Hardt-Negri's "Empire": a Marxist critique
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's "Empire" is best understood
as a *turn* within the ideological/political current known as
"post-Marxism". Although this movement has been closely identified
with protests against globalization--albeit not within classical Marxist
parameters--Hardt and Negri will have nothing to do with any movement that makes
concessions to the idea that "Local differences preexist the present scene
and must be defended or protected against the intrusion of globalization."
(Empire, p. 45)
Before turning to part one of "Empire", it would be useful to
say a few words about the emergence of post-Marxism. As a theory, it tries to
reconcile Marx with postmodernism. From Marx it borrows the idea that capitalism
is an unjust system. From postmodernism it borrows the idea that "grand
narratives" lead to disaster. While postmodernism had been around since the
mid-80s (Lyotard's "Postmodern Condition" was published in 1984), the
disenchantment with the traditional Marxist project reached a crescendo after
1990, when the Soviet bloc began to collapse and after the Central American
revolution had been defeated.
Since a large part of the postmodernist turn within Marxism had to do
with the futility of organizing socialism on the basis of the nation-state, the
collapse of existing socialism--based on such states--would necessarily deepen
the conviction that old-school Marxism was passé. However, what deepened this
pessimism even more was the belief that a 'globalized' economy made the
nation-state itself a dying species, like the brontosaurus. What good what it do
to make a socialist revolution if multinational corporations and international
lending institutions violated porous real or virtual borders?
Perhaps no other leftwing figure expressed these moods better than Roger
Burbach, a Berkeley Latin American studies professor who had been heavily
invested in the Sandinista revolution. In 1997, he wrote "Globalization and
its Discontents: the rise of postmodernist socialisms" with Orlando Núñez
and Boris Kagarlitsky (Kargalitsky would eventually disown the book). Burbach
writes:
"The left has to accept the fact that the Marxist project for
revolution launched by the Communist Manifesto is dead. There will certainly be
revolutions (the Irananian Revolution is probably a harbinger of what to expect
in the short term), but they will not be explicitly socialist ones that follow
in the Marxist tradition begun by the First International." (Globalization,
p. 142.)
Socialists would have to lower their expectations. Instead of
proletarian revolution, they should shoot for "radical reforms",
especially those that have modest geographical and economic ambitions. On the
high end of the scale, you have a struggle like Chiapas, which has tended to
function iconically for the post-Marxists as 1917 Russia functioned for a
generation of classical Marxists. At the low end, you have soup kitchens,
housing squats, and even homeless men selling "street newspapers" in
order to raise the funds for their next meal or a night's stay at a flophouse.
Burbach's program comes across as a leftist version of George Bush's
"thousand points of light":
"In both the developed and underdeveloped countries, a wide variety
of critical needs and interests are being neglected at the local level,
including the building, or rebuilding, of roads, schools and social services. A
new spirit of volunteerism and community participation, backed by a campaign to
secure complimentary resources from local and national governments, can open up
entirely new job markets and areas of work to deal with these basic needs."
(ibid, p. 164)
Although Hardt and Negri share many of Burbach's assumptions, which we
will detail momentarily, they could care less about community participation,
either in Chiapas or northern urban neighborhoods. For them, what is key is the
very process that Burbach was reacting against, namely globalization or what
old-school Marxists have called imperialism. They have their own word for it,
which serves them eponymously: Empire.
Part of the problem in coming to terms with "Empire" is the
lack of an economic analysis, which is surprising given the self-conscious
attempt by the authors to position the book as a Communist Manifesto for the
21st century. Not only had Marx written a seminal economics treatise to anchor
his political program, so had Lenin a generation later. When Lenin was gathering
together the forces that would eventually constitute the 3rd International, he
already had "Imperialism, the Final Stage of Capitalism" under his
belt. This work not only was dense with detail about the emergence of corporate
trusts, it was written only after Lenin had familiarized himself with hundreds
of books and articles on economics, especially those written by J.A. Hobson and
Rudolf Hilferding. Going through the notes of "Empire" you find
abundant references to Baudrillard, Celine, Arendt, Polybius et al, but very few
to economics studies.
This failure leads the authors to make bald assertions that scream out
for verification, but which are not forthcoming. For example, in the preface
they state that "The United States does indeed occupy a privileged position
in Empire, but this privilege derives not from its similarities to the old
European imperialist powers, but from its differences." Those who expect
those differences to revolve around investment patterns, etc. will be
disappointed, for in fact Hardt and Negri are referring to the United States
constitution which was inspired by an imperial (but not imperialist) idea going
back to the Roman Empire.
In the absence of hard economic facts, indeed much of "Empire"
devolves into discussion of the role of ideas in shaping history. Of particular
note is their definition of Empire itself. While "imperialisms" were
very much defined by place and time ("an extension of the sovereignty of
the European nation-states beyond their borders" as they put it), Empire is
timeless and omnipresent. "It is a *decentered* and *deterritorializing*
apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within
its open, expanding frontiers". While to some of us, this comes across as
nothing more than a fancy description of U.S. imperialism's 'new world order',
let us accept this definition on its own terms for the time being.
In order to give this definition some substance, the authors
unfortunately allow their idealist method to run away with itself. This is most
particularly notable in their discussion of the United Nations, which is a
lynch-pin of Empire. Although--like much of Empire--the UN has nasty
side-effects, it is still a breakthrough in terms of pointing in the direction
of establishing a *global* order. From this standpoint, the work of one Hans
Kelsen is critical. As "one of the central intellectual figures behind the
formation of the United Nations," Kelsen sought in
"Kantian-fashion" a supreme ethical idea that could provide an
organization of humanity.
While not taking a position here on ethics, it is incumbent on us to
look at the underlying class dynamics that led to the formation of the United
Nations. As such, categorical imperatives never entered the picture.
To start with, before the UN ever ended up as a group of buildings on
Manhattan's East River, it pre-existed as the wartime alliance of England, the
United States and the USSR. Moreover, these three great powers always saw their
alliance within the context of diplomatic jockeying over how to divide the
spoils of WWII. These discussions took place at Yalta and Potsdam, and
influenced completely the decisions shaping the character of the UN. Behind all
of the human rights and democracy rhetoric accompanying the creation of the UN,
power politics lay beneath the surface.
The United States sought to capitalize on its impending victory in the
Pacific. Sumner Welles, under heavy criticism, disavowed charges in March 1943
that "the Pacific should be a lake under American jurisdiction..."
Great Britain, for its part, sought to maintain its imperial power. Churchill
wrote Eden at the time, "If the Americans want to take Japanese islands
which they have conquered, let them do so with our blessing and any form of
words that may be agreeable to them. But 'Hands Off the British Empire' is our
maxim." Stalin's goal was more modest. All he desired was a series of
buffer states between Western Europe and the Soviet Union that would be under
its sphere of influence. To get a flavor of United States thinking at the time
of formation of the UN, let's eavesdrop in on a telephone conversation between
War Department official John J. McCloy and the State Department's Henry L.
Stimson:
McCloy: ...the argument is that if you extend that to the regional
arrangement against non-enemy states, Russia will want to have the same thing in
Europe and Asia and you will build up these big regional systems which may
provoke even greater wars and you've cut out the heart of the world
organization.
Stimson: Yes.
McCloy: That the whole idea is to use collective action and by these
exceptions you would…
Stimson: of course you'll, you'll cut into the size of the new
organization [ie., the UN] by what you agreed to now
McCloy: Yes, that's right. That was recognized...and maybe the same
nation that had done the underhanded stirring up might veto any action any
action by the regional arrangement to stop it--to put a stop to the aggression.
Now that's the thing that they [Russia] are afraid of, but, and *it's a real
fear* and they have a real asset and they are a real military asset to us.
Stimson: Yes,
McCloy: but on the other hand *we have a very strong interest in being
able to intervene promptly in Europe* where the--twice now within a generation
we've been forced to send our sons over some…
Stimson: Yes
McCloy: relatively minor Balkan incident, and *we don't want to lose the
right to intervene promptly in Europe* merely for the sake of preserving our
South American solidarity because after all we, we will have England, England's
navy and army, if not France's on our side, whereas the South American people
are not particularly strong in their own right, and the armies start in Europe
and they don't start in South America. However, I've been taking the position
that we ought to have our cake and eat it too; that *we ought to be free to
operate under this regional arrangement in South America*, at the same time
intervene promptly in Europe; that we oughtn't to give away either asset...
Stimson: I think so, decidedly, because in the Monroe Doctrine and in-
-and that runs into hemispherical solidarity
McCloy: Yes
Stimson: we've gotten something we've developed over the decades
McCloy: Yes
Secretary: and it's in, it's an asset in case, and I don't think it
ought to be taken away from us....
(Gabriel Kolko, "The Politics of War")
Of course, now that the Soviet Union no longer exists, the United
Nations is more than ever a tool of territorial and economic ambitions by the
USA and its allies. Put in old-school Marxist terms, the UN is not an expression
of Empire but imperialism. Power grabs by big fish in the ocean at the expense
of smaller fish--rather than Kantian pieties--is the only way to understand the
United Nations.
Of course, if one sweeps the nasty realities of the formation of the
United Nations under the rug, it becomes that much easier to convince oneself
that Empire might not be such a bad thing after all. Even after Hardt and Negri
admit that globalizing tendencies involve a lot of "oppression and
exploitation," they still maintain that the process must continue. Why?
"Despite recognizing all this [bad stuff], we 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 the old arrangement, such as trying to resurrect the
nation-state against capital." In other words, socialism defended by armed
working people who would sacrifice their lives at places like the Bay of Pigs in
order to build a better future for their children and grandchildren is a waste
of time.
Leaving no doubt whatsoever about their intentions, they declare,
"Today we should all clearly recognize that the time of such proletarian
revolution is over." With this declaration, they stand side-by-side with
Roger Burbach who, as cited above, believes: "The left has to accept the
fact that the Marxist project for revolution launched by the Communist Manifesto
is dead."
Unlike Burbach, Hardt and Negri have little interest in or sympathy for
local struggles against the ravages of globalization:
"We are well aware that in affirming this thesis we are swimming
against the current of our friends and comrades on the Left. In the long decades
of the current crisis of the communist, socialist, and liberal Left that has
followed the 1960s, a large portion of critical thought, both in the dominant
countries of capitalist development and in the subordinated ones, has sought to
recompose sites of resistance that are founded on the identities of social
subjects or national and regional groups, often grounding political analysis on
the *localization of struggles*." (Empire, p. 44)
Hardt and Negri now regard such local struggles as they would tainted
meat on a supermarket shelf because they "can easily devolve into a kind of
primordialism that fixes and romanticizes social relations and identities."
Although their prose, as is universally the case, hovers ethereally
above real people and real events, it is not too hard to figure out what they
are referring to. They obviously have in mind struggles involving the Mayan
people of Chiapas or, before them, the Mayans of Guatemala who looked to
Rigoberta Menchu for inspiration and guidance.
Don't Hardt and Negri have a point? Isn't it self-defeating to rally
people around 'primordial' texts like the Popul Vuh, the Mayan sacred text that
figures heavily in "I, Rigoberta Menchu." Wouldn't such people be
better off assimilating themselves as rapidly as possible into a global network
of political and social relations on the basis of what they have in common,
rather than what distinguishes them?
In reality, local struggles have exactly that dynamic. A study of
Menchu's career would verify that. Starting out as a simple Mayan peasant with a
desire to defend local communal lands against the onslaughts of agri-business
and the Guatemalan army and death squads, she transformed herself into a global
figure connected to indigenous movements everywhere as well as somebody
committed to progressive social transformation.
Sadly, what Hardt and Negri miss entirely is how socialist consciousness
is formed. It is not on the basis of abstract socialist propaganda but rather
the dialectical interaction between experiences based on local struggles, either
at the plant-gate or the rural farming village, and ideas transmitted to
fighters by Marxist activists, the "vanguard" in Lenin's terms. The
construction of such a vanguard remains as urgent a task as it was in Lenin's
days, a period not unlike our own which faced thinkers not unlike Hardt and
Negri. Part two of Hardt-Negri's "Empire" is a rather lofty defense of
an argument that has been around on the left for a long time. It states that all
nationalism is reactionary, both that of oppressor and oppressed nations. While
the argumentation is studded with references to obscure and not so obscure
political theorists going back to the Roman Empire, there is a complete absence
of the one criterion that distinguishes Marxism from competitive schools of
thought, namely class.
Key to their stratagem is a reliance on the Karl Marx India articles
that appeared in the New York Tribune in 1853. Putting this defense of British
colonialism into the foreground helps shroud their arguments in Marxist
orthodoxy. In effect, the Karl Marx of the Tribune articles becomes a kind of
St. John the Baptist to their messianic arrival: "In the nineteenth century
Karl Marx...recognized the utopian potential of the ever-increasing processes of
global interaction and communication." (Empire, p. 118) In contrast to the
bioregionalist pleas of anti-globalization activist Vandana Shiva, perhaps the
best thing that could have happen to India is deeper penetration by the WTO,
based on this citation from Marx that appears in "Empire":
"Sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness, we must not
forget that these idyllic village communities, inoffensive though they may
appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, and they
restrained the human mind, within the smallest possible compass, making it the
unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath the traditional rules
depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies."
It is indeed unfortunate that Hardt and Negri are content to rest on
this version of Marx even though they have to admit that he "was limited by
his scant knowledge of India's past and present." Not to worry, since
"his lack of information...is not the point." (Empire, p. 120) In
other words, this Marx of scanty knowledge fits perfectly into the schema being
constructed in "Empire" since it too is generally characterized by a
lack of concrete economic and historical data.
As Aijaz Ahmad points out (In Theory, pp 221-242), Marx had exhibited
very little interest in India prior to 1853, when the first of the Tribune
articles were written. It was the presentation of the East India Company's
application for charter renewal to Parliament that gave him the idea of writing
about India at all. To prepare for the articles, he read the Parliamentary
records and Bernier's "Travels". (Bernier was a 17th century writer
and medicine man.) So it is fair to say that Marx's views on India were shaped
by the contemporary prejudices. More to the point is that Marx had not even
drafted the Grundrisse at this point and Capital was years away.
On July 22nd, Marx wrote a second article that contains sentiments that
Hardt and Negri choose to ignore, even though it is embedded in a defense of
British colonialism. In this article, Marx is much less interested in the
benefits of "global interaction and communication" than he is in the
prospects of kicking the British out: "The Indian will not reap the fruits
of the new elements of society scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie,
till in Great Britain itself the new ruling classes shall have been supplanted
by the industrial proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have grown
strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether." So unless there is
social revolution, the English presence in India brings no particular advantage.
More to the point, it will bring tremendous suffering.
Furthermore, there is evidence that Marx was becoming much more aware of
how the imperialist system operated late in life. In a letter to the Russian
populist Danielson in 1881, he wrote:
"In India serious complications, if not a general outbreak, are in
store for the British government. What the British take from them annually in
the form of rent, dividends for railways useless for the Hindoos, pensions for
the military and civil servicemen, for Afghanistan and other wars, etc. etc., --
what they take from them without any equivalent and quite apart from what they
appropriate to themselves annually within India, -- speaking only of the
commodities that Indians have to gratuitously and annually send over to England
-- it amounts to more than the total sum of the income of the 60 million of
agricultural and industrial laborers of India. This is a bleeding process with a
vengeance."
A bleeding process with a vengeance? This obviously does not square with
the version of colonialism found in "Empire".
Within a few years, the Second International would become embroiled in a
controversy that pitted Eduard Bernstein against the revolutionary wing of the
movement, including British Marxist Belford Bax and Rosa Luxemburg. Using
arguments similar to Hardt and Negri's, Bernstein said that colonialism was
basically a good thing since it would hasten the process of drawing savages into
capitalist civilization, a necessary first step to building communism.
In a January 5, 1898 article titled "The Struggle of Social
Democracy and the Social Revolution," Bernstein makes the case for colonial
rule over Morocco. Drawing from English socialist Cunningham Graham's travel
writings, Bernstein states there is absolutely nothing admirable about Morocco.
In such countries where feudalism is mixed with slavery, a firm hand is
necessary to drag the brutes into the civilized world:
"There is a great deal of sound evidence to support the view that,
in the present state of public opinion in Europe, the subjection of natives to
the authority of European administration does not always entail a worsening of
their condition, but often means the opposite. However much violence, fraud, and
other unworthy actions accompanied the spread of European rule in earlier
centuries, as they often still do today, the other side of the picture is that,
under direct European rule, savages are *without exception better off* than they
were before...
"Am I, because I acknowledge all this, an 'adulator' of the
present? If so, let me refer Bax to The Communist Manifesto, which opens with an
'adulation' of the bourgeoisie which no hired hack of the latter could have
written more impressively. However, in the fifty years since the Manifesto was
written the world has advanced rather than regressed; and the revolutions which
have been accomplished in public life since then, especially the rise of modern
democracy, have not been without influence on the doctrine of social
obligation." (Marxism and Social Democracy, p. 153-154)
It is of course no accident that arguments found in Bernstein are now
making a re-appearance in "Empire" a little bit over a century later.
We have been going through a fifty-year economic expansion in the imperialist
world that tends to cast a shadow over the project of proletarian revolution.
From a class perspective, it is not too difficult to understand why the new
challenge to Marxism--in the name of Marxism--emerges out of the academy just as
it arose out of the top rungs of the party bureaucracy in the 1880s. From a
relatively privileged social position in the bowels of the most privileged
nations on earth, it is easy to succumb to defeatist moods.
In a few years, the complacency of the revisionist wing of the Social
Democracy was shattered by the greatest blood-letting in human history, as the
nations of Europe demonstrated that capitalism produced nothing like
"global interaction and communication". The pressures of bourgeois
nationalism caused socialist parliamentarians to vote for war credits. In
reaction to this kind of social patriotism, Lenin and the Zimmerwaldists fought
for proletarian internationalism and withdrawal from the war. In their most
signal victory, the Leninist wing of the socialist movement led working people
and peasants to victory in Russia in 1917.
Key to this victory was an understanding that oppressed nationalities
had the right to self-determination, even if this meant separation from the new
Soviet state. In one of the most important advances in Marxist thought, Lenin
came to the understanding that peoples such as the Crimean Tatars, the Irish,
the Chinese, the Indians, etc. deserved freedom even if they were being led by
bourgeois elements. In the epoch of imperialism, such struggles had a
revolutionary dynamic that Marxists should push to the full conclusion.
Hardt and Negri dispense with this tradition altogether. They take sides
with Rosa Luxemburg who "argued vehemently (and futilely) against
nationalism in the debates in the Third International in the years before the
First World War." (BEFORE the First World War? It is a sign of Hardt and
Negri's unfamiliarity with this terrain that they allude to debates in the Third
International years before it came into existence. The Third International was
formed in the aftermath of the Bolshevik victory in 1917, which itself was
sparked by WWI among other factors.) In their eyes, Luxemburg's "most
powerful argument...was that nation means dictatorship and is thus profoundly
incompatible with any attempt at democratic organization."
While Rosa Luxemburg was one of the greatest revolutionary thinkers and
activists of the twentieth century, their can be little doubt that her views on
such matters were colored by her experience in the Polish revolutionary
movement. Her differences with Lenin were part of a debate taking place prior to
WWI that had to do with relatively localized concerns over whether assimilation
of Polish workers into the Russian economy would hasten the prospects of
proletarian revolution. Her untimely death at the hands of the German state in
1919 prevented her from seeing the revolutionary dynamic of the colonial
revolution. That being said, her article on the Russian revolution was written
in prison where access to information was severely limited. It is, however, in
this article where some of her most extreme anti-nationalist feelings are
vented. She writes:
"Lenin and his comrades clearly calculated that there was no surer
method of binding the many foreign [sic] peoples within the Russian Empire to
the cause of the revolution, to the cause of the socialist proletariat, than
that of offering them, in the name of the revolution and socialism, the most
extreme and unlimited freedom to determine their own fate." (Rosa Luxemburg
Speaks, p. 379-380)
Somebody--I can't recall who--once said that there is "Their Rosa
Luxemburg and ours." If this is the Rosa Luxemburg that counts with Hardt
and Negri, they are welcome to her.
Not only would Hardt and Negri have been opposed to struggles for formal
independence from colonialism, they are just as unrelenting in their opposition
to any struggle against neocolonialism that would rely on defensive measures by
the nation-state of the oppressed group. For example, while Cuba achieved formal
independence after the Spanish-American war, the July 26th movement was
organized around many of the nationalist themes found in José Marti's writings.
Even if the Cuban flag flew over Havana in the late 1950s, the guerrilla
movement quite rightly saw sovereignty as resting in the American embassy.
Not only would Hardt and Negri would have been opposed to any movement
that sought to achieve formal independence like the Portuguese colonies in
Africa in the 1970s and 80s, they would have also condemned efforts to achieve
genuine economic independence in Sandinista Nicaragua in the same period. As
anti-nationalist purists, the only political entity worth struggling to take
over is that which exists on a global basis even though the forces of repression
exist within the borders of the nation-state. When Somoza's National Guard was
throwing radical youth out of helicopters during the civil war, Hardt and Negri
would have urged the FSLN to shun overthrowing the US-backed butchers and
creating a new state based on the armed peasantry and working class.
Their arguments, although formulated in over-inflated jargon, boil down
to the sentiments found in the Who song "Won't Get Fooled Again." They
write:
"The perils of national liberation are even clear when viewed
externally, in terms of the world economic system in which the 'liberated'
nation finds itself. Indeed, the equation nationalism equals political and
economic modernization, which has been heralded by leaders of numerous
anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles from Gandhi and Ho Chi Minh to
Nelson Mandela, really ends up being a perverse trick...The very concept of a
liberatory national sovereignty is ambiguous if not completely contradictory.
While this nationalism seeks to liberate the multitude from foreign domination,
it erects domestic structures of domination that are equally severe."
(Empire, p. 132-133)
As is the case throughout "Empire," there is a paucity of
historical data to support their arguments. If you read the above paragraph, you
would be left with the conclusion that the problem is mainly theoretical in
nature. By embracing nation-state solutions rather than global solutions,
national liberation movements have been suckered into accommodation to the
status quo. Not only that, the new boss is just as bad as the old boss--won't
get fooled again.
Furthermore, if Marx's main contribution was a dialectical approach to
history and society, Hardt and Negri's binary opposition between "foreign
domination" and "domestic structures of domination" leads one to
wonder whether they have read the Eighteenth Brumaire, which states that people
make history but not of their own choosing. In the recent past, the failure of
national liberation movements has less to do with the bad faith of leaders,
personal greed or theoretical error. It has much more to do with the collapse of
the Soviet Union and the rise of low-intensity warfare, two key factors that are
conspicuously absent from their discussion.
In the 1980s, the Portuguese ex-colonies and Nicaragua were subjected to
intense economic and military pressure in the almost total absence of Soviet
support of the kind that was forthcoming in the 1950s. Perestroika and glasnost
meant the Soviet Union was much more willing to turn a blind eye to contra
terror. In exchange for US trade deals, the US got a green light to torment
peasants in Africa and Central America. One can assume that "domestic
structures of domination" are foreordained only if one brackets out this
real history and the economics that underpinned it. When the Nicaraguan
government adopted a 'concertacion' in 1989 that had all the earmarks of
neo-liberalization, it happened in the context of nine years of punishing
warfare, a devastating hurricane that had left the country on the ropes
economically, back-stabbing by the Soviet Union well on its road to capitalism,
and immense pressure from the FSLN's European social democratic
"allies" who would soon forsake the welfare state themselves. When
guerrillas who had put up with torture, mountain leprosy, isolation and aerial
bombing decide to opt for a market economy, the fault is not so much theirs as
it is imperialism's. Or Empire, if you prefer.
However, one can not condemn the Sandinista revolution because it was
destroyed by capitalism. The Paris Commune was also destroyed, but it serves as
a paradigm for the kind of state power that Marx and Engels strove for. Rather
than thinking in terms of amorphous global struggles that would leave torture
states like Somoza's or Batista's in place short of final victory, Marxists
understand that a state that operates in the interests of the poor and the
working people is a step forward, *even* if it is compromised by the global
economic environment it is forced to operate in. Basically this is the
difference between Cuba and countries like Jamaica or Haiti. While Cuba is now
forced to put up with foreign investment, tourist hotels and the like, a
campesino in the countryside does not have to worry about his baby dying of
diarrhea. One supposes that such mundane matters are unimportant to Hardt and
Negri who are consumed with the desire to lead the planet toward universal
communism as rapidly as possible, even if they lack the rudiments of an
understanding how to get there.
Cuba, which is not even listed in the index of "Empire" does
receive an offhanded dismissal on page 134: "From India to Algeria and Cuba
to Vietnam, the state is the poisoned gift of national liberation." Now a
separate book written by different authors might examine the concrete class
differences between these countries and how their respective social and economic
differences might explain how a peasant gets treated one place or another, but
Hardt and Negri could be bothered less by such minutiae. These places are far
away and filled with people who are all being oppressed by "domestic
structures of domination". That is all they need to know.
In the one area that more than other cries out for a deeper analysis,
they are content to pontificate from the mountain-top. I refer here to the
global pandemic of AIDS which interests them in Foucauldian terms, as one might
expect:
"The contemporary processes of globalization have torn down many of
the boundaries of the colonial world. Along with the common celebrations of the
unbounded flows in our new global village, one can still sense also an anxiety
about increased contact and a certain nostalgia for colonialist hygiene. The
dark side of the consciousness of globalization is the fear of contagion. If we
break down global boundaries and open universal contact in our global village,
how will we prevent the spread of disease and corruption? This anxiety is most
clearly revealed with respect to the AIDS pandemic." (Empire, p. 136)
This gob of self-conscious postmodernist prose addresses everything
except that which matters most to socialists, namely the problem of the
intersection of class and public health. We are not only facing a pandemic of
AIDS but other diseases that represent the consequences of an assault on public
health that occur under the neo-liberal regime. The one country that seems
immune to this process is exactly Cuba, that Hardt and Negri are all too willing
to write off. You can find an entirely different attitude from Paul Farmer, the
Harvard physician who has not only been running an AIDS clinic in Haiti for many
years but who has tried to explain the relation between class and disease in
works such as "Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues".
Although the distinction between Haiti and Cuba might be lost on the likes of
Hardt and Negri, it surely is not lost on Farmer, whose attitude was
characterized in a memorable profile that appeared in the July 3rd, 2000 New
Yorker magazine:
Leaving
Haiti, Farmer didn’t stare down through the airplane window at that brown and
barren third of an island. "It bothers me even to look at it," he
explained, glancing out. "It can’t support eight million people, and
there they are. There they are, kidnapped from West Africa."
But
when we descended toward Havana he gazed out the window intently, making
exclamations: "Only ninety miles from Haiti, and look! Trees! Crops! It’s
all so verdant. At the height of the dry season! The same ecology as Haiti’s,
and look!"
An
American who finds anything good to say about Cuba under Castro runs the risk of
being labelled a Communist stooge, and Farmer is fond of Cuba. But not for
ideological reasons. He says he distrusts all ideologies, including his own.
"It’s an ‘ology,’ after all," he wrote to me once, about
liberation theology. "And all ologies fail us at some point." Cuba was
a great relief to me. Paved roads and old American cars, instead of litters on
the 'gwo wout ia'. Cuba had food rationing and allotments of coffee adulterated
with ground peas, but no starvation, no enforced malnutrition. I noticed groups
of prostitutes on one main road, and housing projects in need of repair and
paint, like most buildings in the city. But I still had in mind the howling
slums of Port-au-Prince, and Cuba looked lovely to me. What looked loveliest to
Farmer was its public-health statistics.
Many
things affect a public’s health, of course—nutrition and transportation,
crime and housing, pest control and sanitation, as well as medicine. In Cuba,
life expectancies are among the highest in the world. Diseases endemic to Haiti,
such as malaria, dengue fever, T.B., and AIDS, are rare. Cuba was training
medical students gratis from all over Latin America, and exporting doctors
gratis— nearly a thousand to Haiti, two en route just now to Zanmi Lasante. In
the midst of the hard times that came when the Soviet Union dissolved, the
government actually increased its spending on health care. By American
standards, Cuban doctors lack equipment, and are very poorly paid, but they are
generally well trained. At the moment, Cuba has more doctors per capita than any
other country in the world—more than twice as many as the United States.
"I can sleep here," Farmer said when we got to our hotel.
"Everyone here has a doctor."
Farmer
gave two talks at the conference, one on Haiti, the other on "the noxious
synergy" between H.I.V. and T.B.—an active case of one often makes a
latent case of the other active, too. He worked on a grant proposal to get
anti-retroviral medicines for Cange, and at the conference met a woman who could
help. She was in charge of the United Nations’ project on AIDS in the
Caribbean. He lobbied her over several days. Finally, she said, "O.K.,
let’s make it happen." ("Can I give you a kiss?" Farmer asked.
"Can I give you two?") And an old friend, Dr. Jorge Perez, arranged a
private meeting between Farmer and the Secretary of Cuba’s Council of State,
Dr. José Miyar Barruecos. Farmer asked him if he could send two youths from
Cange to Cuban medical school. "Of course," the Secretary replied.
Again
and again during our stay, Farmer marvelled at the warmth with which the Cubans
received him. What did I think accounted for this?
I
said I imagined they liked his connection to Harvard, his published attacks on
American foreign policy in Latin America, his admiration of Cuban medicine.
I
looked up and found his pale-blue eyes fixed on me. "I think it’s because
of Haiti," he declared. "I think it’s because I serve the
poor."
Part three of "Empire" is devoted to an explanation of the new
realities facing the radical movement, which--swimming bravely against the
stream of academic fashion--they dub postmodernist. They also explain the
crownpiece of autonomic-Marxism strategy, a clever and powerful form of
proletarian resistance called "refusal to work". This plays as much of
a role in their movement as 'focos' played in Guevarist guerrilla struggles in
the 1960s or that the general strike played in anarcho-syndicalism. Let me
hasten to add at this point that refusal to work is something entirely different
than a general strike. What it is exactly--in all its glory--will be detailed
momentarily, but first let us turn out attention to this thing they call
postmodernism.
First of all, postmodernism replaced something called modernism.
Modernism is made up of three characteristics:
1. Fordism: this refers to the wage regime of such as the kind that
existed in Detroit auto factories; Henry Ford's in particular, who combined
relatively higher pay with brutal anti-union policies.
2. Taylorism: this refers to Frederic Taylor, the father of time-motion
studies, whose views on efficiency found support not only in Detroit auto
factories but in Lenin's USSR.
3. Keynesianism: Once you have the first two planks nailed down, you
create deficit spending techniques, welfare state legislation, etc. in order to
maintain relatively low levels of unemployment and high levels of class peace.
With postmodernism, everything changes--at least this is the authors'
conviction. Not only does this include the decline of basic industry such as
automobile and steel production in favor of computer-based services, it also
involves the re-engineering of such traditional industries as
"information-based" entities. In a postmodernist factory, workers not
only program machines to do work, they also participate in nodes in a global
network of inter-related production and planning facilities. Whether any of this
has any connection to the economic processes identified by Karl Marx is an
entirely different matter. As far as one can tell, it seems that surplus value
is being created in the same way it always has.
Part of the problem, as is the case throughout "Empire", is
the lack of solid economic data to support their arguments. In their definition
of modernism, Hardt and Negri take note of the transformation of family farms
into corporate industrial farms, a sign that "society became a
factory." As it turns out, the reality is far more complex. The penetration
of capital into agriculture took a much different form than that of the classic
case of industrial production such as textiles in the 18th and 19th century,
according to Richard Lewontin (Monthly Review, Jul-Aug, 1998). Not only are
there still about 1.8 million independent farms in the USA today, with over
100,000 separate enterprises producing more than half of all the value of the
output. "Furthermore, roughly 55 percent of farmland is now operated by
owner-renters who are for the most part small producers." With the absence
of such hard economic data, we are left with gossamer abstractions in
"Empire," relying all too frequently on novelists like Robert Musil to
buttress their points rather than graphs or charts.
For everybody operating in the Marxist framework broadly speaking,
except for the sectarian "Marxist-Leninist" left, the question of the
industrial working class in the advanced capitalist countries remains
problematic. Except for some outbursts in the late 1960s in western Europe, the
period following WWII has been characterized by the sort of class peace that
existed in the long expansionary period leading up to WWI. That period, of
course, gave birth to "revisionism" in the social democracy while
today's long expansion has generated its own kind of responses, ranging from
Marcuse's Frankfurt school inspired New Leftism to the "radical
democracy" of Laclau-Mouffe. In general, this involves looking to other
forces besides the industrial working class, ranging from the "social
movements" to the lumpen proletariat.
Hardt and Negri have their own peculiar take on this question. Rather
than seeing a weakened labor movement co-opted by bourgeois parties and making
ideological concessions to imperialism of the sort noted by Engels in the
British labor movement of his day, they see an internationalist working class on
the offensive putting capital on the ropes. They write:
"We can get a first hint of this determinant role of the
proletariat by asking ourselves how throughout the crisis the United States was
able to maintain its hegemony. The answer lies in large part, perhaps
paradoxically, not in the genius of U.S. politicians or capitalists, but in the
power and creativity of the U.S. proletariat. Whereas earlier, from another
perspective, we posed the Vietnamese resistance as the symbolic center of the
struggles, now, in terms of the paradigm shift of international capitalist
command, the U.S. proletariat appears as the subjective figure that expressed
most fully the desires and needs of international or multinational workers.
Against the common wisdom that the U.S. proletariat is weak because of its low
party and union representation with respect to Europe and elsewhere, perhaps we
should see it as strong for precisely these reasons. Working-class power resides
not in the representative institutions but in the antagonisms and autonomy of
the workers themselves." (Empire, p. 268-269)
This alleged expression of the needs of the international working class
obviously is something I missed during George Bush's war against Iraq but it is
entirely possible that I was napping. Also, I happen to be one of those paleo-Marxists
who views low party and union representation as weakness, not strength. What
gives me hope is the fighting spirit of Los Angeles janitors fighting for union
recognition. Eventually that fighting spirit might be expressed on the electoral
front through working class candidates running on a clear class basis. However,
Hardt and Negri have and had their sights elsewhere.
What they call "antagonism and autonomy" resides not in trade
union struggles, but in a phenomenon they call "refusal to work." For
those of us old enough to have danced to Janis Joplin, this phenomenon would be
as familiar as an old pair of bell-bottom jeans. Just to make sure that
everybody gets the message, this section includes an epigraph by Jerry Rubin:
"The New Left sprang from … Elvis's gyrating pelvis."
(Jerry Rubin was a co-leader with Abby Hoffman of the so-called "Yippie"
movement that tried to fuse the new left and the counter-culture. It consisted
of about a dozen publicity hounds who used to hold press conferences promoting
their provocative actions on the eve of major demonstrations that poor shmucks
like me passed out tens of thousands of leaflets to build. After the Vietnam war
came to end, Rubin re-invented himself as a stockbroker and "networker"
who hosted parties for young urban professionals looking for love and business
connections. It is entirely likely that Rubin coined the term
"yuppie".)
So what was this "mass refusal of the disciplinary regime, which
took a variety of forms" and which "was not only a negative expression
but a moment of creation" but "what Nietzsche calls a transvaluation
of values." This mouthful of ungainly academic prose amounts to praise of
the following:
--Going to live in Haight-Ashbury.
--College students experimenting with LSD instead of looking for a job.
--"Shiftless" African-American workers moving on
"CP" (colored people's time).
(Empire, p. 274)
According to Hardt and Negri, these seemingly personal gestures of
"refusal to work" were actually expressions of
"subjectivity" that embodied "profound economic power" that
mounted a serious challenge to the stability of the system. Well, what is one to
say.
Speaking as somebody who used to try to sell the socialist newspaper
"The Militant" to barefoot people wearing tie-dyed t-shirts and
smoking pot at antiwar rallies, I have to confess that my views might be overly
prejudiced. So, to be fair, I will instead invoke another expert on the
counter-culture whose views I share, namely Thomas Frank, publisher of "The
Baffler" and author of "Commodify your Dissent", a collection of
articles from this fine publication. Frank writes:
"The ways in which this system are to be resisted are equally well
understood and agreed-upon. The Establishment demands homogeneity; we revolt by
embracing diverse, individual life-styles. It demands self-denial and rigid
adherence to convention; we revolt through immediate gratification, instinct
uninhibited, and liberation of the libido and the appetites. Few have put it
more bluntly than Jerry Rubin did in 1970: 'Amerika says: Don't! The yippies
say: Do It!' The countercultural idea is hostile to any law and every
establishment. 'Whenever we see a rule, we must break it,' Rubin continued.
'Only by breaking rules do we discover who we are.' Above all rebellion consists
of a sort of Nietzschean antinomianism, an automatic questioning of rules, a
rejection of whatever social prescriptions we've happened to inherit. Just Do It
is the whole of the law." (Commodify Your Dissent, p. 32)
This pretty much encapsulates the notion of "refusal to work"
put forward by Hardt and Negri. In contrast, Frank regards personal rebellion as
just another empty gesture that can be exploited by the capitalist system.
"Consumerism is no longer about 'conformity' but about
'difference'. Advertising teaches us not in the ways of puritanical self-denial
(a bizarre notion on the face of it), but in orgiastic, never-ending
self-fulfillment. It counsels not rigid adherence to the tastes of the herd but
vigilant and constantly updated individualism. We consume not to fit in, but to
prove, on the surface at least, that we are rock 'n' roll rebels, each one of us
as rule-breaking and hierarchy-defying as our heroes of the 1960s, who now pitch
cars, shoes, and beer. This imperative of endless difference is today at the
heart of American capitalism, an eternal fleeing from 'sameness' that satiates
our thirst for the New with such achievements of civilization as the infinite
brands of identical cola, the myriad colors and irrepressible variety of the
cigarette rack at 7-Eleven." (Commodity Your Dissent, p. 34)
Like a hot air balloon detached from its moorings, part four of
"Empire" sails into the stratosphere with empty metaphysical
speculation even more divorced from the material world than the preceding three
parts.
There are extensive references to "ontology" and "the
ontological" with apparently no recognition that Marx and Engels dispensed
with these sorts of categories. Hart and Negri write:
"In Empire, no subjectivity is outside, and all places have been
subsumed in a general 'non-place.' The transcendental fiction of politics can no
longer stand up and has no argumentative utility because we all exist entirely
within the realm of the social and the political. When we recognize this radical
determination of postmodernity, political philosophy forces us to enter the
terrain of ontology." (p. 353-354)
Every effort to expand on their definition of ontology only leads to
more confusion. Supposedly postmodern capitalism is distinguished from plain old
capitalism by its tendency to create surplus value all over the world rather
than a single country like in the good old days. Because capital is now
everywhere (and implicitly nowhere), the creation of value takes place *beyond
measure*. In other words, we lack the epistemological basis to quantify prices,
wages, interest rates, inflation, etc. I suppose this explains the rather
embarrassing lack of economic data in "Empire". By supplying something
as mundane as a graph illustrating capital flows between the core and the
periphery, they would be guilty of failing to comply with the postmodernist rule
against trying to know the unknowable.
Just to make sure everybody understands what this 'beyond measure' thing
means, they say, "Beyond measure refers to *the new place in the
non-place*, the place defined by the productive activity that is synonymous from
any external regime of measure. Beyond measure refers to a *virtuality* that
invests the entire biopolitical fabric of imperial globalization." Oh, I
see. Can you imagine the chore that the editor at Harvard Press had on her (most
likely, right?) when wading through this kind of squid-ink prose. After now
having spent the better part of a month reading and writing about
"Empire", I think I have mastered this stuff myself:
"With the advent of the epistemological break wrought by global
telecommunications, biopolitical relations are inverted on the basis of network
forms that are rhizomic in nature. The hierarchical ties of the Fordist world
are exchanged for a *informational* structure that approximates the reciprocal
relations between gods and men in Ovid's Metamorphosis. From the Myth of
Sisyphus we begin to understand the despair felt by Walter Benjamin who took his
life in protest against the Nazi regime of localized ultra-Fordism."
Interspersed among their high-falutin' metaphysical speculations, you
have attempts to sketch out some kind of practical politics, which leave more to
be desired than the ontology. Their practical politics can be summarized as
"going with the flow" insofar as the flow is defined as the process
known as globalization. Rather than showing solidarity with the likes of Jose
Bove, the French farmer who busted up a Macdonalds, they believe that capitalist
homogenization is not a bad thing at all. This kind of resistance against fast
food and all it stands for is fundamentally reactionary because it promotes a
attachment to national sovereignty, including cuisine. Who knows, a crepes
suzette might lead to a swastika if you don't watch out. (This does not even
begin to address questions of how global capitalism is devastating peripheral
agri-export based nations.)
They write "The multitude's resistance to bondage--the struggle
against the slavery of belonging to a nation, an identity, and a people, and
thus the desertion from sovereignty and the limits it places on subjectivity--is
entirely positive." Of course, with the IMF and World Bank trampling
national sovereignty underfoot across the planet from Argentina to Yugoslavia,
it is not too difficult to understand why the NY Times would play up
"Empire". Where else would you get a "Marxist" defense of
the notion that *all* efforts to defend national sovereignty are reactionary. It
is one thing to defend this notion with respect to Great Britain or the United
States, it is another to defend it with respect to a nation that is being raped
by multinational corporations. Under such circumstances, old-fashioned slogans
like "Vietnam for the Vietnamese" still have resonance.
Just to make sure that everybody understands their drift, they defend
"nomadism" and "miscegenation". "Nomadism"--as in
Mexican workers being smuggled across the border in oven-like trucks--is
contrasted to the "regressive" and "fascistic" desire to
reinforce the walls of nation, race, people, etc. So implicitly, the best thing
would be for everybody in the world to jump in bed with everybody else so to end
up with a "mixed race" population that can go anywhere in the world
and take part in the global capitalist informational economy. By this standard,
a mulatto data entry clerk in Ghana working for Aetna Life Insurance would be an
exemplar of the brave new world of Empire.
Obviously what's missing from this schema is class criteria. For
oppressed nationalities like the American Indian or the East Timorese, the
desire for sovereignty is progressive. We must be able to distinguish the desire
for Blackfoot Indians to transmit knowledge of their endangered language to
their children from the desire of US corporations to make English a lingua
franca.
In Ziauddin Sardar's "Postmodernism and the Other: the New
Imperialism of Western Culture" (Pluto Press), you can find a powerful
rebuttal to the sort of nonsense put forward by Hardt and Negri:
"The assumption that the flow of ideas between the west and the
non-west is equal and will lead to a richness of cultures at worst and a
'synthesis' of cultures and traditions is widespread in postmodern writings and
thought. However, the flow of cultural ideas and products, as those of
commodities and goods, is strictly one-way: from the west to the Third World.
One doesn't see an Indian Michael Jackson, a Chinese Madonna, a Malaysian Arnold
Schwarzenegger, a Moroccan Julia Roberts, Filipino 'New Kids on the Block', a
Brazilian Shakespeare, an Egyptian Barbara Cartland, a Tanzanian 'Cheers', a
Nigerian 'Dallas', a Chilean 'Wheel of Fortune', or Chinese opera, Urdu poetry,
Egyptian drama, etc. on the global stage. The global theater is strictly a
western theater, a personification of western power, prestige and control. Those
non-western individuals who occasionally get walk-on parts are chosen for their
exotica or because they specifically subscribe to western ideas and ideals, or
promote a western cause. When non-western cultural artefacts appear in the west,
they do so strictly as ethnic chic or empty symbols." (p. 22)
In contrast to "modernist" thinkers who fretted about the
crisis and decay of Europe (Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Ortega y Gasset, et al),
postmodernists like Hardt and Negri regard the replacement of the old
"imperialist" systems based on the nation-state by Empire to be a good
thing basically:
"From out standpoint, however, the fact that against the old powers
of Europe a new Empire has formed is only good news. Who wants to see any more
of that pallid and parasitic European ruling class that led directly from the
ancien régime to nationalism, from populism to fascism, and now pushes for a
generalized neoliberalism? Who wants to see more of those ideologies and those
bureaucratic apparatuses that have nourished and abetted the rotting European élites?
And those who still stand those systems of labor organization and those
corporations that have stripped away every vital spirit." (p. 376)
One supposes that in a certain sense powerful trade unions in places
like Sweden, France and Germany were obstacles to the "refusal to
work". When one places the prospects of an apprenticeship in a machine shop
side by side with taking heroin in a Berlin squat, the latter would best qualify
as an expression of the "vital spirit". With the collapse of social
democracy, one will have plenty of opportunities to hail "nomadism"
and "refusal to work" all across Europe. Just watch out for the
skinheads.
One of the modernist "Europe is sick" thinkers who receives
special attention from Hardt and Negri is a bit of a surprise: Ludwig
Wittgenstein. Rather than seeing him as others do, as an epistemologist looking
for an adequate basis for establishing 'verifiable' propositions, he is the
quintessential mystic whose early writings are a search for meaning and
transcendence. In the midst of WWI, Wittgenstein wrote, "How things stand,
is God. God is, how things stand. Only from the consciousness of the uniqueness
of my life arises religion--science--and art."
In contrast to this nearly Kierkegaardian plea, you have other thinkers
who "would perpetuate the crisis through an illusory faith in Soviet
modernization." While the diligent reader of "Empire" would have
become inured at this point to the lack of economic data, one can only be
shocked by lack of familiarity with Wittgenstein's real beliefs and attitudes
with respect to the Soviet Union. Rather than seeing him as a Christian mystic,
it is much more useful to see him as a man of his times. Like nearly every other
civilized human being, he looked for alternatives to Nazi barbarism. This
involved an engagement with Marxism that was the subject of a paper given to a
'Capital and Class' conference in 1998 by David R. Andrews titled
"Commodity Fetishism as a Form of Life".
Andrews notes that according to someone who knew Wittgenstein well in
the 1930s, "he was opposed to [Marxism] in theory, but supported it in
practice;" and he is reported to have said: "I am a communist, at
heart" Also, for some time Wittgenstein explored the possibility of
relocating to the Soviet Union to live and at one point the University of Moscow
offered him a teaching position in philosophy.
The impact of the theory of Marxism on Wittgenstein's philosophy is also
mixed. According to Wittgenstein, in his posthumously published Philosophical
Investigations,(Wittgenstein, 1958) Piero Sraffa was the most important
influence on his repudiation of the ideas of his earlier Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus: "I have been forced to recognize grave mistakes in
what I wrote in that first book . . . I am indebted to [the criticism that] Mr.
P. Sraffa, for many years unceasingly practised on my thoughts.
I am indebted to this stimulus for the most consequential ideas of [the
Investigations]." From his letters to Gramsci and from testimony by Joan
Robinson and others, it is becoming increasingly apparent that Sraffa was in
turn strongly influenced by Marx.
In the final pages of "Empire" you finally get a series of
demands that the mass movement is urged to adopt. These include:
1. The general right [of the multitude, a bit of jargon meant to
indicate the new working class and its allies] to control its own movement
through global citizenship.
2. A social wage and a guaranteed income for all.
3. The right to reappropriation. This means the right of workers to have
free access to and control the means of production of knowledge, communication,
information, etc.
Of course, the problem with these demands is that they are only
meaningful when made on the government of a nation-state, particularly the
demand for a guaranteed income. One can not simultaneously dismiss the
nation-state as an arena of struggle and prioritize a demand that can only be
realized through legislation at a national level. One supposes that this kind of
mundane problem never entered the calculations of Hardt and Negri. In reality,
the only organized force that can push for such demands in today's world is the
organized working class whose trade unions they have already written off.