Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 14:39:12 -0400
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: Fw: [PEN-L:13282] Re: Fw: AUT: Fw: Antonio Negri


Pugliese channeling Doug Henwood:
> 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.

Nonsense. "Empire" is characterized by a sense of despair and defeat. That
is the reason that they reject proletarian revolution and propose that the
movement organize around a "social wage". Not as bad as Burbach's soup
kitchens, I guess, but hardly threatening to the status quo.

> 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.

It pays homage to Lenin's pamphlet the same way that Spike Jones paid
homage to Beethoven.

> 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." 

This business about giant firms being "owned" by millions of shareholders
is obviously a reference to pension funds. If Henwood is seriously arguing
this point, that postmodernist junk he's been reading over the past 5 years
has seriously begun to rot out his brain. In reality, you don't need to own
more than 1 percent of a corporation's outstanding shares to dictate not
only what it makes but how it makes it.

> 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.

Pathetic. The United States flag did not fly over Chile in 1973 but the
coup was organized from within the American embassy.

> 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.

Deregulation? Airline deregulation, as Doug himself knows, has led to
further concentration of capital along the lines alluded to in Lenin's
pamphlet.

> 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. 

Spartacist League crapola.

> 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.

Connect the dots? That's not what's needed. What's needed is a fighting
organization of socialist revolutionaries across the planet, not a couple
of middle-class professors writing pretentious books for the cognoscenti.

>
> 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.

What are you talking about? These demonstrations were against
globalization. Hardt and Negri state categorically that it is a mistake to
protest globalization. We should welcome it into our hearts like Richard
Dreyfus welcomed the spaceship in the final scene of "Close Encounters of
the Third Kind".

> 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." 

Communist. Right. Like Spinoza was a communist. Give me an effing break.

Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org



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