EMPIRE by michael hardt and antonio negri

And, is it good for propping up tables, other books, etc?

While social democracy stutters, postmodernism chants. But what if the poor do not incarnate World Possibility or the god of the Earthly City? What if the multitude is just suffering human beings? Then the responsibility of the left is to imagine global, regional, national, and local reforms that will enable these human beings to take political, social, and economic life into their own hands-rather than make them the means of (decentered) intellectual fantasy. Then perhaps it would be better for the left to speak of human beings as if they were ends in themselves rather than "desiring machines." Perhaps it is not an accident but a "symptom" that "biopower," "multitude," and "rhizome" appear in Empire's index but "democracy" does not. The "biopolitics" of Empire recalls Karl Kraus's characterization of psychoanalysis: part of the ailment it professes to cure.

i didn't understand h&n's biopolitix section AT ALL: i will have to reread that

i don't think cohen's final paragraph (as reposted by Fopp at a readbale font-size) especially counters the overall argt from political economy (he is mainly responding there, boringly enough, to an attudinised definition of postmodernism, but this is in general a tiresome and badly intellectually mangled word which means as many things as it has users: h& n use it also, which i was initially v.suspicious of, but they do in fact define it quite carefully, if eccentrically, via something fredric jameson says, in relationship to capitalism's outreach) (in other words it doesn't just by assumption slip a flock of seagulls' haircut in there as well)

Zizek made connection in his LRB piece on Lenin with the failure of social democracy in re war and empire today with ditto in 1913 in re war and imperialism... the shocked realisation that a whole machinery of apparent resistance had gradually become its opposite. Of course this time round there are a score of halfwit chancers also bigging themselves up for the Lenin role.

nath noise may go up on STONES this very weekend!!

"Literary theory has been dead for 10 years," said Stanley Aronowitz, a sociologist at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. "The most important point about `Empire' is that Michael is addressing the crisis in the humanities, which has reached the point where banality seems to pervade the sphere."

Ha! Ha!

anyway the last thing academia needs is a 'new theory', if it's going to treat it like its old ones. I suppose I have to look at this damned thing now. hmph.

i'm gunna be posting in ref some of this on Radio Free Narnia btw, but this weekend is set aside for completion of NOISE hurrah (i just scribbled the final pre-post tinkerings in handwriting and green highlighter pen., though i still have to format the bastard (also still to find out does pitas allow single blog posts this long!!??))

(one of empire's more obviously potent tricks = it rescues-redeems the ideas of the NoPoMo sect as regards the perspective of the YoPoMo sect, AND VICE VERSA)

IM TIM. MY FATHER READ THESE WITH ME. HE TOLD ME SOME WORDS. I CANT REMEMBURER. YOU WRIT GOOD. WHAT IS NOPOMO YOPOMO. IS IT GOOD. DO THEY HAVE IT AT DRIVE THRU. I BET IF YOU GET HUNGRY YOUL WANT MASHPED POTATO. DID YOU EAT THE BOOK SOME MASHPED POTATO. THE WRITIN SAID FAT. FRED THINKS THATS FUNNY. DO YOU. MY FATHER SAID MARX KILT PEEPOL. EVEN OLD PEEPOL. AND THEY DIED TOO. THEY ONLY WERE KILT IF THEY WERE COMYOONITS. OR OLD PEEPOL. WHEN MARX PUT THEM IN A GOOLAG HOUSE. I DONT KNOW WHAT COLOR. MAY BE GREEN. I GUESS. MARX DOESNT SPELL WRIT. WHY. DO YOU NO MY FATHER. I DO. I BET KFC WOULD BE SCARED I BET. OLD PEEPOL CANT DRIVE CARS AND TRUCKS. I SAW. I BET MARX WOULD DRIVE A CAR AND KFC COULDNT RUN AWAY ENUF QWIK. KFC WOULD GO IN THE BACKSEAT. MARX WOULDNT MAKE HIM WEAR A SEATBELED. BECOS HES OLD. THE END.

"TIM", your linebreaks WEREN'T linebreaks

I suppose this is to say that I can't see the argument exciting me as it's excited Mark S: either 1) it's another restatement / refinement of Marxism (in which case, not that exciting) or 2) it's a non- Marxian theory of political economy (in which case a hidden hand within me will prevent me subscribing to it).

I'm not sure whether all this is right, or believable.

But sth that is both right and believable, une fois encore: Zizek = sod off

BTW anyone know what exactly Negri did during the 'years of lead' to land in prison? Brigate Rosse?

negri was early to argue that the industrial working class and the proletariat were no longer identical, and while the former was clearly shrinking, the latter may be growing -> i think it's the shift in the analysis of the latter, from sentimentalised 60s wishful thinking to (somewhat more) concrete understanding, that i am interested in

but this is me already bending this book to fit my own esthetic-politix, so give yr salt a sharp pinch as u read

Pinefox, why?

extremely cheap, but largely RUBBISH books. In fact I can't think of one (just now off the top of my head) Collins book I wanted to read in ages. I picked up the Michael Bracewell thing on the 90s. but meh. might read Ween's Marx thing -- but it's hyowg.

But now the Gramscian notion of "hedgemony" is turned against his squarely leninist aim of the seizure of ideological and political power and into hand-wringing in fear of "hierarchy" by the autonomists, and the savvier workers in the syndicatish COBAS federation thus leaving Italy circa 2003 needing W. Z. Foster circa 1920.

But back the the point, there's a syncretic adoption of autonomism and globalism in Empire which never actually resolves the concepts of centralization and hedgemony and fixes them in definite relations (both positive and negative) and leaves it open either to "Mass Strike" (early Luxemburg) type s-s-storming of the barricades or "Ultra-Imperialism" (Late Kautsky) type panglossianism (a globalized world can't fight against itself anymore) or more often simply suspendid mid-action between alternatives.

I don't know of this is more clear or less.

also wasn't late kautsky talking abt a kind of necessary truce of super-extended imperialisms plural (eg exactly what DIDN'T happen back then) => isn't h&n's idea that *as* the whole of the world disappears into america, america disappears as the whole of the world emerges within america?

i've got a bettah grip on one of the BAD reasons i like it: it dispenses in fine nietszchean sweep w.the tiresome imposed conformist moralisms of soc-dem civil society, which feels like a relief esp.when it's super-generalised extensions of same which used to justify imperialism blah blah (except of course a shared idea of CivSoc = part of the positive-constitutive thingie...)

Anyone have any thoughts how they reconcile or don't with the CivSoc notions of bourdeiu?

what did you make of the race section mark s? (it's in the section: pp. 183-204)

i still like this book a lot.

http://www.zaratustra.it/empire.htm

or, download:

http://www.angelfire.com/cantina/negri/

I'm still reading: I want to say one or two things so far but I won't till I finish.

Okay, so Negri isn't immediately accessbible: so send an interviewer who understands him (and indeed, something about history and politics). This is just embarrassing.

Aynone read Saskia Sassen's 'Losing Control?'?

I'd like to read the review but I think I have a pretty good idea of what he thinks of Hardt & Negri, ie OMGWTF CAPITALISM PWNS.

Well before 9/11 and the Iraq war put the idea in everybody's mind, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri had popularized the notion of a modern empire. Four years ago, they argued in a widely discussed book -- titled, as it happens, ''Empire'' -- that the globe was ruled by a new imperial order, different from earlier ones, which were based on overt military domination. This one had no center; it was managed by the world's wealthy nation-states (particularly the United States), by multinational corporations and by international institutions like the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. This empire -- a k a globalization -- was exploitative, undemocratic and repressive, not only for developing countries but also for the excluded in the rich West.

Hardt and Negri's new book, ''Multitude,'' argues that the antidote to empire is the realization of true democracy, ''the rule of everyone by everyone, a democracy without qualifiers.'' They say that the left needs to leave behind outdated concepts like the proletariat and the working class, which vastly oversimplify the gender/racial/ethnic/ class diversities of today's world. In their place they propose the term ''multitude,'' to capture the ''commonality and singularity'' of those who stand in opposition to the wealthy and powerful.

This book -- which lurches from analyses of intellectual property rules for genetically engineered animals to discourses on Dostoyevsky and the myth of the golem -- deals with an imaginary problem and a real problem. Unfortunately, it provides us with an imaginary solution to the real problem.

The imaginary problem stems from the authors' basic understanding of economics and politics, which remains at its core unreconstructedly Marxist. For them, there is no such thing as voluntary economic exchange, only coercive political hierarchy: any unequal division of rewards is prima facie evidence of exploitation. Private property is a form of theft. Globalization has no redeeming benefits whatsoever. (East Asia's rise from third- to first-world status in the last 50 years seems not to have registered on their mental map.) Similarly, democracy is not embodied in constitutions, political parties or elections, which are simply manipulated to benefit elites. The half of the country that votes Republican is evidently not part of the book's multitude.

To all this Hardt and Negri add an extremely confused theory, their take on what Daniel Bell labeled postindustrial society, and what has more recently been called the ''knowledge economy.'' The ''immaterial labor'' of knowledge workers differs from labor in the industrial era, Hardt and Negri say, because it produces not objects but social relations. It is inherently communal, which implies that no one can legitimately appropriate it for private gain. Programmers at Microsoft may be surprised to discover that because they collaborate with one another, their programs belong to everybody.

It's hard to know even how to engage this set of assertions. Globalization is a complex phenomenon; it produces winners and losers among rich and poor alike. But you would never learn about the complexities from reading ''Multitude.'' So let's move on to Hardt and Negri's real problem, which has to do with global governance.

We have at this point in human history evolved fairly good democratic political institutions, but only at the level of the nation-state. With globalization -- and increased flows of information, goods, money and people across borders -- countries are now better able to help, but also to harm, one another. In the 1990's, the harm was felt primarily through financial shocks and job losses, and since 9/11 it has acquired a military dimension as well. As the authors state, ''one result of the current form of globalization is that certain national leaders, both elected and unelected, gain greater powers over populations outside their own nation-states.''

The United States is uniquely implicated in this charge because of its enormous military, economic and cultural power. What drove people around the world crazy about the Bush administration's unilateral approach to the Iraq war was its assertion that it was accountable to no one but American voters for what it did in distant parts of the globe. And since institutions like the United Nations are woefully ill equipped to deal with democratic legitimacy, this democracy deficit is a real and abiding challenge at the international level.

The authors are conscious of the charge that they, like the Seattle anti-globalization protesters they celebrate, don't have any real solutions to these matters, so they spend some time discussing how to fix the present international institutions. Their problem is that any fixes are politically difficult if not impossible to bring about, and promise only marginal benefits. Democratic institutions that work at the nation-state level don't work at global levels. A true global democracy, in which all of the earth's billions of people actually vote, is an impossible dream, while existing proposals to modify the United Nations Security Council or change the balance of power between it and the General Assembly are political nonstarters. Making the World Bank and I.M.F. more transparent are worthy projects, but hardly solutions to the underlying issue of democratic accountability. The United States, meanwhile, has stood in the way of new institutions like the International Criminal Court.

It is at this point that Hardt and Negri take leave of reality -- arriving at an imaginary solution to their real problem. They argue that instead of ''repeating old rituals and tired solutions'' we need to begin ''a new investigation in order to formulate a new science of society and politics.'' The woolliness of the subsequent analysis is hard to overstate. According to them, the fundamental obstacle to true democracy is not just the monopoly of legitimate force held by nation-states, but the dominance implied in virtually all hierarchies, which give certain individuals authority over others. The authors dress up Marx's old utopia of the withering away of the state in the contemporary language of chaos theory and biological systems, suggesting that hierarchies should be replaced with networks that reflect the diversity and commonality of the ''multitude.''

The difficulty with this line of reasoning is that there is a whole class of issues networks can't resolve. This is why hierarchies, from nation-states to corporations to university departments, persist, and why so many left-wing movements claiming to speak on behalf of the people have ended up monopolizing power. Indeed, the powerlessness and poverty in today's world are due not to the excessive power of nation-states, but to their weakness. The solution is not to undermine sovereignty but to build stronger states in the developing world.

To illustrate, take the very different growth trajectories of East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa over the past generation. Two of the fastest growing economies in the world today happen to be in the two most populous countries, China and India; sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, has tragically seen declining per capita incomes over the same period. At least part of this difference is the result of globalization: China and India have integrated themselves into the global economy, while sub-Saharan Africa is the one part of the world barely touched by globalization or multinational corporations.

But this raises the question of why India and China have been able to take advantage of globalization, while Africa has not. The answer has largely to do with the fact that the former have strong, well-developed state institutions providing basic stability and public goods. They had only to get out of the way of private markets to trigger growth. By contrast, modern states were virtually unknown in most of sub-Saharan Africa before European colonialism, and the weakness of states in the region has been the source of its woes ever since.

Any project, then, to fix the ills of ''empire'' has to begin with the strengthening, not the dismantling, of institutions at the nation-state level. This will not solve the problems of global governance, but surely any real advance here will come only through slow, patient innovation and the reform of international institutions. Hardt and Negri should remember the old insight of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, taken up later by the German Greens: progress is to be achieved not with utopian dreaming, but with a ''long march through institutions.''

Francis Fukuyama, a professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of ''State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century.''

Published: 07 - 25 - 2004 , Late Edition - Final , Section 7 , Column 1 , Page 12

rrrRRRRrrrrrr

wow i just read THE most idiotic quote from these dudes. basically: the evolution of the welfare state in europe '(i)n those first decades after the October Revolution' 'might be cast as a response to the threat conjured up by the Soviet experience, that is, to the increasing power of (the) workers' movement both at home and abroad.'

i suppose it 'might' if you wanted it to be and you were an idiot.

yes let's get it out in the open the rise of the welfare state had nothing to do with the labor movement there i said it

you are joking right?

read it again:

"might be cast as a response to the threat conjured up by the Soviet experience, that is, to the increasing power of (the) workers' movement"

i mean sure, do go ahead and conflate the labour movement and the soviet experience, don't let basic chronology get in your way.

or indeed the hostility of many labour movements (in, say, germany or britain) for the soviets.

Where "the Soviet experience" is understood as "the apparent success of a worker's state" I think it's hard to argue that portions of the international labor movement weren't galvanized to such a degree that they helped bring about the welfare state.

but sure, it's a bit intemperately broad if you like. it's continental shit!

<3 analytic shit more and more imo.

less creepily crypto-hegelian-stalinist.

Late to post, but here's my review of Multitude:

http://www.citypages.com/2004-10-27/books/the-empire-strikes-back/

the reality of the soviet experience didn't have much if anything to do with the "international workers' movement" of course but i'm sure it was perceived as something like that by a lot of governments at the time.

Been thinking of picking this up again, given events in the Middle East.

Anyone read the two sequels?

there was a second sequel?

dollar dollar bills yall

hope i dont have to read the first two to know what's going on

anyone read the FOURTH book? it's called ASSEMBLY and i bought it today. after i'm gonna reread empire and see what's what

also im gonna read it on the train with like a really serious face and sometimes i'll nod appreciatively and others i'll just chuckle to myself

Antonio Negri (1933-2023) pic.twitter.com/iOaa3zDSpy

— Daniel Zamora Vargas (@DanielZamoraV) December 16, 2023

blimey i was excited by this book -- y tho?

i would have to re-read it to recapture that i think

empire, i mean -- i never read any of the sequels (chapterhouse of empire, god emperor of empire)

still a solid and important book imo, 9/10ths of the critiques are from running dogs

Negri and Hardt wrote a followup essay in NLR in 2019 that’s well worth reading and quite jargon free

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii120/articles/empire-twenty-years-on

that's a nice read, thanks for sharing

Yup. Thanks, that's some read.

Thinking how much of the piece I can map to the odd twitter thread over the years.

When I read Empire I struggled quite a bit. But I wonder if I would sail through it now because I've basically read a lot of Marxist discourse via tweets.