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