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Book Description Imperialism as we knew it may be no more, but Empire is alive and well. It is, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri demonstrate in this bold work, the new political order of globalization. It is easy to recognize the contemporary economic, cultural, and legal transformations taking place across the globe but difficult to understand them. Hardt and Negri contend that they should be seen in line with our historical understanding of Empire as a universal order that accepts no boundaries or limits. Their book shows how this emerging Empire is fundamentally different from the imperialism of European dominance and capitalist expansion in previous eras. Rather, today's Empire draws on elements of U.S. constitutionalism, with its tradition of hybrid identities and expanding frontiers. Empire identifies a radical shift in concepts that form the philosophical basis of modern politics, concepts such as sovereignty, nation, and people. Hardt and Negri link this philosophical transformation to cultural and economic changes in postmodern society--to new forms of racism, new conceptions of identity and difference, new networks of communication and control, and new paths of migration. They also show how the power of transnational corporations and the increasing predominance of postindustrial forms of labor and production help to define the new imperial global order. More than analysis, Empire is also an unabashedly utopian work of political philosophy, a new Communist Manifesto. Looking beyond the regimes of exploitation and control that characterize today's world order, it seeks an alternative political paradigm--the basis for a truly democratic global society.
About the Author Antonio Negri is an independent researcher and writer and an inmate at Rebibbia Prison, Rome.
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From Slavoj Zizek -
Sueddeutsche Zeitung
Today, in the midst of a
difficult revolution of the forces of production, one
attempts to revive the old ignominious and half-forgotten
Marxist dialectic of forces of production and relations of
production. How does the digitalization and the globalization
of our lives influence not only the conditions of production
in the narrow sense, but also our social existence, our
customs and our (ideological) experience of social
interaction? Marx readily paralleled revolutionary changes in
production processes with a political revolution. His
leitmotif was that the steam engine and other technical
innovations of the 18th Century contributed considerably more
to the revolution of the social quality of life than
spectacular political events. Considering the unimaginable
changes in production that are being accompanied by a sort of
lethargy in today's political realm, isn't this guiding idea
more relevant then ever? Because we are located in the midst
of a radical transformation of society, of which we cannot
clearly recognize the final consequences, many radical
thinkers despair at the impossibility of taking adequate
political measures.
Furthermore, the concepts that we use to describe the new constellation of forces of production and relations of production (post-industrial society, information society) continue to lack the form of true concepts. They remain theoretical emergency solutions: Instead of enabling us to reflect on historical reality (which these concepts create), they actually relieve us of our duty to think, even prevent us from thinking. The standard answer of postmodern trendsetters from Alvin Toffler to Jean Baudrillard is that we cannot think in this "new" way because we are stuck in the old industrial "paradigm." One would like to state against this commonplace that exactly the opposite is true: don't these attempts to overcome or to efface the concept of material production, in which one classifies the current transformation as a transition from production to information, in the end allow one to avoid the difficulty of reflecting on how this transformation itself is connected to the structure of collective production? In other words, isn't it actually the task at hand to, wherever possible, introduce the new developments into the concept of collective material production?
This is exactly what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri try to do in their new book Empire (Harvard University Press, Cambridge)--a book that attempts to write the communist manifesto anew for the 21st Century. Hardt and Negri describe globalization as an ambiguous "deterritorialization": victorious global capitalism penetrates into every pore of our social lives, into the most intimate of spheres, and installs a never-present dynamic, which no longer is based on patriarchal or other hierarchic structures of dominance. Instead, it creates a flowing, hybrid identity. On the other hand, this fundamental corrosion of all important social connections lets the genie out of the bottle: it sets in motion potential centrifugal forces that the capitalist system is no longer able to fully control. It is exactly because of the global triumph of the capitalist system that that system is today more vulnerable than ever. The old formula of Marx is still valid: Capitalism digs its own grave. Hardt and Negri describe this process as the transition from the nation-state to global empire, a transnational space which is comparable to Rome, where hybrid masses of scattered identities develop.
These postmodern politics concentrate on "cultural wars" and fight for their own recognition: their foundation is sexual, ethnic and religious tolerance--they preach the multicultural gospel. When one reads these authors work, it is often difficult to ward off the impression that we would exploit Turks and other immigrants because we are unable to tolerate their "otherness." Cultural and sexual intolerance serves as the key for economic tensions, not vice versa as it used to be explained in the good old days of orthodox Marxism. Thus, Hardt and Negri deserve much praise, since they enlighten us about the contradictory nature of today's turbocapitalism and attempt to identify the dynamic of the progressive powers at work. Their heroic attempt sets itself against the standard view of the left, who are struggling to limit the destructive powers of globalization and to rescue what there remains to rescue of the welfare state. This standard left wing view is imbued with a, perhaps too deeply, conservative mistrust of the dynamics of globalization and digitalization, which is quite contrary to the Marxist belief in the powers of progress.
Nevertheless, one immediately gets a foretaste, as a result of the authors' style, of the boundaries of Hardt and Negri's analysis. In their socio-economic analysis there is simply a lack of concrete, precise insight which is concealed in the Deleuzean jargon of multiplicity, deterritorialization, etc. It is no wonder that the three "practical" suggestions with which this book ends seem anticlimactic. The authors propose the political struggle for three global rights: The right to global citizenship, the right to social income, and the re-appropriation of the new means of production" (i.e. the access to and control of education, information, and communication). It is paradoxical that Hardt and Negri, the poets of mobility, multiplicity, hybridization, etc. call for three demands that are phrased in the current terminology of universal "human rights."
The problem with these demands is that they fluctuate between formal emptiness and impossible radicalization. Let's take the right to global citizenship: with that, one can in principle only agree-nevertheless, if this demand were meant to be taken more seriously than a celebratory formal declaration in typical UN style, then it would mean the total "destruction" of the carrying out of global laws and even the abolition of state borders. Under the present conditions, such steps would trigger an invasion of the USA and western Europe by cheap labor from India, China and Africa, which would result in a people's revolt against immigrants with figures like Haider appearing as their example for multicultural tolerance. The same is true with regards to the other two demands: for instance, the universal right to social income--naturally, why not? But how should one create the necessary socio-economic conditions for such a transformation?
This critique is not only aimed at secondary empirical details. The main problem with "Empire", is that the book falls short in its fundamental analysis of how (if at all) the present global socio-economic process will create the needed space for such radical measures like the ones that Marx tried to develop in his explanation of how the proletarian revolution would eliminate the basic antagonism of the capitalist means of production. In this respect, Empire remains a pre-Marxist book.
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The Snake
by Alan Wolfe
Issue Date: 10.01.01
Post Date: 09.27.01
Empire is to social and political criticism what pornography is to literature. It flirts with revolution as if one society can be replaced by another as easily as one body can be substituted for another. It gives academic readers the thrill of engaging with the ideas of the New Left's most insurrectionary days, all the while pretending that the author of these ideas is an "independent researcher and writer," as Harvard's book jacket calls Negri, while secretly hoping--imagine the glamour in radical academic circles that this would give him!--that he really was guilty of the acts for which he was imprisoned. For angry militants who have never read Bakunin but who understand in their gut that every destructive urge is a creative one, Empire offers the support of professors who are supposed to know what they are talking about; and if one is too busy running through the streets to grasp the full implications of what Homi K. Bhabha says about binary divisions, or to reflect on Althusser's reading of The Prince, one can at least come away rinsed in the appropriate critique. Empire is a thoroughly non-serious book on a most serious topic, an outrageously irresponsible tour through questions of power and violence--questions that, as we cannot help but remember as we mourn our dead in Manhattan and Washington, demand the greatest responsibility on the part of both writers and readers.
The New Left got a lot of things wrong, but it got one thing right: institutions that wield tremendous authority over the lives of ordinary people cannot be trusted with unlimited power, for, in the absence of checks and constraints on their activities, they will do whatever they can to maximize their advantage. As the New Left turned violent and sought support from the fringes, it lost that significant insight, eventually decomposing into sectarian paranoia or academic obscurantism. The most remarkable accomplishment of Empire is to combine both of those degenerations into a frightfully unstable mixture. There is bad news in this, and worse news. The bad news is that anti-globalization protesters, should they find anything of value in this book, will lead their very promising movement into the same dead ends as the New Left. The worse news is that, to reverse Marx's famous dictum, this will happen the second time as tragedy rather than as farce.
The texts above are exactly as they originally appeared online and belong to the sources not to rpr/WORKS.
3 December 2001