Commonwealth: An Exchange Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, David Harvey
Published in Artforum 48: 3 (Nov 2009): 210-221. Analysis: David Harvey There have been two foundational themes in Antonio Negri's work over the years. The first is an abiding faith in the capacities of the working class or the multitude (redefined as "the party of the poor" and therefore, according to Spinoza, the only "true subject of democracy") to use their immanent powers of laboring to construct an alternative to the world given by capital. They can do so, Negri believes, by way of autonomous and nonhierarchically organized self-management. The second theme arises out of a deeply held belief that Spinoza's philosophical works provide a framework of radical thought capable of illuminating not only how the world is but also how it ought to be and can be. Wedding the immanent powers of the multitude with a neo-Spinozan theoretical armature, Negri grounds a theory of revolution and a redefinition of what real communism might be about. Unsurprisingly, these two themes are heavily on display in Commonwealth, the new joint effort of Michael Hardt and Negri to flesh out their ideas and to define an alternative globalization - or, as they prefer to put it, an "altermodernity" - for our times. In their previous works, they went a long way to support, both intellectually and ideologically, those leftist movements that sought to change the world in radical ways without forming hierarchical political parties or engaging with what the authors saw as the futile quest to take state power. But they did so in a way that sought to define a different kind of communism, one that was grounded in seventeenthand eighteenthcentury philosophy. This constituted a rupture with the post-Marx history of the communist movement but not, however, a wholesale abandonment of Marx's crucial insights. With the collapse or modification of actually existing communisms, particularly after 1989, not only was a different kind of world possible but a different kind of communism was also possible. In the effort to define what this might be, Hardt and Negri have been joined by several other key philosophical figures, such as Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière. _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
