Date: Wed, 20 Jun 2001 17:26:34 -0700
From: Michael Pugliese <debsian-AT-pacbell.net>
Subject: AUT: Fw: [PEN-L:13698] Empire Redux (was Re: Foucault, Marx, Poulantzas)



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
To: <pen-l-AT-galaxy.csuchico.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2001 4:02 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:13698] Empire Redux (was Re: Foucault, Marx, Poulantzas)


> >Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >
> >>Geography must have been a far larger nodal point under 
> >>pre-capitalist modes of production than under capitalism.  That 
> >>said, what's possible within the geography of Russia is certainly 
> >>much more constrained than within the geography of the former USSR 
> >>or socialist bloc, to take just one example.  That's no so much a 
> >>geographical question as a political one, however.  The USA -- or 
> >>Hardt & Negri's Empire -- does not recognize any boundaries; the 
> >>entire planet _& beyond_ is the theater of its "national defense."
> >
> >I just saw the odious Texas Senator Phil Gramm on TV, in a q&a with 
> >Alan Greenspan, complaining about European financial regulation. 
> >Though he was complaining about the constraints on U.S. banks' 
> >European operations imposed by EU regulations, Gramm phrased it as 
> >the EU forcing its rigid anticompetitive standards on our boys & 
> >girls.
> >
> >Doug
> 
> In _Empire_, Hardt & Negri use, as an epigram to Part 2.5, the 
> following remark by Thomas Jefferson: "I am persuaded no constitution 
> was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and 
> self government" (160).  They go on to invoke the _Federalist_ & U.S. 
> constitution as heralding "a new principle of sovereignty" (169): 
> "Already in this first phase, then, a new principle of sovereignty is 
> affirmed, different from the European one: liberty is made sovereign 
> and sovereignty is defined as radically democratic within an open and 
> continuous process of expansion.  The frontier is a frontier of 
> liberty.  How hollow the rhetoric of the Federalists would have been 
> and how inadequate their own 'new political science' had they not 
> presupposed this vast and mobile threshold of the frontier" (169)! 
> While H & N admit that this "utopia of open spaces that plays such an 
> important role in the first phase of American constitutional 
> history...already hides ingenuously a brutal form of subordination" 
> (169), in their zeal to spy out a promise of the world beyond the 
> nation state _anywhere_ (even in the most unlikely place!), they end 
> up theoretically neutralizing oppositions to Phil Gramm & the like 
> who treat the entire planet & beyond _as if it were already fully 
> inside the Empire_; the erstwhile citizens of a multitude of states 
> are now to be remade into residents of the Empire, without the rights 
> of citizenship, some of us to be treated as illegal aliens, others as 
> Green Card-bearing permanent residents.  Since all are inside the 
> Empire from the point of view of the US governing elite, repressive 
> powers of the Empire take the form of not so much wars against other 
> states as policing: "Here...is born, in the name of the 
> exceptionality of the intervention, a form of right that is really _a 
> right of the police_" (17), to be legitimated by the rhetoric of 
> non-governmental morality (e.g., "we must do something to stop 
> genocide & ethnic cleansing").  Hence the political prominence of 
> NGOs in the Empire: "What we are calling moral intervention is 
> practiced today by a variety of bodies, including the news media and 
> religious organizations, but the most important may be some of the 
> so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which, precisely 
> because they are not run directly by governments, are assumed to act 
> on the basis of ethical or moral imperatives....Such humanitarian 
> NGOs [e.g., Amnesty International, Oxfam, Medecins sans Frontieres, 
> and other orgs for relief work and human rights protection] are in 
> effect (even if this runs counter to the intentions of the 
> participants) some of the most powerful pacific weapons of the new 
> world order -- the charitable campaigns and the mendicant orders of 
> the Empire" (35-6), comparable to what Christian missionaries did for 
> imperialism in the earlier centuries.
> 
> H & N hail the Empire's power to break down states (other than the 
> USA) as "progressive" _despite_ their own analysis of its dark 
> underpinnings.  However, to be reduced from the status of the citizen 
> (however oppressed & marginalized) of a state (however impoverished) 
> to that of a permanent resident or worse yet an illegal alien inside 
> the Empire (though outside the USA), to be policed & patronized by 
> faith-based initiatives, is to be disfranchised, deprived of gains 
> made by earlier anti-colonial struggles, & it is this global 
> disfranchisement that gives new rights & powers to the Empire.
> 
> H & N do not think of the Empire-building as a project imposed from 
> above by the ruling class & the imperial elite.  In a typical 
> Autonomist & post-modern fashion, they see the Empire rising from 
> below: "In our time this desire [for the internationalization and 
> globalization of relationships, beyond national boundaries] that was 
> set in motion by the multitude has been addressed (in a strange and 
> perverted but nonetheless real way) by the construction of Empire. 
> One might even say that the construction of Empire and its global 
> networks is a _response_ to the various struggles against the modern 
> machines of power, and specifically to class struggle driven by the 
> multitude's desire for liberation" (43).  I beg to differ.  The 
> multitude's desire for liberation has become estranged & perverted 
> into the construction of Empire, because we have been beaten back in 
> class struggle, unable to step beyond a multitude of micro-political 
> antagonisms.
> 
> Yoshie
> 



     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---