Date: Sun, 26 Aug 2001 20:56:28 +0100
Subject: Re: Empire and the "Facts"


Hugh

Worth saying, I suppose, that I am by no means suggesting that we resurrect marx
- rather I'm just trying to painfully suggest that it's necessary to understand
the line of intellectual descent that Empire and associated texts derive from.


> Your analysis of N&H's use of multitude and subjectivity certainly makes
> sense.  But the
> multitude of workers today, seems to me, would include yourself and others
> on the Lyotard List who have mentioned their experience (similar to my own)
> as workers in  large corporations.

I agree, note that workers within the east-india company in the 19th C would
also have included clerks who in some sense would be our immediate historical
predecessors.

> Such experience is quite different from that of workers, including children,
> who were literally worked to death in factories during Marx's lifetime.
> Different than the experience of  children and prisoners, or 25 cents and
> hour paid employees who work in third-world factories today.  And different
> from the experience or part-time and minimum wage workers who barely survive
> today in the U.S., and perhaps counterparts in the U.K.
>
> In any case, my reading of history says revolutions are not made by those
> who live in abject poverty, but rather by those who have natural and
> educated capacities to organize, communicate, and agitate. Its easy to think
> of such agents of change as a "proletarian subject", although by definiton
> they are only a tiny  component of the  multitude of all those who work
> inside or outside of corporate or national (as China)
> oganizations who own the instruments of production.
>
> As for 20th century revolutions, and there are always about 20 to 40 wars
> going on,
> I wonder how Cuba, North Korea, Viet Nam, China, Iran, Iraq, and numerous
> Central and South American and South African revolutions fit into Empire's
> (the book) assessment of the political potential of the global multitude.

Don't know - I am suspicious of that kind of globalising theorisation, the
cultural differend is to great.

regards

sdv