At 17/10/01 20:01 -0400, you wrote: >Chris Burford wrote: > >>This has been forwarded to several lists, but not I think to PEN-L >> >>That a journal as serious as Historical Materialism should set up this >>talk and that someone as careful of his reputation as Alex Callinicos, >>should want to be seen debating Empire, shows that prejudiced sectarian >>demolition jobs are shallow. >> >>One of the key tests is whether critics can address Hardt and Negri's >>reinterpretation of the Leninist debate about the nature of imperialism, >>pages 229 - 231. The secret achilles heel of all dogmatists is that they >>are lazy. > >Callinicos has a critique of Negri in the new ish of International >Socialism, which also reprints a 20-year-old attack on autonomism. > >Doug
Good. So long as it is a serious critique and deals with Negri at his best, and not as some Aunt Sally, then it is valuable. (Can anyone cite the quotation by Lenin, that it is always better to deal with your opponent at his best?) Part of the sterility of these exchanges may be a modernist view that there is only one truth and that all others have to be anihilated. It is also a theoretical problem that the dogmatic trend in marxism thinks we have to oppose all "post-modenism" instead of analysing why post-modernist ideas arise from late capitalist relations of production, and teasing out dialectically, what is progressive and what is not, in its message. Negri is obviously very much a product of the particularity of his own situation, and up to now I have been unable to prioritise getting a handle on him, even though I could believe he reaches a level of generality from it, which is not wholly subjective and idealist. Can anyone precis the highlights of the critique by Callinicos? Is it a critique of form or essence? Chris Burford London
