Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 11:09:59 -0700
From: Michael Pugliese <debsian-AT-pacbell.net>
Subject: Fw: [PEN-L:13282] Re: Fw: AUT: Fw: Antonio Negri



----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
To: <pen-l-AT-galaxy.csuchico.edu>
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2001 7:29 AM
Subject: [PEN-L:13282] Re: Fw: AUT: Fw: Antonio Negri


> Keaney Michael wrote:
>
> >Rather than lobbing second hand smears, or indeed interminable
hyperlinks,
> >howsabout engaging with the argument?
>
> This is going up on the LBO website in a few days; for those who
> tragically don't yet subscribe, here's a peek.
>
> Doug
>
> ----
>
> Blows against Empire
> [by Doug Henwood, from Left Business Observer #96, February 2001]
>
> Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press),
> 512 pp., $35.
>
> We hear a lot about "globalization" these days, but its meaning is
> often taken to be self-evident -- as is its value (good if you're
> orthodox, bad if you're a rebel). That's neither intellectually nor
> politically satisfying. Now, with Empire, we have an attempt to think
> freshly about the world we live in, and the possibilities for making
> it better. There's a lot wrong with the book, but it's an excellent
> starting place.
>
> Michael Hardt teaches in the literature program at Duke. Antonio
> Negri is described on the book jacket as "an independent researcher
> and writer and an inmate at Rebibbia Prison, Rome." Negri's crime was
> armed insurrection against the Italian state; the state had fingered
> him as the secret leader of the Red Brigades in the 1970s, an
> implausible charge he has always denied. He is the leading thinker of
> autonomist Marxism, an approach which emphasizes the creative and
> revolutionary power of workers on their own, apart from state and
> party. Next to typical left pessimism, autonomists can seem dreamily
> optimistic, seeing struggle and victory where others see apathy and
> defeat. Where most people (across the political spectrum) see capital
> as acting and labor as reacting, autonomists see capital as the
> reactive side of the relation.
>
> Dispersion
> Empire is an extremely ambitious attempt to theorize the economic and
> political world today. Though clearly in a Marxist tradition, it's
> hardly orthodox. Though it pays appropriate homage to Lenin's famous
> pamphlet on imperialism, there's little that's Leninist about its
> analysis or especially its politics.
>
> Maybe the best place to start a consideration is to focus on the
> dispersed nature of power today, a decentered structure Hardt and
> Negri call Empire. Take the ownership and governance of giant
> corporations. Early firms were owned generally by a single capitalist
> or a small network of partners. By the end of the 19th century, the
> likes of Morgan and Carnegie were assembling small firms into giant
> combinations like U.S. Steel. By the early 20th century, it was easy
> to conclude, as Lenin (and Rudolf Hilferding, in his classic Finance
> Capital) did, that industry was coming under the ownership of a
> handful of big banks, arranged in cartels often protected by
> price-fixing and high tariffs. Things didn't turn out that way. Now,
> giant firms are owned by thousands, even millions, of shareholders,
> and it's hard to point to a controlling force other than "the
> markets." And individual workplaces don't really count for much these
> days; the entire world is now an integrated workplace, a giant
> "social factory."
>
> Global political power is also dispersed. Unlike 19th century
> imperialism, when Nation X owned Colony Y, today's hierarchy is
> harder to specify. There are few cases of outright ownership, and the
> boundaries between the First and Third Worlds are getting blurrier --
> literally in the case of the U.S. - Mexico border, but also in the
> sense of the movements of large numbers of migrants from South to
> North, and the proliferation of skyscrapers and McDonald's in the
> South.
>
> Cartels and classic imperialism turned out to be blocks to capitalist
> development. Cartels inhibited competition, capitalism's
> disciplinarian, as well as technological innovation, jointly leading
> to inefficiency and stagnation; tariffs, currency regimes, and other
> instruments of colonial preferences blocked trade and capital flows,
> inhibiting the development of a single world market; and frequent
> imperial wars promoted physical and financial ruin that were
> obstacles to the accumulation of capital. By contrast, the age of
> Empire is one of deregulation and the promotion of trade and capital
> flows -- all designed to encourage competition, technological
> innovation, and the integration of the world into a single market.
> Wars are reserved for "rogue states" that refuse to get with the
> program.
>
> Evolution
> Empire evolved over the last several decades, as capital's response
> to the great rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s. In the rich
> countries, a variety of rebellions flared, from traditional labor
> movements to new feminist, ethnic, ecological, and sexual movements.
> In the so-called Third World, there were numerous wars of national
> liberation, combined with an increased assertiveness by the poorer
> countries demanding higher commodity prices and a global
> redistribution of power and income -- a movement that peaked with an
> oil embargo and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. It looked like domestic
> and international hierarchies of power were under serious threat.
>
> But the masters rose to the challenge. Hardt and Negri are light on
> the details, but the history is a familiar one: the creation of a
> deep global recession in the early 1980s, which scared the hell out
> of First World labor and threw the Third World into the debt crisis;
> an acceleration of technical change, which produced the familiar
> cybergadgetry of today; the dispersion of production into smaller,
> more flexible units often far from population centers and each other;
> cutbacks in the more benign aspects of the state, like social
> spending, and an increase in the punitive ones, like jails; the
> casualization of employment, along with speedup and givebacks; and
> the propagation of a whole new ideology, which repositioned the
> Keynesian social democratic state as obsolete and stifling, and the
> new world of hypercapitalism as a realm of freedom and adventure.
>
> No turning back
> So what's to be done about Empire? A lot of thinkers and activists
> would love to recover a lost world of nation - states or
> self-sufficient localities. Hardt and Negri will have none of this:
>
> <block quote>
> [W]e insist on asserting that the construction of Empire is a step
> forward in order to do away with any nostalgia for the power
> structures that preceded it and refuse any political strategy that
> involves returning to that old arrangement, such as trying to
> resurrect the nation-state to protect against global capital. We
> 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. Marx's view is grounded on a healthy
> and lucid disgust for the parochial and rigid hierarchies that
> preceded capitalist society as well as on a recognition that the
> potential for liberation is increased in the new situation.
> </block quote>
>
> This isn't a popular view. But their critique of the nation - state
> deserves serious attention. For example, though there are undoubtedly
> progressive aspects to classic national liberation struggles -- those
> directed against colonial powers -- it's a recurrent fact of history
> that once established, nation - states thrive on creating new
> hierarchies, and by excluding, to some degree or other, those not
> deemed members of the tribe. Any progressive political movement today
> should be looking beyond hierarchy and exclusion towards a society
> that's egalitarian and truly universal (not the counterfeit kind
> proffered in ads).
>
> In our normal work lives, we're all linked -- often invisibly -- with
> a vast network of people, from across the office or factory to the
> other side of the world. Standard globalization narratives,
> mainstream or critical, often efface this fact, making capital into
> the dominant creative force rather than the billions who produce the
> goods and services that the world lives on. That cooperative labor
> deserves to be acknowledged in itself, as the creative force that it
> is, but also a source of great potential power. Empire uses a lyric
> from Ani DiFranco as one of its epigraphs: "Every tool is a weapon if
> you hold it right." They could have also used a line from Patti
> Smith: "We created it. Let's take it over."
>
> Strategies
> Not, of course, that such a takeover is simple or imminent. But it
> would help if we had a better appreciation of the struggles that are
> going on in our supposedly somnolent time. To Hardt and Negri, the
> most visible rebellions of our time --Tiananmen Square,  the
> Intifada, the Zapatistas, strikes in France and South Korea -- have
> been largely local affairs; they weren't seen as part of a common
> global struggle either by political analysts or prospective
> revolutionaries. Also, a lot of resistance goes on that isn't coded
> as such; a Mexican crossing the border into the U.S., or a data entry
> clerk keying in wrong information as an act of sabotage, are both
> rebels of sorts, even though they're typically seen as individuals
> acting alone. One of the points of a book like Empire is to try to
> make some connections -- to connect the dots between the visible
> rebellions, and to recode all the less-visible dispersed instances of
> rebellion as nodes in a common struggle against exploitation and
> tedium.
>
> Surprisingly, Hardt and Negri have nothing to say about the newest
> protest movements, those invoked by the single word "Seattle," but
> which are much larger than that. Just last month, there were
> demonstrations against the World Economic Forum in Davos -- and,
> simultaneously, a popular counter-summit in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
> Participants in these movements are linked globally through the
> Internet, and on the ground by cell phones, using the very
> technologies beloved of cheerleaders like the New York Times's house
> clown, Thomas Friedman. And convening elites are now forced to
> respond to their antagonists, needing massive deployments of police
> just to hold their meeting, and, more importantly, recasting their
> agendas to address the protesters. So, last April, we saw the IMF
> forced to pretend like it really cared about the world's poor; if
> hegemony consists in part of setting agendas, then a real hegemonic
> challenge is underway. Of course, it's only a beginning; the
> "movement" knows what it's against, but is a bit murky on what it's
> for, and the elite response mainly been in the field of public
> relations, not altered policy. But this does put some flesh on Hardt
> and Negri's evocations of a movement that would push us beyond Empire.
>
> Reservations
> Sometimes Empire reads like a cascade of assertions with little or no
> evidence. Its heavy reliance on metaphors and religious imagery makes
> it seem at times like a theological fantasy, more a dreamwork than an
> exercise in political economy. The prose is often heavy going (though
> next to Negri's earlier works, it's an easy read), and there are long
> detours into the history of political theory whose relevance to the
> book's overall argument isn't clear. There's virtually no analysis of
> the institutions of Empire -- the World Bank and the IMF are invoked
> now and then, but their actual working and associated ideologies
> barely noticed. Ditto agents of opposition like unions, political
> formations, or NGOs. Actual cross-border campaigns, whether for debt
> relief, immigration amnesty, or getting cheap AIDS drugs to Africa,
> are barely mentioned if at all.
>
> Their program, like much of their analysis, is a bit thin on details.
> They call for absolute freedom of movement and a "global
> citizenship," which is lovely but right now seems achievable only in
> the imagination. And they also call for (again in italics) "a social
> wage and guaranteed income for all," though they don't disclose how
> this would be organized in a world beyond the nation - state. Who'd
> write the checks? Would there even be money?
>
> Hardt and Negri are often uncritical and credulous in the face of
> orthodox propaganda about globalization and immateriality. They
> exaggerate the decline of the nation - state -- NATO and the IMF are,
> after all, made up of national governments -- and they ignore
> evidence that production networks aren't as seamlessly global as the
> business press would have us believe. They sometimes play down the
> preeminent role of the U.S.; they say that today's Empire has no
> Rome, but Washington, Wall Street, and Hollywood are pretty good
> approximations; NATO, for example, is meant to bind Europe to the
> U.S. in a subsidiary role, and any talk of independent European
> initiatives makes Washington very nervous. They assert that
> immaterial labor -- service work, basically -- now prevails over the
> old-fashioned material kind, but they don't cite any statistics:
> you'd never know that far more Americans are truck drivers than
> computer professionals. Nor would you have much of an inkling that 3
> billion of us, half the earth's population, live in the rural Third
> World, where the major occupation remains tilling the soil.
>
> Against sadness
> These are not minor flaws. Yet despite these serious complaints,
> making them almost feels like quibbling. Just because the book isn't
> really a Capital for our times, it's provocative in every sense of
> the word. Their emphasis on the dispersed nature of power today, the
> rich potential of the social networks uniting people worldwide, and
> the refusal of all nostalgias are fresh and often profound. Even if
> it doesn't deliver the goods, Empire should inspire a multitude of
> empirical investigations and practical political projects.
>
> Aside from the provocation to think freshly, the value of Empire is
> also in its spirit -- not gloomy or resigned, as is so much left
> writing these days, but full of optimism and a fresh urging to see
> the possibilities inhering, often invisibly, in the present. Their
> revolutionary isn't "anything like the sad, ascetic agent of the
> Third International whose soul was deeply permeated by Soviet state
> reason" -- a passage reminiscent of Foucault's injunction, "Do not
> think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the
> thing one is fighting is abominable." They conclude the book by
> invoking "love, simplicity, and also innocence" and "the
> irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist." One wants to
> say, "oh how romantic, how archaic, how deluded, how impractical,"
> but it's so beautiful that it's best to leave it at that, for now at
> least.
>



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