From: "Neil (practical history)" <practicalhistory-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: AUT: Hardt and Negri
Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 19:12:24 -0000


This article is from yesterday's Observer (main English liberal Sunday 
paper).

Empire hits back

Ed Vulliamy
Sunday July 15, 2001
The Observer

An unlikely book by a left-wing academic and an Italian prisoner is taking 
America by storm. It argues that globalisation, far from seeing off 
Communism, is the vehicle for powerful new forms of protest. World leaders 
might do well to take it to Genoa this week

How often can it happen that a book is swept off the shelves until you can't 
find a copy in New York for love nor money? The central library's edition is 
reserved for the foreseeable future. Amazon's promise that the volume 
'usually ships within 24 hours' is rendered absurd. The publisher has sold 
out, is reprinting and gearing up for a paperback.
Such intense interest is strange since Empire is hardly a blockbuster; it is 
a dense, 500-page tome by a jailed Italian revolutionary and a previously 
unheard-of American academic called Michael Hardt. Stranger still because 
the book rehabilitates the C-word, 'communism' - not despite the fall of the 
Berlin Wall but because of it - along the corridors of respectable academe 
and on to the streets of Genoa, venue for this week's Group of Eight summit.

It is matter of Zeitgeist. Hardt, with his co-author Antonio Negri, a 
political dissident in the tumultuous 1970s in Italy, has become the 
unwitting sage (and critic) of the movement thrown up by demonstrations in 
Seattle, Prague and Gothenberg and written a book about that the theme 
dominating us and the headlines we read: globalisation.

But Hardt has done more. Last week the New York Times was quoting eminent 
professors describing it as 'nothing less than a re-writing of the communist 
manifesto for our time' and the first 'great new theoretical synthesis of 
the new millennium'.

Empire is a sweeping history of humanist philosophy, Marxism and modernity 
that propels itself to a grand political conclusion: that we are a creative 
and enlightened species, and that our history is that of humanity's progress 
towards the seizure of power from those who exploit it.

In saying this, Hardt and Negri have detonated a debate 'not against the 
post-Seattle movement, but within it' - proclaiming a number of heresies, 
including a defence of modernity and the argument that the globalised 
economy presents a greater opportunity than ever for humanist and even 
'communist' revolution.

Empire does three things: first, it examines the global economy, the Empire, 
and finds that, like the internet, it has no centre - it is a 'non-place'. 
Or, as Hardt says in conversation: 'There is no longer a Winter Palace.' (As 
stormed by the Bolsheviks in 1917.)

Second, the book redefines what was called the 'working class' or 
'proletariat' as a new, diverse and potent 'Multitude'.

Third - and here's the crunch - Hardt and his colleague scorn the Marxist 
Left's doom-laden stagnation over two decades. They say the 'post-modernised 
global economy', far from being all-powerful, contains the seeds of its own 
destruction, and that the political climate has never been more favourable 
for uprising by 'communism which is Marxist, but bigger than Marx'.

In short, the decline of Empire has begun and the revolution against it is 
in progress.

Michael Hardt is a genial, quietly spoken man, self-effacing and, famously, 
always dressed in denim. He was born in 1960, and raised in a suburb of 
Washington DC, son of a Sovietologist specialising in economics at the 
Library of Congress. At Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, he studied 
engineering 'during the energy crisis', when he became interested in 
alternative energy sources, and worked during his holidays at a factory in 
Italy making solar panels.

Hardt moved to Seattle in 1983, where he earned a PhD in Comparative 
Literature. From there Hardt went to Paris to write a dissertation about 
Italy during the Seventies under the guidance of fugitive 
philosopher-activist Negri.

He and Negri - who was once linked with the 1970s Italian terrorist group 
Red Brigade, and is now imprisoned in Italy after a 14-year exile in France 
- enjoyed an immediate meeting of minds and later collaborated on their 
first joint book, The Labour of Dionysus.

In the same period, Hardt became involved in America's 'dirty wars' of the 
1980s in Central America. He worked in Guatemala and El Salvador for the 
Christian 'Sanctuary Movement' that gave church shelter in the US to 
refugees branded as illegal immigrants, often people in flight from 
CIA-trained death squads; 'work which was wonderful but also horrible... 
Sanctuary certainly did more for me than I did for them,' he says.

But Italy was closer to home politically and he took a job in the Italian 
department at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, in time to 
catch the riots of 1992. He recalls going to a lecture on Marx and 
deconstruction, not being able to understand a word.

By 1994, though, he was offered a professorship teaching literature at Duke 
University in North Carolina, the year he started work on Empire. After its 
publication and success he was granted tenure - a year earlier than 
expected. Since then, the book has been translated into 10 languages, and 
Hardt has been the star turn at more than 20 international conferences.

Hardt's 'new idea' is to take the conclusions of contemporary physics and 
the 'post-structuralism' or 'deconstruction' of French philosophers such as 
Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault into the realm of concrete politics. 
Derrida's notion that such stalwart notions as 'truth', 'centre' and 
'ground' needed to be questioned in the post-modern world had been seen as 
an abdication from politics. He was attacked, from the Left and the Right, 
as being anti-political and nihilistic.

But one of Derrida's pupils, Thomas Keenan, wrote a theoretical precursor to 
Empire called Fables of Responsibility, arguing that the opposite was the 
case. If politics was to be redefined then we would have to stop worrying 
about 'centre' or 'ground', argued Keenan. When grounds are uncertain, then 
you really have to make political choices. Doing without grounds is a way of 
rediscovering fragile values like freedom, rights and responsibilities or 
human creativity.

In Empire, Hardt and Negri follow Keenan's premise across a sweep of history 
from ancient Rome to the Los Angeles riots. Sometimes it is almost religious 
or millenarian: St Francis is a model militant, American syndicalists of the 
early twentieth century are 'Augustinian'. The style is bold and 
iconoclastic; they write about the 'joy and lightness of being a communist' 
and posit 'against the misery of power, the joy of being'.

The two frequently diverge from left-wing orthodoxy. For example, this holds 
that the global economy is centred on the US and controlled by the World 
Bank, IMF or a clutch of corporations. Hardt argues there is no place of 
power and describes this as 'a smooth space... both everywhere and nowhere. 
Empire... is a non-place.'

In conversation, he makes an analogy to the seamlessness of the web: 'The 
organising principle is similar to the principle of the internet - it links 
the internet age to the way power functions as a distribution network'. Even 
the 'North-South divide' doesn't work - 'there is Third World in the First 
World and First World in the Third World - Brazil is the ideal example'.

Hardt's refusal to treat the US as enjoying more than a 'privileged 
position' within Empire has drawn sharp criticism. 'But,' he says, 'one of 
the primary questions we had to begin with was dissatisfaction with "US 
Imperialism" as a way to name the contemporary world order.' Indeed, Hardt 
is enthusiastic about the American Constitution, with its concerns for the 
universal rights of man - 'and one can trace the Constitution surfacing 
positively at various points in US history'.

In Hardt and Negri, the proletariat has become the global multitude. 'I keep 
thinking of fast-food workers in McDonald's all over the world,' says Hardt, 
'who wear a badge saying "Service with a Smile".' But there are stirrings 
within this 'multitude', says Hardt, that reach beyond its smiling servitude 
to Empire.

So, even if Empire is 'a more elusive system of exploitation' than its 
predecessor, he says, 'it also, simultaneously, creates more potential for 
wider co-operation and connections between people, which are the 
preconditions for liberatory movements.'

And so, says Hardt, the flipside of globalisation is that those it exploits 
have 'a greater potential for commonality among each other. The possibility 
of the recognition of the multitude is dependent on us seeing our 
commonality as humans... Global capital makes that possible in the same way 
that industrial capital made possible the organisation of the industrial 
working class. It didn't make the [Communist] Party - but it made the Party 
possible'.

The Party? Or the party? In Genoa, both will take to the streets, unless the 
Empire strikes back first.

MICHAEL HARDT


Age: 41 - born in Washington DC, January 1960

First job: Making solar panels in Italy

Degrees: Engineering (Pennsylvania); Comparative literature (Seattle)

Books: Translation of Spinoza (by Antonio Negri); The Labour of Dionysus 
(with Negri); Empire (with Negri)




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