File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0107, message 260


Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2001 17:05:17 -0700
From: Michael Pugliese <debsian-AT-pacbell.net>
Subject: AUT: Re: Hardt-Negri's "Empire": a Marxist critique, part 4 (conclusion)



----- Original Message -----
From: Chris Burford
To: pen-l-AT-galaxy.csuchico.edu
Sent: Thursday, July 12, 2001 4:37 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:15055] Re: Hardt-Negri's "Empire": a Marxist critique, part
4 (conclusion)





At 10/07/01 16:21 +0300, you wrote:

Forwarded from Louis Proyect:


Hardt-Negri's "Empire": a Marxist critique, part 4 (conclusion)


Thanks to Michael Keaney for forwarding the fourth and last part of this
critique by Louis Proyect, which I would now like to comment on. The
critique is clearly intended to be in the public realm and to give some firm
answer to "Empire". It has the merit of bringing differences up to date in
the present. Apart from some variations of tone between academic restraint
and pithyness, it would be eminently suitable after editing, for a
publication, and no doubt may be.

>From what I can see of the Hardt-Negri book, "Empire" is certainly a
commodity, one that would appeal to the non-conformist intelligentsia of the
world. Its style is suggestive and allusive, giving a feeling of pleasure
that you are reading a foreign language, and much to your surprise, you can
understand most of what is being said. It is not a modernist agenda for
world revolution. But it may be a post modernist contribution to one.

A few markers:

It is not practical to take other parts of the critique in detail but one
passage in part 1 is IMHO of course clearly wrong and means that LP would be
unable to see the potentially radical nature of H&N's position, even if they
did spell it out more explicitly:


Of course, now that the Soviet Union no longer exists, the United Nations
is more than ever a tool of territorial and economic ambitions by the USA
and its allies. Put in old-school Marxist terms, the UN is not an
expression of Empire but imperialism. Power grabs by big fish in the ocean
at the expense of smaller fish--rather than Kantian pieties--is the only
way to understand the United Nations.


The conclusion of the critique similarly fails to meet H&N on their own
terms:


Of course, the problem with these demands is that they are only meaningful
when made on the government of a nation-state, particularly the demand for
a guaranteed income. One can not simultaneously dismiss the nation-state as
an arena of struggle and prioritize a demand that can only be realized
through legislation at a national level. One supposes that this kind of
mundane problem never entered the calculations of Hardt and Negri. In
reality, the only organized force that can push for such demands in today's
world is the organized working class whose trade unions they have already
written off.

This simply fails to address the fact that the *class conscious* working
class is now not effectively organised even in trade unions. While in past
decades tu's have certainly been a vehicle for the transmission of working
class power, as Lenin pointed out they are also bourgeois organisations,
fighting for better conditions in the sale of labour power as a commodity
under capitalism.

"With the decline of modernism, their position has been further weakened.

Post modernism is pretty irritating. I note on Michael Hardt's website he
includes a picture of himself as he would have been photgraphed by
Botticelli, and has a bust of Karl Marx with a mobile phone. But this is
partly self-mockery.

Nevertheless LP simply does not analyse that if postmodernism is so
widespead, there is from a marxist point of view actually a material base
for this. The relations of production of late capitalism give rise to it. On
the surface subjectivity and presentation are everything. They were
important in previous societies and modes of production too, but the removal
of authority from all structure is a feature of late capitalism.

If anyone wants to mock post modernism it is easy to do: quickest I would
suggest is in fact to try translating the Le Monde review of Empire back
into English with an automated internet translator.

But are H&N talking nonsense? No.

Two tests

A) look up ultra-imperialism in the index. This is a crucial test because
their theory clearly in marxist terms looks like ultra imperialism. There on
p230-231with finesse but with specific attention to detail they deal with
Lenin, Hilferding and Kautsky. For my money it could be crisper still. They
do not, at least in this passage, emphasise that for Lenin imperialism was
not the annexing of agricultural territories but the domination of finance
capital, and they do not emphasise the fact that Lenin described war between
imperialisms as inevitable. They are more interested in tracing the
continuity of the radical ideas bearing in mind the conditions of the time.
But they do handle the question. I may have speed-read LP's critique but I
do not recall him doing so. Indeed in all four parts, oddly, there is no
reference to Kautsky.

B) Lenin argued, and I can never remember where, that if you are going to
criticise an opponent it is only worth really doing it at his best. Not only
does LP not grasp the nettle of Kautsky's theory of ultra-imperialism. The
opening of part 4 of LP's critique with typical contempt argues


Like a hot air balloon detached from its moorings, part four of "Empire"
sails into the stratosphere with empty metaphysical speculation even more
divorced from the material world than the preceding three parts.

There are extensive references to "ontology" and "the ontological" with
apparently no recognition that Marx and Engels dispensed with these sorts
of categories. Hart and Negri write:

"In Empire, no subjectivity is outside, and all places have been subsumed
in a general 'non-place.' The transcendental fiction of politics can no
longer stand up and has no argumentative utility because we all exist
entirely within the realm of the social and the political. When we
recognize this radical determination of postmodernity, political philosophy
forces us to enter the terrain of ontology." (p. 353-354)

Now if you go to the actual text the passage before that quoted, makes quite
sufficiently plain the sense in which H&N are arguing. Chapter 4.1 opens:


In the course of our argument we have generally dealt with Empire in terms
of a critique of what is and what exists, and thus in ontological terms. At
times, however, in order to reinforce the argumentation, we have addressed
the problematic of Empire with an ethico-political discourse, calculating
the mechanics of passions and interests - for example, when early in our
argument we judged Empire as less bad or better than the previous paradigm
of power from the standpoint of the multitude. English political theory in
the period from Hobbes to Hume presents perhaps the pradigmatic example of
such an ethico-political discourse, which began from a pessimistic
description of presocial human nature and attempted through reliance on a
transcendental notion of power to establish the legitimacy of the state. The
(more or less liberal) Leviathan is less bad with respect to the war of all
against all, better because it establishes and preserves peace. This style
of political theorizing, however, is no longer very useful. It pretends that
the subject can be understood presocially and outside the community, and
then imposes a kind of transcendental socialization on it. ..."

And then it continues with the quoted passage, making the context clear.

Mockery is not serious criticism.

There is much I do not understand about exactly what Hardt and Negri are
arguing but it is much more dialectical and contradictory than LP even
begins to suggest.

Consider the sense of the dynamic underlying this third paragraph of the
book, which a reader will sense if he or she wishes it, even if, like me,
they have forgotten what the Peace of Westphalia was:

"It is widely recognized that the notion of international order that
European modernity continually proposed and reproposed, at least since the
Peace of Westphalia, is now in crisis. [helpful footnote at this point] It
has in fact always been in crisis, and this crisis has been one of the
motors that has continuously pushed toward Empire, Perhaps this notion of
international order and its crisis should be dated from the time of the
Napoleonic Wars, as some scholars claim, or perhaps the origin should be
located in the Congress of Vienna and the establishment of the Holy
Alliance. [fn] In any case, there can be no doubt that by the time of the
First World War and the birth of the League of Nations, a notion of
international order along with its crisis had been definitively established.
The birth of the United Nations at the end of the Second World War merely
reinitiated, consolidated, and extended this developing international
juridical order that was first European but progressively became completely
global. The United Nations, in effect, can be regarded as the culmination of
this entire constitutive process, a culmination that both reveals the
limitations of the notion of *international* order and points beyond it
towards a new notion of *global* order. One could certainly analyze the UN
juridical structure in purely negative terms and dwell on the declining
power of nation-states in the inernational context, but one should also
recognsise that the notion or right defined by the UN Charter also points
toward a new positive source of juridical production, effective on a global
scale - a new center of normative production that can play a sovereign
juridical role. The UN functions as a hinge in the genealogy from
international to global juridical structures. On the one hand, the entire UN
conceptual structure is predicated on the recognition and legitimation of
the sovereingty of individual states, and it is thus planted squarely within
the old framework of international right defined by pacts and treaties. On
the other hand, however, this process of legitimation is effective only
insofar as it transfers sovereign right to a real *supranational* center. It
is not our intention here to criticize or lament the serious (and at times
tragic) inadequacies of this process; indeed, we are interested in the
United Nations and the project of international order not as an end in
itself, but rather as a real historical lever that pushed forward the
transition toward a properly global system. It is  precisely the
inadequacies of the process, then, that make it effective."

My biggest reservation about the approach of H & N is that they seem to let
the USA off the hook when its hegemonism ought to be the target of most
progressive, perhaps all progressive global political activity, but perhaps
that would be too prescriptive and would therefore confuse the argument that
H&N are presenting about where the world has currently got to and where it
is moving.

I personally find the ending as cloying as the photographs on Michael
Hardt's web page, but the "project of love" which they extol, is none other
than the love of human beings for one another, collective solidarity. And
that fundamentally is the answer to capitalism. As is also the fact that
dead labour rests on living labour, the day to day labour of the working
people.

The book is much more scrupulous than it appears but it entices from and
demands from the reader a sense of creativity. If people want to mock it,
they can, but developments are occuring in the world that are quite
unprecedented, unlike anything that has happened before in human history,
and we are unlikely to defeat capitalism if we are not creatively receptive
to these changes.

That requires a dynamic and a critical consciousness which is more than a
mocking one. Spinoza, whom Hardt and Negri so much admire, had a
contradictory attitude to the multitude. H&N's own book is not written as if
was mere common sense.

Out of the 1 billion members of the intelligentsia in the world it is
written I would guess for the 10% of them, say 100 million, who are members
of the radical non-conforming members of the intelligentsia. They are now
powerful enough, in the name of the larger multitude, to cripple the
workings of global capitalism until it submits to being tamed into a new
democratic world order.

But Hardt and Negri do not write for every member of the larger multitude.
Of that larger multitude they might say, as Spinoza did:

"Therefore the multitude, and those of like passions with the multitude, I
ask not to read
my book; nay, I would rather that they should utterly neglect it, than that
they should misinterpret it
after their wont."

Chris Burford

London




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