Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2002 00:26:43 +0100 (BST)
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Scott=20Hamilton?= <s_h_hamilton-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Explications of The Savage Anomaly



An Empire study group at Auckland university has just
broken down, after only two meetings of about 12-15
people. Nobody wants to keep discussing the book. The
prose is a big factor, but so is the lack of relevance
to the 'big questions' which participants asked -
about Argentina, about Palestine, about the War of
Terror...people found concepts like 'multitude' and
'Empire' unable to help them to get to grips with the
world in 2002. 

All this is quite interesting, because there has been
a bit of a Marxist revival this year in the sociology
department, which supplied most of the study group
participants. There is a split between the staff, who
seem to be mostly ex-Marxist Blairites, and a group of
about eight postgraduate students who for various
reasons have decided that Marxism is the best tool for
their research.  

It seemed to me that the Blairite staff and the one or
two Blairite/social democrat students who attended the
first study group session were far keener on Empire
than the Marxists. I think they perceived some
important similarities between Empire and the
theoretical Blairism of Giddens. 

Notions of deterretorialisation, of the replacement of
the category working class with a sort of mobile,
educated 'new human',  and the importance of
subjective identity over objective conditions all
resonate with the work of Giddens and co. The
Blairites, it seemed to me, were keen to use Empire to
give Blairism a cool gloss, at a time when the Third
Way project is beginning to fall apart. They used
Empire to attack those who would use working class as
a sociological category, who argued for the importance
of organised labour to the revivial of the left, who
looked at the US as an imperialist power which needed
to be defeated, and who asserted the importance of
national liberation struggles. 

I think Negri in the 60s made the distinction between
'hot' and 'cold' investigations, investigations of
reality made for the cause of the bosses and for the
cause of the workers. I would say that this book is
being used by the cold investigators at Auckland
University.  For instance, one of the staff members
who came to the first study group session claimed that
Empire backed her view that the category 'working
class' was no longer relevant to a description of call
centre workers, whom she has studied, because 'they
identify in so many different ways'. I think this
person would feel more comfortable on autopsy than she
did at the study group.

The subjective self-understandings of a groups of
young, mobile workers in a period of low class
struggle over-rule any reference to their objective
condition as workers. This staff member only laughed
when I argued that call centre workers were workers,
that there was potential for unionising them and that
their large worksites and the contradictions between
their consciousness  and their objective conditions
could spark them into class struggle. How hopelessly
crude and old-fashioned for me to come out with these
'leftist platitudes'!

I'm not suggesting, of course, that Negri was trying
to write a manifesto for Blairism and academic snobs,
but I do think that the people who seem most
interested in his book show up some of its
shortcomings. Give me the theory of imperialism over
Empire any day!

Cheers
Scott 


 

===="Revolution is not like cricket, not even one day cricket"

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