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How immigration is transforming our society.
The definition of “terrorist” has drifted far
from ground zero.
The return of the culture wars.
The Angolan war’s connection to suburban Arizona.
Market Magic's Empty Shell
Days of infamy and memory.
Let's review the tape.
Back Talk
The liberal media strike again.
Appall-o-Meter
Israel’s gravest danger is not the Palestinians.
Bush unilaterally junks the ABM accord.
Broken Trust
Washington gives Indians the runaround—again.
Mumia's death sentence is overturned, for now.
Coal Dust-up
Massey Energy, Inc. targeted by labor and greens.
In Person
Phil Radford: Last Call, Save the Ales.
BOOKS: Empire’s new clothes.
The Empty Theater
BOOKS: Joan Didion vs. the political class.
BOOKS: The Complete Works of Isaac Babel.
Ghost World
FILM: The Devil’s Backbone of the Spanish
Civil War.
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December 22, 2001
Where The Sun Never Sets
Empire, a collaboration between jailed Italian Communist Antonio Negri
and American literary theorist (and, one feels, junior partner) Michael Hardt,
is an attempt, probably the most fully realized to date, at a Marxist read on
globalization. Unlike many anti-globalizers, North and South, they vigorously
reject any suggestion that a return to the world of autonomous nation-states
is possible. They accept the new world order— with its global economy,
global culture and global police actions—as a given, and, taking the longest
of long views, seek out the new possibilities it opens up for human liberation. The book divides into three strands. The first is a new kind of global sovereignty,
replacing that of the nation-state. The second, and least interesting, is what
they take to be the economics of Empire, a highly conventional account of “globalization”
that could be excerpted comfortably in The Economist or Financial
Times. The third is the possibilities for resistance or revolution opened
up by the new order.
This vision is sketched out at a very high level of abstraction and seems rather
obviously contradicted by the reality of unchallenged U.S. supremacy that we
all read about in the papers. But Hardt and Negri rightly insist that the content
of a military intervention can’t always be settled by looking at the insignia
on the uniforms. While nation-states always acted, covertly or overtly, in their
own national interests, today’s interventionists, whether they know it
or not, are compelled to serve an incipient transnational order. The Gulf War was perhaps the first war of this kind. There the United States
found itself compelled to act “not as a function of its own national motives
but in the name of global right.” As Hardt and Negri don’t quite acknowledge,
all U.S. imperial wars, from the Spanish-American on, have been conducted “in
the name of global right.” But today, as they insist in one of the book’s
defining if not most original passages, rhetoric has become, or replaced, reality.
Hardt and Negri see the language of human-rights interventions not as cynical
window-dressing but as their real content: Police power is the signature of
Empire. And as in any well-run police state, police actions soon induce the
victims to police themselves, so the universal rights on which military interventions
are based are incorporated into national legislation everywhere. “Armies
and police anticipate the courts” in “an inversion of the conventional
order of constitutional logic.” What distinguishes this new situation from the old international order, dating
back to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which effectively introduced the modern
nation-state, is that the internal affairs of states are no longer clearly marked
off as a sphere apart under international law. Once the principle is accepted
that interventions across borders are legitimate on human-rights grounds, a
system of global law has been acknowledged even if the bodies that will codify
and adjudicate it have not yet been formed. It’s not unfair to say that Hardt and Negri don’t present a single
piece of evidence for any of their claims. Empire is a book of visions,
not arguments. Either you accept them or you don’t. Still, isn’t there
something to it? If the logic of human-rights imperialism isn’t as profoundly
new as they would like, it remains a departure from the Cold War understanding
of international relations.
In opposition to Empire Hardt and Negri place “the multitude,” a
term carefully chosen and distinguished from “nation” or even “people,”
which are blinds for power. To speak of the will of the people, they insist,
is to postulate a uniformity that inevitably does violence to the aspirations
it supposedly embodies. The multitude is defined by its heterogeneity; it is
simply the many, the sum of numerous distinct human “singularities.”
The essence of political struggle is the effort of authority—whether capital,
nation-state or Empire—to assimilate this heterogeneity into a single will. Naturally, this rejection of traditional political identities —class as
firmly as nation—leads to a rejection of traditional political movements.
The struggles of oppressed peoples are, at best, progressive until they win
institutional form. Genet’s romantic attachment to the Palestinians as
history’s losers—“The day the Palestinians become a nation like
the other nations, I will no longer be there”—is paradigmatic. Similarly
for workers: “Against the common wisdom that the U.S. proletariat is weak
because of its low party and union representation,” they write, “perhaps
we should see it as strong for precisely those reasons. Working-class power
resides not in the representative institutions but in the antagonism and autonomy
of the workers themselves.” Don’t even get them started on meliorative state action like progressive
taxes or workplace regulation: The New Deal was an attempt to institute the
“factory society.” And today, in “imperial postmodernity,”
“big government has become merely the despotic means of domination and
the totalitarian production of subjectivity.” In short, the essential conflict
is not between nations or classes, but between the heterogeneous wills of human
singularities and any system that would, however benevolently, reduce them to
objects or instruments. Hardt and Negri trace the origins of this conflict to the Renaissance, when
people came to believe that the material world was not a reflection of divine
will but self-contained reality, and that individuals had the power to make
creative choices unconstrained by any prior or external law. Human beings were
unique, their choices fundamentally indeterminate. Spinoza was exemplary of
this sensibility. The old Spanish mystic is Empire’s hero because of his
refusal to acknowledge any constraints on this freedom, even physical survival:
“A free man thinks about nothing less than death,” they approvingly
quote. The logic here is tight: Spinoza’s assertion of human creative powers
requires his indifference to death, since death—and more generally the
desire for peace and security—is the weapon states use to “blackmail”
the multitude back into subordination. In a moment of brilliant condescension,
Stendhal once said that a peasant wants only two things: a warm winter coat
and not to be killed. On these terms a man’s a man; one is interchangeable
with another. In their sketch of the origins of the modern nation-state, Hardt
and Negri can’t conceal their impatience with the masses who, unlike Spinoza,
could not stop thinking about death and how to avoid it. Indifference to death is setting the bar for political virtue pretty high.
Combined with the sweeping dismissal of all the fundaments of the 19th and 20th
century left movements, one might suspect Empire of being just another
anti-political, end-of-history tract. This isn’t quite the case: Hardt
and Negri do advocate a sort of political judo, in which the logic of Empire
is turned against its masters. Empire is based on universal rights and the erosion
of national boundaries, they argue, so let’s assert the universal right
to cross boundaries, to migrate: “The general right to control its own
movement is the multitude’s ultimate demand for global citizenship.”
That is almost the only concrete demand put forward in the book. Though the master is hardly cited, Empire is a strictly Foucauldian
work. From the complexities of Foucault’s writing Hardt and Negri, like
many on the left, have extracted an unrelenting suspicion of any formal organization
or assertion of collective identity as only a more subtle form of domination.
Instead, “lateral connections” and “networks of relays”
must somehow replace democratic government and all other forms of delegated
authority. Hardt and Negri are right to warn against the spurious unities of
national or indigenous culture, but the Foucauldian lens constrains vision as
well as sharpens it. Empire has no place for organizations and leaders
that arise out of oppressed groups and exercise power on their behalf, including
trade unions, socialist politicians as well as problematic but undoubtedly progressive
organizations like the African National Congress or Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow
Coalition.
There is a real danger that by dismissing class as a basis for collective action,
Hardt and Negri are simply opening the way for an older set of identities based
on individualism and private privilege to go unchallenged. It’s worth remembering
that Negri made his political bones in the noontide of the ’60s, when the
great challenge was pushing up against the limits of social democracy and Keynesian
economics. Today, he is too quick to dismiss the possibilities of national economic
regulation. More generally, Empire’s focus on what has changed ignores all
the things that have not. One hundred and fifty years ago, Marx was already
appalled at the way capital converts unique human beings into interchangeable
instruments of production. But while this alienation may operate everywhere,
that doesn’t mean it has no center or source. Marx emphasized the importance
of looking behind the formal equality of the marketplace to relations within
the workplace, that zone of authority and subjugation that one may enter “only
on business.” Hardt and Negri by contrast make a conscious choice to limit
themselves to surfaces: “The depths of the modern world and its subterranean
passageways have in postmodernity all become superficial.” But never mind Marx. Empire is troubling on a more basic level. If Empire
has no center and no weak links, if any struggle has the capacity to “leap
vertically, to the virtual center of Empire,” then how does one distinguish
actions that matter from those that don’t? Hardt and Negri seem to be rejecting
the very idea of political strategy. One might conclude: Forget about strikes
and revolutions. The conversation in the coffeeshop, the day one calls in sick
from work, the evening’s sarcastic defiance of the anchorman, tonight’s
insurrectionary sex might just be the blow that brings Empire to its knees. There is no question that the secret of Empire’s success is its
denigration of traditional forms of collective politics (along with its contrarian
pro-Americanism). Rather than the “discipline of liberation,” they
valorize individual desertion, the Bartlebys who “would prefer not to.”
It is possible, I suppose, that everything has changed, and that the great political
projects of the 19th and 20th centuries are all dead. But Empire hardly makes
a convincing case for this. As the B-2s roar out of Whiteman, Missouri on their
global police actions, neither Empire nor Empire seems to offer much of a way
forward. J.W. Mason is a freelance writer in Amherst, Massachusetts. |
|
In These Times is committed to remaining fiercely independent, but we need your help. Donate now to make sure we can continue providing the original reporting, deep investigation, and strategic analysis needed in this moment. We're proud to be in this together.
t’s a rare book of Marxist
political theory that gets a mention in Newsweek, let alone a glowing
page-and-a-half review. Though it sits uneasily next to the two special issues
of Rethinking Marxism devoted to the book, the Newsweek squib
was representative of the response to Empire, which has made remarkable
inroads into the more theory-averse precincts of American intellectual life
in the nearly two years since its publication. For better and for worse, it
captures well a major strand in today’s political thinking.
y “Empire,” Hardt and Negri mean a new political order that is replacing
the competing nation-states of the past 500 years. The nation is supposed to
have an organic unity rooted in the mists of history; states are defined by
the territory they control. Empire, by contrast, lacks boundaries and is potentially
all-inclusive. Empire also lacks any center: Unlike the imperialism of the past,
under Empire one cannot even approximately separate the exploiters from the
exploited with lines on a map.
he real heart of the book—the
passages that now help to inspire the Seattle movement—is its political
program, if the word applies to something so slithery and acephalous. There
are probably half a dozen initiates of Italian political philosophy who can
follow Empire’s every twist and turn; the rest of us will have to
skim a bit. But if one isn’t deterred by discursive meanders, undefined
terms and the annoying insistence on the absolute, unprecedented newness of
it all, the broad outlines are clear enough and even, in a way, compelling.