Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 14:51:06 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: new thread: nomads


> their work process. And I can see that many information workers move jobs
>frequently in
> the hope that the next job will be more interesting or so well paid they
>can escape work
> altogether, but these aren't these all strategies that act on a purely
>individual level, mitigate against collective
> action and fail to challenge capitalist production. Later on he cites the
>IWW and the autonomists as
>  Mobility, escape, 
> nomadism, on its own isn't a political activity and doesn't have a
politics.  
>
> Aileen

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) 

Every effort to expand on their definition of ontology only leads to more
confusion. Supposedly postmodern capitalism is distinguished from plain old
capitalism by its tendency to create surplus value all over the world
rather than a single country like in the good old days. Because capital is
now everywhere (and implicitly nowhere), the creation of value takes place
*beyond measure*. In other words, we lack the epistemological basis to
quantify prices, wages, interest rates, inflation, etc. I suppose this
explains the rather embarrassing lack of economic data in "Empire". By
supplying something as mundane as a graph illustrating capital flows
between the core and the periphery, they would be guilty of failing to
comply with the postmodernist rule against trying to know the unknowable. 

Just to make sure everybody understands what this 'beyond measure' thing
means, they say, "Beyond measure refers to *the new place in the
non-place*, the place defined by the productive activity that is synonymous
from any external regime of measure. Beyond measure refers to a
*virtuality* that invests the entire biopolitical fabric of imperial
globalization." Oh, I see. Can you imagine the chore that the editor at
Harvard Press had on her (most likely, right?) when wading through this
kind of squid-ink prose. After now having spent the better part of a month
reading and writing about "Empire", I think I have mastered this stuff
myself: 

"With the advent of the epistemological break wrought by global
telecommunications, biopolitical relations are inverted on the basis of
network forms that are rhizomic in nature. The hierarchical ties of the
Fordist world are exchanged for a *informational* structure that
approximates the reciprocal relations between gods and men in Ovid's
Metamorphosis. From the Myth of Sisyphus we begin to understand the despair
felt by Walter Benjamin who took his life in protest against the Nazi
regime of localized ultra-Fordism." 

Interspersed among their high-falutin' metaphysical speculations, you have
attempts to sketch out some kind of practical politics, which leave more to
be desired than the ontology. Their practical politics can be summarized as
"going with the flow" insofar as the flow is defined as the process known
as globalization. Rather than showing solidarity with the likes of Jose
Bove, the French farmer who busted up a Macdonalds, they believe that
capitalist homogenization is not a bad thing at all. This kind of
resistance against fast food and all it stands for is fundamentally
reactionary because it promotes a attachment to national sovereignty,
including cuisine. Who knows, a crepes suzette might lead to a swastika if
you don't watch out. (This does not even begin to address questions of how
global capitalism is devastating peripheral agri-export based nations.) 

They write "The multitude's resistance to bondage--the struggle against the
slavery of belonging to a nation, an identity, and a people, and thus the
desertion from sovereignty and the limits it places on subjectivity--is
entirely positive." Of course, with the IMF and World Bank trampling
national sovereignty underfoot across the planet from Argentina to
Yugoslavia, it is not too difficult to understand why the NY Times would
play up "Empire". Where else would you get a "Marxist" defense of the
notion that *all* efforts to defend national sovereignty are reactionary.
It is one thing to defend this notion with respect to Great Britain or the
United States, it is another to defend it with respect to a nation that is
being raped by multinational corporations. Under such circumstances,
old-fashioned slogans like "Vietnam for the Vietnamese" still have resonance. 

Just to make sure that everybody understands their drift, they defend
"nomadism" and "miscegenation". "Nomadism"--as in Mexican workers being
smuggled across the border in oven-like trucks--is contrasted to the
"regressive" and "fascistic" desire to reinforce the walls of nation, race,
people, etc. So implicitly, the best thing would be for everybody in the
world to jump in bed with everybody else so to end up with a "mixed race"
population that can go anywhere in the world and take part in the global
capitalist informational economy. By this standard, a mulatto data entry
clerk in Ghana working for Aetna Life Insurance would be an exemplar of the
brave new world of Empire. 

Obviously what's missing from this schema is class criteria. For oppressed
nationalities like the American Indian or the East Timorese, the desire for
sovereignty is progressive. We must be able to distinguish the desire for
Blackfoot Indians to transmit knowledge of their endangered language to
their children from the desire of US corporations to make English a lingua
franca. 

Full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/modernism/hardt_negri.htm

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




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