Doug quotes from _Empire_:
>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.
There is a big problem with the analogy that Hardt & Negri make: as
capitalism is better than feudalism, the neoliberal Empire is better
than the world of developmental states (in the South), social
democracy (in the West), & socialism (in the East). Capitalism as a
new mode of production provided a historically unprecedented
political possibility -- the possibility of universal social
emancipation of humanity -- _unthinkable_ under pre-capitalist modes
of production. In contrast, the difference between Empire and
DS/SD/S is that on balance we have lost many past gains of the
working class (e.g., privatization), while making few new gains (e.g.
civil rights for GLBT people in some rich nations). You can't hail
every change _within_ capitalism as if it were the emergence of a
brand-new mode of production with unprecedented opportunities.
Empire is more of the same (= the ever-expanding world capitalist market).
Yoshie
