wallerstein and his colleagues, it was the capitalist world-system that reigned and nation-states were subservient to it. Thus, from a world-system perspective, Empire is older than what Hardt and Negri thinks. A striking incoherence in Empire is Hardt and Negri's play with postmodernism. Hardt and Negri first openly criticize postmodernism for producing ineffective critiques of modernity. Similar to David Harvey's position on postmodernism, they argue that postmodernity is a new phase of capitalist accumulation and commodification. Unlike in the modern era, contemporary capitalism thrives on difference and hybridity which are celebrated by postmodernists. Thus, Hardt and Negri argue that "postmodernity is indeed the logic by which global capital operates," (p. 151). However, throughout the book, Hardt and Negri adopt postmodern positions when they find it convenient. They are particularly postmodern in rejecting all binary oppositions of modernity. I have doubts regarding the validity of Hardt and Negri's critiques of postmodernism. It seems to me that difference is celebrated by global capitalism in a selective fashion; more specifically, it is celebrated in capitalist marketing but not in capitalist production. I agree with Hardt and Negri who argue that "postmodern marketing" recognizes the difference of each commodity and each segment of the population (p. 152). However, this acceptance of diversity is still far from the ideal in production and working relations. In the first place, global division of labor in world production resembles more to a modern binary opposition than to a postmodern hybridity. We still have labor-intensive, agricultural, and primary-goods-producing countries on the one side; and capital-intensive, industrial, and high-tech-producing countries on the other. Secondly, labor relations are still not as hybrid as Hardt and Negri argue. According to Hardt and Negri, the labor philosophy of contemporary corporations is that "people of all different races, sexes, and sexual orientations should potentially be included in the corporation," (p.153). Yet this is not the case even in the United States which they view as the embodiment of Empire. The entire low-paying industry in the US is filled with minorities -immigrants or blacks- so much so that one can consider the "white manager vs. black/latino worker" situation in the US a new type of slavery. That is why I disagree with Hardt and Negri's assertion that there is no "outside" in Empire and that there is no more a dichotomy of Third World and First World (p. 144). Postmodern times not only maintain and perpetuate the modern Third World/First World dichotomy, but also create the same dichotomy within both Third and First Worlds with increasing mobility of labor and capital. Interestingly, and only to increase contradictions in their book, in one place of Empire Hardt and Negri argue that European capital does not really remake noncapitalist territories "after its own image" as Marx once argued. Rather, each segment of the noncapitalist environment is transformed differently, and all are integrated organically into the expanding body of capital. In other words, "the different segments of the outside are internalized not on a model of similitude but as different organs that function together in one coherent body," (p. 227). I cannot read these words in any other way than an attestation to the existence of different worlds. Hardt and Negri's arguments on the postmodernity of contemporary capitalism afflict their eventual suggestions to redeem the sufferings of working class as well. Hardt and Negri suggest that the first element of a political program for the global multitude should be a political demand for "global citizenship" (p. 400). But this political demand is simply unrealistic given the dynamics of capitalist world economy. Uneven nature of capitalist development always requires some "others" to externalize the negative consequences of development. In other words, capitalism thrives on spatial differences. Therefore, demands for global equality are contrary to the working of capitalist system. If one day it happens, global citizenry will be the most revolutionary development in history since modern times. Empire is also interesting in that it deviates from the orthodox leftist evaluation of globalization. Whereas the common leftist reaction to globalization has been to criticize it as well as to mourn for subsequent withering of nation-states, Hardt and Negri celebrate the coming of Empire. They claim that Empire is better in the same way that Marx insists that capitalism is better than the forms of society and modes of production that came before it. They argue that Empire "does away with the cruel regimes of modern power and also increases the potential for liberation," (p. 44). I do not share Hardt and Negri's optimistic evaluation of Empire, though. True, the Internet and other technological innovations created new opportunities for the liberation of multitude. But has the capitalist-working class relation also changed in a way that help liberate the multitude? My answer is in the negative. In the past, people were forced into slavery/cheap labor; in Empire, they are doing the same job with their own will. Thanks to global poverty, no sweatshop under Empire has a problem of employment. As a World Bank report stated in 1979, "the poor... cannot afford to be unemployed; they are obliged to accept underemployment." To me, this situation not only perpetuates current inequalities between the world's rich and poor but also legitimizes it. Thus, the liberation of multitude in Empire is more apparent than real. Finally, an important point in Empire is Hardt and Negri's rejection of the Third-Worldism embedded in some leftist arguments, particularly in the dependista school. Dependency theorist has argued that the dependent position of the Third World countries in the global economic system was the primary cause of these countries' underdevelopment. They therefore suggested to these countries to break their ties with the global system in order to achieve any type of economic development. However, like Wallerstein, Hardt and Negri argue that the global economy provides subordinate economies opportunities to grow if not to escape their subordination. Therefore, any attempt at isolation or separation will mean "only a more brutal kind of domination by the global system," (p. 284). They therefore implicitly suggest that leftist theorists should be more concerned with how underdeveloped countries can achieve `development under dependence', rather than breaking their dependence. This was one of the few arguments in Empire that I embraced. As the former Brazilian President Cardoso once put, the primary threat for the underdeveloped countries today is not their exploitation by the developed world, but rather their becoming an "unexploitable" country for the developed world. Indeed, as Knox and Agnew observed, "the structural irrelevance of sub-Saharan Africa to the contemporary global economy is probably a much more threatening condition than the dependency of the colonial period,". | ||
Exercise In Neo-Marxist Scholasticism Short on Relevance "Empire", which is now going on five years, attempts in its atmospheric prose to elucidate a totalizing world view of the future of the global economy. What emerges is an optimistic, incurably Hegelian proposition that the current globalization of economics and society, despite its oppressive characteristics, are a necessary (and inevitable) stage of modern capitalist development which must exist in order to bring about the mobilization of the "multitude." Hardt and Negri's boundless faith in the eventual triumph of the "multitude" (i.e. proletariat) is definitively neo-Marxist and utopian. Hardt and Negri further view the struggle as cutting across culture, class, race, and nationality, and that it must be seen as as multi-disciplinary liberation. Given today's bleak political environment dominated by a conservative, evangelical and thoroughly warlike United States, and a progressive dialogue principally limited to finding the faults of the power structure rather than offering any coherent alternative structures of political economy, I grasped "Empire's" cheery exposition of globalism as a necessary, if evil, transition to a utopian state like a drowning man to a raft. The problem - or a problem - with "Empire" is that it is like the auntie's Christmas fruitcake, likely to sit on one's shelf, only partly eaten, glowering sullenly until finally stashed away. If I still taught political science, I would torture my students with this book, much as I was tortured with Althusser and Foucault, the bread and butter of 1960s academic Marxists. Marxism remains a very valuable tool of historical criticism, as evidenced by such present-day historians as Eric Hobsbawm and Howard Zinn. As a predictive tool of historical development, and as a societal endpoint, it requires tremendous and unqualified leaps of faith and adaptations which are hard to relate to reality. When pressed to explain what the "liberated multitude" would look like, it is anyone's guess. If this is the anti-globalist Bible, as one reviewer so expressively states, there better be a thick codex to go with it. There are plenty of good observations in "Empire" of the development of globalism and the erosion of nation-state dichotomies, but this is not particularly revolutionary. In fact, what is surprising is Hardt and Negri's faithfulness to conventional Marxist conversations regarding the future of the "proletariat" and the "working class." Likewise, they fall into the trap of characterizing the national liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s as some sort of organic global challenge to capitalist economies, when in fact, wars such as Algeria, Angola and Vietnam were anti-colonial and distinctly nationalist. Given the chance, political autonomy ranked far higher to these emerging states than faithfulness to socialist equity. Indeed, unless one has lived as an academic hermit or (maybe this is a cheap shot at Negri) in a prison cell, capitalist corporatism is as triumphant as it has ever been. "Empire's" analytical flaws are not hard to uncover. I had to wince at points where Negri points to the "Los Angeles uprising" (the spasm of a riot following the acquittal of Rodney King's police assaulters) as a historical event on a par with the liberation of South Africa, or opportunistically observing that rap music is the emerging voice of the liberated "multitude" (obviously Negri has not seen Spike Lee's "Bamboozled."). Unlike the late Edward Said who was unparalleled at interweaving culture and political economy with uncanny precision ("Orientalism", "The Culture of Imperialism"), Hardt and Negri mostly engage in trivialities. The opacity of most of the prose in "Empire" is, unfortunately, endemic to European neo-Marxist theory after the 1970s. What appears on first reading as precise diction is actually quite imprecise, yielding any number of interpretations which can be shaped to fit evidentiary data or events (to the extent such data exists). Paragraphs typically start with a declarative statement introducing a "paradigm" but then we are told that the reality is "less clear", subject to "disarticulation" or complex "matrices." From page 319: "In Empire, as indeed was also the case in modern and ancient regimes, the constitution itself is a site of struggle, but today the nature of that site and that struggle is by no means clear. The general outlines of today's imperial constitution can be conceived in the form of a rhizomatic and universal communication network in which relations are established to and from all its points or nodes. Such a network seems paradoxically to be at once completely open and completely closed to struggle and intervention." Say what? I thought asparagus was a rhizome. As good Marxist scholastics, Negri and Hardt are consummate name droppers, which frequent references propel the footnotes and the narrative, while reducing to tears the average reader whose Foucault is still in the boxes of books left over from grad school. The frequent references to authors such as Delenze and Habermas are of little value to readers who do not have their shelves crammed full of such works, let alone actually read them. Each such reference, of course, is a meaningful shorthand for a cascade of complex ideas which becomes immediately lost to the uninitiated. In the final analysis, though, "Empire", while an entertaining utopian epic, is topically irrelevant. Since the end of the Cold War, the upward struggles of the "multitude" have been overshadowed by the epic battle for resource domination (oil) in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. After 2001, this struggle in turn has been exacerbated by the medievalist religious conflict between Wahabist Islam and Puritan America. In no way did (or could) Hardt and Negri foresee the grim, gray "forever war" now undertaken by the United States, perverting the wartime command economy created over a half-century ago by Roosevelt into a mechanism to channel untold revenue to a select circle of military-industrial corporations. This, not Negri's, is the real story of Empire. | ||
A Neither Nor Book If it were really serious postmo scholarship, it would be a bit more honest about its starting points and sources (namely, Deleuze, Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard). Certainly an edition edited for America should have more bibliographic information. On the other hand, this book should prove largely inaccessible to the bestselling audience who have bought it and tried to read it (Michael Moore this isn't). That's because they will lack the background in philosophy and the 'superstructuralist' approach to social theory. To conclude, at least I'm honest enough about the book and with myself: having waded the whole way through the book, I'm still reluctant to give it a great review simply because I feel proud about getting through it. It actually made me, after a 20 year hiatus, want to start reading long works of fiction again. I think Negri might be a highly original thinker--back in the 1970s. I also think he is simply wrong in most of his analysis and predictions. In short, because the book 'Empire' really doesn't deal well with US hegemony, I don't see it as a very serious academic book nor can I take it as a 'how to' manual for living a 'radical' life. Finally, much has been made of its pedantry, obscurantism and academic style. Please note however, that it is not really in the sort of academic style expected in American scholarship. If you have read in the so-called 'continental' traditions in philosophy and social thought, the book is not really that pedantic or obscurtantist. It's still mostly wrong in its analysis, however interesting a certain American readership might have found it, even though they do not usually read European thought in any systematic way. | ||