Keaney Michael wrote:
>Rather than lobbing second hand smears, or indeed interminable hyperlinks,
>howsabout engaging with the argument?
This is going up on the LBO website in a few days; for those who
tragically don't yet subscribe, here's a peek.
Doug
----
Blows against Empire
[by Doug Henwood, from Left Business Observer #96, February 2001]
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press),
512 pp., $35.
We hear a lot about "globalization" these days, but its meaning is
often taken to be self-evident -- as is its value (good if you're
orthodox, bad if you're a rebel). That's neither intellectually nor
politically satisfying. Now, with Empire, we have an attempt to think
freshly about the world we live in, and the possibilities for making
it better. There's a lot wrong with the book, but it's an excellent
starting place.
Michael Hardt teaches in the literature program at Duke. Antonio
Negri is described on the book jacket as "an independent researcher
and writer and an inmate at Rebibbia Prison, Rome." Negri's crime was
armed insurrection against the Italian state; the state had fingered
him as the secret leader of the Red Brigades in the 1970s, an
implausible charge he has always denied. He is the leading thinker of
autonomist Marxism, an approach which emphasizes the creative and
revolutionary power of workers on their own, apart from state and
party. Next to typical left pessimism, autonomists can seem dreamily
optimistic, seeing struggle and victory where others see apathy and
defeat. Where most people (across the political spectrum) see capital
as acting and labor as reacting, autonomists see capital as the
reactive side of the relation.
Dispersion
Empire is an extremely ambitious attempt to theorize the economic and
political world today. Though clearly in a Marxist tradition, it's
hardly orthodox. Though it pays appropriate homage to Lenin's famous
pamphlet on imperialism, there's little that's Leninist about its
analysis or especially its politics.
Maybe the best place to start a consideration is to focus on the
dispersed nature of power today, a decentered structure Hardt and
Negri call Empire. Take the ownership and governance of giant
corporations. Early firms were owned generally by a single capitalist
or a small network of partners. By the end of the 19th century, the
likes of Morgan and Carnegie were assembling small firms into giant
combinations like U.S. Steel. By the early 20th century, it was easy
to conclude, as Lenin (and Rudolf Hilferding, in his classic Finance
Capital) did, that industry was coming under the ownership of a
handful of big banks, arranged in cartels often protected by
price-fixing and high tariffs. Things didn't turn out that way. Now,
giant firms are owned by thousands, even millions, of shareholders,
and it's hard to point to a controlling force other than "the
markets." And individual workplaces don't really count for much these
days; the entire world is now an integrated workplace, a giant
"social factory."
Global political power is also dispersed. Unlike 19th century
imperialism, when Nation X owned Colony Y, today's hierarchy is
harder to specify. There are few cases of outright ownership, and the
boundaries between the First and Third Worlds are getting blurrier --
literally in the case of the U.S. - Mexico border, but also in the
sense of the movements of large numbers of migrants from South to
North, and the proliferation of skyscrapers and McDonald's in the
South.
Cartels and classic imperialism turned out to be blocks to capitalist
development. Cartels inhibited competition, capitalism's
disciplinarian, as well as technological innovation, jointly leading
to inefficiency and stagnation; tariffs, currency regimes, and other
instruments of colonial preferences blocked trade and capital flows,
inhibiting the development of a single world market; and frequent
imperial wars promoted physical and financial ruin that were
obstacles to the accumulation of capital. By contrast, the age of
Empire is one of deregulation and the promotion of trade and capital
flows -- all designed to encourage competition, technological
innovation, and the integration of the world into a single market.
Wars are reserved for "rogue states" that refuse to get with the
program.
Evolution
Empire evolved over the last several decades, as capital's response
to the great rebellions of the 1960s and 1970s. In the rich
countries, a variety of rebellions flared, from traditional labor
movements to new feminist, ethnic, ecological, and sexual movements.
In the so-called Third World, there were numerous wars of national
liberation, combined with an increased assertiveness by the poorer
countries demanding higher commodity prices and a global
redistribution of power and income -- a movement that peaked with an
oil embargo and the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. It looked like domestic
and international hierarchies of power were under serious threat.
But the masters rose to the challenge. Hardt and Negri are light on
the details, but the history is a familiar one: the creation of a
deep global recession in the early 1980s, which scared the hell out
of First World labor and threw the Third World into the debt crisis;
an acceleration of technical change, which produced the familiar
cybergadgetry of today; the dispersion of production into smaller,
more flexible units often far from population centers and each other;
cutbacks in the more benign aspects of the state, like social
spending, and an increase in the punitive ones, like jails; the
casualization of employment, along with speedup and givebacks; and
the propagation of a whole new ideology, which repositioned the
Keynesian social democratic state as obsolete and stifling, and the
new world of hypercapitalism as a realm of freedom and adventure.
No turning back
So what's to be done about Empire? A lot of thinkers and activists
would love to recover a lost world of nation - states or
self-sufficient localities. Hardt and Negri will have none of this:
<block quote>
[W]e insist on asserting that the construction of Empire is a step
forward in order to do away with any nostalgia for the power
structures that preceded it and refuse any political strategy that
involves returning to that old arrangement, such as trying to
resurrect the nation-state to protect against global capital. We
claim that Empire is better in the same way that Marx insists that
capitalism is better than the forms of society and modes of
production that came before it. Marx's view is grounded on a healthy
and lucid disgust for the parochial and rigid hierarchies that
preceded capitalist society as well as on a recognition that the
potential for liberation is increased in the new situation.
</block quote>
This isn't a popular view. But their critique of the nation - state
deserves serious attention. For example, though there are undoubtedly
progressive aspects to classic national liberation struggles -- those
directed against colonial powers -- it's a recurrent fact of history
that once established, nation - states thrive on creating new
hierarchies, and by excluding, to some degree or other, those not
deemed members of the tribe. Any progressive political movement today
should be looking beyond hierarchy and exclusion towards a society
that's egalitarian and truly universal (not the counterfeit kind
proffered in ads).
In our normal work lives, we're all linked -- often invisibly -- with
a vast network of people, from across the office or factory to the
other side of the world. Standard globalization narratives,
mainstream or critical, often efface this fact, making capital into
the dominant creative force rather than the billions who produce the
goods and services that the world lives on. That cooperative labor
deserves to be acknowledged in itself, as the creative force that it
is, but also a source of great potential power. Empire uses a lyric
from Ani DiFranco as one of its epigraphs: "Every tool is a weapon if
you hold it right." They could have also used a line from Patti
Smith: "We created it. Let's take it over."
Strategies
Not, of course, that such a takeover is simple or imminent. But it
would help if we had a better appreciation of the struggles that are
going on in our supposedly somnolent time. To Hardt and Negri, the
most visible rebellions of our time --Tiananmen Square, the
Intifada, the Zapatistas, strikes in France and South Korea -- have
been largely local affairs; they weren't seen as part of a common
global struggle either by political analysts or prospective
revolutionaries. Also, a lot of resistance goes on that isn't coded
as such; a Mexican crossing the border into the U.S., or a data entry
clerk keying in wrong information as an act of sabotage, are both
rebels of sorts, even though they're typically seen as individuals
acting alone. One of the points of a book like Empire is to try to
make some connections -- to connect the dots between the visible
rebellions, and to recode all the less-visible dispersed instances of
rebellion as nodes in a common struggle against exploitation and
tedium.
Surprisingly, Hardt and Negri have nothing to say about the newest
protest movements, those invoked by the single word "Seattle," but
which are much larger than that. Just last month, there were
demonstrations against the World Economic Forum in Davos -- and,
simultaneously, a popular counter-summit in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Participants in these movements are linked globally through the
Internet, and on the ground by cell phones, using the very
technologies beloved of cheerleaders like the New York Times's house
clown, Thomas Friedman. And convening elites are now forced to
respond to their antagonists, needing massive deployments of police
just to hold their meeting, and, more importantly, recasting their
agendas to address the protesters. So, last April, we saw the IMF
forced to pretend like it really cared about the world's poor; if
hegemony consists in part of setting agendas, then a real hegemonic
challenge is underway. Of course, it's only a beginning; the
"movement" knows what it's against, but is a bit murky on what it's
for, and the elite response mainly been in the field of public
relations, not altered policy. But this does put some flesh on Hardt
and Negri's evocations of a movement that would push us beyond Empire.
Reservations
Sometimes Empire reads like a cascade of assertions with little or no
evidence. Its heavy reliance on metaphors and religious imagery makes
it seem at times like a theological fantasy, more a dreamwork than an
exercise in political economy. The prose is often heavy going (though
next to Negri's earlier works, it's an easy read), and there are long
detours into the history of political theory whose relevance to the
book's overall argument isn't clear. There's virtually no analysis of
the institutions of Empire -- the World Bank and the IMF are invoked
now and then, but their actual working and associated ideologies
barely noticed. Ditto agents of opposition like unions, political
formations, or NGOs. Actual cross-border campaigns, whether for debt
relief, immigration amnesty, or getting cheap AIDS drugs to Africa,
are barely mentioned if at all.
Their program, like much of their analysis, is a bit thin on details.
They call for absolute freedom of movement and a "global
citizenship," which is lovely but right now seems achievable only in
the imagination. And they also call for (again in italics) "a social
wage and guaranteed income for all," though they don't disclose how
this would be organized in a world beyond the nation - state. Who'd
write the checks? Would there even be money?
Hardt and Negri are often uncritical and credulous in the face of
orthodox propaganda about globalization and immateriality. They
exaggerate the decline of the nation - state -- NATO and the IMF are,
after all, made up of national governments -- and they ignore
evidence that production networks aren't as seamlessly global as the
business press would have us believe. They sometimes play down the
preeminent role of the U.S.; they say that today's Empire has no
Rome, but Washington, Wall Street, and Hollywood are pretty good
approximations; NATO, for example, is meant to bind Europe to the
U.S. in a subsidiary role, and any talk of independent European
initiatives makes Washington very nervous. They assert that
immaterial labor -- service work, basically -- now prevails over the
old-fashioned material kind, but they don't cite any statistics:
you'd never know that far more Americans are truck drivers than
computer professionals. Nor would you have much of an inkling that 3
billion of us, half the earth's population, live in the rural Third
World, where the major occupation remains tilling the soil.
Against sadness
These are not minor flaws. Yet despite these serious complaints,
making them almost feels like quibbling. Just because the book isn't
really a Capital for our times, it's provocative in every sense of
the word. Their emphasis on the dispersed nature of power today, the
rich potential of the social networks uniting people worldwide, and
the refusal of all nostalgias are fresh and often profound. Even if
it doesn't deliver the goods, Empire should inspire a multitude of
empirical investigations and practical political projects.
Aside from the provocation to think freshly, the value of Empire is
also in its spirit -- not gloomy or resigned, as is so much left
writing these days, but full of optimism and a fresh urging to see
the possibilities inhering, often invisibly, in the present. Their
revolutionary isn't "anything like the sad, ascetic agent of the
Third International whose soul was deeply permeated by Soviet state
reason" -- a passage reminiscent of Foucault's injunction, "Do not
think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the
thing one is fighting is abominable." They conclude the book by
invoking "love, simplicity, and also innocence" and "the
irrepressible lightness and joy of being communist." One wants to
say, "oh how romantic, how archaic, how deluded, how impractical,"
but it's so beautiful that it's best to leave it at that, for now at
least.
