EMPIRE by michael hardt and antonio negri

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

It's okay Josh I know *you* try. I'm more commenting on my lack of knowledge and pathetic attempts to stay abreast rather than any specific cases of obscurantism and obsfucation.

Gramsci -- The Modern Prince (to be read by way of Trotsky's "The Lessons Of October")

Lenin -- Imperialism (to be read by way of the a subscription to The Economist)

Luxemburg -- The Mass Strike (to be read by way of Lenin's "State and Revolution).

First speaks to the question of power, second to the question of the nation, and third to the question of autonomy. H&N claim to be "Communists" so they might as well confront the foax who already were.

It was great fun.

hey and look I thought the same thing last month. at least I'm consistent.

"it rescues-redeems the ideas of the NoPoMo sect as regards the perspective of the YoPoMo sect,
AND VICE VERSA) "

and then

"a clear idea is a little idea"

these threads always make me curious-how much have you all actually read in terms of theory,etc?
i mean,have you all immersed yourself in it for years and read numerous lengthy tracts by the various people being discussed,that explain what nopomo and the like are?

this book is a doozy. not at all dull though, i didn't think. is josh still here? probably not :(

i think i finally understand (and maybe even like!) the term deterritorialisation. h&n argue pretty well that the nation-state as once was 'supreme and sovereign' went through a changing hinge when kelsen's baby ws born (the u.n.; haha i liked this bit in the book it felt like they wr poking fun at his self-fulfilled grundnorm theory) - because sovereignty annexed to that could not be understood as operating on a purely territorial basis (the u.n. as such didn't have a territory or a bounds) - it's how they get from u.n. to Empire tht is tricky and fascinating and i don't really understand it.

the u.n.'s inadequacies were as much propulsion as its adequacies - wtf?!

yeh not anti-american in the usual dickhead way! great! obv ppl have argued long that we can understand the current world in terms of america being *the* imperialist force! which h&n show as wrong by saying that each nation-state is not even sovereign WITHIN its OWN boundaries.

still digesting this; but it reads like fun! 'fun'!

yeah wtf is up w. the biopolitix section - tht does need a re-reading.

haha koritfw

b. de sousa santos, 'towards a new legal common sense' 2nd edn. (the edn. is very important cs it's almost a NEW book entire);

k. marx, 'the german ideology' (extracts of this essay) & 'on the jewish question' (part 1)

s. marx, 'empire's law' (an essay on westlaw i think; which is from the winter 2003 edn. of the indiana journal of global legal theory)

m. weber, obv!, 'economy & society' (esp. the stuff on bureaucracy)

habermas, 'the theory of communicative action' (the stuff on lifeworld and system)

foucault's 'governmentality' essay.

n. luhmann, 'law as a social system' (mmm systems theory mmm)

h&n, 'empire' !!!

some stuff on risk society: u. beck, 'risk society'.

this *is* quite a stuff list bt i like most of it. i might be in trouble w. mark s now fr recommending this stuff ha

apologies fr being presumptuous; you might have obviously read half this stuff already.

(throw in this too, just to bait the pinefox: slavoj zizek 'what can lenin tell us about freedom?' i thk this is already up on the web, googlable.)

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

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.